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The thriving, creative music scene in Miami, which had nurtured so many bands, practically evaporated overnight.
When the Blues Image, who everyone agreed was the best band in the state, split for Los Angeles, that was the first shot across the bow. Soon, NRBQ moved back up to New York state. Mike Pinera, the monster guitar player from the Blues Image, urged us to go west, so it seemed like a no-brainer. Miami rock and roll was never the same after that.
It was 1970. Making our play for the “big time,” I was also about to get a dose of “big-time” reality.
It turned out Little Richard, in spite of his iconic status, was on the Musician’s Union’s “Do Not Perform For” list. Apparently he had stiffed some former members of his band, and they had filed a grievance against him.
Before we even arrived in LA, Richard had us stop over for one of his gigs opposite B.B. King in a beautiful venue in Lake Tahoe called The King’s Castle. Then brand new, it was one of the first Arthurian-themed casinos in the world, though now it’s a Hyatt Regency.
Richard and his musical director, Bobby Forte (veteran R&B tenor sax player with Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland, among others) had a fifteen-piece band waiting for him there. Well, the first night was such a disaster that Richard had us come up to back him up! He figured all these jazz players had to know Little Richard tunes, but those cats had been too busy studying Bird or getting too high to give a shit.
Richard’s producer Bumps Blackwell drove them hard the next few days, and the week-long stand went pretty smoothly from then on.
Forte, though a great player, was a junkie, like so many horn players back in the day. His tenor was held together by rubber bands through most of the gigs. On the last night, he stepped up to the mike for his solo, empty-handed. He had pawned his horn for dope and was so high that he didn’t know the difference! Richard bawled him out on the bandstand, and it was embarrassing all around. Though it was kind of funny at the time, it showed how tough life could be for some of these cats.
•••
When we landed in LA, we all took up residence at Richard’s “office,” the Carolina Pines Motel, on La Brea and Sunset, in Hollywood. It was a fifties modern motel based around a pool, which was already starting to get funky by the seventies. (It’s now the site of a Comfort Inn.) Richard and his entourage had about seven or eight rooms there. It was right next door to a Copper Penny coffee shop, one of the only places in Hollywood that served grits with breakfast.
Richard had an open account with the motel, but even then I was able to see the transient nature of his living—a day-to-day existence. But because we were newbies in town, we had no place else to go, so we stuck around for a while.
You gotta have wheels in LA, so Richard set us up in a house on Raynetta Drive in Sherman Oaks, along with a 1961 Chevy station wagon that looked like it had barely survived the demolition derby. This car was a total eyesore and ran every other Thursday. Because no one in the house got up before noon, I had the beater to myself every morning to search out instruments. One day its brakes died, so we just abandoned it out on Sunset Boulevard.
We eventually ended up with a van, which we used to drive to all our gigs. Many times we got in the van, rolled up a fatty, and got completely lost in LA. If you don’t know the freeway system, it can be quite treacherous. Being slightly hampered didn’t help matters any. There were no navigation systems at that time.
I remember playing in a club in Venice Beach that was right adjacent to Synanon (the famous cult and drug rehabilitation center, which is now a hotel). One night we finished our set and were loading up our gear, when an old lady came out wearing just a blanket and one stocking. I felt bad for her, so I gave her a few dollars. I don’t know if she thought I was propositioning her, but she took off the blanket and began chasing me around the van. Stark-raving naked! All I can say is this was quite an area of town. LA rocked! What a time to be in Los Angeles.
•••
Even though we hardly had any gigs, we knew that we needed to rehearse, so the house in Sherman Oaks came in handy for that. You can just imagine what was going on there, with a group of eighteen to twenty year olds. The house didn’t have a stick of furniture, except for waterbeds (which were everywhere in 1970). We would eat dinner out of tin pans that we purchased at the Eagle Army Navy store. There was no air-conditioning, so on hot days, we’d cool off in the frozen food section at the local grocery store.
Guests used to come and go at all hours of the day and night. One of them was my Cuban buddy from Miami named Lache, who showed up with a load of cocaine. On a lark, he’d bought a Corvette from another guy’s girlfriend, who happened to be a junkie. One night, Marlene and I, and some of my bandmates, came back to the house after a fun-filled day at Disneyland, when we were accosted by some scary looking black dudes. They shoved us inside and pulled out a machete, demanding that we give them the Vette. (By the way, this wouldn’t be the last machete I encountered in LA.) The main guy, a menacing hulk who they called “Grease,” had been hired by the girl who was the previous owner to retrieve the vehicle. After some fast and fancy talking, we finally convinced them that Lache had sold the car himself and that we didn’t know where he was. A week later, we saw “Grease” at the Westward Ho Market (now Whole Foods), and we called out to him, “Hey, Grease!” He pretended he had no idea who we were and, apparently “Grease” wasn’t his real name.
Needless to say, we weren’t too focused on the job at hand, which was getting our music together. Richard’s own career trajectory and reputation didn’t help, either. But something else was gnawing at me, too. Call it self-awareness . . .