Page 38 - Been There… Done That!

Gary Graham
Guys and Dolls was a pretty typical club for its day, nowhere near the venues I would later play like the Whisky a Go Go, but definitely better than where we’d started. Our act went over very well, partly because in those days people in California didn’t have many Southern boys hanging around and talking funny. Around this time Phil Tanzine from the Whisky had seen us and expressed an interest in hiring the band, but I had begun to think maybe it was time for the group to be redone. Before anything could really be resolved, we started a tour back in Missouri during February and March of 1964 and by now the Spartans had added a new member, Mickey Dolenz, who later gained widespread fame as a member of The Monkees.
While only with the group a short time before departing, Micky Dolenz’ time with us was certainly memorable. We met him through his sister Coco, who was part of a group in North Hollywood that liked hanging around the band. One day she brought Mickey along and introduced him to us. Mickey had been a child actor and had appeared a few years before in a television series called “Circus Boy.” One day he just picked up a guitar and started singing “Runaway” and some other songs and decided to be a musician. I thought it might be a good idea to have him join us because, “Mickey could sing and was kind of a television celebrity,” so I asked him about doing the tour with us. He wasn’t doing anything with his career at the time, so he readily agreed. I just didn’t realize what a pain in the ass he was going to turn out to be.
I really liked Mickey, but he had the tendency to drive me nuts. For example, he had a thing about reading road signs non-stop
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