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"Going a little fast weren't you?" I admitted I was. Then he took a closer look at me. "Hey, aren't you the guy who played the FBI convention in Carmel?" I said I was, and he said he enjoyed the show and let me off with a warning. My first perk.
Another time, after a hard night of partying I was driving a guy home. I didn't know him well, but I'd figured out he was kind of a loudmouth know-it-all drunk. I just wanted to get him out of the car, so I was going too fast. A cop pulled us over, and the guy said, "Let me handle this, I'll talk our way out." I told him to shut the fuck up. The policeman walked up to the car and said, "You guys been doing a little drinking?"
I said, "We've been doing a lot. We're drunk, and I'm guilty."
He stared at me and laughed. "Well, I've never heard that before".
This was before the days of cracking down on drunk drivers and he said as
long as it was 4 a.m. and the streets were empty he'd let me go but he was going to follow me to make sure I drove very slowly. I sobered up in about 15 seconds and drove home. Very slowly.
In Monterey I got to know a guy named Jack (again, names aren't my strong point) who owned the foreign car dealership. We played golf together a couple of times. One day I took my Healey in for a repair and he gave me a loaner to drive. A Bentley. Yes, a Bentley! I called up my friends and we drove that thing for hours, pretending we were rich.
The Austin-Healey had the most beautiful sound of any car I ever owned. A couple years later I was working with Brian Bressler and Ron Long at Turk's Straw Hat in Portland, Oregon. Afterwards I would drive home about 3 a.m. through the city with that exhaust sound echoing off the buildings. Beautiful.
There was no stage at Turk's so we would set up on the ledge behind the bar and sing. The place was loud and lots of times people couldn't even hear us so we'd just sing any words that came to mind. Sometimes we'd just sing swear words. I have no idea how we kept that job because we were pretty primitive. We didn't even know the names of chords. D was the Triangle, C was the one we started on, and F was "the hard one". We'd just wing it and Brian and Ron would do physical comedy and I'd do comedy songs. Ron was a good singer and played bass. We all drank a lot. One night, as we were singing, Ron leaned over to me and whispered, "What song are we playing?"
Brian used to tell a joke on stage about great white hunters and a gorilla, and a reporter wrote that we sang and told shaggy gorilla stories. Later, someone asked us what the name of the group was and Brian blurted out, "The Shaggy Gorillas Minus One Buffalo Fish". The band, under that name, with different people coming in and out, lasted 8 or 10 years.
We got booked to play in Seattle during the world's fair. We were going to play on an old cruise ship that was being used as a hotel and it was a nice gig for