Meet Cyril Jordan, founder of SF’s legendary ‘60s rockers, the Flamin’ Groovies, who are still gigging these days. One helluva gifted artist (that’s his work on the cover of this edition of HSV) and storyteller, Cyril spins some groovy yarns about growing up — and living the dream — in San Francisco. Dig!
CJ: In 1954, I was 6. We lived on 7th Ave. I could just walk and within 3 minutes I was in GG Park. I would sneak into the Steinhart [aka Academy of Sciences] through the back door and I’d be where the pendulum was swinging. It would be 10am, nobody was in there! I’d roam the halls looking at the stuffed animals, touch the gigantic grizzly bear. They had a huge collection of antique watches. I freaked out on the Mickey Mouse pocket watch, man! I mean it never went away! Then there was the alligator pit. People would throw quarters in there. I would climb over the railing, get the quarters, climb back out and buy one of those baloney and cheese sandwiches with mustard on it out of the machine. I’d never tasted this before. This was American food and I went, “Wow, this is great!”
You gotta realize I was living in two cultures. At home, I was European with a strict upbringing. Outside the house, I was an American. I’m looking at this new culture that my parents came to, and I’m looking at characters like Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and I’m goin’, “Man, this country is fuckin’ out there! This is fantastic!”
America to me was the greatest place on the Earth back then because this was all culture for the kids. I knew that the American culture was where it was at.
Even now when I think about it, the Haight made such an impression on me. There was a donut store on Stanyan that stayed open til 4am. I went there with Roy [Loney, of the Groovies] one night coming back from partying around town. Chet Helms was in there. This has got to be around ’65. He had very long hair and this was the first time that I saw somebody with long hair like that. About a week later I saw Jerry Garcia with his mop. He was the only long-haired guy on Haight.
This culture was virtually unknown in ’65. In ’66 we all found out about each other. The whole culture all of a sudden bloomed like a flower overnight, and before you knew it, there were so many bands in the area that it was mindblowing. You could be in a band that just started a week ago and nobody ever heard of you and you could be hangin’ out with Jimi Hendrix. This is what was so cool about our culture back then — there were no passports. There was no class system. We were all on an equal plane. I knew these people when they were nobody. I was there. We were all there on the ground floor trying to get somewhere with our art.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
PART 1:
Cyril Jordan: My memories of the Haight, even now when I think about it, the Haight made such an impression on me.
Haight Street Voice: Perfect. Go man! I’m rollin’ tape.
CJ: There was a donut store that stayed open til 4 in the morning on Stanyan and Lincoln right on the corner across from where Kezar used to be. I went there with Roy [Loney, frontman of the Flamin’ Groovies] one night coming back from partying around town and we grabbed some donuts. Chet Helms was in there. This has got to be around ’65 and he had very, very long hair. I’m 16 going on 17, and this was the first time that I saw somebody with long hair like that. Then about a week later I was walking down Haight Street and there were these 2 guys who were in a band called the Final Solution. Both of them were really tall dudes. I think one of them married Jane Dornacker years later. But anyway, they had hair down to their elbows. And then I saw Jerry Garcia with his mop standing in front of that clothes store called Manseka or Mansedka — I can’t remember the name of it.
HSV: Mnasidika!
CJ: Yeah! And it was funny, that day he was the only long-haired guy on Haight Street. So this is really early, right? And my impressions of Haight Street were … there was this magazine called The Image that was pretty much an advertisement for all local bands. So every page there’d be a photo of a band and their manager’s number and all of that. The foldout in the middle of the magazine was a photograph of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Chet Helms, the Charlatans, and Big Brother & the Holding Company. The were all in the Panhandle and they all had hair down to their elbows. This was right before the Fillmore started, so it really made a big impression on me that the Beatnik scene here in the City had morphed into this other thing, you know?
HSV: In some interview you said the band name changed [from Lost & Found and Chosen Few] to the Flamin’ Groovies the day after seeing the Beatles at Candlestick?
CJ: Yeah. I had gone to Europe that summer in ’66 to visit my relatives in Holland in the Hague. Roy went to jail for selling pot. He was working at a record store in Stonestown and apparently sold some pot to some of the Mercy High School girls. One of the nuns saw a note and the next thing that happened was the cops came down to the record store and busted Roy. So he went to jail that summer. I went to Europe. Timmy Lynch (drummer) also went to Europe but he went on his own and we didn’t really meet up.
I come back August 30, the day before my birthday and Roy says, “You wanna see the Beatles?” He picks me up at the airport and I go, “Wow did you get me a ticket?” And he goes, “No. Me and my girlfriend broke up. I’ve got an extra ticket.” So we went to see the Beatles. We were sitting at the very top of the stadium. The stage from where we were was the size of a cheese cracker, you know? [laughter] And when the Beatles came out it looked like a bunch of ants coming towards the cheese cracker! [laughter] And it was so windy I thought to myself, “Who the fuck wants to go to this place to hang out, man?” My hair was blowin’ left and right — some of it was gettin’ blown off my head, I mean it was so windy it was unbelievable.
HSV: You tell the story of Bill Graham seeing you getting drugs for both Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix at two different times. You were in there as kind of the young guy, you were the new kid and these are like your elders?
CJ: You gotta understand, this culture was virtually unknown in ’65. In ’66 we all found out about each other. The whole culture all of sudden bloomed like a flower overnight and before you knew it there were so many bands in the area that it was mind-blowing, you know? All of a sudden we’re wearing boots, we got long hair, we got velvet coats, we got corduroy trousers. And anybody that was part of that fashion was able to hang with Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton — any of these big guys from England who were in the Top-10 charts.
HSV: And still very accessible it sounds like.
CJ: We were all brothers. It was like we all knew we were part of the same tribe. We all had the same thing in common: we got stoned! Whether it was hash or pot or mushrooms or acid, we were all gettin’ stoned. We had a lot of that in common. We all found out around ’66 when Graham opened up the Fillmore for a benefit for the Mime Troupe. Apparently this was the reason why he started that first dance with the Jefferson Airplane was a benefit for the Mime Troupe. And he found out at that gig, like we all found out on Haight Street, that there was a culture that had sprung up overnight. Boom! You know! And from that point on the Fillmore started growing, the Avalon started growing. Chet used to work with Bill. Chet had this old, old bakery truck that was painted pink and it had the Family Dog Indian head painted on the side, the old Indian with the top hat and the pipe. I don’t know who did it, maybe Rick Griffin, somebody did a beautiful job painting that on the side of the truck.
HSV: Maybe Alton Kelley?
CJ: I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Kelley. When I met Kelley, and we used to talk about the early days and what was his inspiration for the posters, he told me that he would go to the SF library and look at the old wanted posters from 1880s for lettering and also design and stuff. But anyway, Chet was with Bill and then all of a sudden they split up and now Chet’s running the Avalon and Bill’s running the Fillmore. There wasn’t much difference between the two — except for the fact that as time went on more and more straight people started going to the Fillmore. I’m talking college people. By ’67, after the Summer of Love, there was a whole influx of wing-tipped and saddle-shoe wearing guys who were checking out the Fillmore and maybe now they were thinking about smoking pot. But they were still pretty straight, you know what I mean? The Avalon was totally hippie, and everybody most of the time was on acid.
As the months went by in ’66, I’d be down on Haight Street every weekend for an hour or two. And I remember one time coming down and everybody on Haight Street had long hair, and there were thousands of people. And I’m walkin’ down the street past the House of Richard, which was selling pot. They had these little plastic containers with a gold chocolate coin in it — and a bunch of pot. And you could buy one of these for like 10 bucks, you know? This guy Ira that worked there, I went to school with him so Ira would always slip me a couple of these for free, you know!
But anyway, I’m walkin’ past the House of Richard and all of a sudden there’s the Blues Project, the whole band hangin’ out on the street smokin’ pot. So it really became this hub-bub and a center for all long-haired people all over the world, at least all over America, to come out and hang out on Haight Street. So it was a migration that began little by little. I would say beginning with Chet Helms and what’s her name, that girl with Big Brother?
HSV: Janis. That little chick …
CJ: Yeah, comin’ out from Texas.
HSV: Yeah, Port Arthur.
CJ: To the Beatnik hub which was San Francisco. You know Herb Caen coined the word Beatnik.
HSV: And Baghdad by the Bay of course. That reminds me of Brian Rohan. He was a great supporter of the magazine. Your voice reminds me of Brian Rohan. The Warthog. Loved that guy.
CJ: You know what’s funny is Brian and I became really good friends. I was still in high school. And I would go over to his little church. He lived in a church on 17th and Clayton, down the hill. This beautiful little wooden church. And he lived in there and he would invite me over for dinner on Sundays. And then he would explain to me law. Him and his partner Michael …
HSV: Michael Stepanian.
CJ: They were vice lawyers.
HSV: Yeah I interviewed them a couple editions ago. HALO: Haight Ashbury Legal Organization.
CJ: They got everybody their record deals.
HSV: Yes! Everybody! In one of your interviews you talk about how all the record companies were coming up from LA trying to find bands to sign.
CJ: By ’68 — Warner Brothers had an office here, Columbia had an office here. All of a sudden man they were all over the place. Tower Records opens up and the whole City becomes this established scene. The migration kind of slowed down a little bit from the hippie people in the country who were coming out to California to sign up. The migration changed after the. Summer of Love. We started getting runaways and we started getting convicts from San Quentin and all kinds of weird people were coming to Haight Street. And then there were the collegiate people who were comin’ to check out groups at the Fillmore. So the whole culture had been infiltrated by other groups of people, different types of people that didn’t have anything to do with where we were at, you know what I mean?
HSV: Right.
CJ: It slowly started to dissipate, the unity that was there before ’67.
HSV: Right. And then the drugs slipped over to speed in the ‘70s and it got pretty intense, I’ve heard.
CJ: Everything went sideways after Altamont. Altamont as far as I’m concerned was a turning point.
HSV: So let’s go back even further. You were telling a story about being a kid roaming around SF. You were just a kid going to Playland and all the crazy stories. Give me a youngster story about the alligators at Steinhart Aquarium or one of those stories.
CJ: I lived across the street from Golden Gate Park. I lived on 7th Avenue between Irving and Lincoln. I could just walk over and into the park. Within 3 minutes I was in Golden Gate Park. I would go in through the back door at the Steinhart.
HSV: How old were you at this point?
CJ: This was like … let me see now. This was like ’55, ’54. I was about 6.
HSV: Okay. This is great. Go ahead.
CJ: There was a big canopy outside of the Steinhart in the back and they had the bones of a whale and god, it was like like 30-feet long. I would kind of go under that and then go through the back door and I’d be in Steinhart where the pendulum was swinging.
HSV: Yep! I remember it well!
CJ: And they had a huge collection of antique watches and there was a Mickey Mouse pocket watch there. There was a beautiful watch that was a skull. It was an enamel skull. The head opened up and there was a clock face inside. It had diamonds for eyes. This is from the 17th century. There was all kinds of clockwork stuff there. I freaked out on the Mickey Mouse pocket watch, man. I mean it never went away! (laughter)
HSV: Clearly your artwork is very much inspired by that early experience.
CJ: You gotta realize that I was bilingual. I was living in 2 cultures. At home, I was European with a strict upbringing. And outside of the house, I was an American. So I’m looking at this new culture that my parents came to this country in, and I’m looking at this culture and I’m looking at characters like Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse and Popeye and Superman and I’m goin’, “Man, this country is fuckin’ out there! What kind of a country is this? This is fantastic!” And then I found Batman and that was it. As far as I was concerned, America to me was the greatest place on the Earth back then because it was doing this for the kids. This was all culture for the kids.
HSV: Especially San Francisco! This is the Wild West! This is where all the kooky people come.
CJ: I can’t even tell you how many vigilante gangs were in San Francisco in the Barbary Coast era.
HSV: Yeah. The point being, you come from the old country. You’re parents sound like they were from what, Holland?
CJ: They were Dutch but they grew up on an island in Indonesia because it was a Dutch colony.
HSV: Wow!
CJ: Mom used to go crocodile hunting at midnight in the jungle when she was a teenager with her parents.
HSV: Maybe that’s why you were with the alligators at Steinhart! It’s your lineage! (laughter)
CJ: So yeah, when I would sneak into the Steinhart, it would be 10 in the morning. There was nobody in there! I’d walk up and down the halls looking at the stuffed animals. I would touch the grizzly bear who was standing straight up.
HSV: Taxidermy, yeah.
CJ: It was gigantic! And then there was the alligator pit. People would throw quarters in there, make a wish or something. So I would climb over the railing and get the quarters and climb back out and buy one of those baloney and cheese sandwiches out of the machine that had mustard on it, you know? I had never tasted this before. This was American food and I went, “Wow, this is great!” (Laughter)
HSV: That’s fascinating.
CJ: My whole impression with America was from an objective view. I saw the 2 different cultures: the European culture and the American culture, and I knew that the American culture was where it was at, you know?
HSV: So when you were hanging out with Jimi and having a conversation with an American guy who went to England to get big, but anyway the point being that conversation must’ve lit your brain up. I mean your music, how it was affected by your trajectory from the old country into this crazy America thing and then channeling that into your music and hanging out with all these musicians. That must’ve been amazing. It was a Mecca, you know?
CJ: In the early ‘60s, North Beach was kind of a Beatnik haven. There’d be guys on the street playin’ bongoes, playin’ acoustic guitar, a lot of those cats had acoustic guitars. There was a whole folk movement at that time with the hootenanny thing, you know. A lot of these guys that became the Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver and the Charlatans — a lot of these guitar players were folk guys who didn’t play electric guitar in the early ‘60s. They were acoustic guitar players who knew folk music. They knew how to fingerpick. And when they went electric, man, they were incredible players. By the time I saw the Airplane onstage at the Fillmore — and this is before Paul Kantner had a Rickenbacker 12-string. He had a Gibson acoustic 12-string with a pickup on it. Jorma had fingerpicks on and he was fingerpicking. I was blown away! All of these people were anywhere from 6 to 8 years older than me. They had come out of that beatnik thing. And immediately when Bob Dylan went electric — he went to electric guitar because of the Beatles — all of these folk guys followed and became electric guitar players. That’s why those bands were so good when they began their debut because they were already accomplished players.
HSV: Fingerpickin’ like Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. My dear friend Ramblin Jack. He’s still around!
CJ: And Joan Baez, one of the greatest fingerpickers of all time.
HSV: That’s what blows my mind about you: I went to New York on the tail end of Jean Michel-Basquiat and all that, the tail end of all this stuff, and I feel like you were kind of on the coat tails of these folks, like, “Wow! This is groovy!” As it were, you know?
CJ: Look, in ’65, there were no venues except the Longshoreman’s Hall in Fisherman’s Wharf. Every Friday and Saturday, being in high school, you could go down to the Longshoreman’s Hall, buy a ticket, and see local bands play, like William Penn and his Pals, Butch Engel, there was a bunch of local bands. Peter Wheat and the Breadmen. We would all go there and watch these guys play electric instruments in ’65, and this is a high school crowd. Some of us had long hair but a lot of us didn’t, not at that point. And at the end of the year at the Longshoreman’s Hall, right before the Fillmore started in ’66, they had a thing called the Acid Test and everybody dropped acid. So we were being initiated into this thing outta high school! [laughter]
By the time ’66 came around we were all stone-cold stoners when we were still in high school. I was there at the beginning. I went to the Haight Street theater when I was a kid in the ‘60s and me and my friends were running up and down in the aisle with our 6-gun shooting cap guns and the ushers kicked us out of the theater. The movie was The Thing from Another World and I remember I had nightmares for weeks — just the 10 minutes of that movie that I saw, you know? (Laughter)
HSV: Jerry [Garcia] was always talking about Frankenstein was a big thing for him, Tales of the Crypt was a big thing, the comics, it was a crazy world.
CJ: Frankenstein is as much a part of my life as the Beatles. Frankenstein was a turning point for me. [laughter]
HSV: That’s the quote of the interview! That’ll be the title of the article, right?! “Frankenstein was the turning point of my life.” In a nutshell!
CJ: And I’m talking about the Boris Karloff Frankenstein. I’m talking about the flat-head guy. That character around the end of the ‘50s there was a kind of a Frankenstein mania because Crack??? Magazine and Mad Magazine and a few of the others would put Frankenstein on the cover. There was one magazine called “Chimk” and their mascot was Frankenstein but they changed his name to Otis Frankenstein, okay? He’s on the cover of about 4 of these mags. So it wasn’t just me who was going crazy over Frankenstein. This was a mania in the underground kid culture.
HSV: So were you drawing way back then? Were you doodling back then?
CJ: Yeah, I just found a photograph of me man, I’m 4 years old and I’m layin’ on the carpet with a buncha crayons, you know? There’s another photograph of me and I’m 4 years old and I’m playing harp and I’m holding the harp like Paul Butterfield! I saw that photo a couple years ago and I went, “Oh my god I didn’t know I was that hip!” My qualifications for hipness man go waaaaay back!
HSV: Did you go to Playland? Did you see Big Sal?
CJ: Oh I went to Playland every weekend! I haunted that place, both Playland and the Sutros and the Cliffhouse. Next to the Cliffhouse was a place called the “Pronto Pup” and this was the only place in town where you could get corndogs. They were crispy and they were mind-blowing and I would ride my bicycle from Glen Park all the way down to the Cliffhouse in the summer every day to get a Pronto Pup. And then I’d hang out at Sutros or whatever.
HSV: I’m trying to keep it Haight-centric but also about you now. You’re still playing with the Groovies, you’re playing once a month, so two questions I guess there: Have you been to the Haight lately? From then to now, where are we? Is there hope? All of that …
CJ: You know it’s really weird, Haight Street is now, I would compare it to Mathew Street in Liverpool which is where the Tavern Club was, and it is now a big tourist spot. There are I don’t know how many merchandise stores of Beatles stuff and rock stuff and records and whatever all up and down Mathew Street. And when we were there in ’67, I took Roy (Loney) on the tour that year. He would come out and do a couple songs with us. Anyway we went to Liverpool and our film crew went along with us and they were filming us walking down Mathew Street. When the documentary comes out you will see what I’m going to tell you, and this was not contrived, it wasn’t rigged: we’re walking down the street, the guys are behind us filming us and all of a sudden we hear somebody playing Teenage Head and we turn the corner and there’s these two 15 year old Liverpudlian kids with a microphone and an electric guitar and they’re playing Teenage Head. We turn the corner and they see us and recognize us and we see them playing our song and we freak out! Roy and I went over and we joined in and we sang Teenage Head with them. It’s all on film. Think about how weird that is, you know what I mean?!
HSV: When’s that documentary coming out?
CJ: Oh god, I don’t know, it’s probably never going to! [laughter] They’ve got 12 hours of footage. They’ve been filming us in Japan. They’ve been filming us for the past 10 years all over the world.
HSV: I saw y’all at the 4-Star and it was like going back in time for me. I used to go see you at the Keystone Berkeley I guess it must’ve been ’75, ’76?
CJ: Yeah, we played the Keystone in Berkeley. You know Big Bob Corona that used to run the Keystones in Palo Alto and Broadway here in the City …
HSV: Yeah, the Stone.
CJ: And then in Berkeley. They called me up one day and they said, “We want you to come down and open for one of the bands.” And so we went down and did that, to Palo Alto, and when I went into the office to get paid the money that they were gonna give us, Big Bob was on the phone. He got off the phone and he said, “How much did little Bobby say you were gonna get?” I said, “He said we’d get 300 bucks.” Big Bob said, “Oh you guys were better than that, here’s $600.”
I’ll tell you this: the mob people that were in the business, that ran clubs, that ran the union, they were the nicest people and the best people I ever worked for. When the FBI got rid of the mafia, this was the dumbest thing that you could’ve done because the mafia kept out all these other gangs that infiltrated all over the country. They really screwed up. Paul Catalina, who was the president of the local musicians union, number 6, him and I became friends in the mid-70s. He’s the guy that brought the Beatles out in ’64. The Groovies weren’t diggin’ in America. We weren’t paying our dues yearly because we’re going to Europe, we were in Europe for a long time playing over there. So when we came back to America we had to reinstate into the union to get our work permits for the next European tour. So we owed them like three grand or something. So I’d come down with $3000 in cash and all these mob guys behind their desks, they’re bored to death, and here comes Cyril Jordan with three grand, and they’re like, “Hey the Groovies are here, break out the champagne!” Everybody was having a party. Paul Catalina comes down from his office and comes up to me and shakes my hand and thanks me for paying dues because the Airplane and everybody else stopped paying their dues. (Laughs) They were touring Europe so they didn’t need work permits.
But anyway, Paul Catalina gave me his card with his home phone, right? And I says, “What’s this for?” And he goes, “Well, you never know. You might need some help some time.” And I went, “Oh, okay.” So about 6 months later we’re playing Frenchy’s in Hayward. We gotta do 6 sets. At 2 in the morning, it’s over and I go to get the money and they don’t want to pay us. So we’re out in the parking lot and I tell the guys, “Well, they’re not gonna give us our money.” And they go, “Well, what are we gonna do?” And I go, “I’ll tell ya what we’re gonna do: I’m gonna call Paul Catalina right now.”
So I call Paul and I woke him up. The phone rang three times, he picks up the phone, he goes, “Who is it?” I go, “Cyril Jordan with the Flamin’ Groovies.” He goes, “Where are you?” I go, “Frenchy’s.” He goes, “What’s the problem?” I go, “They’re not gonna pay us.” He goes, “Okay. Stay there. I’m gonna send somebody out.” Twenty minutes later this Fleetwood Cadillac comes pounding into the parking lot, the guy gets out of the car, the guy is so big, he’s almost 7-feet tall, the car rises up as he’s getting out of the car it rises up about a foot. He goes, “You guys the Groovies?” We go, “Yeah.” He goes, “Wait here.” He goes inside and within one minute a chair goes flying outta the window, we hear waitresses screaming, glass breaking, and he comes out and he gives us our money.
HSV: Damn! Whoa!
CJ: After ’68, we get signed to Epic Records. They cut our first album for Columbia. We lost our rehearsal hall, which is on Hayes Street a couple of blocks down from City Hall. It was a fantastic rehearsal hall. But anyway, we lose our rehearsal hall and one day my manager calls me up and he says, “You know the Fillmore is available.” And I go, “What do you mean?” And he goes, “They’re leasing the building for $500 a month. Why don’t we just lease the Fillmore and we can put shows on there, and we can rehearse there?”
So we did that. We moved into the Fillmore. Bill had moved his shows to the Carousel Ballroom on Market, and also Winterland. Because the year before, he was doing shows at the Winterland and at the Fillmore. When we got our first show for Bill, we played the Fillmore and Winterland that weekend with the Airplane and Mother Earth. So Friday we were at the Fillmore and Saturday we were at Winterland.
HSV: I love that the last edition of Haight Street Voice, Winter 2023-24, I’ve got Bill Graham in front of Winterland on the cover, and now I’m talking to you. It’s almost like the trajectory of the whole San Francisco thing. You’re legendary. I’m very grateful to you for speaking with me about all this cuz it’s important stuff, Cyril, you know?
CJ: I guess. I mean, you know, it’s part of my life but it’s also part of history. And for some crazy reason I was able to be at certain places when historical things were goin’ down. In ’68, the Flamin’ Groovies became the rock band for the Democratic Party in California. We played all of their rallies. We played the McGovern rallies and then we played a rally for Bobby Kennedy up in North Beach. This was a week before Bobby was murdered. We’re playing this old brick building and I look out and in the audience — we’re right in the middle of the first set, we gotta do three sets — I see Ted Kennedy in the audience.
Later I go outside and I light up a joint and Herb Caen comes out and he starts asking me about the band and where we’re from and I tell him, “Well we’re the only San Francisco band. Everybody in the band is from San Francisco.” And I give him the joint and he sucks on it, and then Ted comes out and he gives the joint to Ted and Ted takes a big hit and he gives it to me. I shoulda put that roach in lucite! I’m still in high school and here I am smoking pot with Ted Kennedy! I mean get outta here! (Laughter) My life has been completely nuts and most people that hear these things, they don’t believe it. But I don’t give a damn if they don’t believe it, man! This is what happened! This is real, you know?
HSV: Weird magical things can happen I think if you’re staying true to who you are and all of that.
CJ: This is what was so cool about our culture back then: there were no passports. There was no status quo. You could be in a band that just started a week ago and nobody ever heard of you, and you could be hangin’ out with Jimi Hendrix who’s in the Top-10. There was no class system. We were all on the same equal plane, you know?
HSV: Photographer Michael Zagaris was talking about how you could hang out at the Winterland with Eric Clapton and whoever else and you were all just kind of hanging out, smokin’ weed.
CJ: Yeah! Nobody was uppity about being in the Top-10. All of that stuff that was happening before in our culture was not happening. You were the same guy you were last week but now you’re in the Top-10. Well, you’re the same guy you were last week as you are now, you know what I mean?
HSV: Right. So music was the carrot as opposed to money being the carrot I reckon. Something like that?
CJ: Well, music, but also drugs.
HSV: Dig this: I flunked in the 10th grade cuz my Mom and Dad got a divorce. It was a bad year, you know? So anyway I meet George Alexander and Roy (Loney) and Tim (Lynch) who are going to State College, you know, they’re older guys. And they turn me on to pot. So I get stoned this one weekend and Monday I wake up and I’m too out of it, I’m not gonna go to school. Mom goes off the work and I go back to sleep. And the phone rings at noon and it’s my girlfriend Donna and says, “Rodney Garcia just got shot to death at Tic-Tocks drive-in.” I would’ve been standing right next to Rodney had I not decided to stay home.
The way things went back then was so unbelievably weird. John Kennedy gets killed. And then the Beatles happened. There was terrible tragedy and then there was a blooming of joy with the British Invasion that was just overwhelming, you know?
HSV: Fast forward to now, I mean the world now, and you guys are still out there playing. There are so many people that are hungry for that groove, that essence of it’s in your blood, it’s on your skin. People are so hungry for that, not just myself but kids too. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Flamin’ Groovies — there’s a very magical potion in essence of what all of that was.
CJ: When I did the 10th grade over again, I got A’s and B’s. And my Mom looked at my report card and she said, ‘What’s going on? You were getting C’s and D’s and now you’ve got A’s and B’s.” I said, “Mom, you don’t wanna know what’s going on.” She said, “Come on, we don’t keep nothin’ from each other. Tell me what’s going on.” And I said, “You’re not gonna like it.” And she said, “Come on …” and squeezed me. I told her, I said, “I started smoking pot.” She said, “You started smoking pot and now you got A’s and B’s? What’s going on?” And I said, “Well, pot makes everything real interesting!” [laughter] She said, “Well, if that’s what’s going on then you just keep smoking pot then!”
HSV: I have it written down here it says you got famous right out of high school.
CJ: I get kicked outta Balboa High School and I gotta now make up 2 credits. So I take typing and English at John Adams Adult High School in the Haight! This is the Summer of Love, ’67, okay? So I get out at 11 in the morning and one day I’m walkin’ down Masonic, crossing the Panhandle and I look to the right and they’re building a stage. This is like 11:30 in the morning, and I see Jimi Hendrix and I go holy shit! I run over and start talking to Mitch and Noel and Jimi, and after 10 minutes, Jimi goes, “Hey, can you get us some hash?” And I go, “Yeah, yeah, I can get you some hash.” So I run up into the Haight, I get some hash, and I come back and we started gettin’ stoned.
So I would have to say that the bond wasn’t just the fashion and the music. It was drugs. It was one of the major bonds, bonding factions.
The next time I see Jimi Hendrix is in LA on LaBrea Street at the Free Clinic at 8 in the morning. And I’m talking to these hippie guys, we’re waiting for the place to open and their eyes pop out! Somebody is behind me and I turn around and it’s Jimi Hendrix! And I go, “What are you doin’ here?” And he says, “I’m doin’ the same thing you’re doin’ man, god dammit! I got the clap.” We all got the clap! We go to Hollywood, the big time, and boom! Next thing you know two weeks later we got the clap.
If you look at our album SuperSnazz, on the back of the album it lists who the players are and what we play — lead vocals, guitar … and then it would say “clap”. So four guys in the band have the word “clap” after the little rap about what they do in the band cuz we all got the clap! We figured, yeah, that could be handclaps on the recording, you know?! [laughter]
HSV: Obviously you played the Fab Mab. I wanted to give the Fab Mab a shoutout cuz it was a big part during my formative years. Give me some thoughts about the Fab Mab.
CJ: The first time I went to the Mabuhay must’ve been about ’76 or ’77 and Paul Kantner was there. He was the only person I recognized in the room. He was down there checkin’ it out, you know? Next thing I know my girlfriend Caroline starts working there as a waitress and I become friends with Ness and Dirk. And then all of a sudden the Groovies start playing America. Our first gigs after the Waldorf show that Jeffrey Pollack booked for us, we started working the Mab. We must’ve done 20 gigs at the Mab in those years. I was at the Mab just about every weekend too checkin’ out the Nuns and the Mutants and whoever, you know.
HSV: Leila and the Snakes, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, Devo played there … That place definitely blew my mind open, I’ll tell you that. And Audrey was doing sound, which was unheard of, you know, a female sound person.
CJ: Yeah, Audrey became really good friends with my girlfriend Carolyn. That’s how I met Audrey.
HSV: She and I were talking about my interview with you. She and I again were kind of on the tail end of it all. We were part of it but we also were like, “Wow, holy shit, this is a cool scene.” I’m trying to find the bridge here. Has anybody seen the confounded bridge?
CJ: You guys are like me when I was young, before the Haight Ashbury, looking at these older people going, “Man, this is great!”
HSV: Yeah! I mean I saw Iggy Pop with David Bowie on keyboards with Blondie opening at the Berkeley Community Theater when I was 15! Then I saw the Sex Pistols a year later, like, what the fuck, wow!
CJ: You know, sometimes I have fans coming up to me that were 15 when they first heard “Teenage Head”. I look at ‘em and I go, “You must’ve been pretty hip”, knowing about the Flamin’ Groovies cuz nobody knew about us! [laughter]
The thing is, there is a parallel there with you and Audrey and me and people like me who were younger who looked at the older generation growing up and turning into hippiness and the drug culture. But there’s definitely a parallel there that influenced us in the same way that I was influenced you and Audrey were influenced.
HSV: What would you say to the kids now, you know, the 17, 16 year olds who are still coming to the Haight-Ashbury — cuz I work at the local shop and these people come in from all over the world, Holland, France … Iowa, and they’re like, “Wow! This is the Haight Ashbury! This is so cool!” What do you want to say to those people? Or even all the people of the Haight community then, now, whatever? What would you say if you had a bullhorn and you could say whatever you want to everyone, say your peace?
CJ: A lot of musicians still live in the Haight, but as far as bands living there, there has changed. You know the Dead had a house there, the Charlatans had a house there, the Airplane was scattered all over the place until they got that mansion over on Fulton.
I would say to the young people that are coming to the Haight now that the underground is not visible like it was in the ‘60s on Haight Street. The underground is now in the underground. You gotta go to the clubs to see what the music scene is, you know?
HSV: Love it, yeah!
CJ: Cuz not all the band members are hanging out on Haight Street all day long like they were. You’d go to Haight Street in the ‘60s man and you could see one star after another just hangin’ out. George Harrison comes out in ’67, obviously the Beatles had heard about it. And one night at the Avalon we were doing a gig and Chet comes up to us and he goes, “Hey, we’re all going to the Straight Theater because the Beatles are sending out Magical Mystery Tour on a plane to San Francisco so we can watch it.
So we all go to the Straight Theater and we get there at about 12:30 in the morning and it isn’t until 5 in the morning when this hippie comes running down the aisle with the movie can and we get to watch Magical Mystery Tour. But anyway, the next day I wake up and I got crabs! [laughter] I’d been sitting in the place for over 5 hours, you know?! It scared the hell out of me, man! I thought aliens had landed on my balls! I almost had a heart attack!
HSV: Hey, speaking of aliens on balls. I did a little mockup of the bee with the magnifying glass looking at the Beatles that you did. I’d just be honored and tickled pink to have your artwork on the cover.
CJ: That one would be very appropriate because it’s got one of the Groovies characters on there. The Beatles playing guitars and drums on a mushroom with a magnifying glass.
I stole that from an issue of Cracked Magazine in 1964 when the Beatles came out. They had a whole article on the Beatles and they talked about how their hair was long and looked like bugs on top of their head. And they started talking about what the haircut of the future was going to look like. And they came up with a mohican — and this is years before Taxi Driver. And then they came up with the bald guys. That happened in the ‘80s. This was in Crack Magazine in 1964, and they’re predicting trends and they’re nailing them, okay!? [laughter] When I look back at the issue now, I’m in hysterics, man! How the hell did they know, you know?
HSV: Explain that Flamin’ Groovies character, like a bee or something. What’s the deal there?
CJ: What was happening with that cover is we were cutting the album with Columbia. One day an artist comes in with a big folder of his artwork. He’s going from studio to studio to try and get a job to do a cover for a group, right? He opens up this portfolio and it’s this beautiful airbrushed art deco little black rubber-hose cartoon character. All of the cartoon characters in the ’30 had limbs that were like black rubber hoses. Their arms were black rubber hoses with white gloves, and their legs were black rubber hoses. So I’m looking at this and I’m goin’, “Man, this is right up my alley.” I look at the artist and I go, ‘Could you do a thing like this of the Flamin’ Groovies of all us?” And he goes, “Oh yeah!”
So he comes back 2 weeks later with the cover and shows us and we all go, “Wow man, that’s it!” His name is Bob Zoelle (www.bobzoelle.com) an incredible artist. He took me to his house one day and his house is like the house of Mickey Mouse. There was a little armrest chair in the corner with a lamp. There was a beautiful trim on the floor border. There was a bookcase with all antique Mickey Mouse toys from the ‘30s. He loved Disney with a vengeance, man. If you look at my house now you’re gonna go, “Ohhh. Okay.” [laughs]
HSV: I was fantasizing of doing this interview there and filming a lot of your stuff.
CJ: The house is a mess right now. I’m moving a buncha shit. I gotta clear out my garage and move stuff downstairs. It’s just a mess. You heard about a man cave? This is not a cave, this is a canyon. (Laughter) you gotta be real careful where you walk. There’s shit piled up everywhere, man. If it isn’t Mad magazine it’s Famous Monsters. If it’s not Famous Monsters it’s the Beatles Monthly, it’s Antique Toys, it’s magic apparatus, it’s original art, it’s ventriloquist puppets.
CJ: Let’s talk about your magic! You were a magician when you were a kid?
HSV: I worked in the Golden Gate Magic Company starting at the age of 10. I worked there for 4 years on Saturdays and then 6 days a week during the summer. Now my Mom, she worked for Tide Water Oil Company, and they had an office right around the corner from Golden Gate Magic Company on Market Street. So I would go to work with Mom in the summer. Dad would drop me and Mom off and I’d go to the magic shop and go to work and then Dad would pick us up.
So anyway I became a magician and I had my own one-hour show and I was doing magic shows at the Jewish old folks homes and doing birthday parties and stuff like that.
HSV: What was your piece-de-resistance?
CJ: I called myself Mahatma Kane Jeeves, which was a name I got from WC Fields. I wore a turban, so I was kind of like a middle-eastern magician. There’s a photograph of me wearing the turban and I’m performing magic at SAM at a hotel on Market Street. The SAM is the Society of Magicians that Houdini started. It’s all these old guys watching me perform magic. Now this is 1960. I’m 12 years old, you know! (Laughter)
Roy and I were members of a theatrical rep company called The Interplayers. The Interplayers had a theater down on Beach and Hyde, and for 2 years Roy and I would go there every night, watch the rehearsals, be part of the troupe. And after that, they had a big hit with a play called “Tom Paine”. Jack Nance, who became Eraserhead. You know David Lynch’s Erasurehead?
HSV: Erasurehead, yes!
CJ: Okay, so Jack Nance who plays the character with the big hairdo, he was our closest friend in the theater. Jack was a wild man. I mean at parties at state college somebody would go, “Where’s Jack?” And someone would say, “Oh Jack crawled out the kitchen window and he’s up on the roof taking a leak off the roof. Drunk.” (Laughs) Jack was just one of the wildest guys. David Lynch could’t have picked a better guy.
One day in ’74 I’m at Jack Nance’s house in L.A. and a friend of his comes over and he talks like Jimmy Stewart, he’s got this weird way of talking, you know? He starts talking film. He’s a fanatic on film. Me and him start talking about movies — this is David Lynch! I didn’t find out until 20 years later when I’m looking at a magazine article on Elephant Man and I see the guy in the photo with John Hurt and I go, “Get outta here! That’s that guy that was at Jack’s house!”
HSV: Holy shit, man! (laughter)
CJ: Back then, we were at the beginning of many, many flowers that were going to bloom, and one of them was a kid who would be hanging out at the Whiskey (a Go-Go) when we’re doing a soundcheck, he was a big fan and his name was Richard. I kind of felt sorry for him cuz he looked like he was almost homeless or something. He was kind of grungy lookin’. I would let him into the shows. So anyway, 30 years later I’m looking at a magazine article on Freddy whatever from Nightmare whatever …
HSV: Freddy Krueger.
CJ: Freddy Krueger. And Freddy Krueger is Richard! Richard became Freddy Krueger! [laughter]
HSV: Wow. Well you did say that Frankenstein was a turning point in your life! All these weird characters in your life, you know? I think the moral of the story here is don’t be afraid to be a freak or a monster or whatever you are.
CJ: I knew these people when they were nobody! I was there. We were all there on the ground floor trying to get somewhere with our art, you know?
HSV: Yeah, that’s the thing: you stayed true to your art, your music. You kept playing and learning and growing.
CJ: It’s one of the secrets of our survival ability. We were never contemporary at any time, so we never got the shaft. Like when disco was over, all those disco guys, they got the shaft. But no, we’re still playing rock and roll. We never got the shaft because we’re doing something that’s timeless, which is rock and roll. So we were never dated at any time, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been able to keep going, you know? That, plus we cut really good LPs. I made sure that the songs that were on there man were really high quality and ready to be presented and I wouldn’t be embarrassed, you know?
HSV: Are you a big record collector? Do you have tons of albums? Is that something throughout your history you’ve been doing?
CJ: Not like I used to. I have a lot. People stole a lot of my records over the decades, thousands of 45s and LPs. You don’t know that things go missing til years later when you try to find it, you know?
So yeah, when we started touring 10 years ago around the world, I started buying vinyl again. I do have a small collection but nothing like Bob Hite of Canned Heat. Bob and Al (Wilson) were headlining at the Whiskey one weekend, we were opening for them. I’m playing slide guitar on my Hummingbird, a Gibson, backstage and Al and Bob come in and they’re like, “Wow.” And they go get their guitars and we start playing and we jammed all night. And then Bob says, “Hey, let’s go to my house and keep the party going. So we drop acid — Al, Bob and I. We go to Bob’s house in Laurel Canyon, and Bob has 25,000 ’78s. All blues and jug and jazz ‘78s. So we’re listening to his record collection and then. Al says, “Hey it’s time for me to go to sleep. So me and Al grab sleeping bags. Al was sleeping in a tent in Bob’s backyard! So we’re in the sleeping bags looking at the silhouette of Bob’s house on acid. And I look at the house and I go, “Hey that house is tilted! The left-side of the house is sinking into the ground!” I wake up Al and I go, “Hey man, Bob’s house is sinking!” And he goes, “Man, you’re too stoned. What are you talking about?” Anyway he finally realizes what I’m saying is true!
We run into Bob’s house and we pound on their bedroom door and wake him and his wife up. His wife gets really angry and we go, “Bob! You’re house is sinking!” That the weight of the ‘78s on the left side of the house is causing the foundation to drop down. So we spent all night moving half of the ‘78s to the other side of the house, trying to balance it out! [laughter]
HSV: [laughing] Wow!!!
CJ: I’ve got so many of these wild acid stories. I dropped acid with Eric Clapton, with Jimi Hendrix, with Bob Hite, with Mick Taylor, I mean it just goes on and on.
HSV: Tell me about your Jimi Hendrix acid trip.
CJ: Jimi and I would roam around Hollywood Boulevard Saturday afternoons and day I was I the Cherokee Bookstore upstairs looking at DC Comics, Tales from the Crypt in a box and this shadow comes over me. I’m crouched down and I look up and it’s Jimi. And I go, “Wow, are you into this stuff?” And goes, “Yeah man. I used to collect that stuff when I was in the Army” or the airforce or whatever it was. So anyway, we dropped acid and I told him, “Hey listen. I know a place where they’ve got mint copies of Tales from the Crypt.” So I took him down to the collector’s bookstore, and the guy who ran the place, Leonard Brown, a real uptight guy. From the point on, when I brought Jimi Hendrix in, he treated me like I was a king [laughs] cuz I introduced him to Jimi Hendrix!
HSV: What was Clapton like on acid?
CJ: He and Ginger and Jack, they dropped Owsley acid which at that time was White Lightning. It was 1500 micrograms. And they go onstage like nothing is wrong. Ginger wanted to take another tab! And I said, “No, no, no, no!” He was so stoned, his beautiful blue eyes, the black dot in the middle of your eyeball, it had vanished! It had shrunk down to nothin’! His eye was just blue! And I said, “Ginger, you’re too stoned.You’re not gonna take another tab. I’m not gonna get you another tab.
When they had to go onstage, Ginger said, “Hey, walk me to the stage.” So I grabbed Ginger’s hand, we went down the stairs, and I walked him to the stage. And then him and Jack and Eric went up onstage and they played like there was no tomorrow. It was unbelievable! I don’t know how they were able to on acid. They had never dropped before. These guys were the most psychedelic dudes that I had ever met, you know?
When Disraeli Gears came out, the most psychedelic album cover of all time. I remember lookin’ at it and goin’, Wow man! Did I help influence these guys or what? [laughter]
HSV: Well like you said, they were very well-versed in their guitar playing so it was like they were on autopilot as opposed to just learning how to play and tripping on acid. They were aficionados, they knew how to play.
CJ: If you’re a musician and you’re trying to tune your guitar on acid, you better get a tuner, you know, because the note is gonna waver like crazy! [laughter]
HSV: Have you ever played live on acid?
CJ: Yeah, only once. I remember Jerry Garcia, he got spiked with some frosting on a cake at the Fillmore one night and he got reaaaaal stoned and the Dead are going on and everybody’s looking for Jerry. I run around the Fillmore and I find Jerry and I go, “Jerry, you gotta go on!” And he looks at me and he goes, “I gotta go on? I gotta go on what?” And I go, “You gotta go onstage! Remember you’re in the Grateful Dead?!” And Jerry says this in an interview. I had forgotten about this and somebody told me a year or two ago they were reading this thing on Jerry Garcia and he talked about Cyril Jordan came up to me and he told me that it was time to play. He never dropped acid again either, playing.
HSV: Right. Well Stanley Mouse the poster artist, he’s a friend of mine, he’s in my book. But he said, “Everybody thinks we got really high and started painting, and that’s just not the case. I’d start eating the paint or something. That is not the way it was happening.
CJ: No, no, no. You dropped the acid after the painting was finished and then you looked at it, you know what I mean? [laughs]
HSV: Right. Kind of like listening to the song after you’ve recorded it.
CJ: You didn’t drop acid to create it.
HSV: On a Radio Valencia interview recently, you were talking about buying your clothes at Carnaby Street in London.
CJ: Carnaby Street in London, yeah, but here in San Francisco I bought my clothes at a place called the Town Squire on Polk near California.
In ’65, a group called The Vejtables, one of the San Francisco groups that were on Autumn Records that Tom Donahue signed. They had a big hit called “I Still Love You”. They were at the Cow Palace and their lead guitar player had olive green wide wail corduroys on and I freaked out. I said, “Wow! Did you get those in London?” And he goes, “No, I got ‘em here in San Francisco.” And I go, “Where?” And he goes, “Oh the Town Squire on Polk.” So that was it. After that I bought all my stuff at the Town Squire.
HSV: That’s beautiful.
CJ: One day all the Groovies went down on a Saturday to get clothes at the Town Squire — and Liberace was there getting outfitted! We freaked out! We went, “Oh wow! Liberace!” And he came over and he said, “Hey you guys look like you’re in the biz. What are you called?” And I said, “We’re called the Flamin’ Groovies.” And he goes, “Wow! That’s a pretty far out name!” And I said, “Yeah, we wanted a name that nobody could live up to.” [laughter]
HSV: Wow, Liberace!?
CJ: Then we had a picture taken with him. What a wonderful guy. We were on a TV show once with Jacques Cousteau’s son.
HSV: Phillippe! Phillippe Cousteau!
CJ: Yeah, him and his wife. He couldn’t believe that us hippies knew all about his father. We were excited as hell to meet him and we told him, “Yeah man, we’ve been watching all the shows that Jacques Cousteau’s been doing.” He was just amazing. He was such a nice guy. He was killed in an airplane accident a couple of years later.
HSV: Jacque Cousteau is woven into the fabric of who I am. I remember watching that show so well. That ‘70s television stuff. Like you said, there were so many flowers blooming during that time, Jacque Cousteau, just the essence of that time, there was a lot of cool shit going on culturally.
CJ: There was an incredible awareness of opening up our eyes and trying to really understand reality on a scientific level. That’s why psychedelics were so important to the culture. Because as soon as you took acid, you had a different consciousness that was almost alien. That’s why people freaked out cuz it’s really scary to feel that different type of awareness. You’re seeing more, you’re hearing more, you’re feeling more. Get the fuck outta here, man! People would freak out.
Years later I began to understand that it was like our consciousness of being straight with the gifts that the creator gave us. And these days, as far as the creator, I relate to the creator as the Sun because we all come from the Sun. A collapsed sun is what gave us chocolate milkshakes and Chuck Berry and electric guitars. Everything we know came out of a collapsed sun, man! [laughs]
When I think of god I relate to him as the creator and if you’re talking a physical presence, I relate to him as the Sun because heat is the thing that gives us time. Without heat, there is no time. Nothing’s moving on the planet Pluto! It’s 300 degrees below zero. Everything’s frozen.
HSV: You think about a plant, it’s just reaching for its highest potential, which is the sun, right?
CJ: Yeah! And all the nutrition that’s here in the soil and in the volcanoes — everything has come from the Sun. So when I think of god I think of the Sun, like the ancient peoples 100,000 years ago in jungles. Their god was the Sun. They were in touch with creation. As they were, they for some reason or another understood that the Sun was the thing that gave us all life.
HSV: I was just thinking about the cats and Nefertiti and how cats just love basking in the Sun.
CJ: The Egyptian culture is amazing. I’m crazy about Egyptian history. I love it.
HSV: What’s the circle around the whole thing? A snake eating its own tail into creation? [Editor’s note; Researched later: The name Ouroboros means “Devouring its Own Tail” or “All is One” since 1600 BC. It is symbolic of the cyclic nature of time & the universe when creation begins after destruction and life from death. The symbol was originally made in ancient Egypt.]
CJ: Egypt is the beginning of Western civilization. I look white but I have Persian, I have Armenian, I have Indonesian, and I have Dutch in me. Just cuz I look like a white guy doesn’t mean I’m a white guy, you know? But when it comes to American culture, I’m about the whitest motherfucker there is, you know what I mean, because there ain’t nothin’ cooler than Frankenstein, Mickey Mouse, or King Kong, and I don’t give a shit what anybody says! [laughter]
HSV: Leading us full circle back to Frankenstein like the snake eating its own tail: Bill Graham’s amazing journey of escaping Nazi Germany and then running things with all these crazy gifted musicians in San Francisco music scene — that’s quite the story.
CJ: Our first gig for Bill, we’re not on the poster. This was in April of ’66, so the Fillmore had just been going for 4 months. We played with the Quicksilver and the poster said, “The Final Solution”. Bill didn’t know what that meant, and somebody told him, “What are you doing having a group called the Final Solution on your show?” So Bill fired those guys and hired us! We replaced them! [laughter] And we weren’t the Groovies at that time, we were the Lost & Found. We were right at the beginning. We were the youngest guys in that scene. We were just children.
HSV: Were you scared or were you shining like the sun? You must’ve had a little of both I reckon?
CJ: Naw, nothin’ scared me, man. I almost died with polio. I faced death for 5 months when I was young and I resigned myself to it, that I was gonna die. I was never gonna grow up or fall in love or drive a car or whatever. And then they tell me, “You’re going home and you’re not gonna die.” And it was like “holy shit!” I felt like an alien who now was allowed to join the human race again. There was this objectivity I had, like I was not part of it, that I was on the outside looking in on it, you know, with a bird’s-eye view. A very, very strange transition that I went through.
HSV: Wow. How old were you when that happened?
CJ: Five-and-a-half years old.
HSV: And then you came to America?
CJ: Yeah. And then I became an American. After two-and-a-half years at home with a nurse doing physiotherapy all day long. I chewed bubblegum all day long because I had the polio in my neck and jaw and my spine, so I couldn’t put my lips together for years. When I went back to school in the third grade in ’57, I wanted to play clarinet. So I would hold it out of the side of my mouth because that left side of my mouth, the lips wouldn’t close, there’d be a hole there. So my teacher came up to me and said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’ve got to play it this way.” She said, “You can’t play wind instruments, you’ve got to play a stringed instrument.” So I got a ukulele.
I remember one night there was a knock on the door and it was this guy selling accordions, and he came in and Mom and Dad were downstairs in the hall with me and this guy and he’s showing us the accordion and my Dad says, “What do you think?” And I go, “Uh, I don’t know about that. The only people I see playing accordions are blind people on Market Street. (laughs) There’s no way I’m gonna play an accordion!”
One of my favorite albums from the Haight music scene was an album that Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks cut. It was a Christmas album and it came out maybe 35-40 years ago. It was hilarious! It was one of the funniest things I’ve heard. Dan Hicks was just unbelievably great on this album. His lyrics were like, get outta here! Just fantastic.
HSV: I gotta check that out cuz I know of him but I haven’t really studied his stuff.
CJ: We played his first gig with the Charlatans in Sausalito on a riverboat that was called The Ark. We did our set, we got off, and the Charlatans went on. In their first song, all of a sudden I smell gas and I tell everybody, “I smell gas. We gotta get outta here!” So we’re all moving off the riverboat into the parking lot. We’re all standing there looking at the riverboat and it catches fire! And the fucker burnt down right in front of us!
When you see the poster, it’s July 4th, it’s fireworks above the riverboat and the band is the Flamin’ Groovies! (Laughter) The fuckin’ thing burnt down, man! When I see the poster today I kinda go, “Oh yeah I remember that day!” It was a crazy day!
HSV: You’ve been lighting places up everywhere you go! Sounds like everything kind of lights up. You’re just there. Again, the sun!
CJ: The day of the Sharon Tate murders, that Friday night, I come into the Whiskey about 8 o’clock in the evening and my girlfriend Nancy Throckmorton, she’s freaking out. She’s a waitress there and I go, “Nancy, what’s wrong?” She goes, “I gotta get outta here!” I go, “What’s happening?” She goes, “See those hippies up there on the balcony? They’re talking about murdering people.” And I look at them and I say, “What?!”
So I went backstage and opened the door behind them to see if I could hear them saying anything and I didn’t. Anyway, later that night, the Sharon Tate people get killed and the next day I’m going, “Was it those people?!” There were a bunch of women and there were two guys that looked like surfers, and I got a bad feeling it was them and maybe I should’ve called the cops or something, you know what I mean?
HSV: Wow.
CJ: Is that nuts or what?
HSV: Yeah, that’s nuts.
CJ: That’s how close I was to weird stuff happening.
The day Moscone and Harvey Milk were shot to death at City Hall, I was at Doggie Diner two blocks up on Van Ness at lunchtime, and the cops were across from me eating. All of a sudden they get up and they run outside. So I get up and I run outside and we’re looking at City Hall and people are jumping out of windows. We’re like, “What the hell is going on in there?” This is when they were killed.
HSV: I was just thinking about Jim Jones and all that too. We were just talking about how cool that time was, you know, everybody was trying to …
CJ: I got one more story to tell cuz you mentioned Jim Jones, okay?
HSV: Yeah!
CJ: Okay. So the church that Jim Jones had was a couple of buildings down from the Fillmore. It was on Geary. And in 1969 I go to the Fillmore one Saturday night and I’m hangin’ around and I don’t really see anyone I know and I’m about ready to leave, and I see Chaz Chandler — Jimi Hendrix’s manager, the bass player that used to be in The Animals. Real tall guy, you know? And Chaz and I are outside talkin’ and Chaz goes, “Where you goin?” And I say, “Oh, I was gonna go home.” He goes, “I’m goin’ to a party, you wanna come?” I go, “Yeah, where is it?” He goes, “It’s right down the street here.”
So we walk outta the Fillmore, turn left, we walk down the block and we walk up these steps into this church and then we walk down these steps in a hallway and there are rooms on the right and the left but no doors, and there’s an orgy going on. The Mitchell Brothers are filming a porno movie there. We’re walking down the hallway and there’s a daisy chain one room and out, I look at Chaz and I go, “This is some party!” And Chaz being British, he goes, “I don’t fuckin’ believe it, mate!” So anyway, he looks in one of the rooms, I keep walking down the hallway and there’s light at the end and there’s a big room, kind of an amphitheater. I look to the left and there’s Marilyn Chambers givin’ this guy head on the staircase, and to the right is the film crew and they go, “CUT! CUT! CUT!” I walked in on the shooting of a hot scene! There’s gotta be loose footage of me walkin’ in there, you know what I mean!?” (Laughter)
HSV: (laughter) Oh man!
CJ: That was one night in San Francisco. And that gives you an idea of how wild this town was if you went out at night and you met somebody and they took you somewhere. And man, all I can say is “whoa” — ya know?! (Laughter)
Five years later, Jim Jones moves into that church with all these Bible-loving people. Little did they know that this was a place where orgies were happening!
HSV: Jesus! Talk about the heaven and hell thing, right?
CJ: Yeah!
Okay Cyril, thanks so much man! I’m gonna transcribe everything that just happened and pull the nuggets out — which, there are alotta nuggets!
CJ: Yeah, for sure, thanks so much! I had a great time talkin’ to you.
HSV: I’ll see you March 23 at the Stork Club. Peace man! Thank you!
CJ: Okay babe! Take care.
