Late one nite, in the summer of 1969, when I was trying to build a reputation for myself as a studio guitarist, I got a call from someone whose voice I did not recognize. This was a little unusual because of what time it was and that it wasn’t a friend. This was in the days before telemarketing and robocalls.
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The voice on the other end of the line was Negro, or colored-take your pick: white people didn’t say “Black” in those days and “African-American” was still years away. But the guy’s first few words, and their inflection, “Hey, you Country Al?” said it, for me at least. Plus, as I said, it was very late. Most folks would have been in bed long before that. Sorry if that’s politically incorrect, but this was in the days before that, too, was an issue.

“Right on, man” I said. I wasn’t going to be caught sleeping at the ethnicity switch.

“Hey, how you doin’, brother?” went the other voice.

“Groovy, man,” I said. “What’s goin’ on witchoo?” I wasn’t expected to say a name yet, but I knew I couldn’t let on that I didn’t know who I was talking to. That was part of the code.

“Who you been pickin’ with lately?” said the voice. “Isn’t that what you hillbillies say? Pickin’?”

“Um, different folks,” I said. “No finals or anything. I sweetened some tracks for a psychedelic band that doesn’t have a name. And I did a session for [producer] Dallas Smith; a couple demos for Sam Weatherly…”

“We know Sam, don’t we, Irv?”

“Right on,” said a voice over a speaker-phone.. Now I had a name: Irv. Back to voice one. “He demoed our hit, ‘Think of your fellow man, lend him a helping hand…,’” he sang, the lead line of a Jackie DeShannon single, “Put a Little Love Your Heart.”

“Hey, I played on those tracks!” I said stupidly.

“Yeah, we can dig it, man,” he said. “They sho-nuff buried you in the mix, though. We tried to get you punched up in the final, but there just wasn’t much room for you and Bobby [Womack, the other, and better, guitarist on the date]. Country Al, who you think wrote that song?”

“Um, you guys? “

“Right on: Sam Russell and Irv Hunt,” said Sam. Now I had another name, the person I was talking to, a second Sam. “Anyway, who calls you ‘Country Al,’ Country Al?” he said.

“Well, I guess it depends on what kind of country you’re talking about,” I said. “The day we cut that song I musta been having some sort of white-Soul day.”

“Okay, that’s hip. So, what’s your sign, Country Al?” And even though I knew by this time it was a serious conversation, maybe even with some skin in the game for me, it still caught me off guard. “See, Irv and I are both Geminis,” he went on, “and there are some signs we just can’t have on sessions, right Irv?” “Right on,” from off-phone. “So, what’s your sign?” he said again

I wished I had known what signs were the ones that couldn’t be on their sessions, because I would have had no trouble lying. It was pre-Google days, and I probably could have gotten away with it. But I didn’t have any choice and knew my real sign was going to be as good as any other I could have made up.

I sucked air. “Virgo,” I finally said, and then for no reason I could think of, and regretted immediately, added, “with your anus rising in my third house.” This is the self-destruct mechanism I have mentioned in other posts, wherein I try to discover why I’m such a lousy self-promoter.

There was the briefest of silences, but a silence nonetheless. Then, from Irv, “Hey, Sam, check it out. My man’s a comedian.”.

Another short silence. “Long as he’s not a Scorpio or a Cancer,” said Sam. “We don’t want any Water signs on these tracks, do we, Irv?”

“Right,”said Irv “So, Country Al, we doin’ some demos for Little Richard, you know, songwriter tracks, like that. We got Bobby to play lead, maybe you for rhythm. We got Leslie [Milton, drummer] and Steve LeFever [bass]. Sam and I will do keyboards. You good for this Saturday? It’ll be all day, brother.”

I let out a relieved laugh. “Wait’ll I check my daybook.” Then, immediately (no sense playing games), “OK, yep, I’m OK for Saturday. Do you want me to play acoustic or Telecaster?”

“Bring ‘em both, brother.”

I could hardly hold the pencil steady as Sam gave me the time-“twelve or one o’clock, we’ll let you know.”
They never did, so I showed up at noon; the session started around three- at an address in Watts, now known as South Central. No matter, I thought. This could be a game changer, another phrase we didn’t yet have.

The place was vintage Soul/R&B demo studio, an old, run-down stucco single family dwelling with weeds instead of lawn and one window pretty much boarded up, the other with ratty drapes pulled over it. Nonetheless, it seemed about right. A big studio on Sunset Boulevard would not have been.

I’d love to say the session was magical-it seemed with all the substances put there to abuse it should have been-but it was a pretty much workaday session, laying down guitars, bass and drums, layering on Fender Rhodes and piano, sweetening with percussion, recording the back-up vocals, then the lead vocal-not Li’l Richard; these were demos, remember-, but Sam Russell and Irv Hunt were all business, and knew how to produce successful tracks. We did three that day, par for a single recording session. As I remember, I, personally, thought they were good enough to use for final recordings. But that’s not the way it worked in the record business in the days before synthesizers and basement studios for recording and the streaming for distribution. There were a lot more mouths to feed and jobs to make appear important before any product reached the shelves.

But I did get to see Li’l Richard as he cape-swooped into the control booth, entourage in tow, engaged in some hand-slapping and other (to me) incomprehensible body pressing and rubbing with Sam and Irv, then swanned out again and into a huge, black car I could see when someone in the retinue opened the door. I was in the control booth at the time, listening to a playback of one of the tracks, and I thought about saying, “Good Golly, Miss Richard,” but this time self-preservation won the day and I didn’t. Anyway, this life-long hero of mine was gone before I could have gotten the four words out of my mouth.

But is didn’t matter. For me, for a day, I could be my own hero. I’d played, as far as I was concerned, on a Li’l Richard thing. So what if it was only a demo. It was a Li’l Richard demo, and that was what counted. Something to write about some day.

I was still pretty sure I was not going to end up playing music for a living.

Went back t0 Hollywood, my home (believe it or not) town to attend the 57th (?) anniversary of my jr. high school YMCA club, the Banshees-Saracens, and decided to take a little trip down memory lane to see the corner where I thought the Whiskey Go Go would no longer be. (On the chance you don’t know what that is, it’s the famous club my band,  Evergreen Blueshoes, headlined at 45 years ago. Also, people like Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Janice Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Linda Ronstadt, BB King, et a few others. I’d have to look it up to be sure). But, lawdy me, there it was, same corner, same name in neon scrip above the same dilapidated marquis, same creeps hanging out in front of it, same weather on the Sunset Strip,  etc., as in 1968.  Is LA a great city, or what?

I honestly don’t remember if we played the Whiskey four or five times. I remember we opened for Procul Harem, Albert King, Canned Heat and Spectrum 2000, a band we soon replaced as headliner for about a week. It seems there was one more, but I was usually wasted on something or other in those days, and memory is not serving at the moment. I do remember a moment, though,  from one of those times that has never left my personal archive of the mind, and reminds me to this day: don’t wish too hard, because you’ll get your wish.

(CAN WE CALL WHAT FOLLOWS HERE “NOTES” OR AN OUTLINE OR SOMETHING? PLEASE? IT JUST AIN’T REALLY WRITTEN YET. THANKS.)

I was on a break between sets, and I’d slipped out for a moment to go to the liquor store across the street for a half-pint of blackberry brandy. Shut up, it was Rock n’ Roll in the ‘Sixties. I dodged a hippie-hunting driver, and as I turned around to give him the finger, my eye caught the marquis over the entrance of the club, which was a bank long before it was the Whiskey A Go Go, and it still sort of looked like one, if you subtracted the marquis from facade. In fact, I used to bank there when I went to West Hollywood Elementary School, from 1948 to 1953.  I’m just saying. Anyway, the effort of turning my head quickly caused me to see purple spots in front of eyes for a few seconds, the visual component of these blazing headaches I was getting from a bad spinal tap (no, not Spinyl Tap) I’d recently gotten for a false alarm over what they thought was dropfoot. Don’t ask. I’m just trying to give some texture to the story.

This was two days after my father had a heart attack,  which I was there to witness, and though he was out of ICU, he was not out of danger, and I’d been spending most of my non-performing time at the hospital with him and the rest of my tiny family.

My girl friend, Jane, a budding ethnographic film-maker and the love of my life, had had a miscarriage on an expedtion in Tepatlaxco (sp?), Mexico. I thought at the time that I wanted the baby. Talk about bad personal management. We later bought a house together. After a short while she left me for a film sound editor from UCLA. But that’s a different post.

Back to my moment of light in the crosswalk at Clark and Sunset.  Looking up at the marquis, now, it finally hit me square between the eyes that my band, Evergreen Blueshoes, the club’s headline act that night, was no longer Evergreen Blueshoes.  It had been changed by club owner Elmer Valentine (read: Valentino) to “Topanga Canyon,” because that’s where we’d gotten our reputation as up-and-comers in the LA underground, and Elmer was “really groovin’ on the Underground, man. I mean, really trippin’, man.  Real far out.” The Canyon was a fairly well-known venue, a spawning ground for local Rock bands, including Canned Heat, our benefactors. I vaguely remember the conversation as going something like this:

Valentine: “What the fuck is Evergreen Blueshoes. I never heard that before.”

Us: “It’s our name, mister Valentine. Kim Fowley gave it to us.”

Valentine: “I don’t care if Kim Novak gave it to you, it’s stoopid, ok?”

Us: “If you say so.”

Valentine: “I do. From now on yer Topanga Canyon. That way we’ll get all the hippie chicks that take their tops off when they dance, right?”

Us: “Yup, all of ’em.”

Valentine: “I’m also replacing you for Spectrum 2ooo. They’re fucked up. Too straight, or something. I like my bands to be high. Have a nice day.” (or something like that).

So, when I looked for the real name of my band, maybe to tell my friends about, there it wasn’t.

But then again, that may not have mattered at all, since my partner, Skip Batten, later bass player with the Byrds was on a weird ego trip and refusing to rehearse with the rest of us. There were several reasons for this, he said, including that he wanted to replace the drummer, Chet McCracken (who later joined the Dooby Bros.), and the rest of us didn’t want him to.  (For the record, Skip’s tantrum, which sank the band, by the way, was more about his frustration at not “being creative,” his term, not the rest of the band’s, when that’s what (he insisted)  he wanted to be. But that, too, is a post for another time.

Finally, our album deal had stalled, it looked like it wasn’t going to happen at all, and in 1968 you were in oblivion til you had an album out, whether you were playing a hot club or not.

So I guess that’s about it, for that moment. But as I turned back to cross the street to Art’s Liquor and Snax, I wished I were almost anyplace else, doing almost anything else in the world, than there doing that. And I couldn’t help flashing back, on that warm June evening, to the nights I would drive up and down the Strip, passing the Whiskey and fantasizing about just what it would be like to play electric guitar in a Rock n’ Roll band at the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. I would have bet the farm during one of those drive-bys that I could sooner land on the moon than realize that fantasy. Like I say, be careful…

Not read back, yet. 6/10, 10:30 pm.

playing with two woodwind quintets, one up here in Westchester, the other on 75th

Street in the city, which is gratifying, if somewhat stressful, since all the other players

are much better than I. But it’s my trio, Three Wheel Drive, that seems to be grabbing

my attention and energy these last couple months. Maybe it’s because we’re getting

some face time with the masses, tho probably not as much as, say, Nirvana or Jimi

Hendrix, did. But  we played an actual paying (well, hat-passing)  gig at Starving

Artist on City Island in New York and did a really well-received number at Tribes Hill

annual Winter Soltice concert in Hastings, which is in lower Westchester. I live in

upper Westchester. There’s no implication of superiority, here. Scarsdale is in lower

Westchester. So is Larchmont.

Heard a Freddie Cannon retrospective on the radio (remember those? Little electronic wave conveyers that worked only one way, didn’t have monitors but did have lots of atmospheric interference?)  the other day, and, of course, it took me back to his heyday in the  1950’s. Freddie had a least three number one national hits on the charts that I can remember offhand, Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, Tallahassee Lassie and Palisades Park, and was a big deal to anyone who sat in high school parking lots getting a last smoke in before school started).

But I can’t imagine one in fifty people you’d stop on the street to ask if they ever heard of him answering in the affirmative. Can we say transience of fame?

I played in the band with Freddie during one of his comeback attempts, probably 1969, doomed, as is usually the case with comeback attempts, to sputter and fizzle like Roman candle on the Fourth of July you think has just a little more magnesium (or whatever) in it.

I remember three things about that gig:

It was hot enough in Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California to be setting records all over the place, including the one Freddie and I were playing in: the San Fernando Valley, and, specifically, Topanga Canyon, at the Corral  [that’s right, the same roadhouse that launched my band, Evergreen Blueshoes (q.v. this blog) as well as Canned Heat and many other famous and coulda-beens of the era]. It was 115 in the Corral, which had no air conditioning, low ceilings and little cross ventilation. I shorted out my amp with my own sweat during one of the sets. You can’t make this stuff up, as the man said.

(Sidebar: Los Angeles just yesterday recorded a new record high for itself and its environs, 125°, and I have a feeling that might not have been in the Valley, which is usually several degrees hotter than the City)

The second thing, and related to the first, I remember about the gig was that I drove to in a brand new maroon Triumph TR6 sports car,  with the top down, my Gibson ES335TDCi n the passenger’s seat and my Fender Super Reverb strapped to the back with the kind of  we you use to transport furniture or glass. We didn’t say chick-bait then (and I don’t think we say it now)  but I thought I might be headed for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame (which we didn’t have then, either).  Heading due west on the Ventura Freeway, ponytail flying in the wind, joint in the ashtray, Yellowjackets in my guitar case)−I’d scaled the heights, no doubt about it.

(Sidebar:  two weeks later I found myself in the Ventura County jail for driving on the wrong side of the highway – for half a mile−thence to a detox, the first of many. So much for having the world by the hippie hair).

And finally: Freddie forced me to perform this unspeakable, politically reprehensible thing on stage for which I have no one to blame but myself, and have never been able to satisfactorily atone:  a harelip version of the R&B hit, (I’m Gonna Put it in the) Want Ads (“Wanted! Young man single and free…” ). He pulled the “request” on me onstage, got the audience chanting “Do it! Do it!” and stood there at the mike, waiting for me to step up and sing the song. I thought about walking, right there, but I also was under the impression I was a pro, so I stayed and ensured decades of bad karma for doing so.

Anyway, Freddie Cannon tried to come back several more times, with no better luck than with this attempt here. Maybe bad karma is contagious.

APR/apr: Written, unread and unedited. (I’m trying to be more spontaneous).

Maybe another door will open, now that this one is closing. Maybe I can run over Frank’s hands with my car. Stranger things have happened.

I know this is not at all like my other posts, but I’m thinking going public with my feelings might ameliorate them a bit.

Yer bent-but-not-broken uptown-music correspondent,

Chamber Al

An old friend and fellow Evergreen Blueshoes member and I have been pepper-spraying each other with emails for the past years, and it’s time to try to fuck him up with a post.

Kenny Kleist, organist, trumpet and sax player, guitar picker, singer and general Renaissance-man musician, was my favorite band-member when I had my folk-rockish  group 45 years ago. I can’t say he was the most important to me; that had to be Skip Batten, my bassist-lead singing charismatic co-leader, because Skip provided what I didn’t have and never had: a good voice, stage leadership and sex appeal.

But Kenny and I hit it off in many other ways: we were the most “serious” musicians in the band, aside from the procession of drummers that passed thru Skip’s  garage doors in the two years we were all together. I always felt that his organ playing and strategic trumpet licks, and my folky-country-picking style and songwriting ability  had the most to do with what made the ‘Shoes unique, and, for a hot minute, one of the most watched bands in the LA Underground scene in 1968. This was the time when the underground scene in general was what was happening, as we used to say.

Kenny, photo-opped above doing his one-man band thing, is a seasoned, all-round musician, who understands and approaches the craft in a meat-and-potatoes way: you  learn the song the best you can and play it in front of people as soon as you think you can get away with it.

When we started Evergreen Blueshoes (not my choice for a name, btw, but Kim Fowley’s) we got gigs right away, but that meant having to have a repertoire big enough to fill up five sets a night without repeating. We hadn’t been together as a fivesome long enough to have rehearsed very much, so we were often playing tunes for the first or second time in front of people who were paying to see us. Kenny was very calm about that, even if he didn’t like it, and as he was set up next to me on stage, kept me from flipping out with confusion and guilt more than once. Btw, this was where Skip was at his best:  leading a five-piece band in a song they’d never played before in front of a crowd, and pulling it off. As I said, we got gigs right away.

Pictured here is part of our 1968 album cover. You see Kenny playing recorder from the trees above while the rest of us cavort with some lovelies for an early nude album cover.  He does this because his wife, Carole, is afraid someone in Shiocton, Wi, may see him. We should have been so lucky. (Btw, that’s Chet McCracken, later drummer with the Dooby Brothers in the middle with his girl friend, Deborah Walley, of Gidget fame. Skip Batten, hidden here, later played bass with the Byrds).

Kenny and I had a whole life together apart from the band. He helped my run my father’s property rentals when Dad got a heart attack, which included, but was not limited to repairing roofs, replacing windows and patrolling, with me, one of the less savory locations with shotguns and thermoses full of coffee laced with Southern Comfort. Were we smart, or what?

He also fixed my car and showed me how to do all sorts of things he’d learned on the farm: use a block and tackle, fix electrical connections. In return I helped him as much as I could move his organ from gig to gig, because unlike the rest of us, his instrument was more than one person could handle. I also dipped into my part of whatever we made to help him and his family out. After all, I had only one mouth to feed; he had four.

Spiritually, we seemed to have been kindred souls for some reason or other, tho we came from radically different backgrounds, me from an over-protecting Jewish household, him from a fend-for-yourself farm family. But we both saw life as an ongoing adventure, a procession of wonder-moments that always sparkled if you knew how to look at them and always had some new lesson or entertainment or woman or you-tell-me whatever to present. Kenny was great looking, and could have gotten all the tail he ever wanted, especially since Skip often introduced him as beloved by the women because he had a foot-long tongue and couldn’t smell. (The last part was true; for some reason, Kenny had no olfactory function whatsoever).  But he was loyal to Carole,  and tried hard to avoid many encounters with “something strange,” as he called non-curricular tail.

Here we are, as pictured on our album liner. We’re the bottom two in the middle (my name was Rosenberg then).

The shot at the beginning of this post, of Kenny on stage with all his instruments and other equipment, is vinatge in every way: lots of axes and amps,  his own P.A. system and a jar for tips which is behind him. The very fact that he’s doing his thing in his seventies, is probably the most illustrative statement of who he is. Although when he gets off-stage he might very well pack into the woods, convert a tractor-trailer rig into a an automatic guitar string winder or make love to an Eskimo. He’s that kind of guy, I kid you not, as he would say.

It didn’t help matters that I took him to a taqueria after our visit to Travel Town (q.v., at this site), making him violate his upper-G.I. doctor’s trust and causing him to have a Tex-Mex attack and almost miss a couple sets at the Grove.  After that, he vowed to stay on an ulcer diet, and made me his wingman for that job. So now I was diet watchdog as well blind-musician leadboy, which, by the way, is an exalted job in guitar-playing tradition. It’s a way lots of guitarists got their start. It turned out to be mine.

One of the main places we’d go to eat after gigs at the Ash Grove was Canter’s (pictured here), on Fairfax Avenue, a few blocks away from the Grove.

I wondered if  Doc’s ulcer would make the fare there a problem, but he said no, not to worry, we shouldn’t change our routine for him, he’d figure something out.

So, about the second or  third nite of his gig, we all went to Canter’s, which, like the Ash Grove, was right in the middle of the main Jewish section of Los Angeles. We all got whatever it was we usually ordered−me, probably chopped liver, Dave Cohen probably corned beef with potato latkes or something like that, Ed Pearl probably something healthy, his brother, Bernie, something like a burger and fries−but Doc didn’t have a clue, the menu being almost totally dominated by what I call Jew food.

Now, most people who, accidentally, because maybe they’re Gentiles and think they’re going into a regular restaurant, find themselves seated at a booth in Canter’s are confused by the menu, which consists mainly of ethnic dishes or unrecognizable versions of what they thought they’d be getting: chicken with varnishkes (kasha and noodles), brisket with kishkes (stuffed intestines), gedempte brust (a roast cooked in its own juices) , you know, Jew food.

I said, “Look, Doc, tell us what you can’t eat, and maybe we can figure out something that will work.”

Doc said, “Well, I can’t eat things like tuna or chicken salad sandwiches, or any salads,  or anything greasy or deep fried or with gravy or made with fat [bye bye matzo ball soup, which was going to be my suggestion] or fatty meat, or most things that I love. Damn.”

“Well, Doc,” I said, “what can you eat? What kinds of things?”

“Well,” he said, ” the doctor said I should stick to lean meat and dairy.”

“Hmmm,” I thought, wondering what they had at a place famous for people dying at the table from cholesterol-poisoning  that could fill that bill. I informed the waitress of our dilemma. “What do you have that could make Doc’s doctor happy and still give him  a taste of something he is probably never going to get in a million years in Deep Gap, North Carolina?”

“Well,  there’s Novi and cream cheese,” she said. “You will find fish in lots of ulcer diets, and the cream cheese, there’s your dairy.”

“Doc, what do you think?” I said.

“What’s Novi?” he said.

“It’s short for Nova Scotia lox,” I said.

“What’s lox?” he said.

“Doc,” I said, “I thought you said you’d been to New York.”

“I have. What’s lox?” he repeated.

“Smoked salmon,” I said.

“Nothin’ smoked,” he said. “Not cigarettes, not food, the sumbitch said,” reminding himself of his doctor’s dicta.

“Hmm,” I hmmmed.  “Whatabout steamed meat?”

“For example?” he said.

“For example, like pastrami, say,” I said. “No, no, wait a minute, that’s going to be too spicy. But what about corned beef? That might be digestible, if you cut the fat away.” I had no idea what I was talking about.

“That might be okay,” Doc said. “So, I’d get a corned beef and cream cheese sandwich, right?”

The rest of the table, as well as the waitress, went silent.

Orthodox Jews are not allowed to mix flaishik (meat) and milechik (dairy) in the same meal. Actually, at the same table.  There is a prohibition against “seething a lamb in its mother’s milk.”  And although Canter’s was not a kosher restaurant, didn’t abide by those rules, and could serve a malted milk to someone eating at the same table as a brisket of beefeater, still, actually shmearing cream cheese on top of a heap of steaming corned beef  seemed a little over the top. Like we’d be dissing our grandparents or something.

Finally, the waitress shrugs and says, “I guess it’s your call, but I think I’m going to double check with the manager, in case it’s a real no-no to make that kind of sandwich at the counter [where sandwiches at Canter’s are made], and we might really piss someone off, you know.”

She went away, and I explained to Doc what was going on. He was appropriately  respectful of the stricture. “Listen, don’t get Abraham all up in arms for me. I can eat the corned beef or the cream cheese, the one without the other, and it’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

I thought about that, and then I said, “OK, Doc, that’ll be our fallback position, but in the meantime, I want to see what the manager has to say. He’s a Jew, too, you know, and we’re a people that’re supposed to have a sense of humor.

In a couple minutes a thin, slightly stooped young man with early male-pattern baldness came over to the table–rushed over is more like it. He was obviously harried, as most of the wait staff at Canter’s usually was and was all business when he said, “OK, tell me what’s  going on here?” It wasn’t hostile, just maybe that he didn’t quite understand what the waitress had told him.

“Look,” I said. “We don’t want to make trouble. I just want to know if there’s any way you could make a cream cheese and corned beef sandwich for this famous musician with an ulcer and still be able to count on being buried in a Jewish cemetery.

“What’s his name?” the manager said. “He is obviously not Jewish.”

“Arthel,” Doc offered, breaking into the conversation with his real first name. “Arthel Watson. Now, listen here, son,” he said facing up in the direction the manager’s voice was coming from, “I’m no trouble-maker. I know a lot of perfectly nice Jewish folks, and we even have a Jewish man in Deep Gap who owns the ladies’ and menswear shop. Sol is his name. Actually, he says it’s Schlomo, but he says nobody there could handle that, so just to call him Sol. “

“Look,“ the manager says, “I understand what’s going on, but I don’t know what to tell the counterman. He’d look at me like I was meshuggeh– or worse. It’s sacrilege, you know, altho’ I, for one, couldn’t care less. But the counterman…whose name is Sol, by the way…I dunno….”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Listen: tell Sol the sandwich man that it’s for ‘Doc Watson.’ Don’t say “Arthel” or anything about him being a musician or anything else. Just say it’s for ‘Doc Watson.’ For his ulcer.”

“Why?” the manager said. He seemed a little slow that night.

“Just try it,” I said. “All he can do is say ‘no.’”

We watched as the manager walked over to the counter, leaned in over a customer who was munching a sample piece of lox and talked to the counterman. The counterman raised his eyebrows, but didn’t jump back in horror, a good sign. He looked over at our table, seemed to study it a minute, then turned back to the manager and said something to him that was more than a yes or no. The manager shook his head up and down, and came back to us.

“You called it,” he said to me. “He said as long as it’s for a medical professional, who’s he, a sandwich maker,  to ask questions? How long are you in town, Doc?” the manager said to Doc.

“I think another six days, right, Al? ” Doc said.

“And nights,” I said. I always liked to make sure everyone remembered Doc was staying with me.

“Good,” the manager said. “The counterman says we’ll call it the “Dr. Watson” and run it as a special for a week. If it goes over big, we may put it on the menu. If we hear from the B’nai B’rith or the Anti-Defamation League we’ll pull it. Have a nice day.” Or something like that.

So that’s what Doc ordered for the next six days, and that’s what the waitresses served him, whether they wanted to or not. Once he even asked for it to go, when he was hungry before a show and didn’t have enough time to eat at the restaurant. The managers and waitresses later told us that no one else asked for it from the daily Specials, so the “Dr. Watson” did not go the way of the “Jack Benny,” George Burns” or “Milton Berle.” Doc and we didn’t go to any more taquerias while he was in town, and he never had another attack.

I wonder what would have happened if he’d tried to order a “Dr. Watson” in Deep Gap, NC.

Trying to answer this kind of question is what flat-picking Talmudic scholars must accept as their sacred duty.

[The vinyl album slick (ca. 1966 or thereabouts) pictured here was a token from Doc in lieu of a signature. As I recall, Rosa Lee, his wife, took care of all his correspondence]

These visits had a whopping influence on my guitar playing, and I talk about that in other posts. But there were other, non-musical, experiences, some funny, some touching,  some that were real learning ops for me. I’d like to put them all down in one place, right here and now,  but I’m going to space  them out a little in the silly hope that maybe you’ll come to this blog again. In my dreams. Although many of them are pretty interesting, even if not particularly momentous. The anecdotes, I mean.

Take, for example, some things I noticed about the way Doc, who didn’t travel with even a companion, let alone a retinue, coped with blindn−oops, sight-challengedness.

Besides the usual unsighted-persons use of watches and clocks with exposed numerals and hands and not-so-usual use of Braille, Doc had some routines that he may or may not have developed on his own.

For example, all his sox and shirts were one color, white, and all his pants were copier-repairman blue.  His shoes were black. No exceptions. So he never had to ask anyone if he was color-cordinated or not. And nobody could play any mean-spirited tricks on him (see my post on him and Roy Noble’s psychedelic guitar). Doc prized his independence.

He carried bills of different denominations in different pants-pockets: ones, say,  in front right, fives in front left, tens in right rear. A twenty (it was the ‘Sixties, remember: no one needed to carry a much bigger bill than that unless he was buying a car) went in his watch pocket.  I asked him what he did in places like New York, where pickpockets would have a field-day with that organization plan. He told me he fastened the bills to the insides of his pockets with saftety pins.

“Doesn’t that make them really hard to get to?” I asked.

“Well, lets’ put it this way,” he said, grinning. “A lot of people pick up the bill when they eat with me.”

He also sometimes figured out where things were in a new place by measuring the distances between them with toe-to-heel steps. E.g, in my roomy Hollywood apartment, he quickly learned where the bathrooms, hi-fi (remember those?) and telephones were by counting the steps between them.

Next post: Doc-as-foodie. Y’all come back, y’hear? Please?

Anyway, we call ourselves the CoDependents with Pete on guitar and vocals, Iris on guitar, balalaika, vocals and percussion and me doing fancy flat-picking and Le Hot Club-style clarinet.  Iris writes haunting songs in a  Jillian Welsh vein.

We have a gig-demo CD, and I’m interested to see what kind of trouble the three of us can get into.