THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 1, EPISODE 5

 

SILVER SURFER!

 

Music was the Haight's auditory incense - masking police sirens and bad-trip screamers, the beggars and barking perros with clubs and parking tickets, tinkling bad windchimes of Dime City. After Wally's rockfest collapsed, I'd enrolled in two Berkeley courses (requiring all-day bus trips, Tuesdays and Thursdays) and rented a room in a cheap flat on Lyon Street with two women way younger than I. Deanne, the leaseholder, was a freshman at Hayakawa's S.F. State and called herself a capital R Revolutionary; Dana was a runaway living on checks from the old folks at home. To further Revolution, Deanne offered space on the couch in the front room for dope, food, spare change or whatever... "blows pig minds every time we save a refugee off Amerikkka's street..." rolling k's so allusions to the Ku Klux Klan couldn't be missed, "... each one means less slops for the pig jails."

Perspective - Lentex contracts with six state prison systems for computerizing locks, billyshocks and ring-a-ding-ding alarms, amounting to over ninety million in sales last year. Oz is Lentex ambassador to America's Panoptica... he gathers his own intelligence and passes on odd, useful nuggets - Nevada told him Jake Moss was an asshole in the joint. (During that dinner in February, Wilson Leonard predicted one fifty million in prison bounties this year; I don't see the real spike coming until '83 but details, details...)

So Deanne... in the course of a month, I'd observed her rescues to be usually male, more often than not good looking, under the grime and facial hair... it would be two more years before Women's Lib put an end to all that. So when, on a nippy morning, late in winter, I saw one of her regulars on the couch but, also, two other crashers on the floor... one a spade and the other this fat, blond dude snoring in a gas station man's green shirt... it didn't seem anything other than business as usual. I'd started coffee up and buttered bread and the blond dude lumbered into the kitchen, following the heat... I say nice to meet you, uh... Eddie is the name on the gas station shirt. "No ma'am," he'd drawled, he was actually Brendan Kyle, musician... if you please... born in Alabam, raised up in Arkansas, Oklahoma and other places where military bases proliferate... Eddie just a name off a fifteen-cent shurt from a church sale outside Tulsa.

So we laid Eddie to rest with coffee and weed, fine by Deanne, who wasn't into balling white people that month, she was more interested in his buddy who was, like, from one of those islands mon'. They both crashed a week, then Reg just disappeared; whether the cops picked him up or he got bored and split Brendan never found out. Then Deanne grew impatient, so Brendan found a more permanent crash in the Fillmore; I'd see him sometimes in the street playing guitar for dimes and the occasional twenty five cent piece, once inside a Fillmore concert which he boasted he'd crashed by hauling equipment from trucks out back inside with the rest of the roadies, then disappearing until showtime. "Could've stolen primo gear but I don't rip off brother musicians. Even asshole Brits in capes and earrings..."

I never got that downtown job, like I think I mentioned, Egg, but Wally turned me on to Casper Cauthen, relocated from the East to provide a serious alternative to sloppy, hippie rags like Rolling Stone and Oracle because "New York's a goddam puke-machine and anybody who stays there becomes a machine himself." We'll never know if Cap would have turned out any differently than Jann Wenner owing to death... a driven, cynical man in life, I don't think he made a very friendly ghost. But he never dealt me from the bottom of the deck... perhaps because he feared Wally mightily... so 1967 was, all in all, decent... more, really, I was twenty-one and it was a very good year. Having known a few, seen a lot more I understand why silvers call their computer bugs "hippies" but don't quite understand the ferocity of trendy retroactive bashing. Age embarrasses, I guess.

I'm sorry, I've totally forgotten the name of that rag, Egg (though not the fact that it wasn't printed on rag pulp but on real magazine paper, Time/Life slick)... anyway it was the first place where mention of Brendan Kyle occurred.

The pre-Rambles band never quite developed a name... Brendan on guitar, an older guy Matty Gouas, burned-out beatnik junkie on drums, this East Indian highschool kid on summer vacation, Darkell Nukh, Mukh, something on bass. Another kid with another guitar sometimes, though not regular. Whoever finagled gigs got top billing, usually Brendan or Matty... they did mostly covers. Plenty of surf music because it didn't require real vocals, only Matty's maniacal, rattling screams. It would be years before Brendan's voice would be regarded as having "character", what they say about Dylan, Lou Reed, Joe Cocker, Tom Waits... throats like that. Their instrumentals ripped, at least, and gigs began piling up, especially inland in Stockton, Sacramento and college towns in the North Bay. Maybe it was shit on Brendan's roots, maybe a lack of competition, who's to say.

Local gigs... there could be problems with those. The one at Catholic school lasted into the fourth number before a priest pulled Brendan's plug. Oakland got offended when he confused John Steinbeck with Gertrude Stein. But since I kept on Casper to report their successes and overlook disasters, I had a fistful of clips to send Wally along with their homemade tape by August, just before Darkell had to decide whether to go on the road and risk the draft or listen to his parents and enroll in the community college. "Kid," Matty Gouas advised, "if you go back to school you'll graduate next June and that war will still be going on. The army will have your brown ass and both sides will be shooting at you. Whereas if you miss a year and go back, it's 1969 before they catch up with you and lots of things might happen. LBJ, for one, will be out of office - out in space is the place. I read Silver Surfer, kid, I know things that go on." 

 

TOMORROW:

"CREATION SCIENCE!"

A panspermia of comix... Silver Surfer to the finest undergrounds of 1967...may be found...

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