***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Back From Edge City

Classic Rock : 1969: various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on this CD which featured a Doors/Youngbloods-like stripped down, just slightly behind the note, waiting to explode, strobe-lights turning, band getting ready to belt out some serious rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night once the "high" wears off, a little. Yah, that high, the one that brought on that illegal smile, and what of it. Then. We were going to slay the dragons, we were going to turn this good green earth around, and more, no hassles, man, no hassles so a little weed was nothing, nothing at all in the cosmic night. Oh yah, and we were going to live forever.

But back to the guys, and it was mainly guys, guys with names like Mountain, Zeus, Animal, Leopard you get the idea, in the heavy rock scene then all long-haired, some with beards, some with wisps of beards, jeans, some tie-dye tee-shirt all rainbow-like cooling out waiting for that nirvana minute, a minute that mostly never came. Except to the very few. A few like Jimi, Jimmie, Jerry, Neil, Ritchie, yeah, guys like that.

******

Everybody had a million stories to tell about Captain Crunch (real name, Steven Stein, Columbia Class of 1958). Stories about secret caves and strange oriental-like rituals, about huge stashes of drugs, and money, about a string of women left behind, with and without children, about how he lived his life on the high-wire out there on edge city. And despite appearances, since he looked and had the demeanor of some father time figure when yet not even out of his twenties he liked the edge, liked being right there just before the fall. Yah, Captain Crunch the “owner” of the merry prankster, magical mystery tour, yellow brick road bus that you and I were “on” or “off” of from early 1966 up until now, the summer of 1969 now was a piece of work.

One story, not the story that I am going to tell you but another story, had it that the Captain had gotten the dough for the bus from his "take" in some ghost of Pancho Villa drug deal down Sonora, Mexico way. Some tale of how he and his confederates tried to finess the deal with some badass cartel boys, cartel boys when they were just starting out not like today, and barely got out alive. In fact one guy, a guy from back East didn't make it and was left on a dusty Sonora back street with a couple of slugs in him face down, face down and unclaimed, unclaimed since nobody was brave enough for a return trip to identify the body. So he had the dough when his friend Ken Kesey, the mad monk author and pied piper, outfitted his Further In yellow brick school bus, and the Captain decided to do the same. He named his bus, the one that I am sitting in right now The Sphinx. Nice name, right, just like the Captain, except he was a guy everybody went to, and I mean everybody including me, when you needed to try to figure something out. Like how to figure the universe and your place in it, or how to open a can of beans. Everything except how to run the Sphinx, how to keep it moving, which was strictly Ramrod Rick's job and nobody messed with him when the mechanics of the Sphinx was involved.

Oh yah, and except when the name Mustang Sally came up (real name Susan Sharpe, Michigan, 1959) the Captain’s "main squeeze" girlfriend. Except when she wanted to be squeezed by someone else. Then the Captain saw red, or some hot color but that is not what I want to talk about either because almost every guy, including me, has had a blind spot for some such woman since about the time old-time Adam and Eve were playing house, maybe before.

So this story is not going to be about dames, or about guys getting hung up hard on them since that is not a subject the Captain handled too well. What he did handle well, and nobody questioned that, was helping you figure your place in the non-girl obsessed universe. And his most famous success, although he might not call it that, was with Jimmy Morse, you know, the lead vocalist for the Blood Brotherhood. And although it didn’t have anything to with girls, women I mean, a woman was involved at the start, Mustang Sally, of course.

Sally had a thing for young musicians, used to hang around the Cafe Aleman in Ann Arbor when that place spawned young rock musicians, hungry guys like Jimmy Smith of Zero, Jack Devine of the Mirrors, guys like that, not Mick and Keith guys but respected, and who on any given night could set the place on fire, musically. So once the Captain organized the bus back in ’66 and Sally, his sometime lover even then, was the first who came on board she was always, Captain grinding his teeth, on the look-out for such guys. So on a side trip down in the desert, the high desert just east of Joshua Tree, around Twentynine Palms she “found” Jimmy living among the rocks with some Indians, excuse me, Native-Americans, some renegade tribal warrior band of Hopis, complete with their own shamanic medicine man, complete with god peyote and golden mushrooms too.

See, as least this is the way Sally told me the story one night after Jimmy got his big break up in Monterrey, up at the Pops, got noticed by Don Lake of Electron Records, Jimmy knew he had the music down, the beat, the rock beat like a million other guys who came of age with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Bo and Chuck in that blazing 1950s be-bop rock night. Knew too that the old-style stuff good as it was needed some updating, needed some golden karma he called it. What he was missing, knew he was missing, knew he wanted to be not missing was that cosmic karma thing that separated you out from some so-so- joe be-bopper. Yah, Jimmy had it bad, star-lust bad. So there he was among the rocks. Sally, and I know this because she told me on another night when we talking about past lovers and were cutting up old torches in general, went for Jimmy real quickly. But it was also over really quickly she said, like some fade-out burning ember charcoal thing. Jimmy was obsessed, too

obsessed with that karma star thing for her tastes.

But that is where the Captain took over. The Captain, as much as he hated Sally’s hankerings, was a serious musical guy. Music was hanging over the bus all the time. While Sally wanted their bodies the Captain wanted their muses, or to be their muse if a guy can be such a thing.

So when Jimmy came on the bus after Sally dumped him like a bad dream, he stayed for about six months, a time before I got on the bus, the Captain kept pushing him to find his inner spirit. And that inner spirit was found, I guess, through many acid trips. Kesey had nothing on the Captain in that department. But not just that doors of perception stuff though. See the Captain kept pushing Jimmy toward that shamanic medicine-man-cure-the-wounded-earth-thing that he had started to get into with the Hopis. Forced him to go home to the earth, to be one with the earth, so he could make those healing sounds, maybe hit what jazz guys call hitting the high white note floating out into some bay. So when you see Jimmy whirling dervish, trance-like, evoking strange (strange to us) sounds, rums clashing, guitars on fire, pushing the music out to the edge, just remember who “taught” him that.