spare drumsticks, a couple of joints and a towel I wear around my shoulders because the way Canned Heat plays, the drummer's doing sweaty, manual labor.
Skip was giving us a pep talk. "You guys are going to be great today. This is a terrific crowd, you'll see when you get there. This is a Canned Heat event, man. Remember Monterey? Remember Newport? We are the perfect band for these things, these festivals. And this is going to be the biggest."
Under all this optimism, he must be as worried as the rest of us that this is it. That the band is about to simply explode in a puff of smoke.
We went into the Fillmore West in San Francisco two nights earlier on an edgy high. Our "Living the Blues" album had hit Number 14 and we were on the cover of Cashbox. We were headlining over Three Dog Night and Santana.
Sweet victory. We were the same anti-commercial hippies we always were, playing the boogie the way we wanted to play it. Screw the critics. Screw the lightweight pop types. The people are buying it. They're loving it.
Our lead guitarist is Henry Vestine, a long, lean stick of dynamite, tattooed like the outlaw motorcyclists he hangs out with. His chest is a billboard. It says "Let the good times roll." Henry is a brilliant guitarist, in many ways a wonderful guy, intelligent, a heavy reader, sort of shy when he's straight.
But he's a Jekyll and Hyde character.
In a business where almost everybody gets a little high on some kind of dope now and then, Henry sets records. He takes anything and everything and he takes a lot of it. This makes him wild or morose or dangerous, no telling what. He sends his head so far away that sometimes his music soars and pounds and howls like he's found a door to whatever they use for hell in some other universe. Too often, he just loses all coordination and skill and goes rambling off to the Doper's Dismal Swamp.
The brilliant Henry got hired into The Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa's strange but wonderful all-star team. The bad Henry had to quit because Zappa wouldn't tolerate his heavy doping, so now he's with us. Going to excess was not a firing offense in the Canned Heat. It was a given.
Except for Taylor--who is the best blues bass player in the world, he's a fanatic for order, discipline, predictability, control. He is never satisfied with anything. He's a perfectionist, surrounded by all these party-loving hippies in Canned Heat, where being brilliant was expected, but it took second place to having a good time.
The Bear and Alan Wilson are the founding fathers, the guys who created the band, its core and its star performers. The tormented, introspective Wilson's nickname was "Blind Owl," but we called him Alan. The massive, Falstaffian Bear's real name was Bob Hite but we called him The Bear. They were two white suburban kids who loved black country blues, who collected so many obscure records and listened to them for so many hours that the music just began spilling back out of them like overfilled bathtubs.
Alan gave the band his genius on the harmonica and his strange, questing intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of the blues. The Bear gave the band his own heart, which valued boogie and music and food and love and chaos and sex and drugs and all-night parties. The blues singer's life. There wasn't much room, in Bear's heart or the band's, for good order and discipline. That was driving Larry nuts.
In the dressing room at the Fillmore West, just three nights before Woodstock, Henry was dribbling reds down his throat like peanuts. Before we even got to the stage, he was totally wasted. A little high is one thing but this had the whole band uptight. Me, the new guy, the immigrant, I just tried to keep smiling. Let the old hands, the gringos, deal with this.
By the end of the first set, we had to holler for a roadie to bring Henry a chair. He couldn't even stand. In the "Fried Hockey Boogie" he took off on a solo that rambled on for 25 minutes with no point. In his head he was saying something but whatever it was stayed locked in there with the downers. He forgot what key he was in. It was awful.
The Fillmore crowd thought that was great. To them, dope was a sacrament. They loved Canned Heat because they thought of us as outrageous. They ate it up, the band's mystique of rebelliousness, the idea that we were messing with our perceptions to make brilliant music.
"I love this band," yelled a guy up front. "They play 40-minute songs, and look at this guy, he's so wasted he can't stand up."
Taylor explodes. Out in the audience are some really fine musicians: Paul Butterfield, his guitarist Mike Bloomfield, Harvey Mandel. These are guys we respected and wanted to impress as peers.
"This is terrible," Larry yells at the rest of us on stage. Some of the audience can hear him, but he doesn't care. "I am never playing with that guy again, never. He's out of his mind. We look fucking ridiculous."
We all make stone faces to hide what we're thinking, something I am learning to do often, as we finish the gig. Leaving the ballroom, I even tell a couple of groupies to beat it, get lost. Even me, who likes to take refuge from the band's chaos with a nice, bouncy little girl. I was too upset to fuck. This band was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. We're famous. We're getting rich. And now what? Our bubble pops?
We had a meeting in our hotel, all of us scared for the band's future except Larry. He was still enraged.
"Henry sucks," he said. "If he's in this band, I'm out."
Henry felt guilty, you could tell, but he has this "Yeah, I'm a bad guy, so what?" attitude. He doesn't want to say it was his fault. Henry is the only child of a wealthy family. All his life, he's done anything he wants. So his answer is: "If Larry plays, I don't. Screw this motherfucker. I don't have to put up with him."
Says Skip, the manager, "I don't know who's in the goddamn band now and who isn't in the goddamn band, but we have another gig at the Fillmore West tomorrow night and I expect every one of you to be on the goddamn stage."
That was no solution. Henry walked.
Some other time, that would have been okay. Henry had exceeded the limits of how much you can abuse your fame, your audience, your band. In the decades to come, we got used to it. The brilliant Henry rejoined the band over and over again. Then the spaced-out Henry got fired, or walked out, over and over again.
Except now it meant that when we went on stage at the Fillmore the next night, we were without a lead guitar, which is like trying to get an airplane off the ground without wings.
On stage, we hear someone in the audience say that Mike Bloomfield is there. Immediately, The Bear says, "Let's invite him to play with us. We can jam."
Bob was expert in jam sessions. He knew every song there was and we had such a strong rhythm section that even though Mike had never played with us, he could play around us. Mike was so good The Bear offered him a job after one set. Hell, Mike was as famous as Henry.
"Thanks," he said. "It was great playing with you guys, but I'm burned out on touring. I've been on the road with Butterfield for years now. I have to cool it. I have to get off the road for awhile."
What do we do for a lead guitar in the second set? Somebody says Harvey Mandel is out there too.
"Harvey's really good," Larry says. "Ask him to sit in."
Mandel wasn't as famous as Bloomfield--he got a lot more famous years later when he recorded with the Rolling Stones--but he had played with Charlie Musselwhite, a great blues harmonica player, so he ought to be good with Alan's harmonica work.
Harvey came up and kicked ass. He had a great tone, a virtuoso left hand. Not fast, not a lot of notes,
