and Peter Stahl. (Not pictured: Barry Shapiro and Don Solomon.) (Ernie Tallarico)
Oddly enough, three years later, Henry Smith, still working for us as a full-time roadie this time, gets a phone call from his old-time buddy Brad Condliff at the front door to the club in Greenwich Village called Salvation, asking Henry if he wanted to help out his old buddy Jimmy Page with his recently formed band, the New Yardbirds (always respect the guy at the door). Henry grabbed a ticket to London and his only possession at that time, a large toolbox covered with stickers with only enough room for a pair of underwear, which he stuffed in behind his ounce of pot, and headed off to Europe to help his friend with this new band that over that summer became Led Zeppelin.
Everybody likes to overblow their past, including me—to squeeze out the relevance of what may or may not have really taken place. And when you’re just starting out, any story will do. Beck was on guitar, Jimmy Page on bass—it was the Yardbirds’ second incarnation (after Eric Clapton left), an unbelievable, unstoppable, funky, overamped R&B machine. “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” was bone-rattling . . . there was steam and flames coming out of it, and the whole place quaked like a Mississippi boxcar on methadrine.
Every morning before school I’d fill a plastic cup with Dewar’s whiskey or vodka and down it. I used to dry my hair before school to “Think About It,” the last single the Yardbirds did. I’d get the vacuum cleaner, take the hose, and stick it in the exhaust socket so it blew out . . . turn it on, go upstairs, and eat breakfast. By the time I got back downstairs, the vacuum cleaner was warm and I could blow-dry my wet hair to look like a Brian Jones bubblehead. Got to have good ha-air! I used to sew buttons to the sides of my cowboy boots, and at the bottom of the inside leg of my pants I would tie three or four loops of dental floss and attach those to the buttons on the boots so that my pants would never ride up. I loved doing that sort of thing! I was a rabid rock fashion dog. So I went to school, spending an hour getting ready every morning, and ended up getting shit for it. I wound up in the principal’s office every day. “Tallarico, you look like a girl,” the man would say. I’d tried to explain, “It’s part of my job . . . rock musician, sir.” That got me absolutely nowhere.
From winter ’66 into spring ’67, Chain Reaction continued to get good gigs—in part through Pete Bennett. We played record hops with the WMCA Good Guys. We opened for the Left Banke, the Soul Survivors, the Shangri-Las, Leslie West and the Vagrants, Jay and the Americans, and Frank Sinatra, Jr. Little Richard emceed one of our shows—the original possessed character always doing that crazy shit. He was so fucking out there. He could get so high and still function. I don’t know how the fuck he did it! He was doing amyl nitrate. That’s scary stuff. There aren’t a lot of drugs I’ve refused, but with that shit I was, like, “I’m outta here!”
Pete Bennett wanted to get rid of the band and just represent me, but I wouldn’t do it, even though Chain Reaction was already winding down. After three years I’d definitely had it with covering Beatles tunes. I was already thinking about a hard rock band. Our last gig was at the Brooklawn Country Club in Connecticut on June 18, 1967. We made one more single, which came out on Verve the following year: “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday” and “Ever Lovin’ Man.” And that was that—the Chain stopped a-rollin’.
The Chain: me, Don Solomon, and Frankie Ray, 1968. (Ernie Tallarico)
In the summer of 1967 I found myself up in Sunapee with no band and wondering what to do next. I’d been a local star with records on the jukebox, but now kids were asking me, “Where you guys playin’?” Later on that summer I formed another band called William Proud, with Twitty Farren on lead guitar. Twitty used to play acoustic guitar and sing at the Anchorage with a guy named Smitty. Twitty and Smitty were a major thing in New Hampshire. They covered Simon and Garfunkel to the T, nailing uncanny versions of “Sounds of Silence.” We played out in Southampton for the summer, and while we were there wrote “Somebody,” which is on the first Aerosmith album. I collaborated with Don Solomon on most of the early Chain Reaction songs, but with the song “Somebody” (which I cowrote with Steve Emsback), I realized I could truly compose a good song. The inner voice was wailing, “Let’s get cracking here!”
“When I Needed You,” the flip side of the first Chain Reaction single, had a Yardbirdish tinge to it, but “Somebody” was straight Yardbirds. The Yardbirds were so strange and unpredictable. They could make a pop song like “For Your Love” (with its minor key) sound dirgelike and ominous. We’re talkin’ fucked-up time-traveling R&B monks. Gregorian chants! Outlandish Australian wobble-board percussion! Harpsichords and bongos! They virtually invented the rock solo as an end unto itself. The Yardbirds used minor thirds and fourths like alchemists. They were really the first progressive rock band, with their use of Eastern melodies on “Over Under Sideways Down,” the howling sirens on “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” I loved their weirdness and their mystery.
When Henry Smith was working for Zeppelin, Jimmy Page would blow his speakers and Henry would send them to me. I had two huge deer antlers I got from New Hampshire from eight-point bucks, and I put one on the left headboard post of my bed and the other on the right. I’d put my speakers there and painted them with thick phosphorescent paint—five or six coats—so that when you held a lamp to them, they would glow forever . . . well for at least ten or fifteen minutes, but if you smoked pot or took hallucinogens, as we did in high school, that was enough.
I’d draw mustaches on the Beatles and Stones posters and put phosphorescent paint all along the drawers and the knobs of the dressers, so when I went to bed at night, the room was a psychedelic cave! I put dots, like, all along the edge of the chest of drawers and the molding. Dot, dot, dot (maybe that’s where my . . . thing started), then a nice big fat one, and I did it all over the room with phosphorescent paint, six coats, so it was that thick—to hold the light.
In the middle of the room at the end of my bed, I had a twelve-foot span (from the door to the window) of fifteen thick rubber bands knotted together—which could really stretch out—and in the middle I attached a five-ounce sinker dipped ten times in phosphorescent paint, so it glowed like a fucking red-hot poker. When you let go of the sinker, the linked rubber bands would bounce like crazy . . . swinging in slo-mo, back and forth across the room . . . and you’d be Star Trek-trippin’. By the time I was done, when I was, like, seventeen or eighteen and getting ready to move out, my room was a masterpiece. You were in this realm of pulsing phosphorescent light between the speakers. I would smoke a joint, bring the linked rubber bands all the way over to one side of the room, and let it go back and forth, right? ’Cause it was right in the middle.
Then I’d crank up the Association, Pretty Things, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Boy Williamson, and all this weird early German electronica stuff. I’d invite my friends over and they’d get wrapped up in my phosphorescent audio wonderland.
I went up to the Woodstock Festival with Don Solomon and Ray Tabano a day or so early. We told them we were Ten Years After—you never know when that Brit accent is going to come in handy—and they let us in. We made our way through the woods to the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm was the name of Wavy Gravy’s commune in Tujunga, California—the longest-running hippie commune of the sixties. It eventually became what they called “a mobile hallucinatory extended family”—now that’s the kind of extended family I wanted to join. The Hog Farm got involved in the Woodstock Festival to make trails, dig fire pits, and provide a food kitchen. The trail through the woods was called Groovy Way, a quarter-mile path hung with Christmas lights.
When I went to Woodstock, I was tripping my brains out. Everyone always says, “Woodstock, Woodstock—were you there?” but the funny thing is . . . half the people who were there didn’t know where they were. I walked over to the stage area from the Hog Farm through a strip of woods with multicolored holiday bulbs running through them. I was so high they were like the mother
