Could It Be Forever? My Story (5 page)

Jimi had soul. He was so charismatic as a performer, and had a sexual presence that no one else had at that time. He had broken through in England with
Hey Joe
and somehow I got a copy of it. And then I saw him at the L.A. Forum twice and I saw him at Devonshire Downs. You know how he inspired me? Not so much as a guitar
player, but as an individual. It was at the time when individuality was heralded and it confirmed to me that you could be an individual and be willing to reveal yourself as a unique songwriter, singer, performer. That’s why, decades later, he’s seen as the great innovator.

Jimi blurred all the lines. Was he R&B? Yeah, he was an R&B guitar player. Was he a rock guitar player? Yeah. Was he a soul guitar player? Yeah. Was he pop? Yeah. He was all of that. Most of his audience was white but that didn’t matter. Back then, there was very little musical prejudice in terms of defining culture by colour, race or theme. We were exposed to so many different musical influences. You could hear Petula Clark, Otis Redding, Cream, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Louis Armstrong and Marvin Gaye on the same radio station, and often even on the same stage, because they were great artists and they made great records. Unfortunately, if you turn on the radio today, you’re going to get hip hop here, jazz there, R&B somewhere else. Music and art are much more segregated today even though it all comes from the same place.

Steve Ross, a friend who played guitar in the first garage band I was in (and would be an important friend for many years to come), turned me on to guitar. We could jam on basic blues or a Hendrix number for an hour and a half at a time. I’m sure it stunk, but to us it was the stuff.

When I was in bands, we started off playing Beatles’ songs. But I progressed from being a real pop music fan, like any average kid, to listening to rhythm and blues,
which was deeper, more authentic. I then moved on to hardcore acid rock – Hendrix, Clapton, Jeff Beck, Peter Green, John Mayall, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield. The music of the era reflected all the social changes that were happening, the whole social revolution.

Because of
The Partridge Family
I became publicly identified with a kind of sweet, lightweight, mainstream pop music. I was the antithesis of that. I wanted to be on the cutting edge of pop culture.

Drugs, of course, became a big part of the youth movement. We came to think of drugs as recreational, fun, something that could expand your mind, make you more loving and enhance sex. And drugs were new, something my generation did that, generally speaking, the previous generations didn’t do. In the 60s my friends and I went to rock concerts and saw Cream, with people selling – and some even giving away – acid. I went to a party up in Laurel Canyon one night in late ’66 or early ’67 and Janis Joplin was there. She was a big deal at that time, but she was there getting high like everybody else. Sunset Strip in Hollywood was a gathering place for people who shared that philosophy and were really committed to change. Hendrix and Joplin were role models for teenagers in the revolution that I identified with.

When I was 15 a friend of mine who was a few years older offered me and Sam Hyman our first joints. I already knew how to smoke, of course – I’d been smoking regular cigarettes since I was 13 and would continue to do so until I was 20 – but this was something different. Pot was just
coming on to the scene as far as kids my age were concerned. None of my friends had yet seen pot or even talked about it. Don’t forget, this was 1965 – we’re talking about the period just slightly pre-psychedelia, pre-Haight-Ashbury, before
Life
magazine reported that people were experimenting with LSD, which was how, as a curious ninth-grader, I first learned that LSD existed. Drugs would really explode on to the scene in 1966 and 1967. In 1965 I didn’t know much about marijuana at all, except that there were some jazz musicians like Gene Krupa who’d messed with it.

The first time I smoked a joint, I felt like a real derelict. Sam and I had gone to visit this unbalanced guy down by the railroad tracks around Sepulveda, a pretty funky neighbourhood. The guy had an alcoholic mother; Sam and I bought her a bottle of Cutty Sark, as our friend had suggested, so she wouldn’t care what any of us were doing. We went around to the back of the house and he showed us these two wilted, hand-rolled cigarettes. I thought they looked bizarre, really sleazy. But I was a curious, adventurous lad. I rarely had anything to do except go to school. And this older guy showed us how to smoke pot – inhaling real deeply and holding it in. And I was profoundly affected by it. I got hammered.

Eventually, I told my mom I smoked dope. She surprised me when she told me that she and my dad had actually tried it back in their early theatre days and so she knew it wasn’t hell, although she hadn’t cared for it. I was impressed that mom thought so ‘young’. Because she’d
been brought up in and around the theatre, I guess, nothing really shocked her. She was open-minded compared to most adults. So she was really my friend, I felt then. My pals from school all used to tell me how cool my mom was. She was really good-looking, too, which probably impressed them. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. She was a knockout.

Over the next few years, I was to discover I was deeply sensitive to almost any kind of drug. As a teenager in high school, I found myself experimenting with all sorts, as opportunities arose. It became an important part of my life, part of my zest for living. I was reckless, wild. We were young kids experimenting with pot, hash, psychedelics, mescaline, THC, speed, Tuinal and more. In 1966–7, when I was 16 and 17, I’d take speed maybe once a month, or once every couple of weeks, and sometimes go on a binge for two or three days. Maybe some diet pills or something. My body always reacted violently to amphetamines, though; I was never able to handle them well. Everybody I knew in school experimented with drugs. Now that I have my own kids I shudder to think about it.

In 1967 I hitchhiked up to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco with Kevin Hunter because we’d seen it on the news. We spent a couple of days and nights there smoking weed and taking acid. We’d heard it was the place to be and we considered ourselves to be tuned-in guys. I had just finished eleventh grade, although I guess I looked about 12 years old. But I had pretty long hair and I felt a part of the whole hippie movement. Kevin and I figured we
were just like those older guys, except that we were still living at home.

We stayed at this place right off the Haight. The door was open to us. Hippies everywhere. It was a crash pad – a small room with people sleeping on the floor. There was one really weird-looking guy wearing a white robe. He was probably 98 pounds; he looked like a skeleton. He was clutching this bottle that must have held a hundred pills, like a miser with a purse. Every so often, he’d flip the top open, take a couple of pills, then flip it closed. His mind was obviously lost already.

We crashed in this room on the floor that night. In the morning, the guy was gone but his shoes were there along with the bottle that had two little pills left in it. I wondered what had happened to him from taking so many pills, I wondered if he had died. Nobody knew.

Later that day we went to Golden Gate Park. As we walked in, someone handed us some purple Osley acid. Free. It was the summer of love and we were at a love-in. I think either Jefferson Airplane or Iron Butterfly was playing. We were too ripped to know.
We hitched back home. Kevin and I had hardly slept the whole weekend, maybe two or three hours a night, and we were blown away from the acid and the hitching. I went up to my room and slept for twenty-one hours. My mom just assumed that this was all normal teenage behaviour.

LSD wasn’t even illegal when I first heard about it. We tried it because it was part of the cutting-edge culture of the time. I also experimented with peyote buttons, which
come from cactus and are hallucinogenic. I can remember holding a friend’s hand during a bad trip. I watched people who were not terribly secure really lose it.

I think my psychedelic experiences, by and large, were with the wrong people or in the wrong environments. If you’re not in good shape to begin with, believe me, LSD’s not going to make it any better for you. Some people have told me that they enjoyed blissful, beautiful, magical psychedelic trips. But I didn’t. I think I often took it with guys who were lost – the most insecure, sad, lonely, desperate guys I could have picked – kids from school or people I’d met hanging around a pool hall I used to go to. One druggie friend I knew had tried to commit suicide a few times.

I had an appetite for living on the edge from the time I was 13 or so. I’d take a bike on my way home from school, paint it or fix it up a little, use it for a month or so, and then guilt would take over and I’d return it. A while later, I’d swipe another one and do the same. I’d always return them or I couldn’t have lived with myself.

Stealing wasn’t really a part of my life. It was more that if I saw a rule of any sort, I’d think,
Let’s see, how can I break this? Or bend this?
Being told not to do something was an enticement for me.

My mom had me go to a psychologist for a period of time when I was using drugs. In the 60s, that was considered a very sophisticated, intellectual way of dealing with children. I basically manipulated the psychologist, so my mother would be told I needed more love, trust and
understanding. As far as I was concerned, the only problems I had were how I was going to get through the school year without doing any homework and how could I pull the wool over my parents’ eyes so I could continue having the lifestyle I wanted?

I was very good at being a teenager. I was good at getting away with anything – staying out all night, messing around, lying to my parents, all the while trying desperately to act older than I was – until the arrival of Judgment Day, the day report cards came. I wound up having to go to summer school between tenth and eleventh grades, and then again between eleventh and twelfth grades, and then again right after twelfth. I got kicked out of two high schools for cutting classes. My parents didn’t know what to do with me.

I wound up getting sent to what they called continuation school, which is what they had in Los Angeles for incorrigibles who were too young to drop out of school legally. There were students with a lot of emotional problems. There were a lot of losers. I saw guys who brought guns and knives to school, guys whose future was clearly a stretch in San Quentin.

Everybody is a jerk to some degree in their teenage years. Everyone I’ve ever met, who has been honest, has told me of their irrational or outrageous behaviour during that period of their lives. Rebelliousness was the norm. OK, so I didn’t want to go to school. I wanted to play music. I’d much rather stand out on the street and get an education there than sit in a classroom and learn things I was never going to use. I’ve never once found a use for the algebra I learned.

I scratch my head when I hear what courses my son has to take in school so he can go to college. And I think,
When he’s 25, is he going to need geometry or chemistry? Is he going to learn the things that we use as tools in our lives?
What we should learn is how to be parents, how to be married, how to coexist with each other and other cultures, or we’re not going to have a planet any more.

I couldn’t take the continuation school any longer, so I begged my mom.

‘There is a private school called Rexford where they let you grow your hair, where they let you be who you are. They encourage individuality. Let me try it there and I promise I will work hard.’

I went to Rexford for my last year and a half and I actually flourished a little bit. There were only five to twelve kids in a class. I began drama classes, too, which I loved. The teachers related to me. It sparked my interest.

Kevin was already going there when I enrolled midway through my junior year. He was wild, but he had a lot of gifts. He had a great mind, was an artist, a very good writer, and he was a great pal. He’d make up all these great characters with names like Jackson Snipe. I mean, who could forget a name like Jackson Snipe
?
Kevin had a tape recorder. We’d get high and write and act and tape ‘radio shows’ together. A lot of our creativity, we believed, came out of beer and drugs. We played two homosexuals in some really silly one-act plays. We wrote plays together, which we performed in drama class and for our graduation. We were headed, or so we presumed, in pretty much the same direction: acting.

By our senior year in high school, 1967–8, Kevin was occasionally getting high on heroin. And I, foolishly, tried it with him. Once. I was into experiencing as much as I could back then. So we went out and bought a dime bag of heroin and shared it. I never used a needle. I just snorted it. I became very dark and slow. I could see how you could become a human wasteland very quickly, and I wanted no part of it. Way too bleak.

Kevin and I also liked doing poppers – amyl nitrate – the fumes of which produce an intense, short-lived rush. I remember when we were in a school play, right before we were supposed to go on, performing for all our parents and teachers, we popped an ‘amy’. We walked out on stage in our costumes and blew it completely. I mean, we were in hysterics, just bent over, knocking things over, bumping into people. It was more like a slapstick routine. Embarrassing now, looking back. The adults may not have been too impressed, but we were having a good time. I have good memories of that period. And of Kevin, who would be dead in two years.

My stepfather had fantasies of me going to college, but I knew I wasn’t headed in that direction. My academic interest was next to nil. My grades weren’t much better. Sex, drugs and rock and roll came first. OK, kids, let’s talk a little about the sex.

I reached puberty pretty early. By 11 or 12, I had matured sexually and had an incredible appetite for it – driven by it, in fact. It’s all I could think about. I’d walk around with
a hard-on all day long. At 13, all I did was play with myself and think about getting laid, getting blown. Sex, glorious sex.