“Hello, boys!”
… said Tony and I as we loaded our guitars and amps through the side door of the Lone Star Cafe on 5th Avenue and E. 13 Street in Manhattan, that rock club with the giant fiberglass iguana on its roof. The boys in question were the male portion of the Lone Star staff, a few of whom were instrumental in tossing me and Tony out of the joint the week before. It seems their upstairs bartender objected to being called a Yuppie twerp on top of having us hitting on his girlfriend (who knew?).
These things happen in night clubs, and Tony and I got over it right away, and were hoping the Yuppie twerp and the bouncers felt the same, which is why we announced our presence right away. It’s always better to know exactly where you stand than wonder. As it happens, the Yuppie twerp bartender wasn’t working that night and the rest of the staff laughed the incident off as one of those things, no one got hurt and nothing was damaged, so they told us have a great show tonight.
We were the opening act that night for Hot Tuna, the stripped down acoustic version of just Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Cassidy and a second guitarist named Sammy something-or-other, I forget. The night was a benefit for homeless New Yorkers, and Hot Tuna was the expensive box office draw, while my band The Big Spenders were the bargain Opening Act. Our lead guitarist Gary was friends with Jorma and had played with Tuna here and there over the years, and I was looking forward to meeting him and Jack Cassidy, who I first saw perform with the legendary Jefferson Airplane when I was a teenager, years before they launched their second successful band with Hot Tuna. Bobby D, another Tash Brother who also played with the Big Spenders, also had met these cats, but for me this would be the first time.
This was around 1983, when their years of being a big time touring act were over, so Jorma and Jack had mostly abandoned the full electric band for small acoustic ensembles more suitable for the nightclub circuit. They were still a formidable live act, and their rootsy music was well-suited to the acoustic format, so the Lone Star was sold out for both shows. Being that we were on first, we set our amps up on stage while our drummer, another Bob, was assembling his rig, and the band drifted in one by one, Tony the keyboardist, then Ian our bassist. We found our places on stage, letting the sound people do their thing, darting all over the stage, moving monitors, taping wires to the floor and setting up over a dozen microphones on our amps and drums as well as the mikes for our voices.
Then we ran though a couple of tunes for our sound check, both our loudest and softest numbers, until everyone was satisfied they were hearing everything, both onstage and all over the odd-shaped nightclub, a 2-floor joint, narrow and deep with the stage facing sideways, and on the second floor was another bar and a balcony ringed with tables directly above the stage, best seats in the house. The sound people at the Lone Star were real pros, and they would later adjust their dials to reflect the sound-absorbing effect of a house full of people later on, and the club was well-known to patrons and musicians for it’s great PA system.
After our sound check we got shown our dressing room on the 3rd floor, a medium-sized room off the hall with no windows, a couple of sofas and a few chairs, with room to stash our guitar cases and all the other “stuff” you drag around with a band. Management provided a large ice bucket filled with bottled water and soft drinks for us, and we were invited to have a meal downstairs since we had a couple of hours to kill before the show.
The headliners hadn’t even shown up yet, and there were several people I assumed were patrons in the place also ordering food, but they were the volunteers for the charity running the show. A couple of them explained that they had rented the entire club for the night, so today’s menu included some healthier items as well as the regular menu if we cared to try some, pointing to the unappetizing mounds of foliage in front of them. We did not. They also assumed we shared their passion for helping the homeless, when in fact we were not volunteers but getting paid tonight, and in truth did not even know what charity was sponsoring the show until we got there. Sorry to disappoint you people, and we’re pleased as punch that someone else is on the ball with that, but it ain’t us.
Outside of handing beggars a buck on the street when I can, I didn’t have any answer to homelessness, which was a growing problem in NYC in the 1980s, and had been ever since they closed all the mental hospitals and psychiatric clinics practically overnight in the 1970s. Now, New York City has always had our share of bums (vagrants, hobos, derelicts, etc), both the lone wolf local neighborhood bum variety, sleeping on doorsteps and heating grates, and the Bowery bums who gathered in numbers in Lower Manhattan and slept in flophouses when they had an extra buck-fifty, basically broken people who had surrendered but there was no one to take them prisoner, so they spent their days in a fog, chasing their next bottle of wine, a nickel and dime at a time.
Homeless people were different. They are many things, but not bums. There were the former mental patients trying to survive without their meds or treatment of any sort, joined by legions of drug addicts as the Crack Epidemic exploded nationwide, families in crisis, the suddenly unemployed, the mentally challenged and the severely depressed, all of them preyed upon by brazen thugs out to steal what little they did have, and generally scorned by a public who wanted them to be humanely housed in group facilities, as long as said humane facility was not in their neighborhood.
So we sat there eating our meals and feeling pretty good, about the great meal, a chance to play the Lone Star again, and actually playing a gig for a good cause for a change (even though we only found out about it moments before). The good feeling wore off in a hurry, however, once we returned to our dressing room and found out someone had gone through our belongings and stolen a couple of things from us, small things like wires, a guitar effects box and my favorite guitar strap. Not a huge loss, but irritating and a personal violation, and there were too many strangers in the club that night to point any fingers. Could have been anyone, even an enterprising street kid pretending to be a volunteer and grabbing whatever was loose.
That meant one of us had to stay in the dressing room, since maybe the guy would be back or was working with another thief, who knows? We were pissed off, nothing like that ever happened in this club, so I volunteered to take the first “watch” while the other guys went downstairs to see what was going on. Not even 10 minutes later, there I am sitting on the couch tuning my guitar when I see the door opening very slowly, so I sat still like no one was there, and sure enough a small, scruffy looking guy in a hoody sneaks into the room, looking furtively this way and that.
As soon as he’s inside the room I made my move, grabbing the guy from behind, one hand around his neck and the other gripping the back of his pants, and pushed him up against the wall so he can’t use his arms against me, saying “Okay motherfucker I gotcha now,” or words to that effect. He says “what the fuck!” or something like that, then tells me he’s Jorma Kaukonen, only I’m not believing him since Jorma was taller and has no beard (I erroneously thought), so I say, “Oh yeah, you’re Jorma? Then show me your back!”
So he says “you’re holding my backside, just pull up my shirt!” Sure enough, there was the bottom fringe of Jorma Kaukonen’s famous tattooed back, and my heart sinks as I release him and apologize profusely, talking a mile a minute and telling him I thought he was a thief and how we were just robbed and I’m here watching our shit, and I’m thinking “holycrap I just manhandled Jorma Kaukonen a week after getting thrown out of here, I’ll never play in the Lone Star again, or anywhere on the city circuit for that matter, if they don’t throw the whole band out right now, I really fucked up here…,” but Jorma just looks at me and says ”hey, it’s cool, relax. I did kind of slip in here without knocking, I figured I’d stop by and surprise Gary.”
Then he asks me why I didn’t think it was him and I said “well, the beard for one, and I honestly thought you were taller, I only ever saw you on a big stage, with the Airplane and Tuna,” and he laughs and tells me “that’s because I was usually standing next to Jack, who makes everyone look tall. Come next door with me, I’ll introduce you.”
Next thing I know I’m in the big dressing room up front with Jack Cassidy and few other people, and Jack’s actually wearing a pair of his famous round sunglasses indoors, and Jorma’s telling everyone how he just met a new friend from Brooklyn and his name is Bob and how we met, and Cassidy tells me it sucks that there’s a thief in the club, then laughs his ass off about Jorma showing me his tattooed back to ID himself.
Needless to say, the graciousness of Jorma Kaukonen has stayed with me to this day, as will the easy laugh of his longtime partner Jack Cassidy, and how generous they both were to an opening act they never met before (and whose singer almost put a hurt on Jorma!), sharing their imported beer and champagne and an assortment of food sent up by the kitchen, swapping stories and laughs until it was showtime, with The Big Spenders doing our tightest hour of music to warm up the crowd that had come to see Hot Tuna.
I have to say we were hot that night and the crowd loved us, something management always puts in the mental file when seeking opening acts for their headliners, so that was another positive on a night that could have gone south in a hurry. Between acts, the organizers of the benefit sent up a speaker who thanked specific large donors, like at any fundraiser, and then outlined whatever program it was they were advocating for the homeless (none of whom seemed to be in attendance, by the way), but we didn’t stick around to find out.
We wanted to stash our guitars, smoke a few funny cigarettes on the roof with the giant Iguana, then grab an interesting libation and watch Hot Tuna play, so we beat it up to the 3rd floor, where an extra security guard had been posted to prevent more pilfering. Jorma, Jack and Sammy left their dressing room door open and were prepping for their show, tuning their instruments and going over their set list, those dead serious moments before every performance where you’re laser-focused on the task at hand, giving your audience their money’s worth with a kick-ass performance.
And that’s exactly what they did, played a set of Hot Tuna music that swung and swayed and swelled, then mellowed for a couple of quiet numbers before roaring to a close with “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.” They earned a standing ovation from the entire house, including their opening act and the Lone Star staff. The first show swiftly emptied out and the room filled up for the second show almost as quickly and before you know it The Big Spenders were back on stage, sporting 3 guys named Bob, 2 Tonys, an Ian and a Gary, and once again we kicked ass, wanting to keep the great vibe going.
The late show crowd was even more raucous and we had them going with a table-tapping finale we used to do sometimes if the crowd was game, and this crowd was plenty stoked. The charity’s featured speaker was gone for the night so Hot Tuna took the stage with minimal delay for the second show, and had been waiting on the staircase with their guitars to jump right up as soon as possible, while the crowd was alive, paying us the compliment of watching our last couple of numbers.
Once again, Hot Tuna delivered, opening with the ethereal instrumental “Water Song” before cranking out some of their foot-stomping folk blues numbers, Cassidy bouncing his bass notes like a fat basketball while Kaukonen and Sammy traded musical slam dunks on acoustic guitars. Hot Tuna’s sound was very unlike their “parent” band’s sound, The Jefferson Airplane, and was as improbable and unexpected a musical success as there ever was, and better still, their popularity sparked renewed interest (and royalties) in the music of the Reverend Gary Davis and other early blue artists who were Jorma and Jack’s obvious music influences.
They earned an encore and another standing ovation, then climbed the stairs waving to their crowd to chants of “Tuna! Tuna! Tuna!” The Lone Star delivered another memorable night of music and I managed to dodge 2 bullets by not getting banned from the joint for life, got to meet and hang with 2 of my musical idols (our peculiar and unfortunate introduction notwithstanding) who turned out to be very cool cats who liked a good laugh. Not only that, the manager told us he’s got a few upcoming dates for us, always welcome news to struggling bands (which describes 99.9% of bands), so that was icing on the cake of a beautiful night.
I was feeling so good I even started thinking about quitting drinking, which always seemed to be at the epicenter of all my troubles when you sat down and thought about it (which I rarely did back then). It was easy to identify the culprit that kept my life careening face-first into the void, but it would be some time before I finally kicked John Barleycorn to the curb. Lucky for me, though, that my crazy booze and drug-fueled years came and went before cell phone cameras were around to document my every bonehead move (and there’s been no shortage of those). There’s no video or selfies or incriminating texts, so you just have to take my word for it that these things happened, with allowances for a few fuzzy edges around the memories.