Tales from the Trails of a Rock ’n’ Roll Bus Driver

by Jerry Fitzpatrick

  I also started taking courses on airframe maintenance to start preparing for my future transfer to the Air Wing. Sergeant Williams had been in Vietnam working with 105s and told me some gruesome stories. He also told me he had been busted in rank and sent to this unit for telling some jerk-off officer to fuck himself. I found that honorable in some weird way and admired him all the more.

  I bought a Yamaha 650 Motorcycle from another Marine that had been transferred and had to leave his bike behind. I started riding it throughout the island, visiting the north shore on weekends and hitting Waikiki or the Keys, as everyone referred to the area, at night. Staying out late in the Keys would make morning runs with the unit tough. It sucks to wake up and hit the door for a five-mile run with boots on when you’re nursing a hangover. My body just did it.

  I went into downtown Honolulu one night in October when I had heard Rod Stewart was performing at the HIC Arena. In order to get to Honolulu and Waikiki, I rode over the Pali Mountains. The drive over the mountains has some of the best views in America. Driving up and through the tunnel to reach the other side of the island, you could look back over your shoulder and see green valley and endless sea. Looking up as you head toward the tunnels your eyes were greeted with tops of the mountains, a breath-taking scene. Riding a motorcycle was the best way to view it. Many days it would rain in the mountains, so you would get wet going over. The warm air usually had me dry by the time I reached my destination.

  When I arrived, the show wasn’t sold out, so I got my ticket. I was excited to see Stewart perform. I was such a fan, and a couple of his songs were anthems for me. Of course “Maggie May” was a favorite, but “Reason to Believe” and “Mandolin Wind” were favorites of one of the first albums that I ever owned.

  When the opening act went on stage, I had never heard of Peter Frampton. By the time he finished his set, I didn’t want him to quit. He played most of the songs that were released on his “Frampton Comes Alive” album. I was so entranced by Frampton’s show that I didn’t stay long for Rod Stewart’s show. I left within the first 30 minutes and went looking for a ticket for the next night’s performance. I came back again the next night and was blown away again by Frampton. And again, I didn’t stay long for Rod Stewart’s show. I couldn’t get Frampton’s tunes out of my head. A month or two after “Frampton Comes Alive” hit the stores, I bought one of the first copies I could get my hands on. I played that album so much the guys in the barracks complained to me to give it a break.

  When I had the time, I’d ride over to the Keys, park my bike by Fort Derussy, the Army depot, and walk to the beach, and from there down Kalakaua Avenue. Across the street from the International Market Place were some rock planters that I would sit on and watch people go by. Tourists came from all over the world. Have a beer, get a buzz and sit and watch the sunburned travelers – a good time for me. Up the street was a bar called the Crows Nest where I went many nights. They had a couple of musicians playing songs and telling jokes. Late one night, I was sitting in the booth right next to the stage with another Marine who had gotten so drunk he fell asleep. The place was jumping when one of the singers looked over and saw him asleep. He put his hands in the air and stopped the entire show. There were about 60 patrons in the place. Quiet filled the room.

  My buddy was slumped over with his chin on his chest, and now he was snoring. The musician put the microphone next to my buddy’s head where everyone could hear. The place burst out in laughter. He looked over at me. I had a good buzz going on, but I wasn’t passing out. He put his finger over his lips telling me not to disturb him. It had been dead quiet and when everyone laughed, my drunken friend snorted and woke up. He was looking around with this blank look on his face when the musician leaned over in his face

  “Do we bore you, sir?”

  How embarrassing!

  Crows Nest was a fun place. It was always full of military people from all branches. Most were grouped by their branch, Navy guys in one part of the room, Air Force in another and Marines in another area. Occasionally, there would be a scuffle, but nothing too out of sorts. I met a couple of guys who were in the Navy one night, one of them from Cabot, Arkansas, just a few miles north of where I started life. He had a license to drive a submarine, and I thought that was pretty cool. We partied together often when they were in town. Their sub was actually ported out of Guam, The USS Abraham Lincoln, and during their down time they came to Pearl Harbor.

  I got an apartment with them in the Keys, but that didn’t take long to screw up. The first or second morning, I was late getting over to the other side of the island to the base for duty. I was called in and warned. The third or fourth time it happened, I was told that I couldn’t live off base. Drinking from “beer thirty” in the afternoon till 2 a.m. sometimes made it hard to make that five-mile run three hours later. I had gotten to know many of the people in my unit by the first year and had ended up spending more time with the “Slackers” and “Shitbirds” as the year went on. I still had a couple of friends that were squared-away Marines, but the more I drank and took drugs, the less they had to do with me. Several people took me aside and warned me I should straighten up, but I didn’t seem to heed their warnings.

  One day a first lieutenant smarted off to me over some silly bullshit. I immediately threw it back at him and told him to kiss my ass. I’m sure I had a hangover, and I let my mouth overload my ass. Of course first lieutenants need people to push around, and it was my lucky day. I had gotten along okay with him before that, but he had to write me up. I got busted a rank, docked some pay and restricted to the barracks for a few days. Perhaps it slowed me down for a few weeks, maybe a month, but I got right back into the groove of chasing music at bars.

  Some of the best weed in the world is grown and sold in Hawaii. Kona Gold and Maui Wowi were unlike anything I had smoked in Michigan. It was available in large quantities and inexpensive. Other varieties were available like Tai, which came wrapped on a stick, and several nice California varieties. In Hawaii in the mid-’70s, smoking weed, shooting heroin and dropping acid were what most of the drug crowd was into. There wasn’t much cocaine around. I had tripped on acid with several people when I was at the Harbor House, mainly at my own curiosity.

  I hung out with some people in Hawaii who were dropping acid every day, and I did a few weekend trips. They were at a beach one day, and were tripping, and the next thing I knew I was invited to a party and eventually many others. One particular weekend, I tripped like I had never in my life, seeing things and trails from lights. After that, I didn’t do any more acid. I thought I had reached my limit, so I didn’t need anymore.

  Drinking booze and smoking weed seemed to be a good way to relax, and I kept the pace with them for some time. I could drink late into the night, get up the next morning without a headache, open a beer and start my day. I could hit a couple at lunch with a burger and get a six-pack in the evening and start another night. The head took it well at that age. But my actions didn’t, and the many stupid things I did eventually caught up with me enough that the commanding officer pegged me for a discharge a few months before my three-year obligation was up. I was sent to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay under the Oakland Bay Bridge and processed out of the Corps with an honorable discharge. While I was on the island going through the processing, I met another Marine who was getting out in a similar situation. With the Vietnam War ending, all military branches were downsizing. Troublemakers were the first to go. He was from North Carolina, and we both were looking at ways to get home. We both had two and a half years of gear to transport and endless days on a Greyhound bus going across country didn’t seem too appealing. How I would laugh at that thought later in life.

  In the San Francisco Chronicle, want ads were placed for a drive-away car service. People who wanted their car sent across country but didn’t want to drive them hired this company, and they used a lot of military people getting out of the service to drive cars to various locations in the U.S. We made con
tact, and within a few days, they gave us a car to drive to Dallas. There, we had to wait a day for another car, but we found one going on east to D.C. I was dropped off in Arkansas and the car went on. I didn’t have any idea where else to go. I may not have realized it at the time, but the walls were closing in on my desperate attempt at a normal life.

  Chapter 46 A Match Made In Music

  It’s a long way from Hawaii to Little Rock. It’s an even longer way from having a course set for yourself and having no idea where to go next. But that’s where I was when I was 20 years old, just out of the Marine Corps and feeling stuck back in the town that I vowed to leave so many years ago.

  I had technical school available to me, so I signed up for a welding school, wanting to become an underwater welder for the oil companies on offshore rigs. That lasted several months and seemed to possibly be something I could get interested in. But one stupid move nixed it altogether. I went with a childhood friend to rob a convenience store. I’m not sure now why I even thought about it, but being the getaway driver was my new job, and apparently I sucked at it. When he ran out of the store, I drove the van away, but we weren’t the best of criminals. I was busted for armed robbery, caught another charge of burglary and sent by the Arkansas Department of Correction to a prison farm in south Arkansas.

  Cummins Prison is a rough place, and I spent several weeks there before being transferred to the Tucker Prison Farm, the home of “Old Sparky,” the electric chair and death row. Never saw it. My punishment was enough for me. The prison farm experience resembles Cool Hand Luke, where the inmates sleep in open barracks and spend their days laying asphalt, cutting weeds and picking vegetables under the hot sun. The difference would be a walled prison, much like The Shawshank Redemption, which keeps its inmates secure behind metal and concrete. In Arkansas, the first months on a prison farm are spent on hoe squads, walking the bean and rice fields, chopping weeds with hoes while guys on horseback with guns yell things like “ska-bow” and “get them weeds, Convict!” It was miserable, exhausting and a mental drain like never before.

  After six months of chopping weeds in the hot summer sun, I had an offer to attend a Vo-tech school in the prison that was teaching auto mechanics. It was a chance I didn’t want to pass up, especially since I had another year to serve before parole would even be considered. After six months of schooling, I was made a trustee and assigned to the tractor barn to repair field tractors.

  When planting of the rice began in the spring, I was assigned to a rice field with another inmate who had worked them before. As the levies were cut, we had to shore them up in our field, maintaining them throughout the year until harvest. Throughout my 18 months in the prison, I spent six of them waiting in the Pulaski County Jail for a slot in the system. I didn’t get in too much trouble, opting to avoid it as much as possible. There were a few fights and threats from the guards that I might be fucking up, so I kept to myself most of the time, daydreaming about my release date.

  I went before the parole board for the first time and got a six-month deferral, commonly known as a “re-write.” It was nothing new, and I had another chance to impress them in a few months. The second time up, I made parole and was given a release date. I felt much relief.

  Working the rice field as a trustee, I would be dropped off at the field early in the morning and picked up before sunset. With a pickup truck, the guards would load as many convicts as possible and drop them at designated fields. We would then make the rounds to each of the fields every day. We did it six days a week and had Sundays off. One Saturday, after I had made parole and was waiting on my release date, my rice field partner got picked up early, because he had a visitor. I was left to tend to the field alone. It wasn’t the first time it had happened so I took the lazy Saturday walking the field, doing a small bit of patchwork and then swimming in the retaining pond where the water is held before it flows out to the field. In the hot afternoon summer days, it was a refreshing dip in cold water pumped directly out of the ground. For a short time, it didn’t feel like prison.

  As the afternoon slipped away and it began to get dark, I had gone over to my pickup spot... but the guard never came to get me. I sat for several hours until it was well after dark. That felt strange. I realized I hadn’t been outside in the dark for about two years. That was when I figured they forgot about me. Maybe my parole had started early. Hell, maybe it was a test. If it was, I wasn’t going to fail it.

  I started to make the more than two-mile walk back to the main prison compound, strolling down the main road with no one to stop me from going anywhere else. About a half-mile out, one of the captains saw me. He was one of those that released the hounds after inmates who were caught running in the opposite direction. He was leaving the dog barn as he drove past me in the dark. He stopped and backed up. I just stood there looking at him.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” he asked. He was dumbfounded.

  “I guess they forgot about me,” I said politely. “I’m walking back. I’m hungry.” He couldn’t help but laugh. As I climbed in, he radioed back to the prison.

  “Has the last count been cleared?” he barked to the prison guard over the radio.

  “Yes sir.”

  He looked at me and smiled.

  “There’s going to be some trouble tonight,” he said to me as we drove back.

  “Hell, boy, why didn’t you just run away?”

  “Shit, man. I just made parole. You ain’t gonna run me away from here now.” He laughed again.

  “Let’s get you some food.”

  We arrived at the gate, and he went over and talked to another guard. Within a few minutes, the alarm sounded throughout the entire prison. I guess that made me a fugitive. Whatever. I just wanted some food. Everyone was locked down, and a new count began while the captain escorted me to the kitchen. Someone gave me a plate of the evening slop, and I filled up and went back to my room. On my release date, my mother came for me. It was a strange feeling to be out and on my own time again. And with my mother. After Marines and prison, I had no fear of her. I just wanted to stay away from her.

  Within a few days of being released from prison, I had visited with my parole officer and found a job at an Oldsmobile dealership as a mechanic. Now, I enjoy working on cars, but it’s no fun when you’re under pressure to fix things just to make a paycheck. I also realized I couldn’t get that gas and oil smell off my hands no matter how much I washed. Every night I was going to bed with that smell on my hands. I realized being a full-time mechanic wasn’t going to be my destiny, and I quit less than a month later.

  I picked up another job running a lathe machine on the night shift for Roll-Lift Corporation. Roll-Lift makes pallet jacks for the warehouse industry. I was cutting metal parts on the late shift, cutting and measuring and running up to five machines for eight hours in the middle of the night. I started at 11 p.m. and finished the next morning. It was money in my pocket, and at the time, that was what mattered.

  I started dating some girls and not long after I had collected some funds to start buying drum parts for a kit. I met some guys, and we started jamming together. This was better than the Marines and better than jail. It may not have been my destiny, but making money and making music was what mattered to me.

  I moved into a house with my brother down the street from one of the high schools in Little Rock. I started living a somewhat typical young Arkansan life, again, just trying to stay out of trouble. Most of the guys who played music didn’t have trouble on their minds, instead putting their energy into music. It sounded like a good plan to me. After a few of us had played together, we were having enough fun that we started calling ourselves “The Arnold Layne Band” after the first single that Pink Floyd had released in 1967. The song was about a transvestite who stole women’s clothes. I don’t think there was a connection to our band, but it sounded cool. We mainly played British and European band songs like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC from the Dirty Deeds album.
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  We played parties around town and in pavilions at the river in Murray Park, a city park where hundreds of young people would gather on hot summer nights. It was great fun while it lasted. It was also a good way to meet chicks, but we weren’t making any money. Just having fun.

  One Friday night, I stopped at a bar on Asher Avenue in Little Rock looking for someone who wasn’t there. It was here that I discovered Lightfoot. I already had a good buzz going, so I got a drink and sat in front of two guys doing an acoustic set in the corner, singing country and folk songs. Both playing guitar and singing. No beat. No driving beat. That’s what I wanted to hear but was too lazy to find it at another bar.

  After awhile, I started making comments and jokes that they needed a drummer. I was soft spoken at first, but as the beers kept coming, I became a little more aggressive. Finally during a break, Mack, one of the singers, had enough of me.

  “Say dude. Are you a drummer?”

  “Well, sure I am.”

  “I’ll tell you what, pal, if you can drum, why don’t you bring your drums here tomorrow night, and we’ll have a drummer in our show. And if you can’t play, we’ll ask you to sit down, and you’ll have to wait until we finish to get them.”

  I was drunk enough to take the challenge. I didn’t make any more comments the rest of the night.

  The next afternoon, I arrived, set my small drum kit up and played with the guys. They didn’t ask me to leave, so I figured I aced the audition. Before the evening was over, all I heard was, “Do you know this? Do you know that?” Having grown up being forced to hear country music every day, the songs just seemed to be in my brain, and I was able to play most of them pretty well. Easy beats for two-stepping, waltzing, and Do-Si-Do kind of stuff. We were playing it all: The Flying Burrito Brothers, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Mickey Gilley and Johnnie Lee and all the outlaw country being played on the radio. And “Wipeout.” Why does everyone want to see the drummer play “Wipeout?”