Even better, Bree could take a punch and a kick. Bree is Cato Fong to my Inspector Clouseau, as in the Pink Panther movies. Like them, we enjoy springing surprise attacks on each other anywhere and at any time. Sometimes it’s just a brief burst or flurry of punches and kicks while the elevator is between floors or we’re waiting for a cab. Other times, we go at each other for longer periods, trading insults, shots, and blocks for fifteen minutes or more until the battle dissolves into exhaustion and laughter.
We lived with our girlfriends for a time in an apartment on Stanley Street in New Haven, and it was there that we began this ritual of whaling on each other in spontaneous assaults. Neither one of us could walk in the door without the other jumping out from behind the couch or a door, or out of the closet or pouncing down from the kitchen counter. We would then bash each other with high-speed punches, kicks, and blocks. If one of us woke up in the morning and sleepily came down to get a drink from the refrigerator, the odds were that the other one would be waiting and lurking somewhere, then lunge into an ambush, yelling “Haaiiiiiiiiyaaaaa,” and the pummeling would begin yet again.
I particularly enjoyed waiting for Bree to come home from the grocery store carrying two or three bags of food, trying not to spill anything as he opened the door. I’d spring on him with a series of kicks and punches, ripping open the bags and sending heads of lettuce and bean sprouts flying across the room. Occasionally, my girlfriend, Maureen, or his girlfriend, Gypsy, would get caught in the fast-and-furious cross fire as collateral damage. The girls did not seem to find it as amusing as the boys.
Our rabid sparring often spilled out into the streets or erupted in movie theaters, restaurants, and other locations generally not receptive to what we regarded as part play-fighting, part training, part practical joking, and—since we were very competitive guys—always an attempt to land a good kick or punch just for bragging rights.
I have to confess that even today, Bree and I beat the crap out of each other at every opportunity. After my most recent trip to Australia for a 2012 symphony concert tour, I returned home with most of the skin on my shins shredded and bruised, courtesy of Dr. Bree Belford. I’m sure many of his patients wondered why the backs of their physician’s forearms and his elbows were bruised and bloodied. I shouldn’t be surprised that Bree knocks people out for a living in his anesthesiology practice. He’s been trying to knock my ass out for years (without success, so far). We still greet each other with karate punches, blocks, and kicks. We say good-bye with flurries of the same. And in between, whether it’s in a fine restaurant, a hotel elevator, or backstage at a concert, we take every opportunity to inflict bodily harm upon each other.
As we’ve gotten a little older, I’ve expected that Bree might back down a little. He has a booming medical practice and his hands are sort of important in his line of work. But no, my good buddy just keeps coming at me like a human weed-whacker. He’s not exactly the underdog in this fight. I have had a lot of martial arts training. I spent hours upon hours sparring with Bill all through my teen years, but with all my travel and work as a performer, I never made the time to do all that is required to earn a black belt. Bree is a sixth-degree black belt in karate and a first-degree black belt in aikido.
In a 2012 dinner get-together, Bree brought backup—his friend William Cheung, who is a Wing Chun kung fu grand master and was an early instructor of Bruce Lee. During our meal, the gracious and fit seventy-two-year-old Chinese physician explained some of his kung fu techniques and philosophies, which only fired up our friendly fight club.
Jabs and kicks ensued over and under the table. Bree’s fiancée, Pia, was with us, and she was not entirely amused: “You act like a grown-up until Michael comes to town—then you both act like children.” (Which, I must say, is quite gratifying for both of us to hear. We just reverted back to living on Stanley Street as teenagers forty years ago.) We were really going at it that night. We were so busy trying to block and strike that we were oblivious to all the commotion we were causing in the restaurant. We started out sparring sideways, since we were seated next to each other, but then we pushed our chairs back from the table and went at it face-to-face, throwing shots faster and faster. We were laughing the whole time, but I think some of the other diners must have wondered if they’d walked onto a Jackie Chan movie set.
The restaurant manager approached my tour security guy, who was sitting a few tables away, and suggested that he might want to intercede, but he knew Bree and I were just playing. Fortunately, our kung fu grand master dinner partner also got the joke. He coached us and urged us on. Then, after dinner, Bree and I continued the sparring like middle-aged ninjas in the hotel elevator, with William Cheung standing between us. The grand master, who is still no one to mess with, amused himself by occasionally blocking our shots with a shrug of his shoulders.
By the time we reached our floor, we all stumbled out giggling like schoolboys, but only two of us continued trading shots down the hallway, laughing and limping all the way.
MY DOGGONE TRIP TO CALIFORNIA
In 1967, my other best hometown buddy, my musical sidekick and guitar hero Marc Friedland, lured me away from my first band, the Nomads, into a new group. This rock band was a reconstituted version of a group called George’s Boys. Our drummer, Bob, was one of the original George’s Boys, so he brought the name with him. Most people, including my father, assumed the band was named after my dad, but it was just a coincidence. Of course I never told my dad that. He was too big a fan and supporter. If it made Dad happy to think we named the group after him, that was fine with me.
George’s Boys became a popular band around the local bars and Yale campus parties. But we never moved much beyond the hometown circuit because the lead singer—me—announced that he was quitting to embark on a personal quest. I wish I had some noble purpose to explain this decision, but in truth, I had a mental meltdown because my mother gave away my dog, Dog. (He was a mutt, but not stupid. If you said, “Nice Dog,” for example, he perked right up.)
Mom gave Dog away because she said I wasn’t taking proper care of him. Imagine that. I suppose food, water, an occasional walk, or basically any sense of responsibility whatsoever would have been nice. Eventually I made up for it in what became a life full of tremendous responsibility. I may not have exactly doted on the mutt, but for some reason the loss of him sent me into the doldrums. To recover, I decided to hitchhike across the country to California, where I planned to jump into the loving arms of the woman of my dreams, Cory Morrison, who was then living in Berkeley. Actually, just being in her vicinity was enough for me. I was not discouraged by certain harsh realities: I had no money, no real idea of how to get to Berkeley, and no claim on Cory, as she had never expressed anything other than a big-sister sort of fondness for me.
Maybe I was still angry about my parents’ divorce and angry at the world. High levels of THC in my bloodstream and raging hormones may have played a role. Everyone has a male or female Cory Morrison at some point in life—an enchanting, unattainable, yet unforgettable object of desire. This wasn’t lust. My first groupie was lust. I seriously wanted to marry Cory, join a commune with her, and spend my life playing guitar and singing while basking in her sweet glow.
Cory was five years older than me. She had a boyfriend, but I was sure I could win her heart. She’d stolen mine and taken it to Berkeley after she was kicked out of high school for daring to say that her history book was only one interpretation of events. Cory was right, of course, but the principal didn’t see it that way.
After moving to Berkeley, she’d made the mistake of telling me to come visit anytime. She didn’t mean it, but that didn’t matter to me.
“I’m quitting the band and hitchhiking to Berkeley to see Cory,” I announced to Ribs and the guys in the band. I figured they’d just find another singer and continue without me. Instead, Ribs and Bob announced they’d come along.
“If you leave there’s no band, so we might as well go, too,” Ribs said.
I told my mom I was hitchhiking to California.
She said, “That’s ridiculous, you are not hitchhiking to California.”
So, naturally, I hitchhiked to California.
By that time, she was used to my disappearing for extended periods. Most of the time I was hanging out with Orrin or other friends in the Village, or staying at the Friedlands’ house, where the parents were stricter but the food was plentiful. The Friedlands always seemed to have a full pantry and they were extremely generous and welcoming. Looking back, I am especially amazed at how they opened their home to me and even allowed us to have band practice there. I’d like to take this opportunity also to set the record straight on something that occurred at the Friedlands’ house: The ashes of charcoaled weed and seeds Mrs. Friedland kept finding in her fur coat pocket were not mine. They belonged to our friend Tom, who often took refuge in a basement storage room to smoke his pot in a pipe. Unfortunately, Alice Friedland stored her beloved fur coat in that same room. I had visions of her attending some social function, sticking her hand into her coat pocket, and coming up with illicit residue clinging to her hand and wedged under her manicured nails: “Good to see you, Mr. Mayor, please forgive the burned remnants from my pocket.”
I feel so much better after clearing the air on that.
Now back to the story of our hitchhiking trek to California: All I knew was that we had to get on Route 66 somewhere in the Midwest and follow it to California. This was the sixties. Nobody had a plan. Or a map. We just went with the flow. We walked out to the nearest highway and stuck out our thumbs.
It was October. We were wearing light jackets. We had a grand total of twenty dollars between us, none of it belonging to me. There were consequences, naturally.
We damn near froze riding in the backs of pickup trucks or sleeping in ditches and under bridges. The trip took six days, and for half of them I was fairly certain I was dying of exposure and starvation. At night, I would find a bush to wrap myself around in between other bushes, which was the only thing that stopped the wind from continuously assaulting my face and body. My body shivered so hard some nights that I thought they’d find parts of me scattered all over in the morning. Ribs still had short hair at that point, and Bob’s wasn’t nearly as long as mine. They quickly figured out that if I stood beside the highway alone with my thumb out, the truck drivers would figure I was a girl and pull over. Their ruse was more than a little insulting, but damn if it didn’t work. Ribs made sure to sit between the driver and me so the trucker couldn’t make a grab for me. I wasn’t allowed to talk for fear the driver would realize I wasn’t a girl and throw us all back out on the road.
The highway was not a friendly place to be without a vehicle. More than once, we had to run for our lives because of hostile rednecks, predators, or perverts. I had nightmares of ending up as an ingredient in some serial killer’s Hitchhiker Stew. Our twenty-dollar grubstake didn’t last long, considering there were three of us and we were starving. Our salvation came when a family of good Samaritan “church people” picked us up one night somewhere in the heartland, took us to their warm home, and fed us until we fell blissfully asleep.
Another time we lucked out when Ribs spied a family checking out of their roadside motel room at 5 a.m. As soon as their car pulled away, we tried the door to their room and it was open. We went in, cranked up the heat, took hot showers, and slept under the covers until the maid came in four hours later and kicked us out.
You might find it hard to believe that alert lawmen in every state were eager to check us out. Most seemed to think we were juvenile runaways or escaped convicts. Ribs and Bob were over eighteen. I had Marc’s driver’s license, which put me at sixteen. Luckily, driver’s licenses didn’t have photos back then. Most cops just questioned us, checked us for drugs—we couldn’t afford any on this trip—and let us go.
There was one notable exception. We were somewhere in an old neighborhood of Saint Louis, and the next thing we knew they were hauling us into their station. They said they were going to throw us in jail unless we cooperated in “an investigation.” The cops wanted us to hang out in a strip mall known for its drug dealers. Our mission, should we decide to accept it, was to find out who the dealers were and rat them out. If we did not play along, they vowed to lock us up for vagrancy, or for violating the Clean Air Act.
We said we’d cooperate, mostly because we were freakin’ starving and they bought us fast food. Their plan also was for us to be seen hanging out with an undercover cop, to give him credibility. He was a tough sell. He looked like a kid trick-or-treating as Teen Wolf, or Serpico having a bad hair day. Even we could barely contain our laughter every time we’d look over at his enormous black wig. But we pretended to go along with the plan. They dropped us off at the strip mall in a scary neighborhood and promised to return in a few hours. What ensued wasn’t exactly a drug raid.
We eventually ditched Teen Wolf and ran to the roadside, where we hitched a ride back to Route 66 and hauled ass out of town.
We encountered other law officers but managed to avoid arrest through the rest of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. In New Mexico, another highway patrolman hauled us in to the station to make sure we weren’t on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Once he confirmed our lack of criminal expertise, he was nice enough to drop us off on the highway so we could continue our trek through Arizona and into California, where we met up with another lawman in downtown L.A. He announced within about two minutes that he was hauling us back to headquarters and calling my parents because I was a minor far, far from home. He put us in the backseat of his squad car and slammed the door.
We thought, This is it? We’ve come all this way just to get busted and sent home?
The cop was in the front seat, talking on the radio, when another LAPD squad car pulled up behind us with its lights flashing. He jumped out and took instructions from the other cop. The next thing we knew, he threw open the back door and told us to get out. Apparently, there were more serious criminals afoot. We gladly climbed out and waved farewell as the two squads took off with sirens blaring.
We took this as a sign that karma was on our side, finally. We set out for Berkeley, and about ten hours later, we were knocking on the door of Cory’s apartment. She seemed moderately thrilled to see us. Her live-in boyfriend wasn’t nearly as enthused. Soon, though, he realized I wasn’t much of a threat. Cory had room for only one guest on the couch, so Ribs and Bob had to find shelter with other friends. We stayed a couple of days, but it became clear that Cory wasn’t going to ditch her boyfriend, quit college, and run off with me to a commune. So Ribs, Bob, and I hit the road again, my love for Cory still unreciprocated.
PLAYING FOR JOY
When we returned to New Haven, George’s Boys re-formed as a new band named Joy, featuring Marc on bass guitar, Fred Bova on lead guitar, Bob on drums, and me on rhythm guitar. We performed at every opportunity, gradually moving up from high school dances and teen parties to Yale mixers, clubs, and college bars, which was interesting, since we were all underage. We could play but not drink, even when people sent up shots for us.
That was okay, because beer and shots were not our favorite intoxicants anyway. Some of us managed to keep a buzz going during our breaks by dashing out to our converted Wonder Bread delivery truck, which was adorned in psychedelic colors and trippy drawings of a giant sun with glowing rays, stars, moons, wizards, and rainbows rendered by our drummer, Bob, and hippie artist Brad Johannsen, who became a noted illustrator of posters and album and book covers, especially science-fiction novels.
Our truck’s bold exterior screamed, “Officer, pull this vehicle over—stoned hippie musicians inside!” But that didn’t stop me from using it as a rolling den of sin and vice. The truck’s Wonder Bread origins were appropriate, since I was usually fully baked when riding in it. Once safely locked inside with friends and maybe a few fans, some of us would light up or fire up the bong and do our best to smoke the glass so no one could
see in. We’d be in a blissful, silent stupor until the entire vehicle would seem to be exploding. It would take a while for us to realize that it was Ribs yelling and banging on the windows and doors: “You’re supposed to be starting your next set!”
Back then, being stoned was part of my performance. Long-term career planning wasn’t a priority for the artists or the record companies. Yet despite occasional lapses due to mind-altering drugs, Joy developed a strong following at hot clubs like the Yale hangout Hungry Charlie’s, later known as Caleb’s Tavern and then, most famously, as Toad’s Place. The hometown crowd was always supportive, and Toad’s also attracted other musicians. I was stunned during a set break one night there when David Lee Roth walked up, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Man, you’ve got a serious set of pipes there.” He then proceeded to tell me a very sick joke, which I will not—and cannot—repeat here.
The first night we played Hungry Charlie’s, we drew such a crowd they ran out of beer glasses. We were proud of that, though not so happy when we figured out they’d shorted us on our paycheck, which was supposed to be based on a “piece of the door,” or the night’s receipts. Still, we couldn’t complain, because they kept inviting us back to play more gigs, once they stocked up on beer glasses.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
Soon we were spreading Joy through all the Havens (New, North, West, and East) and beyond, into Branford and Hartford. Our fan base kept growing. Ribs always told me I was better than anyone on the radio. I thought he was nuts. Other friends of friends who knew somebody in the music industry were telling us that we should write more of our own songs if we wanted to get a recording contract. This encouragement inspired my unilateral decision to pack our guitars, drums, amps, and other gear into the Wonder Bread truck and head to Northern California in the summer of ’68.
The Soul of It All Page 5
