Living the Blues. Adolfo de la
got hired into The Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa's strange but wonderful all-star team. The bad Henry had to quit because Zappa wouldn't tolerate his heavy doping, so now he's with us. Going to excess was not a firing offense in the Canned Heat. It was a given.
Except for Taylor--who is the best blues bass player in the world, he's a fanatic for order, discipline, predictability, control. He is never satisfied with anything. He's a perfectionist, surrounded by all these party-loving hippies in Canned Heat, where being brilliant was expected, but it took second place to having a good time.
The Bear and Alan Wilson are the founding fathers, the guys who created the band, its core and its star performers. The tormented, introspective Wilson's nickname was "Blind Owl," but we called him Alan. The massive, Falstaffian Bear's real name was Bob Hite but we called him The Bear. They were two white suburban kids who loved black country blues, who collected so many obscure records and listened to them for so many hours that the music just began spilling back out of them like overfilled bathtubs.
Alan gave the band his genius on the harmonica and his strange, questing intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of the blues. The Bear gave the band his own heart, which valued boogie and music and food and love and chaos and sex and drugs and all-night parties. The blues singer's life. There wasn't much room, in Bear's heart or the band's, for good order and discipline. That was driving Larry nuts.
In the dressing room at the Fillmore West, just three nights before Woodstock, Henry was dribbling reds down his throat like peanuts. Before we even got to the stage, he was totally wasted. A little high is one thing but this had the whole band uptight. Me, the new guy, the immigrant, I just tried to keep smiling. Let the old hands, the gringos, deal with this.
By the end of the first set, we had to holler for a roadie to bring Henry a chair. He couldn't even stand. In the "Fried Hockey Boogie" he took off on a solo that rambled on for 25 minutes with no point. In his head he was saying something but whatever it was stayed locked in there with the downers. He forgot what key he was in. It was awful.
The Fillmore crowd thought that was great. To them, dope was a sacrament. They loved Canned Heat because they thought of us as outrageous. They ate it up, the band's mystique of rebelliousness, the idea that we were messing with our perceptions to make brilliant music.
"I love this band," yelled a guy up front. "They play 40-minute songs, and look at this guy, he's so wasted he can't stand up."
Taylor explodes. Out in the audience are some really fine musicians: Paul Butterfield, his guitarist Mike Bloomfield, Harvey Mandel. These are guys we respected and wanted to impress as peers.
"This is terrible," Larry yells at the rest of us on stage. Some of the audience can hear him, but he doesn't care. "I am never playing with that guy again, never. He's out of his mind. We look fucking ridiculous."
We all make stone faces to hide what we're thinking, something I am learning to do often, as we finish the gig. Leaving the ballroom, I even tell a couple of groupies to beat it, get lost. Even me, who likes to take refuge from the band's chaos with a nice, bouncy little girl. I was too upset to fuck. This band was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. We're famous. We're getting rich. And now what? Our bubble pops?
We had a meeting in our hotel, all of us scared for the band's future except Larry. He was still enraged.
"Henry sucks," he said. "If he's in this band, I'm out."
Henry felt guilty, you could tell, but he has this "Yeah, I'm a bad guy, so what?" attitude. He doesn't want to say it was his fault. Henry is the only child of a wealthy family. All his life, he's done anything he wants. So his answer is: "If Larry plays, I don't. Screw this motherfucker. I don't have to put up with him."
Says Skip, the manager, "I don't know who's in the goddamn band now and who isn't in the goddamn band, but we have another gig at the Fillmore West tomorrow night and I expect every one of you to be on the goddamn stage."
That was no solution. Henry walked.
Some other time, that would have been okay. Henry had exceeded the limits of how much you can abuse your fame, your audience, your band. In the decades to come, we got used to it. The brilliant Henry rejoined the band over and over again. Then the spaced-out Henry got fired, or walked out, over and over again.
Except now it meant that when we went on stage at the Fillmore the next night, we were without a lead guitar, which is like trying to get an airplane off the ground without wings.
On stage, we hear someone in the audience say that Mike Bloomfield is there. Immediately, The Bear says, "Let's invite him to play with us. We can jam."
Bob was expert in jam sessions. He knew every song there was and we had such a strong rhythm section that even though Mike had never played with us, he could play around us. Mike was so good The Bear offered him a job after one set. Hell, Mike was as famous as Henry.
"Thanks," he said. "It was great playing with you guys, but I'm burned out on touring. I've been on the road with Butterfield for years now. I have to cool it. I have to get off the road for awhile."
What do we do for a lead guitar in the second set? Somebody says Harvey Mandel is out there too.
"Harvey's really good," Larry says. "Ask him to sit in."
Mandel wasn't as famous as Bloomfield--he got a lot more famous years later when he recorded with the Rolling Stones--but he had played with Charlie Musselwhite, a great blues harmonica player, so he ought to be good with Alan's harmonica work.
Harvey came up and kicked ass. He had a great tone, a virtuoso left hand. Not fast, not a lot of notes, but like Henry, he had a sound of his own. He wasn't just another of the 4,297 guys who tried to sound like Eric Clapton. To the rest of us, who had gotten used to wondering whether the next lead guitar notes were going to come from the brilliant Henry or the wasted Henry, Harvey's control was a relief. We invited him into the band then and there.
Alan was devastated by Henry's leaving. Alan wanted the band to be a family, to be this sort of holy circle together, and it caused him deep pain whenever there was trouble between us. He didn't think anyone should be hurt or pushed out, and for some reason, Henry was especially important to him. Bear used to say "What are you, in love with that guy? Are you a faggot?" But Larry was all jazzed at having a lead guitar who didn't do heavy drugs. I didn't have any power but I was in favor of keeping the band together and playing, and if that meant we had Harvey, fine.
We drove right to the San Francisco airport after hiring Mandel out of the audience, slept on the plane to New York, scrambled in and out of the gig in New Jersey or wherever the hell it was and hit the Fillmore East, where there was another band we didn't know, new guys, I think making their first performance, named Sha Na Na.
Meanwhile, Harvey is learning our numbers and style as we go, learning in front of these huge audiences. With Harvey's talent and a powerful rhythm section, Alan's delicate harmonica notes and graceful rhythm guitar dancing around The Bear's gargantuan showmanship, we were getting away with it.
We were zonked, wasted, uptight, downbeat, ripped, torn and shattered. And we were supposed to be on our way to a festival called Woodstock. Big deal, just another gig, I thought, although we were sure having a hell of a lot of trouble getting to it.
So here we were hanging around the airport in Whitekill, New York for hours, waiting for our turn on the helicopter shuttle that was the only way for musicians to get to the stage, which by now was surrounded by a crowd that reached for miles in all directions, like a fortress of human bodies.
I was trying to sleep on the concrete floor of a hangar. Skip was going crazy, worrying that even if we got into the festival, we wouldn't have any instruments; from all the radio reports we heard, there was no way they could get through those traffic jams with the equipment truck.
It was after four in the afternoon, six hours after we got to the airport, that a helicopter had some passenger room. A TV crew and some reporters bolted for it, with us chasing them down the runway. They got to the chopper first but The Bear charged aboard after them.
"Where the fuck