Rocket Norton Lost In Space. Rocket Norton
saved me from freaking out and jumping off a bridge, just as my former biology lab partner had predicted, was musical guest Stevie Wonder. His first number was For Once in My Life, and it knocked me out. Then he sang Blowin’ in the Wind. It was so good it calmed me down and I sailed through the rest of the night. Still, I realized that I had taken about two hundred acid trips since the spring of 1967 and vowed that this would be my last. I almost lived up to that vow but, a few years later, there would be one more LSD trip to come.
I did quit smoking cigarettes though. I just woke up one morning and decided to quit; cold turkey. I was a lousy smoker anyhow.
Back in Vancouver, Jim knew a dealer named Bill who sold LSD, grass and hashish. Bill had an old house out on East Twenty-First Avenue at Renfrew Street in East Vancouver. Jim gave Bill the names of two bigger dealers in return for the use of the house for a year. Jim got the master bedroom on the main floor with Bill in the other bedroom.
Steve and Lindsay bunked in together in the room upstairs. Our comrade from the first barnstorming tour, Howard Diner settled into a room in the basement. The house was rundown and filthy dirty but I moved a small cot-like bed into a tiny space in the attic. I had a wooden box for a table and a small lamp with a red coloured bulb in it. I also had the Sony transistor radio that I had received for my eighth birthday.
Still newlyweds, Geoff and Jocelyn were living together at the house on Welch Street. Things were not all lovey dovey. Lindsay was hanging out with a stunning body called Jane. Jane was a woman, not a girl. She was built like Raquel Welch. She strutted around like a runway model and oozed sex from every pore.
Geoff and Jocelyn were out drinking with Lindsay and Jane one night when Geoff decided that he couldn’t keep his hands off Jane any longer. He took Jocelyn aside and explained to her, lovingly, that he felt compelled to act upon this overpowering urge. He thought he had her endorsement and scurried off with Jane. Jocelyn was not as happy with this arrangement as Geoff imagined. To fuck back she turned to the nearest man she could find ... Lindsay. Nobody knows where Geoff went with Jane, but Lindsay brought Jocelyn back to 21st and Renfrew. By the time they arrived Jocelyn had calmed down and changed her mind about fucking Lindsay to spite Geoff. Lindsay was relieved; not because he didn’t want to but because of the inevitable repercussions from Geoff after he sobered up. Jocelyn left for home and Lindsay went to bed alone in the house.
Sometime in the middle of the night Lindsay was rudely awakened by a clatter on the front porch. He could hear Geoff yelling; first in the front and then stumbling around in the back. He had come looking for Jocelyn. He assumed that she was with Lindsay and was crazy with rage and jealousy. Lindsay, sometimes an intelligent man, stayed quietly in bed and pretended that nobody was home. Geoff gave up pounding on the house and attacked his car, the Datsun that I had driven back from Montreal. Lindsay sat still in his bed and listened while Geoff kicked, and pummeled the little station wagon to a pulp. When he had exhausted himself he stopped, got in and drove the dented wreck off home.
Lindsay, shaken by Geoff’s reaction to the misunderstanding, and anxious to disentangle the situation, got up and rode his bicycle all the way to Welch Street in North Vancouver. By the time he arrived it was mid-morning. He explained to Geoff, who had, by now, slept it off, that nothing happened and they both had a good laugh about it. That is until Geoff saw what he had done to his car.
Jocelyn wasn’t at all pleased. It wasn’t long after this that Geoff arrived on his own to live at 21st and Renfrew.
John refused to move in. We were all disappointed. Geoff and Lindsay were particularly upset. This was the first time that we had not acted together and they considered John's snub as an affront to our continuity.
John had already earned the nickname, Papa John, even though he was the youngest in the group. He could be gruff and had a tendency to come off like a grumpy old man sometimes. Once, early in the morning, after driving all night, we had stopped in at a café for breakfast. When everybody’s food arrived the waitress had forgotten John’s toast. He looked up and snapped at her, “where’s my toast!?” with such a harsh tone, we never let him forget it. Another time, Geoff had reached in front of John and swiped his book of matches to light up some hash. John looked like he had been slapped. Then Geoff absentmindedly threw the matches in the garbage. John shrieked, “Hey! There were thirteen matches left in there ... WHY ME!!!???” He leaped up and dug into the trash to retrieve his matches.
John wasn't happy with the escalating use of heroin. Geoff was in the early stages of getting himself strung out and he was dragging Lindsay and Steve along. Even I was chipping from time to time. Justified or not, John's absence was cause for tension within the family.
Trisha and I met in my little attic space frequently and employed that little cot vigorously to the sounds of Marvin Gaye‘ssmash hit, Heard It Through The Grapevine blasting from the Sony. Poor Bengie was raw from overuse but still I couldn’t stop. My room didn’t have a door so I hung a gray woolen blanket across the opening. One night, as Trisha and I got it on, I could see Lindsay in his cot reading a magazine while Steve humped some girl in the cot next to him.
All of this was fine until I felt something itchy in my crotch. Upon closer inspection I was horrified to discover tiny creatures ... CRABS!!! Trisha had them too. We doused ourselves in calamine lotion, burnt all of the bedding and scrubbed the little room with enough antiseptic to sterilize an outhouse. We didn’t meet there quite as often after that.
The entire group; manager, girlfriends, dates, escorts, friends, acquaintances and anyone else that happened to be around went to see The Beatles’ new animated film, Yellow Submarine at the Totem Theatre in North Vancouver. In order to fully appreciate and understand the story of The Fab Four’s epic journey to Pepperland and the attack of the Blue Meanies and whatever else they were about to throw at us, we all toked up on some very fine hashish before we went in. The movie blew me away! To this day, I still cannot decide which song I like better, Hey Bulldog or It’s All Too Much. Regardless, George Harrison came up big. So did producer, George Martin, who wrote all of the incidental music for the film (even though some critics feel that he borrowed too much from the classics).
The general euphoria of our group was marred somewhat by Howard’s sudden hash-freak-out somewhere around the time that Nowhere Man showed up. He went running, screaming from the theatre and had to be comforted all the way home.
Perhaps to atone for his outburst, Howard shocked us all by cleaning up the kitchen the next morning. A couple of days later Bill went into his stash and discovered that five hundred hits of LSD were missing. After a frantic search of the whole house Howard realized that he must have thrown the bag out with the trash. He and Bill and Jim drove out to the city dump and spent the entire day sifting through mountains of stinky garbage. They never found the bag.
Howard was so upset, he moved out shortly after. He spent many years in India and ended up in retail in Vancouver. I never saw him again.
On March 29, 1969, The Monkees began their North American Tour in Vancouver. That same night, The Seeds of Timewere playing at Mark Derrick’s new club called The Big Mother. Jim went to see The Monkees and, after their show, brought Micky Dolenz and entourage down to The Big Mother. Micky got pushed up on stage and bounced around playing tambourine and singing back-up for a while but, he didn’t look comfortable - someone said he was stoned on acid - and made a quick but gracious exit.
The Seeds became regulars at The Big Mother. In fact, we were booked to play there a whole week. On some nights we invited Trisha up to sing Stormy Monday Blues and In My Time of Dying with us. She even stayed on to sing back-up sometimes. She had a powerful voice and I thought she raised the level of our musicianship. Jim did not agree.
After a few nights he called a huddle during a break. He chewed us out about bringing Trisha up and said that we were losing our focus on 'entertaining' ... We were supposed to be “Fun; not boring!”
He was probably right but I was told many years later by a guitarist, who attended every night of our week at The Big Mother,