A Distant View

Audio Recording of Maz Storytelling

Part of it, or or maybe it’s better. Do it all in one one big chunk. Maybe it brings it together if you do it in one chunk. Yeah. Maybe.

I’ll have to, I might actually make some little notes on that one before we start too. There’s different towns, different venues we played. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think that’s how hard to remember.

Okay. So here we’re talking about here. That gap, covered that already. Okay. So let’s see.

When I got a mature, then, I went and stayed with the mothers of invention. I think we got that at the Chelsea Hotel. Alright. That was, you know, that’s when I got off of the sixty seven tour in June. It’s something called the Laughing Academy here.

Do you come Yeah. That’s McCracken and I. Yeah. It it was a stem it was a part of of the, of the the Crosstown Bus psychedelic nightclub. We got an invitation to to join the Harvard Library’s, living arts program.

They set us up with a studio in Cambridge, which we call the laughing academy. I think we covered pretty much, and I think I told you about my crack and throwing the painting out the door and on Yeah. Yeah. And throwing darts at the throwing darts at the map and then driving there and putting up the way it’s sculpture. Because that’s The cow activated sculpture on in South Dakota.

I think we I think we’re covered. There’s something I I didn’t remember you covering is You you joined forces with Andy Warhol in a light show? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He, I had the psychoanaly club going in Boston, the crosstown bus. And Warhol came into town, and he’d been playing with, with, Nico and the Velvet Underground. This is 1967. And, he he’d he’d been playing little tiny clubs in New York Yeah. That that only held, like, a hundred people, 50 little tiny Uh-huh.

Places. Because the Velvet Underground one, they they had they had a hit song kind of like, you know, goddamn the no. It wasn’t goddamn the deal. We got this cocaine. There’s some some drug song.

Lou Reed did. And so, anyway, he comes to Boston, and they’ve got a big giant movie theater in Downtown Boston, this really beautiful theater. And it’s bigger than any clubs that they’d ever played before. And Laurel didn’t have enough light show equipment to fill up the the theater to really Yeah. So people told me about my club, and so he contacted me and said I, you know, and Andy Warhol and we played with the development.

I’m like, oh, I like the development. He goes, yeah. He goes, the theater is so big. I just don’t have enough equipment. So do you have, you know, do you have any extra equipment?

Yeah. And I said, how long are you playing? And he’s and he just said, you know, like, I I think he was there for there for two or three nights. Uh-huh. I can’t remember which.

Probably two nights. And, Just four nights here. Oh, other than the maybe it was four nights. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. It probably was. So, yeah, it was, like, during the week too because I didn’t really need my equipment until, like, the weekend. Uh-huh. So I brought over, some, liquid projectors and some slide projectors and and a mirror ball and some, you know, systems just some stuff.

And, and we set up on up in the, up in the, up in the mezzanine deck, you know, up above the shooting down on the stage. Yeah. And, and, we we played for four nights together. But it was fun. It was really cool, and the band was great.

And, we finished up, and Andy thanked me and invited me to come to New York and hang out at his place there, the factory and stuff, which I did. I made a trip there about two or three months. Late after that, I went to New York hung out for a weekend there. And that was pretty cool because I was right during the garbage strike in New York City. So there was trash eight feet high on all up and down on every single block in in Manhattan.

Yeah. And, you know, obviously, it was it was awful. And so I get there, and I get to the factory in in Whirl, and the guys are they’re like, they got these big weather balloons that they bought at the army surplus store, and they’re like four foot giant balloons. And they have helium and a bunch of balls of string, and and one of us, he goes, how long have you got there just in time? He said, we’re going out we’re going out, and, I’m gonna say, should we deal with this garbage program, the problem?

I went, garbage? Yeah. There’s garbage everywhere. He goes, yeah. He goes, he goes, he looks at me.

He goes, the thing in New York is that everybody is always looking down. They’re looking down at the sidewalk and the street, and and hardly anybody ever looks up because the skyscrapers isn’t all that much to see. He said, so we’re gonna take these weather balloons and then tie garbage to them and fly them up in there where nobody can see them. And we did that for about, well, I don’t know, half a day. We went all around gathering up garbage and bags and tying them and filling up weather balloons and setting them up.

And, and some some magazine came by, and they photographed it in the local paper and stuff. But, that was pretty much fun. That was my hanging out with Andy in New York, I’m pretty sure. Did they, they ever come down somewhere? I have no idea where they came down.

You know? I I don’t even know if they cleared the skyscrapers or not. You know? They went up pretty high, though. It’s it’s probably we we lost about, I don’t know, probably a half dozen half dozen balloons.

Yeah, that was that was our plan on dealing with the garbage thing. Just flying all the garbage up there with nobody ever looks. So, that was my fun little adventure with the world. He was really he was a nice guy. He was a really cool guy.

Shortly after that is kind of when his career just really lost big time. Yeah. You know? So that that’s that one. And then, I think I told you that the, the local police and fire department were collecting money from us Uh-huh.

To at the club. Alright. They had to hire, you know, every night certain amount of cops and stuff. And then after Morrison and the Doors came and played for a couple nights, we had so many people there that they saw a whole lot. We had a line all the way around the the club and his wanting to come and check out this new band.

And, and then the police chief and the fire department decided to double up on how many cops and fire department guides we had to have every night. Yeah. So instead of three of three cops and three firemen, we had to have six cops and six firemen. Basically, this means it’s like you couldn’t I didn’t run a business. Well, they just wanted more money.

You know? I think we had to pay everybody, like, you know, $20.30 bucks a night or something for three hours of hanging out. And, but the the three guys that that built the club decided we just don’t wanna be part of this graft interruption thing, and then that’s what makes it a close down the club. That was right just about the same time that Mac and I got this invitation to go over to the Harvard library and have my 05:00 whiskey with Philip Offord, the world’s foremost collector of antique books, and he was in charge of the Harvard library. And he and some other collector professors in Harvard put together this living arts program, and, we ended up getting a carry child’s behind this mansion.

Right. I think you guys have pretty covered. That to that to laugh. I was just noticing this one here. You have turned an abandoned logging now above Palo Alto into Star Hill Academy for Yeah.

Yeah. I came out came out I was sort of missing California after being in Boston for almost two years, a year and a half. And so I was coming out and I I caught a ride one time with David Lindley and the and the kaleidoscope band. They were playing in Boston and they stayed. I had a big giant three story house by the Charles River and I they were staying crashed at my place and because I had extra rooms downstairs.

It wouldn’t even they were unfinished rooms, but it was okay for musicians to crash. And, they just finished up playing, not at our club, they played at the Boston Tea Party. They were a really good band. The Kaleidoscope band was a really cool band. Literally always had really good musicians with them.

And, so they’re hanging out, and they finished up their last night, and they said, they said we’re, leaving tomorrow. We’re all gonna drive from here to to LA. And, they had two sort of like old Dodge Valiant cars, funky old Dodges. I think they were Valiant. And they had a Volkswagen bus where they had a keyboard inside the, you know, an old keyboard, not not the little tiny ones.

This was a piano, you know, like, and it was filled filled up almost all inside of the Volkswagen bus. And, and they had everybody split. And so David goes, he said, I’m missing California. He goes, well, come with us, man. You know?

You too. You know? We’re just gonna drive straight from here all the way there. And, and I did. And, I’m I’m, was well, there’s, like, four of us in one car and four in another car and two or three people in the Volkswagen bus.

And we get out to the edge of Massachusetts West, and one of the valiance blows up. So we have to put all those four people in the other car in the Volkswagen bus, and I am in the Volkswagen bus now. And I’m literally laying on some kind of weird pillow thing on top of the piano between the top of the piano and the top of the bus in a space only about 18 inches tall. And for two and a half days, I’m laying there, and there were a couple people sitting down off to the side. And at the front, there’s, like, three people in the front of the seats.

Everything’s grabbing the other cars in front of us, and it’s got, like, six people in it. And, but we made it all the way to LA in about just about four days. Just driving twenty four hours a day, you know, and, and it was really cool to get to LA. And then from there, I went up to San Francisco to see Margo, Saint James, and my buddy and to see what was happening. I haven’t been around for a while.

And when I got to Margo’s, there was this guy there. His name is John Wickett. And he was sort of an eccentric multimillionaire guy. And, he, Barger said, oh, man. You know, he’s a great artist and all this stuff.

So John sort of he was interested in some of my art and actually doing this weird, like, pen and ink kind of drawings. And I showed them from the music from the living arts program. Doing painting drawings at the Farr Museum. And, and he bought a couple and I was telling them about the laughing academy and being hooked up with the Harvard, you know, this living arts program. And Wicked goes, as you know, he goes, I’ve got an old abandoned I built a sawmill up on Kings Mountain above Palo Alto on on 1,800 acres.

It’s right up above Woodside. And Kings Mountain is the biggest mountain in the whole mountain, the coastal mountain range. The next big mountain is across the bay, Mount Tamalpais. And the third one is is Mount Diablo inland. Right?

Right. And literally from the tops of those peaks, you can see the other two, three peaks. There’s, you know so we’re up on top of Kings Mountain, and the the backside is where the mill’s built, and that’s got a beautiful ocean view right up above San Gregorio. It’s just really a beautiful spot. And, you can just about see the curvature of the earth on the ocean.

I know because we’re we’re up about around 1,400, 16 hundred feet. And and they’ve they’ve taken one hill and leveled it off flat and made this big round and cut the top of the hill off. Made this big round here that they take all the redwood trees and stack them up getting ready to bring them up to the mill to saw them up. So it was like a big area for bringing up the lumber. There’s 30 miles of of dirt road on the 1,800 acres logging road.

There’s just little dirt trails, ATVs, and motor cycles. Ricky tried to make it an a a motorcycle off road motorcycle park, but all the neighbors complained. And they already complained because he never got any permits for the logging mill. So San Mateo is a pretty strict place. And Yeah.

So, you know, they closed them down. Right? Yeah. And the but they had made a ton of wood. They had all these beautiful redwood, two inch thick by 18 inch wide by eight foot long, big giant planks and boards.

And that was all stacked up, you know, like eight to 10 feet high in this other sort of area. And also Wicket would go to these Navy Yards, auctions. And he would to get a double band saw, he’d have to buy four acres of junk from the navy to get one piece that they could use in the mill. So they cleared another area, which was about three acres, and that’s where they put all the junk that they didn’t need. So they had this incredible junk pile with boxes full of aluminum webbing, cabling, and and, sheets of glass and slot glass windows, just all this stuff.

Right? And old old boiler tanks and all kinds of cool pieces of metal and stuff. So it’s an artist’s heyday. It was is a perfect place for and, Wicked through it as he goes, why don’t you, you know, why don’t you you got these connections going on the East Coast. Why don’t why don’t you guys come and set up a an artist retreat, you know, at at my place.

And so Mac and I decided to do that. And, in August, 1967, we left, we left oh, ’68, actually. We left Boston and, drove across. And, and, we got to the mill and capped out by the front gate. And then next morning, we went in and he and I just sort of started making a start.

Yeah. We just we found there’s a lot of old buildings and stuff. So we kinda found a cool building and, you know, made us a wood burner stove to put it in there and just sort of got but where could it send some friends up? This one woman, this wealthy woman that lived down in in, in Atherton, Alice. He said, yeah, there’s some artist friends in there studying to build an art retreat.

So Alice came up and she would bring us big bags of groceries and all because we didn’t have a whole lot of money or nothing. But Alice would come and she would she sort of became our our patron. She would would bring up food all the time and hang out and and give us rides down into town or whatever we needed, you know, stuff like that. So so that’s how we got started and, we met some other kids and and well, the first the first two people we met, Mac and I were first there. The first day we were there before we even met Alice, this guy and, these two guys show up.

They’re walking down the road because it’s about a mile road from the gate to the mill, you know, and it was a pretty long dirt road walk. And these two guys come in and they they live from down the sky laundry corners a couple miles down the road. And the mill was like one of their sort of picking places, you know, where they get some wood and and one of them turned out to be a college professor named Kent Crockett and the other was Drew King. And, Kent and, we all became really good friends. And Kent, he was studying, Canada College.

He was a professor there. And so he goes, it was math. He goes, you know, so I’m I’m gonna they put me in charge of making a, liter a poetry magazine, a lit literary magazine for the the school. Why don’t she come? And, it was like the second semester the school was open.

Why don’t you come in? He goes, you can do you can make the magazine. You’ll be in charge of that. I never made a magazine before, so I said okay. And then so I went to school for six months and got all the local kids to send them, bring in their poetry and photograph them and put it all together into this magazine.

And that was that was pretty pretty much fun. But we ended up with about 40 people leading up there. We all built illegal houses in the woods out of the lumber. And, there were macrobiotic couples that made the macrobiotic food. We had guys that would go down into into Redwood City behind the grocery stores and get all the food that they were throwing away from the grocery stores.

Bring just boxes full of food. So we fed everybody all the time. I think we’re the only thing we ever had to buy was, like, rice or something. You know, really nothing because everything came. We had it all worked out.

We Mac and I got, from a neighbor, we got a donkey, because the spring was halfway down the hill from from where the mill was. And so to carry five, two five gallon containers of water all the way back up was kind of so somebody gave us a donkey. So we got the donkey and we made, we could put about 20 gallons of water on the donkey and walk him back up. And that was pretty cool. We, you know, we had a pretty, that was pretty fun.

We go down and take our showers down at the spring and we’ve dragged down and we found an old bathtub up in the junk pile and brought it down there and set it up where you could build a fire under it, just under it and have a hot bath, you know, on the side of the mountain. Stuff like that. It was pretty rough. But then we got more and more people as the place grew. We got guys that set up go ahead.

They set up they set up our gasoline motor and a pump and they literally would pump the water from the spring up to a tank Okay. Up above where everybody lived and then gravity fed it down to everybody everybody’s places. So so those guys are, you know, working the pump doing that. Mac and I are kind of hanging out just making art, you know, and we set up a little foundry and a little blacksmith shop and we’re doing metal work and then, casting, some little silver pieces because in those days, you could get quarters. So so the quarters.

Quarters. Yeah. So we get stacks of quarters and melt them into silver bars and then make sculptures out of them, stuff like that. So, you know, we’re being artists in the other we had, like, the practical people running the pumps and, doing all that kind of stuff, you know, cutting the firewood and and and and it was like, no chainsaws. We’re gonna do it the old fashioned way with bow saws.

So it took like a half a day to make a cord of wood with a chainsaw. You’re gonna make four cords of wood in the same time. But that, you know, they were all 1969. They were all, like, super idealistic, you know? It turned out eventually that the artist became the assholes of the community.

Right? It got very political and, and it just got it got pretty intense. Neil ended up moving. Neil Young moved in down below us. He bought his ranch down there.

Why you were there? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We we were full tilt running. We had we had the whole mill was really going good. So Neil moves in. He starts out buying 285 acres, this little farm. And then, the neighbors, there’s this big giant ranch right next to him called the 3 K in, Kellogg and, the guy, Abigail Folgers and all these people from Woodside.

They all owned this big 2,500 acre place. So doctor Geraci was one of our neighbors. He invented the birth control pill, Syntex Corporation. He lived on one side with Neil. And, so Neil and Geraci and another guy, they bought they bought the whole place.

I think Neil put up a million bucks, and he got, like, 1,200 acres. Okay. So So so we expanded the ranch. At that time, he’d been coming up to the, up to up to start. Well, how he found us was really cool.

He he he bought the ranch and he and his his roadie from South America, came up to kinda get settled into the ranch. And they’re driving up Skyline Boulevard and they see these two really cute hippie girls, and they pull over. Neil’s got one of his old cars you know what I mean because he’d been doing pretty good he’d have some hits in ’69 and ’70 and the first song he ever had that made him a million dollars was a song called Broken Arrow. So he called the ranch Broken Arrow Ranch. And, so he picked they pick up these two hippie girls and and Neil goes, hi.

I’m Neil Young. I just bought a place down the road. You know, girls wanna come on down and see the place. And they said, oh, hi, Neil. He said, see, you just moved into the neighborhood.

And they said, yeah. I said, well, have you met Sandy Castle yet? And he goes, Sandy Castle? I changed my name to Sandy Castle. And so it’s a commune, you know, McCracken became Mossy Grotto, and I became Sandy Castle.

Right? And we’re building this artist retreat. I don’t know why we did it, but when we left Boston to head to to head out to up to the property to the the sawmill, just as, we’re getting out of town, Matt just looks over at me and goes, boss. Boss and Bossy Grotto. Bossy Grotto is six hours there.

That’s that’s that’s my name now, Mossy Grotto. And I went, oh. And then I thought about Castle Beach here in Santa Cruz, which is where Seabright Beach is, but it used there used to be an old castle down there. You know, remember the old castle? They were selling hot dogs out there and shit.

Well, in my senior year, the place was empty. In 1962, they had emptied it out because the state took it over and they were gonna they bulldozed it down. But for six months in my senior year of high school, it was empty. And so all me and my surfer buddies, we broke into it, and that was where we would crash and sleep when the surf was good. It was like our first beach house.

And so when he said, I just thought of the sand all the sand on the floor in that old castle where I’ve been to the, you know, and I was Sandy, Sandy Castle. So that’s how that happened. So Neil, they said, come on. You gotta meet Sandy. You know?

There’s the oh, this is great. There’s this whole commune. You know? Right? So they came up and and Neil came over and, you know, said, hi.

I’m your new neighbor. You know? Neil. I said, yeah, Neil. I said, I did a light show for you guys at the arc, you know, a couple years ago in ‘6 in ’66.

He goes, you’re at the arc? I said, yeah. I did. I I did the light show. And he goes, goes, wow.

You know? I never met Neil because he he wasn’t talking to too many people in those days. Steven and Neil and Dewey, like, were the three big guys in the band and and and Bruce and, Bruce and, Dewey, the drummer. Bruce Bruce was a bass player. And, but the drummer and the bass player and I with the ark we smoked a lot of pot and had a really good time and became friends with them.

But Stephen was like up on this high horse you know and Richie was you know the other high horse singers you know, they were out in the front. And apparently, they the the arc was the first place that Buffalo Springfield played when they left LA. They were playing they were real popular with the whiskey. They were doing good. And Steven said, let’s go up to San Francisco and see how we do outside of LA, you know, and start playing up there.

So that they came up, but Graham couldn’t get him in there for about three days. So for the first three days, they just hung out at the ark all the time and and Moby Grape was just starting. And Moby Grape was doing five part harmonies. Five guys in the band, and they were all singing and doing these incredible harmony things. Buffalo Springfield, Neil, they had told Neil down in LA that Steven goes, I’m the guitar player.

You know? He goes, I’m the guitar player, and your voice sounds like shit. So, Dewey so, so, what’s his name? Richie. Richie Fury.

And he says and so Richie’s gonna sing all your songs. He told us to kneel? Yeah. Okay. You know, Neil was just, you know so when they’re there, it’s Richie and Steven up under the light under the light show.

Right? And they’re up in the bright lights, and and there’s, like, shadows in the back because that’s where I need shadows so I can project my pictures and stuff on the screen right there. And, and Dewey’s smiling and playing the drums, and Bruce is doing he’s a great bass player. He’s just doing his bass. And Neil’s all dressed in black with his long black hair over his face and and fringe black jacket.

And he’s got his back to the audience, and he’s just facing his amp, and he’s just playing rhythm and shit like that. You know. And it hardly ever even turned around. He was just always, like, just looking backwards standing in the dark way back there. And I’d be out there with all the people, Joplin and all these incredible musicians.

They were all there to see this new band Garcia, all kinds of guys from the Jefferson airplane, they’re all hanging out. And and Buffalo Springfield’s up and they’re doing their stuff and Richie and Steven are singing. Singing. And everybody’s like, look at this new band because they heard a lot about them. But everybody’s going you know, there’s Steven and Richie under the lights singing, but everybody’s looking at the guy way back in the shadows.

And I I could hear Janice and the these other people going, who is that guy back there? Who’s that? Who is that guy? And it was like, Neil had more people tuned in on him by having his back and being, you know, just just unavailable. It just, like, caused a sensation.

Everybody just went, wow. That guy’s, you know, that guy’s powerful. You know? So that was that was that’s how I knew Neil from and I told him that. When he came up to start, I said I said, yeah.

I said, we never met. I said, I I was I was friends with with Dewey and Bruce, though. You know? We spoke to a bunch the pod and these guys, they’re really good guys. I really like them.

He goes, oh, yeah. Bruce and Dewey lives there. Cool. I said, yeah. I said, you, you just were standing right at the back of the stage all the time in the dark.

He was like, yeah. He goes, we got that worked out. He was pissed off because they told me, you know, he couldn’t sing his songs and and that, you know, Steven was the guitar player. Anyway, so Neil and I became friends up there and every morning he’d walk almost a mile and a half down the hill from down the hill up to my place up in the woods there. He’d come up around 10:00 in the morning and I’d make some camp coffee on the car in my stove in my little house.

We’d sit and have a cup of coffee and talk and become friends. And and that’s sort of how, how we developed a friendship. And he started doing a film called Journey Through the Past. And he said, he said I told him that we were kinda having problems up there with the people, you know, because the practical people were kinda like Oh, we better pop a quarter in there. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, thanks, buddy. Oh, thanks. So, So you’re having problems with practical people? Yes.

I’m telling you. So Neil goes he goes, why don’t you just come down and and, you know and I had a girlfriend named Catherine and two kids, and they’re living in my little handmade house that I made, which is really cool. And they said, why don’t you guys just come down and, you know, I got I just bought this addition to the property and there’s houses down there. Come on down and help me put the ranch together. And, he goes, you could be my road manager because because your role went back to back to LA.

And so, I moved down there and moved down. That’s how I moved down to the ranch. That’s transition. Yeah. What kinda really did it was what what time there was right next to my house was this giant redwood tree.

It was, like, 230, 40 feet high. Just the at the base of it’s, like 12 to 15 feet in diameter. Just a huge tree. Really a big old tree. And up at 50 feet, this big side growth came out of the side of the tree 50 feet up, and another four foot diameter redwood tree grew up out of the side growth.

So there was this big yoke 50 feet up. And this guy, Kendall Whiting, who I’m still in communication with, he lives over in Hawaii. He decided he fell in love with the tree and decided he was gonna build his house up in that yoke up there. And the bottom floor is 50 feet off the ground. And so he he, you know, he got up there and it it just hung ropes and stuff and started hauling up beams and lumber.

He didn’t wanna cut any branches, and he didn’t wanna nail anything into the tree. So he used turnbuckles because we have all that junk from from the navy. So he used these turnbuckles and old logging drag cables and stuff to squeeze two beams against the two trees together, and then he’d build off the beams. Right? He built a seven story high place up there.

And he used to write letters when he went to Canada College. He would go to school together because I was working on the magazine and he he hanging up. So he would write letters to the tree and then mail them. And then when he got to, he’d bring it to the tree and hang off the off of her rope in the in the lineman’s, harness, you know, fifty, seventy five feet up. He’s just like a spider hanging on the line, reading the letter to the tree.

He he actually had a little wood lathe up there with a little gasoline engine that he could take a branch that would fall off the tree and turn it and and turn it on the lathe. Right? So he was really into it. But he’d have to he had the kitchen was on the Bottom Floor and there was this there was a square hatch and and the hatch had a have a lid on it. It would open up and this he had a big old hook and he had this rope hanging off there that went down 50 feet to the ground.

And then he had another rope that he would lower with a harness. So when he wanted company, he’d lower the harness and you have to put on this harness and kind of try to pull yourself up on one rope while he’s pulling on the other one fifty feet, you know. Oh, fuck. So he was in great shape, you know, after building the whole house. He was like a little Spider Man, you know.

He was, like, all muscle, no fat. And, he, oh, it was you know? He he got parties up there, and sometimes they’d they’d have, like, seven or eight people on there and stuff. And it was, you know, it’s pretty tedious, and people were scared shitless going up and coming going back down, you know, because, you know so Kendall and I, we had we had the blacksmith shop going in there and and torches there. So we decided to build a a gondolier car and string a cable from the beam at the at the welding shop, 285 feet off the side of the hill to the 95 foot level in the in the in the tree, which was also right at the Top Floor of his.

He was from fifty to ninety five foot, which is was his seven room place. And the top was, inverted roof with a water tank. So when it rained, so theoretically, it would catch water and then the water you could use in the tree house. Unfortunately, redwood trees get covered with dust and shit. So when it rains, it’s muddy water, you know, so it’s really not water you can use or anything.

But it was it was, you know, it was just a perfect line for this cable, and we we fastened it to the beams of the Second Floor of the shop, the Second Floor of the back wall that looked out towards the tree. And we cut a hole in the back wall with it and made it a door that could swing open, and then the cable went through the door and all the way to the tree. And then Kendall and I built a two seater gondolier car with a big giant pulley that we had found up there in the up in the junkyard, but it was a big aluminum pulley. And the cable was a was a drag cable, which was a cable with another cable wrapped around it. So it wasn’t real smooth.

It had this, like, wrapped cable on it, which was like a saw blade. So every time you would go sit two guys would sit in the gondolier car in the shop, open the door, and it was, like, it was slightly down. So it just, like, go to about 30 feet to the tree. But then it would pull the cable to such an angle that it would, like, stop the car. And so we had another rope going through the gondola car.

So you have to pull this rope to get yourself the last 30 feet up to the water tower room, lock in, and then climb the the gondola cars at an angle. So you have to kind of climb out carefully because now you’re 95 feet up above the ground. Climb into the water tower room and go down to the house. It was still better than going up the road, you know. We built it.

We finally get it done. And, and the the night we get it done, we we make runs out to make sure it’s safe. We we make it run back and forth and go cool, you know. That night, Kendall and his girlfriend hop in their gondola weird car and off they go. And every time they go, there’s little flakes of aluminum from the pulley wheel because he’s got a sawing on the cable.

But, it but it’s a big wheel and this it wasn’t it having reached a danger zone or anything. So that night, you know, they go home and they come back the next morning and, you know, how is it? Oh, it’s great. You know? We’ve you know, it’s a little bit of work pulling.

You know? And, so Neil shows up that morning, the next morning after we build a gondolaire car and he’s got a bad back. He’s got to go in for a disc operation on his back and he’s in a lot of pain and he’s kind of feeble and you know, he’s got his big old leather buffalo coat on and stuff because we’re up on the hills. He shows up. He goes, how you doing, Sandy?

And I go, I’m doing great. And I said, oh, man. He goes, I go, come here, man. You gotta check this out. Because the guy on the litter car is parked in the Second Floor now.

Because we opened the door, the car comes right inside the room, right at the top of the stairs. And, and it’s still on the cable and everything. It’s just parked inside. So I said, come on, man. You gotta check this out.

And Kendall’s there, the guy built the tree house. So we go up and Neil goes up the stairs kind of slow and feeling. And, he sees this weird metal thing hanging there, you know, and he’s looking at it and everything. And Kendall goes, come on, Neil. Hop in.

It you know, the door shuts. So Neil, you know, so Neil just, well, you know, just carefully because his back hurts. He kinda carefully gets in. Right? And he goes, oh, yeah.

This is kinda cool here because it’s kinda hanging there. You know? And he goes, yeah. Yeah. And Kendall goes, yeah.

He goes, check this out. And Kendall jumps in in front of him. Right? Because it’s kind of a two seater kind of thing. It hops in front.

And I kick open the door, and Neil sees the cable go 285 feet to the top of this redwood tree. And he goes, woah. And then she goes, woah. We go, woah. And, man, he didn’t get them.

Off they go. And then he asked, you know, is this bad back? Are things parked, you know, at an angle? You’ve gotta get up and over. He stayed at Kendall’s house for about four hours before he had enough, you know, to to take the ride back, you know.

But somehow that really bonded him and I together because I got him to get outside of his comfort zone, do something that was downright fucking dangerous, you know, and ill timed. But somehow we made it. You know? We got through it. And and I think that just kind of it just kind of set the mood for who he was and who I was and how we kind of, like, fit together in a in a weird way.

You know. And, so that that’s when from that experience, he he said, you know, why don’t you move on down and, you know, you can put a blacksmith shop down there. Yeah. And I did, man. I I moved down there and and he just I had a I had a wood shop.

I built a wood shop and they do wood. I had a metal shop. I had everything I wanted. You used to do all that kind of stuff. I have a you did blacksmithing too?

Uh-huh. Yeah. I’ve made I’ve made knives out of automobile leaf spring steel and and, and and I made a giant metal sculpture for the ranch. I made that up at Star Hill because I mean, they have big sheets of plate, what, quarter inch plate steel. Yeah.

You know? And and I made this giant broken arrow, sort of Zuni sun sign with a broken arrow coming through the middle of it. Okay. And, I got pictures of it. I can show it to you.

And I use this big old big link, old anchor chain kind of stuff to hang the thing. And next to Neil’s recording studio, he had a tree that had a big branch off the side of it. So I got the guys from the mill and everything we trucked and the the whole sculpture. Sculpture is about eight feet tall by five feet wide, all made out of of quarters here. It was really heavy.

It was like, you know, six, seven hundred pounds. Oh, man. Quarter inch plate steel. Okay. Yeah.

You know, then I cut into this design and then I did this kind of edging on it and stuff. And then put the links on. So we got it over there. We hung it off the branch. And it’s all rusty.

Right? And it’s on the redwood tree. So it blended in, the rust and the and the redwood. So it’s really big, but it kinda blended in where you hardly even noticed it until you you were just right up under it, and then you could’ve not noticed it. You know?

But from it, it it it was very it was subtle and big all at the same time, which is kinda cool. So we hung out at the on this tree, and it hung off the tree for about, six or seven years. But then finally that branch started to, like, look like it wasn’t gonna gonna stay up much longer. So they knew I had a special arch made over the road to the studio, big tall arch and really nice. And then, across it, we hung the things.

And it was high enough that the trucks could get in and out of the studio underneath it and stuff. It came out and still that’s where it still is. Still there. Yeah. So, yeah, I had all this kind of stuff going.

But there was a a when I got there, there was this old couple living on the original ranch that Neil bought, Louie and Clara. And they were they were old Louie’s an old cowboy. And my mother’s sister, my aunt Ruby, married this cowboy from Hollister named Frank Grimes. And then he and his, he and his brothers were the Grimes brothers. And they were like this rough cowboy guys living in Trost Penas right down South of Hollister.

That’s where their family ranch was. And Frank was a was a roping champion at the at the at the road at the road Hail in Salinas. He and his father, they were were calf ropers, and they go out on two horses. Right? And and lasso the calf, and Frank would jump off the horse and tie him up.

Right? They were champions. They had they they won trophy ropes and Remington statues. I mean, they were they were the best. His other brother, Elmo, became the cattle inspector.

And Louie, up there on the website, on this ranch, they had cattle and stuff, and he knew Elmo Grimes. And I said, well, that’s my that’s my uncle’s brother. So Louie and I became really close buddies. And Neil wrote the song, Old Man, Take a Look at My Life. That’s Louie.

Oh. And he’s writing about it. And that’s that’s that’s one of the first songs he wrote when he was up there. And they were great. And I I thought this is gonna be really fun living here.

Living here. Let’s see. You know, we got this great couple and everything. But then, we had to put roads in because we had gravel roads and Neil had his cars, so he wanted to put in asphalt roads and stuff, which is hugely expensive. He hired a local asphalt guy from down in the valley, Bob Hash, who was from Montana or something.

He was and his brother had horse ranches on a couple of hills down from from where it was on Teneas Creek Road. And, so Hashut and his family moves into this big old white estate on the second property, and I’m in this little red house up there. And, and Hash has a couple boys, you know, and a couple sons and stuff. And they’re they’re they’re they’re out of high school and I’m starting college and they have girlfriends and stuff. And Hash is kind of I didn’t know it at the time, but he’s kind of like eyeballing my little red house for one of his kids and his girl kid’s girlfriend to live in.

So I’m putting together the blacksmith shop, and I’m making all kinds of brass chandeliers and stuff for the recording studio and getting old. Neil and I go down to antique stores in Redwood City and buy old brass fire engine lights and stuff that I would make it. The lights were inside the recording studio. Having a lot of fun. So, Hash is becomes the foreman and and Louie and Clara lead and that was like really kind of a drag because I really love Louie and Clara.

But they, they moved up to, I don’t know, Sonoma or something And Bob took over as the foreman. And, he’s laying the roads, and then they’ve got Mulligan and I building, split rail fences for the buffalo and all kinds of stuff. And we’re working our butt off for $75 a week or something like that. Yeah but, Hash, when I’m doing the blacksmith shop he goes, he goes, I got you an account at the local welding shop down in Red Lake City. Go down there, tell them who you are, and they’ll get you set up.

You can get all your brass rod and everything from them. And I and I’ve I’ve never had a shop. I’ve never had a business, you know. And so I go, okay. So I go down and set up the account.

And Bob goes, he goes, when you set up the account, tell them that you’re gonna be buying a lot of brass and stuff and that you you want 10% of the sale of the brass, which is like a kickback. Oh, okay. But but I didn’t I didn’t know what kickbacks were. I didn’t I didn’t know. And I go, really?

I get 10% of everything I buy? He goes, yeah. He goes, how else? He says, people make money. I go, really?

So I do. I go down there. I said after I go, oh, listen. You know, I’m gonna be buying a lot of brass, and, I want 10, you know, I want 10% of of all the business I bring in. I just thought that’s what I’m supposed to do.

That’s what the foreman told me to do. Bob tells Neil, hey. Your friend Bowser was trying to get a kickback. Right? And starts creating a real, literally, stabbed me in the back.

But he was only the first of many people trying to get to Neil. And Neil and I are really close friends, so I’m a target. And Neil knew that I that I was a target more than I knew that I was a target. You know? So it got it got pretty it got pretty weird, and and there was a lot of conflict.

And Neil said, look. He goes, you know, you’re gonna you don’t deserve this kind of stuff. He goes, he goes, why don’t maybe why don’t you get a house somewhere close by? You know, just get off the ranch and get out from underneath this thing that’s happening, you know, around here. Because he needed Ash.

He needed Ash to finish off, you know, the big construction and stuff that was going on all over the place. So I did. I moved off the ranch. I moved to Pescadero. I lived I lived right next to the IDES Hall downtown.

Okay. At the end of, of IDES or IDES? The IDES Hall. Okay. That’s the, that’s a Portuguese thing with queen Isabella would feed fed all the people of Portuguese when they were starving.

She sold her jewels. So the Portuguese farmers and stuff at Pescadero built the Portuguese IDESO, which is the the society for Isabella’s thing. And once a year, they would have a big giant barbecue and feed everybody for free in Pasadena when I moved in 1971. So I moved there. I had every school.

It was it was okay. I knew it would come and we’d hang out. You know, I kept working and going on the road with them and doing all kinds of stuff. So that’s, that’s kinda how that all started with meeting, with me and Neil. It started my career with Neil and our friendship.

And we, finished we did the first movie journey through the past and all the a whole lot of the scenes are up at the mill. You you helped with that movie. I did all the yeah. I did all the costumes and props. I made all the props and all the costuming and some of the location work and stuff like that.

Okay. And I got I got all the credits for the set the set design and construction and all that kind of stuff. Later on when we did the Green Deal movie, I actually got to be Earl Green that played the part and rejected artist. I got two wins. Okay.

Well, that’s a pretty good amount of stuff. Okay. Journey Through the Path. Journey Through the Paths of the movie. Neil has photographic memories of his dreams.

Oh, god. This is the first movie he ever got money to make. It was the very first one, and we had to give him a soundtrack album. It’s called Journey Through the Past, my pictures all over it and stuff. It’s a really cool album.

And, for the soundtrack album, the record company gave us enough money to make the movie. So Neil would have these dreams. And then the next day, tell me what his dream was. Uh-huh. And we’d work it out into, into a scene for the movie.

And we go film it. And he had this one dream that all these, like, Ku Klux Klan guys were all riding except they’re being in white sheets. They were all in black, black hoods on black horses, everything black. Is that yeah. Yeah.

And, and, so we we got all these horses and we sprayed all the white spots so they were all black and everything. Took them to Greyhound Rock Beach up there. You know where Greyhound Rock is? And, we got down there and we got the of course, we got, like, six guys and they were I made these big poles that that they had on their horses with crosses on them and, made them out of little redwood tree kind of little poles of redwood trees. And so they’re all riding on these black horses at Greyhound Beach.

And, we went down and we filmed the Susan the Tony and Susan Alamo god squad in on Hollywood Boulevard, all the LSD casualty kids, these Susan and Tony had this God religion thing, and they take these acid casualties and take them in and feed them and and convert them into being part of their cult, basically. Mhmm. Well, they got a choir, the God’s God choir, and they we got a record we went down and recorded them singing Handel’s Messiah. We use that as the as the music of these riders and black horses with their hoods on Greyhound Beach to the God Squad, which is the most whacked out version of Handel’s Messiah anybody ever heard in their whole life. Have you ever played it?

And then we got one of the guys from the commune, Richard Lee. We we called him we made him a character called the graduate. And there was a general and a graduate and a a preacher, you know, all these sort of symbolic characters that from his dream state that we’ve used inside the in the film, in the movie. So the graduate, we have him dressed in the graduation robe with his little square hat on and everything like a graduate. Right?

And he’s sitting at one end of by Greyhound Rock at the beach while all these guys are riding their horses towards him. Right? And he’s sitting there and he’s got a bible in his hand, the graduate. And my my friend, McCracken, from the Laughing Academy, who was at the commune, we had Mac doing making scenes and props and stuff too, you know, for the movie. Mac also plays the drunk minister in in the movie too.

And and he dances to Are You Ready for the Country? And he’s got a bottle of whiskey and he’s anyway, the graduate is sitting there and all these guys are riding towards him. And he’s got this bible that Mac hollowed out a square cross shape out of the pages of the bible and and lined it with blue velvet and then put in the silver crutch that he cast holding a hypodermic needle. And the graduate sitting there, right, and all these horsemen and stuff are riding towards him. And you see there, and then he opens up the bible and we’re filming them.

And there’s the hypodermic needle and the silver cross in there, and he pulls out the hypodermic needle. We had a doctor, obviously, in the sterilized water. And Richard never shot up in his life. But, basically, we we had him tied off for the scene, and we had we had doctors. We had everything there.

But late, he literally took the hypodermic needle out with the sterilized water. For the first time in his life, he punctured a vein to shoot, and he’d never done it. Right? And and we’re we’re actually doing a super close-up of the needle in the vein. You know?

And and he puts the vein that would just go along kind of like, oh, no. He’s gonna puncture himself. You know? But he he presses, and it doesn’t he doesn’t puncture the skin. It just, like, pushes in on the skin.

You know? And it’s like, oh my god. He’s not pushing hard enough to fuck me. You know? It’s because he’s little really scared.

You know? But up close, it’s, like, intense because it’s, like, you see the skin push and then you pull back in a little red dot, and then he goes back. And finally, like, he shoots up and then I’ll do the to the higher most messiah. So that’s the that’s that’s the kind of scenes that that Neil would dream up. Yeah.

Literally, he had these dreams, and we just turned them into scenes for the movie all all the way down the track. So one day, he came I show up. He goes, he has mass. I had this. Yeah.

You can listen. Come on in. Oh, hi, Dale. How you doing? Good.

Have a seat. Tell a story. Telling a story. Yeah. So being recorded.

Well, we got twenty minutes. Okay. Good. Well, me too. So, we’re talking about Neil’s first movie that I I did all the props and set designs and everything on called Journey Through the Path.

So Neil has these dreams. So I show up one morning, and he goes, man, I had this dream that of the first the the first religious space capsule in outer space. And he goes, so I want you to go up to Star Hill and and and the big old blower shells and stuff that they would, you know, pump air through and stuff through the mill. So there was one that was shaped really nice size for a space capsule. And, so I got him to drag it on down to the mill and and I started painting on it and I painted like air force signals with crosses in them and and, above the capsule entrance, I put, the sign above Jesus’ head on the cross in me.

You know? The that was above the day. And so it was the very first space capsules, religious space capsules, and in outer space. I get it all done, and I get the decal I get everything painted. It looks really cool, you know.

And Neil shows up, and I go, what do you say, man? Looks pretty cool. He goes, he goes, yeah. Except I trust that it crashed and burned. So then I had to take it and, like, hit it with torches and make it all dark and bang into it and make it look like it had crashed and burned.

You know? The the very first Venusian Space Council didn’t make it. Another one, he wanted me to build the biggest cross I ever did, and we had the big round area, right, where they used to stick the trees at the mill. I told you about it, it was all flat. I had him dig a four foot hole, four feet deep and about, I don’t know, that big around.

And then I had Jimmy Dyer’s, who’s a friend of us, and had a d nine caterpillar tractor go down into the woods and bring up a a redwood tree. It was about that big around, you know, about three and a half, four feet in diameter and about 60 feet tall. And I cut off the top part and made it the and I had to make a cross. He goes, I want the biggest cross because it’s this this Mercedes with the general and the people that are gonna come down and they’re gonna drive around this cross. So it has to be really big.

And so I did. I made this cross. And, I got I got the pieces up there, and I got it cut, and I notched the cut so I could I didn’t want the straight sockets. I wanna make it look like it was kinda hand in hand kinda. I kept the bark and stuff.

So I and I made giant nails in my blacksmith shop, big old spikes, and I could spike the two pieces together, you know, in the center and everything. And I got it all laid out, and and we also had it from the logging company, what they call the traveling a. It’s an a shaped thing with with tractor with wheels on them, except that they’re they’re they’re like bulldozer tracks. Right? And they they take it down into the woods, haul up one end of the log on this a shaped thing with a cable and pull the log up and then they drag the log all the way up the hill.

Right? Pulling this this traveling neigh would raise half the log up and then drag the back end and that’s something. So Dyers came up with this bulldozer and they had the traveling nay set up there so we could set it on one side of the log and get it up high enough so we could drop it down into the hole, you know, and stuff. So it’s laying there. The traveling day is there.

The bulldozer is there. We’re gonna we we I’ve got a set for sunset. We’re gonna raise this thing at sunset. So all the girls from the commune we have about 40 people living in this commune. They all go and they get food and everything.

They’re gonna have a big dinner out there, tables and everything, you know, for the raising of this cross. So everybody’s pretty much gone except for me. And I’m I’m chopping the ends of the logs and and kinda dialing it in, you know. And it’s like 01:00 in the afternoon, and everybody else is down in town and doing stuff. And as I’m out there, and you come down the hill, down into where the mill area is and then the big round areas out looking out over the ocean.

Right in the middle of that circle is where we have the hole and and this big old cross waiting to get raised. So I’m chopping up and this purple van with a cross on it, painted on it, comes down the hill and it’s filled with a bunch of young Jesus freaks and they’re lost. You know, they come down and they see a guy down there with the biggest cross they’ve ever seen in their whole life. Right? All by himself on the side of the hill.

And they come down and they’re going, hallelujah. We you know, hallelujah. We’ve been lost and now we’re found, you know, and all this stuff. And I I’ve gone along with you. I’ve gone I’ve gone, I I I know you’ve been lost, but you’re not lost anymore.

And he said, Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. You know? I said, you know why you’re here, don’t you? And they go, no.

Tell us, father. You know? I go, we’re gonna raise this cross. And they go, it’s big and hairy. They go, how, how, how are we gonna do that?

Hallelujah. Yeah. You know? It’s like, oh my god. It’s like their whole religious experience is culminated at that particular time, you know?

And then people start showing up and the women show up and they start cooking the food and and then Jesus freaks are there. And Jimmy Dyer comes up the hill with his old diesel, you know, d nine caterpillar tractor. The a’s already there. And, he hooks up, you know, and, and we we we raise that cross. You know?

And, the Jesus freaks there, they they’re all saved. You know? They they leave at a home with a major religious experience and stuff. That was, like, one of the one of the cool cool things that happened in in making that moving journey. And that’s in the movie.

Oh, yeah. Not the raising of the cross. The cross is already raised. In the movie, you just see the general and all these guys in this old Mercedes. They come down and they they just do this weird drive around the cross kind of thing.

And then one more scene, we have the sawdust burner at the sawmill, right, where they ship up the sawdust and it would go into this big rusty teepee, right, you know, big old sawdust burner. You’ve seen them. Well, that’s made just to take air and swirl into a circle. So when the sawdust comes up, it falls down. It kinda swirls and then the flames burn and all kind of stuff.

But we we never used it as a sawdust burner. It was just empty. We used it as an acoustic theater to play music and stuff. It was like really cool, you know. And, so Neil wanted me to make a a a nest in one corner of the inside of the Sawdust burner that he could put this big Baldwin piano.

He had this beautiful $80,000 full concert black lacquered Baldwin finest piano in the world kind of thing. Tracked up there. I made this stage. It’s inside of the curve, so I made this stage for this piano kinda curved in the opposite direction against the curved wall. And then I built with out of old dry tree branches and stuff.

I made this sort of archway that the piano was inside of. So Neil would be inside this sort of nest kind of area playing the piano, and it’s the last song in the movie called soldier your eyes. It’s the last song on the album too. And that when you listen to it on the album, you can actually hear the fire cracking. Because then in the middle of the song, I got these logs, and I started doing a pentagon shape about with four foot long logs, and I I pyramid them all the way up.

So it was like this pyramid paramount shape all filled with wood and everything about eight feet tall. Right? And so for the steam, we lit it off, so there’d be this fire going in there. Right? Well, I didn’t really know how the inside of a sawdust spoon would work because we never had a fire in there.

What it does, it creates this tornado. Right? So, you know, we got this eight foot high giant pyramid of stacked dry wood and a dry wood nest, like, literally eight feet off to one side of it. And all of a sudden these sparks start going around. Of course, they catch the whole nest on fire, but we’re filming.

Right? We let it we’ll let it off. The film’s there. We’re playing. Neil’s playing the song, and the fire is spreading over to where Neil is.

You know? And we’re kinda going, you know, what do we do? We we get him out of here and, you know, and Neil goes, no. He keeps playing. You know?

He wants to get the scene done, you know, no matter what. And so literally, the the whole thing catches on fire and and Neil finishes the song and you can really hear the fire crackling and going nuts in there. But, you know, we get him out of there. The fire, we get the fire shot down with hoses and shit, and the pianos burned and wet and the whole finish is bubbled. You know, it’s all bubbled.

Literally, he had to buy the $80,000 piano, have it refinished, and I think he sold it for, like, 18,000, you know, because it had been damaged. So that was kind of a a major major expense. You know, that that was just another one of those things. You know? Anyway, so that’s that was the journey through the past, and that’s probably enough for now.

I’ll show you a couple of things that we’re gonna do. I’ll show you the I’ll show you the, sculpture that I did for