A Distant View

Audio Recording of Mazzeo Storytelling

So so you have Ken Kesey in the basement, and there’s not a lot. Is there there’s not a lot of interaction there? Not too much. So you you just But pretty much he’s just in the basement. He was there hanging out for three or four days.

He didn’t, like, talk to him too much or Hi. How are you doing? Smoke of joy. Okay. And, his his guy, Ron Hasler, was one of the, Merry Pranksters.

Oh, okay. And he was the one that was running him back and forth from San Francisco to La Honda. And, the Honda was being watched by the feds, so we need to be really careful. They finally got him on, by Bay Shore Freeway by the airport. He announced What they came for?

What was he? What was he Well, he was they wanted him because, he was the leader of the Merry Pranksters, and they were on the giant LSD parties and shit. All of us have, so he was like a hippie leader. Okay. And they were getting cultural leaders.

Oh, okay. You know, they’ve gotten leery and, you know, and a few people. Right. So that was I’m sure they had some other reasons for getting them, but that’s that was what it That was what they said. But the funny thing for Leary, though, was that while he was with us, Margo is very creative.

Uh-huh. And, she, she went over to Outlaw Press in San Francisco and got a bunch of bumper stickers.

When the bumper stickers said things like, you know, I’m on my way to see Ken Kesey. Follow me. I’m going to Ken Kesey’s, hideout. You know? Have you seen Ken Keyes either day?

You know? There’s always different bumper stickers. And at five in the morning, we go over to Sansom Street or the Federal Building, and we plaster bumper stickers on the every car on the street all around the Federal Building. The pretext being that at six, seven in the morning, all the feds met in the Federal Building to get their assignments every day. And a lot of those guys’ assignment was fine.

So we figured if they walked out of the Federal Building and we saw a car drive by with a Ken Fusey Ducker sticker, they’d follow it. So that’s that’s the kind of, things we would do in here Yeah. Help help protect him. Kinda be on prankster stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Just kinda keep keep the keep the investigation under our control rather than theirs. So let’s see. We left off with, you’re in the Midwest and, Frank Zappa. You got how do you know how do you connect with Frank Zappa and get Before I went on tour, in in back in ’66 when I first had my light show with the West Coast pop art band, and they they paid for all the light show equipment.

We we played at the Ark for about three or four weeks. And, Matthew really liked the light show there, you know, because we’re not very good at places that had light shows in ’66. So he kind of and I had a houseboat, a funky old houseboat at eight five, right right down the street from there. So the West Coast Pop Band played there for about two weeks. And then, I I guess they got tired of not getting paid.

And, they motivated back to LA. And they got these two gigs, Friday night playing at the Daisy Club, a private club for actors and actresses. Saturday night’s a a club in Santa Monica called The Other Place, and that was a private club for for directors and producers, movie producers and directors. And this is, this is, November Yeah. November and December, ’66.

Yeah. And, a couple gigs we got in LA was Shriner Auditorium, and the Mothers of Invention were playing there. And, we played with those guys. And I became friends with with Jimmy Carl Black. Just just keep going.

He was one of the drummers with the mothers. And, so so we all became friends. Okay. Cool. You’re back.

And, also, Mike Love and the Beach Boys and guys like that. You know, everything was kinda new in ’66. The mothers were pretty established, so they’ve been playing Fillmore and San Francisco back and forth. And I really liked them, so they they were really cool. And, then I went off on this tour, And, when my six month contract was up with with the pop art band, it was time for me to leave.

I didn’t want to be able to do it anymore. So I was just gonna go head back to LA, but the mothers came into Chicago to play a gig. And, of course, I went over to say see Jimmy and everything, Jimmy Black, and said, yeah. He goes, how’s it going with those guys? I said, oh, tedious.

And I’m, you know, I’m headed back to California. And he goes, well, you know, Frank just got us this theater for the whole summer in New in Greenwich Village. To me, Greenwich Village was like the holy grail of Yeah. Being wanting to be a beatnik, you know, and stuff. He said, yes.

We’re all staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He was I got my wife and kids, but we we got enough room. We’ll fix you up at the place in the living room. You know, come on and hang out with us, You know? And, hang out in in Greenwich Village.

So I, you know, it was only $70 to catch a plane to New York and, you know, a hundred and 30. Yeah. That was a so I said, cool. And, I went to New York and hung out and moved in with those guys. And I was I lived with them for about, just almost not quite maybe a month, maybe five or six weeks.

Not not a really long time. But it was fun every night. We we played, you know, they played all night long. They got up at ten in the morning and rehearsed from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon every single day, seven days a week. That’s dedication.

Zappa was a control master. You know, you could literally raise one finger and the band knew what to do. You know what I mean? He had it everywhere. On his music and how how it was produced.

He had two drummers, Jimmy Carl Black and Billy Mundy. And, So he had two different drummers and, and a pretty big size band. So I went there and hung out, and Zappa did all these crazy things. He’d go down to the down to the fisherman, wharf section in New York and buy a basket full of live lobsters.

And then he’d take this basket of live lobsters up on stage with him. And, while he’s doing his his show, at at some party, just, like, pull out the basket and pull out a live lobster and literally rip it apart and throw it at the audience. You know, this is kind of a day sort of a lot of people in the audience are on acid and stuff, you know. It’s just like, woah. Lodge to pieces, finance.

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes they they actually showed up with with, like, ponchos and stuff because they knew they were gonna get something thrown at them from from Zappa when the word got out. You know? So we had good fun like that.

But Paul Butterfield hung out a bunch, and he and I became really good pals. And then, watching the show at at night, you know, some clubs and stuff. And, he was intrigued with me because I had the, you know, like, this first psychedelic light show in the Midwest. And, he knew these three kids these three guys in Boston, wealthy kids of wealthy successful people. They wanted to build a psychedelic night club in Boston.

And, he said he goes, oh, yeah. I know these guys. You’d be perfect. They’re looking for somebody like you. You know?

Psychedelic nightclub. And, so he got it. He he made the introductions. I got the gig, and New York up to Boston and checked in with those guys. They got me a place.

And I met James McCracken who later on became a really good, close partner of mine. What was he? He was doing posters. For the club.

Like art posters? Yeah. Art posters. Yeah. The club posters.

Okay. And then, also, while we’re building the club, my friend Jimmy Phillips here from Santa Cruz, he does the blue hand and all that stuff, and he did all this late skateboard barfing guts. Sorry. Yeah. Well, Phillips and I, we’d surfed in high school together at Pleasure Point in all around Santa Cruz.

We were old high school surfing buddies. Uh-huh. And, and he was in Florida, and he was glassing surfboards down in Florida. And there was no surf in Florida. He was like getting really bummed out on the whole scene.

And so, I’ve said I’ve talked to him over the phone and I go he goes, yeah. I gotta get out of here. He goes, I don’t have any money. This place sucks. There’s no surf.

Too many bugs. And I said, well, he said, I’m working with this club in Boston. There’s this really cool artist named McCracken. And he’s one of the he’s been making posters for the club. But why don’t you come up here and you can make posters for the club too?

You and McCracken. You guys can do the you’re running the the art department. And so he did. So Phillips came up and he joined us. Yeah.

He moved in with me. I had this about that time, I had this sort of big three bedroom, three story high house in Dryden. Yeah. And, it was actually a big old three story house with a brick wall going right up the middle of the house. And I had all three floors on one side, and there were three separate apartments on the other side.

My landlord was this guy, Joey Aiello, whose grandfather was the number one mafia mafia chieftain of Massachusetts. He lived up in the whole Northeast, Tony Aiella. And when Keith Keyflower decided to make it hard on the mob and bust the mob and deport all the big mafiosas Yeah. The first one he deported was Tony Aiella. Joey was my landlord.

He owned that house. And because I had the club club going and had the whole scene, I didn’t even pay rent. I had the whole place. He had finished three apartments on one side, but he had never quite finished the the three floors where I was. And so I just I just moved in there and did all of it.

It was great. So Phillips lived there with me. Joey had a picture of his grandfather holding Joey when he was a little baby and swaddling clothing on the on the side of a super constellation airplane. The airplane that took him back to Italy. And, and he’s he’s halfway up the ladder, and he’s got Joey in his in his little swaddling baby blankets.

And he’s put he’s having Joey back down to all these mobsters. And they all they’ve all got their heads up, you know, give it to me. And then he he did, like, have the Joey down to the mob and said, take a good care of my grandson, Joey. And they did. I would Joey, I Joey, come over.

I go, hey, Joey. I’ve I just read about these new speed electric IBM typewriters that have this ball thing and it it types really fast. They’re they’re really cool, you know. They were like $1,100, you know, those days, you know. Yeah.

You guys so yeah. Cool if you had one. He went, well, let me make a phone call. So you’d make a call. It’s sure enough in the day or so of station wagon and these two guys would get out.

They’d come they’d get us. We’d go out to the station wagon. They’d open up the back, and there’d be, like, six of them there. And they go, hey. You understand?

You want one of these? Yeah. So we get it, you know. And Joey go, what kind of cars you guys got? He goes and they go, any GM product any GM product, $385 No Corvettes Cadillacs are $1,300 And, these are brand new cars, right?

And, I told Troy, I said, Holy shit, they must be taking my truckloads of cars. It was no. They don’t take truckloads of cars. They take trainloads of cars. Joey also had me come well, I’ve lived there.

Had me come to, a party out on the North End, the Italian end of Boston. Out on the out on the worse. And we said, we said, yeah. I got invited to this party. It’s gonna be kind of interesting.

Come out with me. You know, I’m Ivan from Ozzio. I’m an Italian. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. So so we go, and we drive way out out of there’s this old dilapidated pier, and all these old rundown warehouses that are all half toward no roofs on them. It just dilapidated. Right? Just total, like, abandoned.

And I’m thinking, god. I wonder if I’m getting if I’m getting bumped off or something. You know? This is weird. There’s nothing out here.

You know? We go way out to way out to the end one. And we go up in front of these big doors, And, Joey goes beep beep. And, the door is open. And, there’s a parking area.

It’s a huge old warehouse. Parking area. And, then, there’s a glass wall. And, on the other side of the glass wall, the palm trees, two two story open, a giant luxury apartment with skylights and views and everything. Just totally deluxe, you know.

It was it was it was a party. So I’m there, and, these guys are coming up, you know, Maziar, what do you do? I said, well, I’m an artist. I’m doing these lecture and stuff, You know? They said, how would you like to make us some real money?

What do you mean real money? We have this, we have this club down in The Caribbean. And, once a month, you can make a thousand dollars. Give you a thousand dollars. It’s yours.

And, we give you a hundred thousand dollars. And, you lose it at this serving roulette table. You just lose that money. If you win any money, you keep the money. You leave $100,000 at that roulette table.

Right? Once a month, you get paid a thousand bucks anyway, all transportation paid. So it’s fucking a lot of money in 1967. You know? I said, well, I said, I’ve got we got kinda got commitments, you know, with this club and everything.

You know? Yeah. You know? I I have to think it over. You know?

Okay. You think it’ll be you know? If you’re interested, you tell Joey. You you take care of her. That night, I I I just saw myself being rode out in a row boat in a in a burlap bag.

Hundred thousand dollars. You don’t wanna hold you wanna hold out of that money for that. And I don’t even wanna have knowledge of the roulette table. I don’t I don’t know. But I just saw myself, like, being rode out into the Boston Harbor on a foggy night with these two guys as they’re pushing me over the side of the boat right in the middle of the night.

And I just, I told Joe. I said, no. No. No. I just I love it.

I can’t do that, Joe. I’m here. You know? That’s not for me. Joe was a great guy.

He was really a cool guy. Really fun guy. We had a ghost in the house. I told him, I said, there’s a ghost on this side of the house. I’d be working late at night up on the Third Floor.

I’d be doing pen and ink drawings and stuff, you know. And, as I’m working, I’d do the bottom door slam and I hear boom boom boom boom boom up the stairs. And I go over and I look down the stairs. There’d be nobody there. You know?

And I go, what the fuck? Somebody’s here. Yeah. Who’s there? Nothing.

I go back to work. I swear to god, there’s, like, apparition. It looked like an old Indian guy. He was a big Indian. He’s like, be right in my peripheral vision looking over my shoulders.

I’m dry. And as soon as I’d look at him, he’d, like, fade away again. And as soon as I got back to work, he’d, like, come back in again. I got like, you know, he didn’t bother me. I said, I I kinda got used to him.

I told George, yeah. There’s a ghost. He looks like an old Indian, you know, Ismat the Whaler and Moby Dick or something. You know? You know, the New England Indian guy.

And Joey goes, yeah. Yeah. So it nobody believed it. Joey lived on the Third Floor on the other side. Graham.

Yeah. Man, it’s always spoken too much. You know? But then Joey decided there’s a above the Third Floor was this huge attic, which is all empty, and the brick wall went up through that through the attic too. Joey’s had half the attic on his side because he was up on the Third Floor, and I had an an attic on my side.

Joey decided to take out some of the bricks and make up a passageway through there. And when he did, he let the ghost over to their side. And the and Joey as soon as he did it, within a week, Joey goes, the ghost was in my house. And and the the the people living on the Second Floor. The ghost was here.

You know, they had all heard about it. You know? They’re like, butts. You know? As soon as they did that passageway, the guy goes to Cedric playing around with those guys.

So that was kind of a fun fun aspect. Anyway, Phillips lived there. Phillips, we had a ticket taker that sold the tickets to the shows. Yeah. Her name is Dolly.

She and Phillips fell in love. She’s married. She’s missus Phillips now. Still married. They’re still married.

They got married. They they, took off the from the club there and came back to California and had a kid. You know, but that’s where he met Dolly, his wife. So that was pretty cool. Let’s see.

There’s there’s a lot of stuff. The club was, was made with vinyl backed mylar, which was really The walls you mean? Yeah. The walls. Uh-huh.

The in the in the reviews, you read about the the Crosstown bus, our club. That club became the, these guys came up from New York and they checked out our club. Went one room in full swing. And they went back and they built a club called the Electric Circus in New York, which was a huge successful, exciting like club in New York. But they used our club as the model for building the electric surface.

So the vinyl backmar out of the electrical looks like a reflective. It was a mirrored. It’s like a mirror away. Yeah. They bounced 98% of the original light source off of off of the, you know, because it’s mirrored it’s mirrored surface.

But it was it had a vial instead of being thin sheet mirrored, mylar, it was it had a vinyl backing, so it had more weight to it. Heavier. And, we built we built triangles of it, on the roof. And we had the roof do this slow arch and these triangles going down, down, down. And did a beautiful slow arch with all these mylar triangle points kind of pointed down, which is good for sound baffling as well.

Then I got 200 pin spots that I have color wheels on that slowly rotated. Yeah. And, these pin spots, like, they would just bounce off of off the wall and then bounce up there because 98% of this light would bounce up there and then 98% of that. So one light would bounce about four different times. And I had 200 of them.

Them. So I had all these different colors and lights bouncing like a spectrum. And people smoked cigarettes and shit in those days, so it was all cloudy inside. So all the light rays and stuff were really beautiful. You know?

Really and they’re always changing and moving around and something. But to make it even more dramatic on the walls, I built these these 14 foot long boxes that were three foot high and about 22 feet wide. And, I put industrial blower motors inside of them that I could control. And, put big holes on the bottom of the boxes and we stapled the mylar to the outside of it. We made mylar bags that went from floor to ceiling 14 feet wide, we made three of them on each side of the of the plug.

So and I could turn them on, and the bags would fill up with air Yeah. And shut them off, and the weight would cause them to collapse again. So the walls would expand like you would on the OSD anyway. Yeah. But, also, when I bounced light off of them and it was moving, it really animated everything even more, you know.

And I I could control the the speed of the of the motors a little bit. You know, not too much, but a little bit. I usually just left them going the way they were. And then behind the stage, I had a big old plexiglass shell that the band was inside that I project I had a tower that I had my my, my, carousel slide projectors and and all that and liquid projectors, and that was all projected really tight on the band. Had a mylar cave with strobe lights in it.

It was just all wrinkled mylar, Within one side, walked about 14 feet and came out to this other side here. There’s all strobe lights inside. But, what really got what really got their attention was we had another big room behind the main room. Yeah. And, that was, that was where we were gonna sell refreshments and stuff.

Get kind of a break from the from the club area. But it was a it was a pretty big room. It was about 2,000 square feet. And, it was all painted white. Just all white.

No floor, ceilings, everything. And, what I did was, I had them build these staircases. And halfway in the room, these stairs sort of went up to this platform. And at the top of the platform, these oversized, sort of like vending machines, except they were really big with mylar mirrors, you know, where the glass with mirrors would be. And big phony knobs.

We looked in the slot, and there were people back there passing out coffee and sandwiches and stuff. But the steps I made the steps being normal size at the bottom. But, it’s you had to go up about about 10 steps. By the time you got up to 10 steps, the steps were about that big. So, your body you literally became the size of a five or six year old standing next to a vending machine.

Right? Yeah. So the and people by the time they got up to they they were, like, playing with the knobs and, like, looking in there and getting their ice cream or whatever they wanted. You know? They literally kind of became, like, childlike, you know?

And then when they came back down, they kinda, like, became adults again. You know? It was kind of a cool thing. Yeah. That got the attention of these collectors at Harvard, these old guys in Harvard, these professors and stuff that have a living arts program.

They left me a card one night saying, would you join us for a 05:00 whiskey at the Harvard library? And, so I went over and and Philip Offor was the world’s foremost collector of antique books and in charge of the Harvard library. Yeah. And he said, he said, we love your club. Yeah.

We, you know, we we love everything about it. We have this living arts program. We’d be really honored. I’m I’m, like, 22 years old. We’d be really honored if you would become one of our one of our members of of the living arts program.

And, he said that we have a new and we’re also interested in in the cracker. You know, it was an incredible poster. And, and, we said we have a we have a Carrie Chow sat behind Kerry Welch’s, where he was the foremost authority on ancient Persian art, a professor at Harvard. Kerry has, generously, said he’s gotta put up his Kerry Chowst. You guys can use it as a studio.

We provide that, and we provide all the materials you need. And so for about, yeah, eight or nine months, I was part of this living arts program, doing pen and ink drawings on sheepskin parchment. Uh-huh. And, my cracker was doing all kinds of So you would do art and then people would come by and Every five every Wednesday, I’d have to go I’d have to put on a suit and tie. And, you know, proper suit and tie.

Okay. I’d go to the Harvard library for a 05:00 whiskey, and he would have the Henry Cavitt lodges and the Kennedy family and all these old New England families show up for the, it was like an honor for them to go have a whiskey. It was like, the alumni knew that if you were invited to the 05:00 whiskey at the library, you would have, like, flu. So these he’d have all these families come in, and I guess they were supporting his living arts program, right, with contributions Yeah. Yeah.

Sure. That we all I never got into that. But I I I figured what I’ve done in the past week or two in Macquarie down with some of his stuff. And, they bring their last trip to South Africa. I’d show us pictures.

And we’d all have a really good, afternoon. Then we’d all go eat a big giant dinner. We’d be we’d be there from five to about six or seven. And then we’d go to these, like, really incredible restaurants. The King Henry the fourth eating establishment, the Boston Yitz Hotel.

Just season that have, like, incredible five course meals and stuff. Just one one day a week, I ate like a king. It was just unbelievable. And they they always get me to eat. I think it was the first time I ever had escargot in my whole life doing stuff like that.

The rest of the time, Mac and I are eating sub sandwiches. You know? That was, that was part of, part of that club. Part of it. Yeah.

And there’s the the crosstown buses. It’s I’ve I’ve noticed it’s starting to creep up on various little sites on the social media and stuff. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It’s called the Crosstown bus?

Yeah. That the reason why is the main rock and roll club in town is called the Boston Tea Party. And it was like the Fillmore Auditorium, you know, like the one it was like a Bill Graham kind of thing. Right. And but it was all the way on the on the sort of, like, the the the East Side Of Boston.

And we were in Dryden, which is sort of the West Side. Okay. And so you had to take this bus cross town Okay. From one to the other. Okay.

So we called it the cross town bus. Right? Because that’s the bus stop right in front of where, there was a picture of the building that that somebody just posted on Facebook that I have. I’ll I’ll send you a picture of it. And, you went in at the street level, but then you had to go up a flight of stairs, and then everything was up on the Second Floor.

The whole Cross Valley Bus Club was up there on the Second Floor. What happened was when we started, we were just doing local bands. Just, bands called, like, Lothar in the hand people. Just always they they were okay. The New York rock and roll ensemble, and all dressed up in tuxedos and played rock and roll with violins or whatever.

So local bands and stuff. But when I was doing the clubs in in in LA, at the Daisy Club, actors and actresses, I met this this guy, Jim Morrison. And this is before the doors. And Morrison, he was, you know, he was kind of a character. He he really liked, you know, my light show.

Yeah. But every I’ve cut everybody out of the woodworks, you know. Like I said, everybody’s taking acid and shit. So I I met Morrison, and he came to he came to the Schreiner show, and I was playing with the mothers. And, you know, he he came to a bunch of my gigs.

So, when I’m after doing the club, after about a month or two after we were open, I get a call from Jim and he goes, listen. I got this new band. We’re doing we’re called The Doors and we’re we’re kinda like doing good. But, we’re we’re gonna yeah. We’re gonna go play.

We’re we’re gonna play on the East Coast. And, you know, we’re we’re headed on out that way. And somebody said, you have a you have a club going. I said, yeah. We got the second ring microphone.

He goes, do you think we could play there? And I said, yeah, man. You know, in fact, you know, aren’t you getting he goes, yeah. We’re getting radio play and stuff. I said, hell yeah, man.

I think I think, you know, this is gonna be great. So I hooked them up, and they played two nights in a row. And all the kids knew who the doers were. By the time, you know, we had for the first time, we had lines going almost double lines around the block for the kids to get there. What happened was before that, Boston’s corrupt.

It’s it’s a it’s been it’s an old town, and it’s very established. So in order to just open, we had to hire every night, we had to have two firemen and two policemen that we paid $40 a night each of those guys to be at the club. And, so they were not always the same two policemen, the same two firemen. They they they take it and those guys would get their extra $400 for spending a couple hours at the club. I it’s just paid all of them basically.

Yeah. And, but after the doors, we did so good that they they the guy who has the powers to be called in the owned the club owners and said, well, you guys are doing pretty good. So, there’s an increased amount of people there. So you need increased security and increased fire protection. So now you have to do six police officers and six fire.

Wow. That’s a big jump. Yeah. It was a big jump. And the and the guy said, we’re not gonna do it.

We we’re just like we’ll just close the club down. And they literally sort of closed the club down. So we were we were only open for about five or six months. Do we decide? That was the end of it.

Exactly. That was the end of that. If it wasn’t the end for me, because I was still going with the with the Fogg Museum. Mac and I were just right there devoting full time into you know, art, you know, being produced that way. So and also, I got all the mylar from the club.

And because I had that funky three story house, the whole First Floor was not finished at all. It was just it was all torn apart, drywall turned off, everything. And all I did with the Second Floor and Third Floor was they were okay and live above the kitchen, was up on the Second Floor bed So I just built a mylar tunnel from the from the the entrance way, you know, with with there’s a second door for snow. Right? There’s like a a a a room there to protect you from the mile away tunnel that went straight up the stairs, a mile away tunnel all the way up the stairs in the in the art place up there.

Stuff like that. So yeah. So that that place those are the the three owners were, Ian Hayne, Michael Cropp, and John Fishback. John Fishback’s mother had the most exclusive art gallery in New York City. You couldn’t even go to get in.

They have to make appointments to get in. You can go in and talk to her about buying some expensive art from her fishback galleries. And, Ian Haines’ father, on every bottle of Scotch whiskey, and probably to this day, on the side of the label, it says distributed by Hain distribution. He was the one who went to went to Europe and got Scotch whiskey and brought it back and changed America from drinking straight straight bourbon over the Scotch whiskey. Sophisticated people drink Scotch.

It was really rednecks, they drink whiskey. Right? And he he created that whole thing and he created a huge market. In back of those days, he was worth $220,000,000, which is a whole lot of money in 1960. He actually came to the club, old man Haim.

He and his father came and his father his father had, like, four just impeccably dressed young 35, 40 year old lawyers. He had four lawyers, like, one on his, you know, elbow kind of thing. And he walked out and he just he’d been wearing a rumpled suit with one collar up and chewing on a cigar, you know. He was he was in character. We’re kind of looking around like, no.

This is where all the money’s going on. Kevin’s shit. And, Michael Cross Parish was just a wealthy New England family. All three days, guys, they do the money behind the cross count. That’s that part.

So I stayed there until, just about August of sixty eight. I got in there in the summer of sixty seven. I didn’t survive in August of sixty seven. And, I left around August of sixty eight. So that was about a year, I guess.

And what happened? Happened in a year. Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot happened to you.

Yeah. They’re full tilt duty. And, they came out to California in summer of of sixty eight. And when we saw Margo and say hi and everything, just just kinda check it out. I was kind of Boston.

I didn’t like winters in Boston too much. And then summers are real hot and humid. You know? So I and I’ve been kind of burned out on the museum thing too, and we had some fun with it. There’s a lot of little stories we did.

McCracken liked to bite the hand that fed him. Alright. So, yeah, you know, it’s like a true artist. Yeah. This seems to be common.

Yeah. So what he would do is all these old professors, they’d come by the laugh we called the studio the laughing academy. Yeah. So they come by the laughing academy to see what we were doing. They were in the back the the museum bought us an antique dentist office, like an eighteen nineties dentist office.

So we had all the little tools to sculpt with, and the chair went over to Carrie’s house, you know, and we’re gonna go to the guy in the front of the house, the professor. He got the chair and some stuff, and we got all the other stuff. And, we’d use these little tools, and Mac would make little bases and use them and make little sculptures out of them and stuff. And these collectors are they they kinda, like, try to outdo each other. Like, they both two or three would would want what Mac Mac was working on.

You know? You know? And Mac would, they kind of I tried to outbid them and out clover the other guys to get it. And Mac and I, we die. We take the Mac and he goes he goes, this is this is how we’re gonna handle this.

In Boston, different neighborhoods on different nights of the week put all their trash out on the street corners. Old couches, old lamps, everything they don’t want. Not not not wet garbage, but just stuff, you know. And, there’s there’s big piles of stuff on street corners on Thursday night in this neighborhood, Wednesday night in this neighborhood. And, Mac would take the piece that he had.

First, he would we’d go to the neighborhood bar, this old funky bar where everybody’s, like, passed out on the side of me. You know, the the bartender’s kinda half asleep, you know. This stuff funky neighborhood, smelly old bar, dark. And Mac would go up to some guys, like, sleeping at the bar and put the sculpture down in front of him and goes, hey. And wait the guy out there.

I we just came in there to get a beer, but we found this out on the street. Is it yours? And the guy was like, we gotta go, no. Yeah. And back we go, well, what do you think it is?

And the guy looked at it. This one guy looked at it. It’s a death ray. So back when called it death ray, that’s where he’d get his titles, which would, you know, at the bar. I said he put the death ray or the piece in in a in a plain cardboard box, and he puts the box out on the street corner in the trash.

And then he just tells the guys, yeah, if you want the piece, it’s it’s in the Dryden. It says that it’s on the street corner. We just left it out there with the rest of the trash. I’d rather sit there if you want it. And they’d, like, go nuts, man.

They’d, like, race over there and see all these little rich guys, like, go through the trash, look at the boxes. Just go ahead and start. Can you see this? Yeah. I don’t think you’re You know what?

Yeah. So that kind of stuff. One of them commissioned Mac to do this big painting, so he acted the bottom side of a a house fly. So, like like, he said, yeah. The fly landed on my eye.

And, and it’s like looking right at the bottom of a fly with all the clouds and sky up above it. And there was a big pain in it. And the fly was like really cool the way it painted all the little iridescent parts and stuff. It was very cool. And, but it took him forever.

They he was charging the guy $3,500, which was a huge amount of money. The guy was coming over, like, every weekend. How’s the painting coming? How’s the paint? And Mac, the more the guy asked, the less Mac would do on the painting.

Right? And finally, the guy I I think it was, like, three or four months. And the guy finally the guy said, okay, Mac. I I like the painting just the way it is. I’m gonna be here Friday afternoon.

I’m just gonna pick up the painting. I’m gonna bring the truck because it was too big to fit in this car. Because not making arrangements. I’ll be there Friday afternoon. I’m just gonna pick he’s already given back the money, which was his mistake.

Right? So so I’ll just be there to pick it up Friday afternoon. So we’re there Friday afternoon. Sure enough, the truck goes down the driveway, parts the front of the carriage house. The carriage house has an upstairs students.

The painting studio is on the Second Floor, and there’s a there’s a a door that opens to the front of the carriage after that. I guess they loaded hay or shit into, you know, at some time. And the truck came back, just threw open the two doors on the Second Floor, and the guy in the truck that just gave him out walking up to the through the through the garage house, knocks, slams, opens the doors, takes the paint, and throws it from the Second Floor all the way out of just, like, one corner kinda, like it almost breaks a little. You know, it lands on the gravel driveway at the guy’s feet, you know. And shuts the door again.

The guy who takes his bathe in the leaves. Stuff like that. We also had a map in the Laughing Academy. I had a picture of The United States, and, we have welding equipment and stuff that we like welding and doing stuff and little foundry stuff. And, every now and then, we just throw a dart at the map and wherever it hit, we drive there to that spot.

And and on the way, we collect roadside pieces of metal and stuff. And when we got there, we weld it all together into a piece and just leave it there. The the the really notable one was we, we threw threw the dart and landed it in White Buttes White Buttes, South Dakota, the highest spot in South Dakota. It said White Buttes, highest spot in South Dakota, and boom, man. We landed right on.

So we went, okay. That’s that’s where we’re going. And so we drove all the way from Boston to South Dakota. And we had a we had a little we pulled a little four foot by eight foot trailer behind the the Jeep wagon there. We had some welding equipment in there and stuff and, and we’d pick up along the road which is old rusty metal in some field.

We’d go over and get the metal and throw it in the trailer and kept filling it up by the time we got to we got to the spot. And it said, White Butte’s the highest spot in South Dakota, a little sign on how to log the road. But it was all it was cows and there’s this there’s just these little knobby hills, and one of them is just a little bit higher than the other ones. Right? And we figured that has that’s the tallest one.

That has to be it. But, there was a barbed wire gate that we had to get we’d go through, which we did. We just went in, parked up on top of the there’s a tree. There’s little trees that I don’t know if they’re oak trees, some some kind of tree, growing on top of these little knobby hills. And, we get up there.

We set up camp, and, we pull out the stuff. And every day, we’re just starting to weld up the metal, and we’re gonna just build this metal sculpture and leave it there, you know, and and go back. And, about the third day, every day while working, we noticed there’s this truck, this pickup truck comes by, and it just kinda parks. And it’s it’s, you know, it’s like a quarter mile away from us, but it just parks for a little while then drives off again, you know. The third day it comes, the same truck.

So two days in a row, third day it comes over, and it’s the farmer, the the rancher who owns the property. Right? And so he actually we’re having coffee the third morning. Yeah. And he comes drive it up.

Right? And then the back goes, oh, that’s a truck again. Yeah. Gotta be the property owner. Yeah.

So the guy comes up. He introduced. He goes, yeah. He was like, I own the property. He goes, I’m kind of interested in what you guys are doing.

Because by this time, we had this this piece that was about six or seven feet high, you know. And, and we tell him, oh, we, we’re from this museum and and, you know, this museum at Harvard University, and we’re in the public garden. We threw this dart and landed here, and we decided that we’re gonna just leave this piece of public art here on the on where the dark landed. And the guy who thought that was kind of fun and interesting, and he goes, you know, so how high are you gonna go with this thing? And he he said, well, we’ve got enough metal.

You know, you know, as high as we can get it. He goes because because, you know, I got a whole barn full of a bunch of old metal there too. You know? So he’s donating metal for the project. Right?

And we get up about 12 feet high. And you see and this kind of it’s cool. We got old car bumpers and all kinds of shit going off of it, and it’s looking pretty good. You know? And you get up so high that the base isn’t real big or anything, but it’s holding up.

It’s holding up in the summertime, and it’s not real windy or anything. And, the guy goes, you know, we get wind too, and we get up to, like, 80 miles an hour. You know? It’s We got these storms that you won’t believe. And, we didn’t wanna dig a hole and fill it with cement or anything.

We go, well, I don’t you know? Well, maybe we’ll just have to lay it on its side or something. You know? It’s nice because I have an idea. He was up right here at me back.

So he goes and comes back. He’s got these cables with these star things on him that he hangs off the trees because the cows cows like to scratch themselves. Mhmm. And if they scratch themselves on the trees, they rub off the bark and they kill the trees. So he hangs these cables down from the trees and they the stars are on the cable They’re round right in there.

And the cows scratch themselves on the stars and and the trees are saved. And they’re called cow scratchers. And so you’ve got, like, three three cow scratchers. And if if they’re long, we have got, you know, sixteen, eighteen foot cables, and we’re gonna stake them down. And so we stake down the thing with three cow scratches, you know, to hold up, to give them predominantly wounds and everything.

And, sure enough, man, before as we were leaving, you know, we got everything set up and we said goodbye. The guy’s name is Frank. The guy that owned the guy said said that it’s Avios and took some pictures to go back and show the museum or, you know, or but as we’re leaving, the cows come up and they start scratching themselves on it. And when they do, it causes the whole thing to make noise and and it’s like they’re, like, tune strings. And, all of a sudden, it’s like they’re vibrating and it’s making this weird kind of croaking noise or something.

And so we called it a cow activated cow sculpture. You know? Yeah. Went back to the museum and showed him our cow activated sculpture, and we thought that was brilliant. Stuff like that.

So those are the kind of things that we were pulling off at the at the Lafayette Academy. Yeah. Academy. That’s okay. That’s okay.

No problem. I’ve got some really good stuff again, I think. Oh, yeah. We’re just we’re just scratching the surface here. That’s good to hear.

Yeah.