A Distant View

Audio of Mazzeo’s Storytelling

On 2018-11-26 02:45, Carla Dillinger wrote:

It was ’75.  Moved to Malibu.  The band was just down the road from where we were.  they had bought Elvis Presley’s old place, Rancho Shangri-La.  Actually Presley owned it, Johnny Carson owned it after Presley.  All these famous people owned this Rancho Shangri-La and it was a really big old house on top of a hill and it had a little corral down on the bottom when you first went in the road there’s a little corral and the horse corral.  

So I was talking about Rancho Shangri-La.  And Neil and i were living down the road at Broadbeach road on a street called Sea Level Drive.  It was this old Cape Cod cottage, right on the beach at the end of Sea Level Drive so there was no one on right side of us except sand dunes.  Except down on the right side of us, about a quarter mile, was Carol King  and then next to her was Cheech, from Cheech and Chong.  On the beach in Malibu.  It was a really cool house.  Neill saw it when he was recording the Zuma album.  It wasn’t’ called Zuma in those days but he dreams of making this album and it was actually up on Bird View Drive right above Zuma Beach and he’d go down and he saw this house, right?  And it’s just this Cape Cod, just romantic little Cape Cod cottage right at the end of the road all covered in red Bougainville.  it was two lots.  The first lot was just a brick patio area so we had this big social area  and then this cute little two-bedroom Cape Cod cottage that Catherine Ross lived in.  So he started asking around the neighbors, who is it?  whose there?  He goes, “Oh ah Catherine lives there.”  He goes, “I wonder if she would ever sell it?”  He said, “Oh, no.  She’d never sell, no way.”

Turned out she didn’t own it.  She was just leasing.  So Neil told his lawyers about it in LA, big powerful lawyers, they checked.  they found the property owner and they said, “They have a client who is interested in your house.”  And he just low-balled this really ridiculous price, when you consider $285,000 for it.  This was like 1974-75.  The guy must have lived in Kansas or something.  He said, “Yeah, sure!”  he could have probably bought it for sixty grand, and he said, “Yeah, sure, no problem.”  So Neil bought it.

So we moved down there and I’m down there and we did the Zuma album cover there and we’d go shopping for furniture, old antique furniture, and they’d fix up the beach house and then I heard that The Band was living just down the road. We became friends out on ’74 CSNY tour because The Band, and when The Band didn’t open for us the Beach Boys opened for us.  That’s how big the CSYN tour was.  We were literally the American Beatles and that tour made more money than any other tour had ever made.  We broke history.  We made 4.4 million dollars on that world tour which was an all-time record back in 1974.

I got to be friends with all the guys in the band so I went down and said, “Hey–Neil, I’ve got this house.  And he said, “Ah, it’s cool.” So I sort of hang out with these guys and then one day I went over there and then one day Robbie Robertson was there and Robbie said (in those days I was “Sandy Castle”, that was my rock ‘n roll name), “Hey Sandy, we are putting together a tour and it’s going to be our last tour together.  They were calling it “The Last Waltz Tour” and we are going to go all over the place and see all our fans everywhere and just do one last show for everybody.  It’s probably going to take a year and we know we can’t afford a guy like you.  But we really like the way you were out on the road and we really think you’d be the perfect guy to represent us because we have lots of friends all over the world and they are going to come see us and we are going to be busy rehearsing and doing band stuff but our friends and family are going to be there and you are the perfect guys.  To meet them, take care of all our friends, get them to the shows, and do everything.  Make sure everyone has a great time, as well as being our tour manager–road manager.  That would be your function.  And Robbie goes, “Look, ”  (Robbie talks out the corner of his mouth like a gangster) “Look, we know we can’t pay you as much as CSNY paid you but we can give you a hundred dollars a day for every day that you’re not on the road and then we’re out on tour we’ll give you $200 a day, seven days a week.  So that’s $1400 a week in 1975-76.  That’s a lot of money.  CSNY, I think I was getting $300 a week.  I think I got off that  tour with about $4,000 in the bank.  That was the world tour.  Robbie goes, “I know I can’t pay as much.”  They offered me like four times as much without even knowing it.  And then he said, “But what we can do, because you are going to be representing us, we will give you the finest suite in every hotel that we stay at, because that’s where our friends and family, you can invite them to this really fancy suite and they can all hang out with you while we’re rehearsing and doing stuff like that.  So wherever we are, you get the finest suite in every single town, for a year!”  I went, “Oh.  Well, that’d be good, yeah–that would make for a  fun time for everybody.  So I went back and told Neil, I said, “Listen, I’m going to take about a year off from you and from what I was doing with Neil.  I’d just done the album covers so he was happy and he had other stuff planning Crazy Horse and stuff.  So, I said, “I’m going to go work for a year with Robbie and The Band.  It’s going to be the last tour and everything and that, I told him the whole deal.  He goes, “Fuck, they’re paying you that much?”  I said, “Don’t tell anybody!”  So he said ok, so I got his blessings and everything and I literally moved from Neil’s place over to Shangri-La because Shangri-La was this big old–I was telling you–at the bottom of Shangri-La when you first drove in off the road was this corral, right?  This lower part of Rancho Shangri-La was flat and then you went up the hill to where the house was.  It wasn’t a big hill, it was only about a hundred feet high from the lower part.  But he drove up the driveway, up to the upper big old, spread-out California Ranch House.  But on the end, Elvis Presley had built a whole row of cottages, just like a wing of a motel off of one end of it, and each one was a little cottage with it’s own bathroom and everything.  I guess that’s where his band and stuff would all stay.  Each one had their own room and everything.  Robbie then gave me the end room out of all the whole rows the end, which looked right down this beautiful canyon out at Zuma beach.  So I had this just beautiful ocean view and everything.  It was really cool.   Down at the bottom where the corral was, before Elvis, then it was a TV program called “Mr. Ed, The Talking Horse” did you see that?  Mr. Ed lived in the barn, in the corral at the bottom of the road!  It was Mr. Ed’s corral and they actually filmed him there with the little house and he’d be coming through the door and talking to Wilber and stuff, and that is where they actually shot Mr. Ed!  We were teenagers, when that was happening.  And so when I’m living there we had about –I moved in there about the end of ”75 and the two of us  were going to start to –oh like February of ’76, so we had like three or four months before we actually got on the road, just kind of putting things together and everything and Robbie was arranging for the last show that was The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving Day with Bill Graham and stuff and Scorsese, the film director, he did that film and it was incredible, it was the best rock film, I think, that’s ever been made.  I designed the stage sets in The Last Waltz.  Bill Graham and I, Bill’s an  old buddy of mine,  and he did a whole lot of this of The Band’s Last Show.  He did a whole lot of CSNY shows the year before, so Bill and I had been  out on the road a bunch doing the shows and when we went to do The Last Waltz we got there a week early and Bill goes, “Hey Sandy, come with me, we’re going to go down to the San Francisco Opera Company’s warehouse and we’re going to pick the sets for the stage for The Last Waltz.  You see the chandeliers and the big curtains on the stage–that’s all from La Proviado (Traviata} operas– “Well, we’ll take this, this, and this…” we’d put it all together so but–we had so much before we went out on the road and we grew some pot in Mr. Ed’s corral where Mr. Ed had been shitting for twelve years and the ground was really fertile and the plants just took off–they grew like fourteen feet high and they grew higher than the hedges and stuff.  They were like sort of blocking the filming for Mr. Ed and the road–they grew way up above that–all the way down Malibu has like a hundred and fifty cops that just keep patrolling.  Malibu’s a mile wide and twenty miles long and they just have cops all the time–it’s the ’70s–you-d go to jail for pot and stuff.  Our pot plants they just grow so high that you could literally see them from Highway 1!  And there is a stop sign right at Morning View Road and the cops had plenty of time just to stop and glance up the canyon and see the pot plants, there were only like two football fields away and everybody’s going, “Oh my God, man–we were going to get busted but it was SO good pot–it was just incredibly good pot and we could just smell how good it was and I went, “I’ll handle it.”  And I went down to a craft’s store and I bought four hundred dollars worth of red and orange artificial flowers [who?] on wider? stems and me and the sound engineer who actually lived in Mr. Ed’s that was converted into a little tiny cottage that our sound engineer lived in and it was in his front yard is where we’d grown all the pot.  So I got four hundred dollar worth of big red and yellow  flowers on wire. and we just wired them to the plants so all the plants had red and yellow flowers just all growing all over and son-of-a-gun!  It no longer looked like pot plants anymore.  I thought, “God, you know, I ought to just buy artificial flowers and put them in a plastic sack–bang–two hundred worth of artificial flowers and sell it for fourteen dollars to the pot guys so they could disguise their plants all around the whole United States…  
Anyways that was a fun little thing.  

So that’s how I ended up managing The Band for that whole year and we finished it at Bill Graham’s place at Winterland on Thanksgiving Day.  We fed five thousand people and we fed them and I had my mom and my sister come, I sent a limo over to Freemont to pick them up and bring them there and everything.  It was like one time–it was like the only time they ever came to any of my shows.  And we had a special section for our friends and family and stuff and I became friends with Rodney Wood and Keith Moon while I was The Band’s manager and Tony Curtis and Larry Hagman and just all these amazing people and  so Woodie –Keith Moon moved in and Woody and Keith and I became really good pals just jamming around.  Neill and I went down and for some reason I decided I wanted to get a little trailer because every now and then we would have like Dr. John or these other guys come and use the studio to make their little projects? Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and stuff.  In fact when Clapton was there–

Kirk: So Neil had a studio there?

No, no.  The Band had a studio in Shangri-La and it was a whole studio in one section of the house.  Really a nice studio.  They’d been there for a few years and so everybody, all these other people would rent the studio and sometimes they’d have to use the “Star” you know would want my place with the ocean view and so I’d have to sacrifice–so we decided that I would just get a little cool little fourteen foot trailer and keep it in the parking lot  at Shangri-La up next to the house and I’ll go hang out in there.  So I’m just doing that every now and then.  And I was friends with Woody and Keith and they are just crazy English guys, right?  Usually if they’re not drunk they’re high on something, just having as much fun or trouble as they could get into.  and sometimes I’d be sleeping in my little trailer and about three in the morning all of a sudden I’d hear commotion around the trailer as I’m sleeping in there and I’d  hear Woody and Keith going, “Oh my God–Oh my God!  It’s an earthquake–it’s an earthquake!” And they’d start shaking my trailer, right?  So they’d wake me up–“We’d better wake up Sandy! –The trailer is going to go over the cliff!  Oh no!  It’s going over the cliff!  Quick—Sandy!  Get up!”  And I’d go, “Wha…what…what? and I’d come out and they’d all go nuts and I’d go over to Keith’s house and we’d get high for the rest of the night or something.  They were really–that was really fun stuff.  But then I invited Neil because The Last Waltz was all these famous musicians that always loved The Band, it was their chance, Van Morrison, all those guys, to do their stuff with The Band backing them, right.  That was the whole premise of The Last Waltz–the concert film and everything.  And Neil did  the song “Helpless” in The Last Waltz film and Joni Mitchell and Rodney Wood and then Rodney Wood brought Ringo and a bunch of different people and so with Neil we are back stage for The Last Waltz and I’ve been gone from Neil for a year, so this was our chance to do a gig together again so I was mostly–I was taking care of everybody else, all The Band friends too, but I was hanging out with Neil and Joni a whole lot, you know.  We’re back stage.  We had a whole room back stage called Le Cocteau the French artist Cocteau room where everyone would go in and snort their cocaine.  This was 1976, the whole world was on cocaine in ’76.  So we are back there.  They give me the bag of coke to hold for everybody.  Meanwhile Joni and I –everybody’s out, the show’s going because they don’t come out until about the middle and the show’s all going on and everything and Neil and Joni are going back there and Neil goes, “Oh!  We’re on next!  Sandy–some coke!”  “So I’d go, “Okay, here.” and there’s a big rock and I’d go, “Okay, listen, I’ve got to chop it up, you know?”  so I’ve got a mirrors there were mirrors on tables and [ can’t hear–coke to a room?] everything all set up.  And so I’m chopping it up, right?  and Neil’s going, “Hurry–hurry” because they’ve got to get out there, you knew.  And I go, “I am, I’m going as fast as I can!  Ladies first.”  I set  up Joni a little hit of stuff that was really nice and chopped up like I needed more for Neil, so I get another one and start chopping it up.  And he said, “Naw, that’s okay. I think I’m going to go.”  So he just took a big snort and the rocks were kind of still big you know, and they stuck in the hairs of his nose but he left so fast I wasn’t able to catch it or anything–[did voogoo gone?]   In the movie, Scorsese’s doing super hot close ups of Neill, right?  which in film is little tiny pictures but in a giant movie theatre, Neil’s face is like twenty feet high and twelve feet wide and his nostrils are like four foot circles with big white chunks of cocaine hanging out of them.   So Rodney and Scorsese saw the problem and they had to literally take that footage and take it into Hollywood and hand paint each frame of the film–hand paint the coke out of his nose.  it took them an extra week and a half  to do the whole song, you know.  And Rodney came back to me a couple weeks after that, we were off the road and I still have a place at Shangri-La still there.  And Bobby comes and says, “Sandy–I just wants you to know that I just paid $4,650 for a rock of cocaine that big!  I’ve never paid so much money for cocaine in my entire life!  I told him, “No problem.”  We didn’t talk about my first tour but we had  fun covering [can’t hear—] then after that, the next day, we did The Last Waltz and we’re all sitting at the Japanese hotel The Miyake Hotel in Japan town in San Francisco.  It’s a really fancy Japanese hotel, I didn’t know Japantown over there and each room has it’s own hot tubs and all kinds of cool stuff.  So we stayed there and whenever Neil and I had been out on the road on all our previous tours and stuff we always had breakfast together the next morning and so we’re having breakfast the next morning, after The Last Waltz, and it was a late morning because we had got in a long night the night before, and so we’re having breakfast, coffee and eggs and stuff and Neill goes, “So what are you going to do now?”  And I’m really happy with The Band, you know, I’d been with them for a year.  I got my place at Shangri-La and everything.  And I go, “What do you mean, what am I going to about…”  He goes, “Last night The Band just announced to the entire world that this is their last show!”  And I went, “Yeah?”  He goes, “So that means they’re not going to be playing together anymore.”  And I went, “Yeah?” And he goes, “That means they’re not going to be going on the road anymore.”  And I went, “Yeah?”  And he says, “You’re their road manager.”  I went, “…Oh.”   [ Laughs. ]  

He said, “Look, I’ve got this big hundred foot boat in the Caribbean that’s moved up–I had to move it up to Fort Lauderdale.  They’ve got it –I want it rebuilt because down below, it’s a 1911 Eighty-five on deck, a hundred and four feet over, all Baltic rig, [gaffrig catch?] from the Baltic Ocean, right?  and he said they belong to some millionaire down in the Caribbean and Europeans, down below you’ve got modern Formica white Formica so it could all be kept really clean all down below and everything, very “boatmanlike” kind of but sparse.  He goes, “That’s not me.”  he goes.  so we are going to design the whole inside of the boat.  It’s 24 feet wide and 86 feet long made out of timber that’s like the hull was like four inches thick by fourteen inch plank oak and stuff.  180 ton boat.  Big big boat.  So he said, “It’s in Fort Lauderdale.  They’ve got it all hollowed out.  And they’ve sand blasted it.  All of the inside.  It was a granite hauler originally before the millionaire put his stuff in it originally it was to haul granite from Norway, where  they have lots of granite and they would motor up the North Sea, load this giant hull in front of the whole front of the boat was this big empty hull where they would fill with granite in the center of the boat and then they’d turn around and put up the gaff sails and they’d sail back down because the prevailing winds were blowing that way.  And so it was a granite hull.  And so the inside of the main salon in the middle of the boat was an inner lining of big giant heavy planks because they didn’t want the stone to break through the hull, right?  So they had a second sort of loose hull but big enough for giant chunks of granite. And all the granite had scarred the wood, really deeply, like an inch, you know, an inch deep, but the wood was like, three inches.  So it had all these scars and stuff.  So when they sand-blasted it all the scars were really beautiful so we just all kept that and then  designed the whole boat with other wood we got these big slabs from this rancher, wood slabs that we’d made from the redwood forest for countertops and tables.  We bought a big French butcher block that  they would butcher meat on and stuff.  That was sort of like a coffee table in the main salon the thing weighed about six hundred pounds, it was huge.  Everything was big.  We went to the Hemmingway museum in Key West and they had –Hemmingway was a hunter, right?  He liked to go hunting and he had the world’s biggest elephant’s tusk.  It was like 12 or 14 feet long and about 12 inches in diameter tapering down.  Big curved hunk of ivory.  Solid tusk.  And we bought it.  And we put it down in Neil’s –Neil took the whole forward third of the boat and then the middle section was like the salon and the galley area and then there was — it had a brand new Caterpillar engine in it and a captain’s room way at the back of the boat.  it had like staterooms off of the main salon and stuff.  The elephant tusk, we took the hull, it’s kind of curved, right? Inside –so we took the tusk, just put it off the hull and made that like a guest bed in Neil’s stateroom for his kid to sleep in and something like that.  Just this beautiful Ivory tusk.  So we had like, treasures, down below in his boat and a pump organ right at the front of Neil’s stateroom where it’ [sudd–] to the bow–it got smaller right at the very end of it.  Not at the pointed end because there was a paint locker and stuff up there but like a four or five foot wall section at the front is tapered to about four foot wall and we put this old pump organ, an old antique one Neill could play, it was really cool.  So we left The Last Waltz and went to the Ranch, got everything together and decided to go up route 66 for a week or two working our way across the country to Fort Lauderdale with the boat.  So we lived on the bus.  It took us about nine days to get to Fort Lauderdale.  And that was really a fun trip going on route 66 because it was really dilapidated still and everything in those days.  They still had the old tee-pee section you could back in wherever it was like, pretty cool in the ’50’s, you know.

I had this idea that route 66, they built a super highway next to 66, right?  And that’s why 66 became sort of like a ghost town that nobody went to because the highway  just took everybody faster so it was really funky and it wasn’t very prosperous so I thought, “This is where the artist community from Santa Monica all across the country, the middle of the country could just be Art!  Sculptors could live in this section– painters here, galleries and museums living in the old cement Teepees and you know, whatever.  I just thought, that would just be an incredible thing, just to turn route 66 because artists  love cheap rent, right?  I mean, that’s SoHo and all those great artist spots that are now very expensive.  It used to be the cheapest places around, right?  I just thought this is perfect for artists, man.  It would just be incredible and the whole middle of the nation be nothing but creativity and stuff.  Anyway, we had some pretty good times.  Then we went to Fort Lauderdale and this was after ’76 in November we got to Fort Lauderdale in January.  We did Christmas at the ranch, Rodney Wood and people all came up to the ranch for Christmas and stuff.  And then right around February we decided to go live on Route 66 and across the country.   

Kirk:  Who went with you?

This is Neil and I and a guy who was my assistant out on the 74 tour used to be a ranger up in Pescadero, used to call Ranger Dave.  The guy was really good detail man.  Every little detail of everything we had to do, Ranger Dave was on top of it.  He’s the kind of guy, he worked at the San Matteo memorial  park up above Pescadero there’s a big park up there and he was a ranger up there.  He got famous for picking up cigarette butts off the side of the trail.  He was so efficient.  So he went with us and the three of us, which is great because we could share the driving.  Your driving a forty foot silver Eagle, you know, it’s pretty trippy, pretty fun stuff.  So yeah, he went with us.  

We get to Fort Lauderdale and start working on redesigning the boat and Neil had hired all the best wooden boat builders on the East coast.  He had a whole team of them.  Just shortening the wheel house and just doing all the stuff. When we finished the boat and got it running, Architectural Digest Magazine did a fourteen page spread of down-below.  They didn’t say who the boat belonged to, they just showed every little thing.

Kirk:  What did they name the boat?

Yeah, well we named the boat after—the whole boat was named after Neil’s family, the whole boat was named The WN Raglan that was his mother’s father who was a Canadian bird guide, hunting up in Norther Canada who could call down ducks and call down the geese and stuff.  And people would hire him to go bird-hunting and stuff.  He was like this world-famous Canadian bird guide and so we named it the WN Raglan, which the nickname for this giant sailboat was “rags” which was the perfect name for a big sailboat, ox-blood sails and everything.

But down below, all those little staterooms for the guests and stuff–each one the main salon was name “Pearl”.  Pearl was Neil’s maternal grandmother that was married to WN Ragland, right.  So the main salon was Pearl.  And then there was “Rasees?” which is his mother and his mother had two sisters, so each of the staterooms was named after the daughters and then there were two heads.  There was a head up in Neil’s place and then a head in the salon for everybody else to use.  There were showers in there and he goes, “What are we going to call them?” And I says, “The head–the heads.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got your grandfather and your grandmother, we got their children, did you have any pets?”  And he said, “Yeah, they had two dogs.”  And I said, “What were the names of the dogs?”  He said, “Bonnie Pie and Stinky-poo!”  There you go!  Perfect.  I’ll take Bonny Pie and you can take Stinkypoo out there!”  (Laughs)  So anyway, that was really fun.

So we’re hanging out and -Oh- while we were there, Neil decides to go buy this 1936 Matherson-Trumpy riverboat, because there’s inline canals on the East coast and they made these mahogany riverboats, kind of, houseboats, basically but they are like, two-stories and everything, like a big kind of house, I mean these are about forty-five feet long, it was a nice size, and antique, it had antique curtains and lace and stuff in the windows.  It was really cute.  It kind of leaked a little but we got the got the bilge pump going all the time.  So he bought that and we moved on that while we were working on the big boat, that’s where Neil and I lived.  And I think Ranger Dave had to go back to California after awhile so it was just Neil and I.

So we are in Fort Lauderdale and then one day Stephen Stills has a big mansion on an island off in Miami and he invites Neil and I to come down and in the Matherson-Trumpy and he’s got a big dock in his backyard and hang out.  So Neil goes, “Let’s go!”  I was in the Coast Guard so, you know, Neil felt safer than I did.  So Neil made me the temporary Captain.  So we get her fired up.  It’s always fired up.  The only problem is, it has an electric bilge pump.  It didn’t have a battery-powered bilge pump so once we unplugged from Fort Lauderdale we had about twenty-six miles of inland canal to go down to get to Stephen’s place which is about three or four hours of cruising at four and five knots and by the time we got to Stephen’s we were low in the water.  Then it occurred to me, “Oh my God, I’d better check the bilge.  I looked at the bilge.  Bilges were full.  Just full.  And I said, “Fuck man, we could fucking sink!”  And we still had like six more miles and another hour to get to Stephen’s place and I just go, “Come on, we got [can’t hear-something?] we gotta go, we just–we may make it, we may not make it.”  So we get to Stephen’s place and we were so low in the water it’s almost coming up through the floor boards.  The bilge was about three and a half, four feet deep, so it was a lot of water, swimming pool basically.  We get there and we were so low in the water, Steve’s going, “A-Hoy, there!”  “Here take the ropes, get us some tied up along side of the road, we need a power cord!  Get a power cord ready!  Get us plugged in!”  

We get plugged in.  We hang out at Stephen’s place for about two or three days with —you can only take so much of Stephen Stills so after about three or four days, Neil goes, “Let’s go down to Coconut Grove because that’s where all the clubs were and all the party time and some pretty girls and everything.  He said, “Let’s go down to Coconut Grove and I can get us a slip down there.”  So we did.  So we left and we went over to Coconut Grove and we lived in Coconut Grove for about two weeks and we are going up by car, we run up to Fort Lauderdale to check on the boat but who lived in Coconut Grove was Freddy Neil, the singer-songwriter, Fred Neil.  He wrote “Everybody’s Talking” the theme to the cowboy movie.  [Urben Cowboy?]  What’s-his-name sang it, made it famous, was the other guy [Glen Campbell?].  But Fred Neil wrote it.  Fred Neil was a real famous folksinger and it was the guy who actually took young Bob Dylan off of the streets and started introducing him to the club members in Greenwich Village.  When Bob first started it was Fred Neil that actually got Bob going, you know, from Minnesota to you know…
And Fred Neil writes great songs. He wrote, “I’ve Been Searchin’ For The Dolphins In The Sea”, the Linda Ronstadt made famous.  All kinds of  people sang Freddie Neil songs and they were all beautiful hits and stuff.  And Freddie was a heroin addict and had his own thing, but he was really a super nice guy.  And his best friend in Coconut Grove was Vinny Marty? [Martin?] and Vinny Martin had had a hit in the ‘ 50s, called “Marianne:  …..works down by the seashore, sifting sand…Even little children love Marianne….down by the seashore sifting sand…”  That was a huge hit in 1957 or something.  And so Vinny and Fred would come over to –we named the houseboat the Evening Coconut, right?  So they would come over to the Old Evening Coconut and Vinny–I think Vinny went back to New York–so then mostly it was just Fred Neil would come over with his guitar and Neil and him would sit on the back fantail in the houseboat every evening around sunset, I’d make up a blender full of Margaritas and we’d sit back there and they’d jam together.  And Freddy Neil has a really low, deep beautiful velvety voice, just incredible.  And Neil has a really high voice and hearing these two guys singing–it was like, Holy Shit, what a combination of voices.  It was amazing.  And I was like the whole audience, it was an audience of one, me!  It was just so cool.  Really nice, really cool.  And I became friends with Fred and everything and he was a good guy.  

Send? Neil down at Coconut Grove at one of the clubs one night.  I think I had a date or something.  He went off to some club.  And he met some guy, you know, with a gold chain around his neck, and has really got it–[fingers snapping]  and Neil just kinda got into this guy’s trip, because it was just not kind of like us from the ranch or anything, and the guy goes, “Let’s go down and look at cars!” (because Neil is a car guy).  And the guy takes him to this Ferrari place, right?  And he’s trying to talk Neil into buying a brand new Ferrari.  Neil’s a ’48 Buick-guy.  You know?  Maybe a ’57 Caddy if it’s a convertible with fins.  But he’s not a Ferrari , in fact, he had an old 1932 Bentley and he got rid of it because it was just a little too sporty.  And he started—you know, they’re into the blow and they’re into the club scene, and I’m staying at The Evening Coconut, and I’m kind of seeing what’s happening, and Neil’s like really falling for this guy’s rap and Neil’s thinking, “Yeah Man, I can get a Ferrari.”  And finally, I just went, “Man, Neil’s just turning into this person that’s not him, and I’ve never seen him before, so one morning at breakfast I just went, “Look, I have to tell you something.  I’ve seen you hanging out with what’s–his-name and it seems like the more this guy kisses your ass, the more you bend over and smile.”  And I said, “I can’t take it.  I don’t want to be around it.  I’m going back to California.  You go buy your Ferrari and have fun with your new friend and I’ll just see ya.  I’ll be back in California.”  And I split.

And I come back and I didn’t want to go to the ranch because it’s empty, Neil’s back in Florida.  And so, I’m a Santa Cruz guy, so I phoned Jeff Blackbird? and Bob Moseley from Moby Grape that used to play at the Ark where I had my very first light shows–right?  I told you about the Ark and Sausalito when I got out of the Coast Guard.  And those were my old buddies right there, Lee Michaels and stuff.  But Blackbird lived in Santa Cruz –and still does, and Bob Moseley lived down here and Johnny Carviato [spelling?] which is this drummer friend of ours, who makes really beautiful snare drums, he wasn’t back in those days,  this was 1977, I moved back to Santa Cruz from Florida, and Blackbird (Blackman?) had an old one-and-a-half acre–it used to be a farm, it was that water tower on 38th Avenue, just a block from Pleasure Point.  So I still had my little tiny trailer from Malibu.  So I went down, I picked up my trailer, it was over at a friend’s house, I’d stuck it over at a friend’s place in Malibu and I went over and I picked it up and I brought it back up to Santa Cruz and parked it on Buck’s property there, and was just getting ready–Buck and Johnny and Mosely–guitar, bass, and drums, were going to put together a little trio and play over the Summer, they were going to call themselves “Buck ‘n The Odds” (Buckin’ the Odds) and so they said, “Cool man, you could be our manager!”  Yeah, it’s good, we’re all pals.  I went, “Cool.”  So I move right in and it’s kind of fun, I’m back in Santa Cruz and it’s really nice and I’m going for about two weeks and all of a sudden Neil shows up–and he just drives in.  I didn’t even know how he found us but he did.  And he drives in and I go, “Oh”. [Snide voice] “Where’s your Ferrari?” and he goes, “Yeah, Mazz.  Mazz, I’ve got to tell you something.”  He goes, “I don’t have many friends that can just come and tell me the truth and how they see things.  Most people just want to accommodate me all the time and say yes to everything.  You’re a real friend.  I just have to let you know that I really value that.”  And I went, “Cool.  Good.” And he goes, “So what are you guys doing?”  And I said, “Well, we got a little three-piece band, we started playing some clubs around town here, you know, Moseley and Blackburn [?] and Johnny Gravianno.  And he goes, “So you got, let’s see, bass and–Blackburn’s a great rhythm guitar player and you got Moseley on bass and Johnny on the drums….Sounds like they need another guitar player.”  And I went, “Sure!”

And so Neil literally moved into Buck’s ranch with us, because it was a little apartment off one side and all overgrown and we kind of cleaned it out and he moved in and we drove around town and started figuring out what we were doing and we said, “Well, we like doing these things called “Art Attacks” and so we are just going to just consider this a Summer Surf band.  Which is actually going to be an Art Attack in disguise.  And Neil goes, “Okay, but here’s the deal.  We are not going to play outside the city limits of Santa Cruz.  We’re not going to play Capitola.  All we did was city limits of Santa Cruz.  And they had about five or six live clubs going in 1977.  There was The Catalyst, which we never really wanted to play because it was too [organized?] but they had these little tiny clubs.  There was one called The Backroom, which was [little off-of-London?] hotels off of SoCal Ave.  There’s one out on Harvey West Park called The Steamboat, another one out there called The Crossroads, which was a biker-beer bar–but they all had music.  And there were bands, there was The Snail Band, which was a local band, there was another band called The Artichokes, and there was one that did nothing but 50’s rock ‘n roll stuff from San Jose, played over here all the time at the beach and stuff.  So there were five or six little clubs that we could play, all just bouncing around.  And one day we’re driving, one day Neil brought down this ’48 Packard Woody station wagon which we made the band car and we’d all drive around in the Woody from town over to Pleasure Point.  And we’d go by Twin Lakes, where the harbor is, and the lagoon.  And i was thinking, “What are we going to call the band?” And we were throwing out all these names:  “Thunderhead!” All these different things…

And we go down into the Lagoon and there’s a duck crossing from the beach over the lagoon and they had a sign right in the road that said “Duck Crossing!” with this little plywood cop and we’d been shouting out all these names and we come down the hill we get to the lagoon and there’s a little crosswalk and we kind of slow down and we go “Oh, duck crossing….” and Neil goes, “That’s it–Ducks!  That’s the perfect name!  Because in the grocery store and in the bakery shops, all over Santa Cruz at that time in ’77, they had big boxes of stale bread with signs saying, “Feed the ducks”.  The whole town was into ducks!  There was even a story about one of our surfer buddies when I was in high school named Dave Pussinger.  Pussinger had this old black Packard hearse.  Really sinister old hearse.  And Pussinger was about my age and we were all juniors and seniors in high school and surfing at Pleasure Point and Cals[?] Beach. 

And Pussinger, one day, we didn’t really didn’t realize right at the time but we found out later that when Pussinger’s father was at Duck’s Unlimited, right?  He was a duck hunter.  And he had duck plates on the dining room table, duck wallpaper, and Pussinger’s bedroom: Ducks–his whole–Pussinger grew up with ducks and his parents didn’t get along all that well, right?  So one day, Pussinger is driving down by the lagoon in his black hearse and this little family of ducks is waddling across from the beach over to the lagoon and Pussinger steps on the gas and runs over and kills six ducks and he’s the only old black hearse in town, so it’s pretty easy to figure out who did it because there were witnesses.  He gets arrested.  This is years before we got the band.  Many years before.  And he gets arrested and it’s in the newspapers and everything–“He’s a duck killer!” and he gets up in front of the judge and the judge sentences him to jail and says, “A day, a duck.”  So he had to go to jail for six days.  So when we had the ducks when I told them the story about Pussinger, and we turned into “The Pussinger Curse”, right?  The only problem, in Santa Cruz, when Pussinger killed the six ducks, there was Old Master Mallard [can’t hear] he was like a shaman duck.  And he put a curse on the town that couldn’t be broken unless everybody in town quacked like a duck.  And that would break the curse.  So the whole Summer thing was for the ducks to get everybody in town to at least once in the Summer quack like a duck to break the curse.  So we would have shows–the ducks–and anybody that came with a duck call could get in for free.  Anybody who came up to the cash register–we decided to only charge $2.50 at the door because when we all first met each other in ‘ 66 when I had my first light show at The Ark, that was how much it cost to get in to see the shows, is $2.50.  And by that time it was up to four or five bucks, in ’77 from ’67.  But we decided, let’s have ten-year-old prices.  So these guys are getting Neil Young for $2.50 and so–crowds, just everybody–beautiful girls–and just everything.  

So we got everybody to quack like ducks at the concert.  And we also got Mulligan, from the ranch, who was a recording engineer.  We got a truck set up with recording equipment, a mobile truck.  So we had Mulligan come down every night from the ranch up in by Half-Moon Bay, come down and wire up wherever we were going to play in the afternoon and we recorded every single show we ever did for the entire Summer.  And I think that we’re the only band that ever existed literally recorded every single show that they ever did from beginning to end, we did like twenty-six shows over the Summer.  And we have all those records, all those recordings.  We kept them all.  Neil’s doing his archives now and he just had me do a take-off on the Zuma album cover but there is also a duck album too, from the making of the duck recordings.  Then we started to pick, just the best take of this one, basically the duck set, but the best of all the different shows, the best recordings to put together for the record and I told Neil, I said, “No, man.  What we should do is offer every single show that we did from the time The Ducks started to the very last show.  Then everybody could go to every single show and listen to every single show, they’d have twenty-six albums to listen to, you know?  So, I don’t know where they are at with that, because it hasn’t come out yet, but that’s what I’m kind of hoping for, because that would be like a truly historic thing, really historic.  

So that was the — we moved over by –you know where the museum over off Sea Bright Beach is, with the Whale on the front lawn?  Across from that museum are two little cottages right on the cliff.  Neil and I rented those.  We rented them for $400 a month.  We moved out of my trailer and out of funky Blackburn’s–we called it Duck Landing over on 38th Avenue.  We moved off of Duck Landing and he and I got these really cool places right on the cliff.  The band would come over and there’s a lawn at one of the places right at the edge of a cliff and down off the cliff is Sea Bright Beach.  It used to be called Castle Beach in the old days.  So we’d set up on the lawn and every afternoon the band would play and practice for that night.  First thing–I’m their road manager–so first thing, they’d go, “Well, tonight we want to play The Crossroads Club and I’d phone the Crossroads but they’re all booked, right?  They’re booked.  They’ve got bands that are going to play that night.  So I call The Backroom or The Crossroads or whatever clubs they told me they wanted to play at, I’d call the club: “Oh, The Artichokes are playing tonight.”  I’d say, “Well, give me their phone number.”  So I would get their phone number and I’d go, “So you guys are playing The Crossroads tonight, huh?”  And they go, “Oh yeah.”  And I said, “Uh–how much money do you think you’re going to make tonight?”  And they said, “Are you guys playing in town?”  I go, “Yeah”.  They’d go, “Not much!” Because everybody’s going to be to see us, right?  And I’d say, “What do you think?  A hundred bucks, a hundred fifty bucks?  How much?”  And they’d say, “Yeah, if we’re lucky we would make a hundred bucks.”  I said, “I’ll pay you $150 not to play.  We’ll take your spot tonight.”

So I would pay them $150 and I’d say, “You’re our guests, you know.  Come and hang out, have a good time.”  And so that’s how I would do it, everyday I just phoned a different band and they’d say Backroom tonight, or The Steamboat, a different place every night.  And we just bounce it around.  And I’d just phone whatever band that was playing and we’d bump ’em, pay them not to show up, kind of farmers growing soybeans or something.

Kirk:  So the band would decide where to play the same day that they were going to play.

Yeah, in the morning.  They wouldn’t even tell me until the morning, right?  But nobody’s going to say no, because it’s Neil Young and he’s legendary in ’77 he’s got a big rep.  And the whole town’s going nuts, everybody is quacking like ducks at the concerts and stuff.  Not everybody knew that if they just winked and said, “Cool Duck.”  they could get in for free.  Just people who we’d say, “Here, just tell the cashier “cool duck” and wink and then [can’t hear: Then they’d duck call?].  So on the tape you hear people quacking like ducks all the time in between the songs.  We’d drive down the road and people would quack at us as we drove across town.  India Joe’s was this restaurant in town that was a late-night restaurant so after the gig we would go to India Joe’s.  But we never had much money.  We’d be lucky at the end of the night if we each made $2.50 each.  They only held like a hundred fifty people, seventy-five to a hundred fifty.  Two hundred people was a big crowd.  That’s only like $400 for Mulligan, and the sound truck? and you know–we’d be lucky to end up with $200 each at the end of the night.  So we’d go to India Joe’s and people would know that we went there after the gig so that place was just rockin’ like at one in the morning [can’t hear next word] because they were doing such good business, right?  Because we were there every night, that the owner of the place, I’d tell ’em I’d say, “Yeah, you know, we’re a little short on money…”  And they’d say, “Don’t worry about it!”  I said, “Here’s our check.” He goes, “Just sign it ‘Ducks'”.  And so I’d just write “Ducks” on our bill and the guy started pinning them up by the cash register.  He had a whole wall.  He said, “Yeah, it’s deductible!”  It was a business investment because his business was making so much money from everybody else.  So we ate for free.  It was really fun.  

Then two motorcycle guys, near the end of the Summer, we were going pretty strong and living at those places on the cliff.  But we’re off doing a gig one night and these two motorcycle guys, a couple days before that last gig, went to the Crows’ Nest with guns and laid down everybody in The Crows’ Nest, robbed The Crows’ Nest–they robbed The Sky-View drive-in movie theatre.  They were on a binge, they were two little outlaw motorcycle guys.  They robbed the drive-in one night.  They robbed the Crows’ Nest the next night.  I think they did two or three robberies and then one night they came over and broke into our house and stole a bunch of shit from us–BUT–we’d had all Summer here, you know, and we’d go down to Union Grove to The Guitar Shop and Neil would look at Guitars, and look at stuff.  Just goofin’ around during the day.  We bought bicycles.  We’d ride bikes across town.  it was really fun.  

One time at Union Grove, right at the beginning, when we moved into the cliff house, we went to Union Grove.  When we’d crossed the country going to Miami, going on route 66, we stopped in Nashville, Tennessee and hung out with Bobby Charles and Ben Keith, Neil’s steel guitar player.  Bobby Charles is a friend of ours who wrote “See Ya Later, Alligator”.  He was a song-writer’s songwriter.  Everybody Bobby Charles, Bob Dylan–everybody sang Bobby Charles’ s songs.  He’s legendary, and he’s a great guy, Cajun, from the swamp.  We all hung out.  We hung out there for about a week-and-a-half in our bus because we were living in a bus across route 66 and there was an empty lot next to the Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville.  There was just this empty lot.  We didn’t even ask permission, we just parked in the empty lot and Ranger Dave snuck an extension cord from the museum plug outside over the fence and into our bus and we had electricity and just moved in there.  It was a big fancy bus and the museum just thought it was another rock or country-music star [can’t hear–something like “let us alone” ?]

So we’re there, and we go shopping for guitars there in Nashville and we get turned on to an opportunity to buy Hank William’s guitar and his kid, Hank Williams Jr., who does pretty good too.  But as Hank Williams Jr., as a kid, he was a problem kid, and his father was on the road and he died young himself, and Hank Williams Jr. destroyed most of his father’s guitars.  So much so that one of the old-timer friends of Hank’s grabbed this Martin, that Hank had, and just got it out of the house, so he’d already destroyed a couple of Hank’s [stock?stuff?] .  We got that guitar and we bought a decoy guitar at Union Grove.  It was an old Kay? that needed refinishing It was beautiful.  The guy did a beautiful job refinishing it.  They only wanted fifty bucks for it but it was so pretty.  We bought it for $50 but they said, “This would be a good decoy-(duck decoy–right!) and so we got it and when we set up the beach house in Neil’s living room I put the guitar stand and I put the decoy right there in the living room so when the guys broke into the house they stole Neil’s guitar, they stole the Kay but in his back-bedroom closet, buried under some clothing, was Hank William’s guitar, so they missed that!  So our decoy-thing worked!  But it bummed out Neil that we got broken into but that’s what pretty much ended The Ducks, he went back to the ranch.  But the Ducks ended.  I went to court and testified against the two guys and identified my stuff.

So I became friends with the district attorney who later became a judge, which is pretty cool.  Anyway, that’s pretty much the story of The Ducks, that’s pretty good.