A Velvet Underground Mystery, the NAMM Show, and a Batmobile

by Jim Washburn

A musician friend invited me to a salon he and his wife were hosting at their San Francisco home, where an old beat poet type named Mel would be talking about Angus MacLise, the mysterious, little-known first drummer of the Velvet Underground.

I went, although the only mysterious thing to me about the Velvets is the fact that anyone liked them. My enjoyment of them has always been limited by the fact that I don’t enjoy them. It doesn’t even sound to me like the band liked what it was doing itself; their records seem far more joyless than anyone with a Gretsch Country Gentleman has any right to sound.

I guess you had to be there, though many who were there also didn’t dig them at all, particularly folks on the West Coast, where we had Captain Beefheart, Love, Spirit and so much else to keep us busy.

But there’s no denying the Velvets meant a whole lot to some people, one being Vaclav Havel, another being my friend, who has written at least 200 better songs than I ever will, one of them being a song about the Velvets, which I also like far better than I do anything the Velvets ever did themselves.

not Nico; rather an analog synth reissue from NAMM

There are many paths to enlightenment, and I don’t have to enjoy the Velvets to enjoy the effect they’ve had on some people, just as I don’t have to, for example, get Mormonism to appreciate the truly kind, spiritual Mormons I’ve been lucky to know.

So I went up, it being easier these days to get to San Francisco than to L.A. For $90 plus inconvenience fees, I flew Virgin from John Wayne to SFO, in a spanking new plane with TV/Internet/gaming consoles on every seatback (hint to Virgin: customers might fly a little more at ease if one of the games available wasn’t called Mad Bomber) and absinthe among the drinks being offered.

Got off the plane, walked to the BART station at the airport, took the train into town for $8.05, got off and right onto a bus, got off, walked a couple of blocks and was at his house. If I’d been driving to L.A., I’d probably still have been in traffic.

So we listened to some Velvets—I’ll admit they did have a certain unprecedented churn going on, though I prefer the contemporaneous chug of their labelmates the Mothers of Invention on “Trouble Coming Every Day”—and went shopping at the sprawling Rainbow health food co-op to accumulate a largely vegan repast for the evening. (For those of you who don’t do dairy or wheat, may I recommend Amy’s brand soy cheese, rice flour pizzas? They are actually pizza-like and delicious and they do not, as other wheat-free pizzas tend, turn into a failed ceramics project in your oven.)

That night. MacLise’s brief 1966 tenure in the pre-Mo Tucker Velvets wasn’t made much less mysterious. Mel only knew him later, after MacLise had quit the band because they’d “sold out” in taking a $75 paying gig, and hopped a Yugoslav freighter, on which one could get from New York to Morocco for $105 back then. There, he was slightly behind Burroughs and well ahead of Brian Jones in asking the question, “Hey, what’s the holiest place where we can go do a lot of drugs and lay about?”

While there, he headed into the Rif Mountains and hooked up with the Sufi master musicians of Joujouka, and studied their drumming. Some tapes of MacLise’s drumming were played, and he definitely had something going. The music sounded hypnotic and holy. MacLise ended up in Kathmandu, where he died of TB and exposure at age 41. Mel was there when he was cremated: poor strangers gathered around to dry their laundry in the heat. Meanwhile a member of some sub-untouchable caste waited with a long pole, for just the right moment in the burn when he could tap the skull with his pole and it would crumble, freeing the soul.

The next day we went by trolley car and foot to North Beach, where my friend and former L.A. Times editor Tony Lioce has finally found honest employment as a bartender at Vesuvio, the famed bar that shares an alley with City Lights Books. It’s a dream job for him, and I’ve never seen such a happy bunch of Sunday morning drinkers, who all seemed to have nicknames like Jimmy the Reluctant Carpenter.

Tony, another Velvets devotee, was the best boss I ever had, a legend in his own right. We were in a Times band together and once went back to Boston to play a wedding. We shared a motel room. He arrived on a later flight, having had to work late, and took a shower when he arrived. The last two places he’d been were the newsroom and an airplane, yet when he exited the bathroom there was debris littering the floor, I mean dirt and twigs and stuff, like he’d been prowling the woods of Braintree, Massachusetts in werewolf form all night. That’s Tony.

I freelanced at the Times OC when there was a hiring freeze on. I once asked Tony what my prospects were of ever getting hired onto the staff. Always straightforward, he told me, “There’s about as much chance of that happening as I have of sprouting a twat.”

While he finished his shift, I wandered through City Lights, where I determined that even without computers, there’s just too damned much information in the world, including three fat volumes on the slim Velvets. (One is a day-by-day account of their doings, which I can only imagine reads: August 16, 1967: score smack; August 17, 1967: score smack, August 18 ...) There was also a lengthy bio of Lester Bangs and a history of ambience in sound recording.

My musician friend lives at the edge of the Castro district, a lovely neighborhood, though somewhat different from OC. In any number of storefront window there, you’ll find generous, colorful arrays of butt plugs laid out like pastry. I’m all for a healthy, open attitude about sex, but wonder, what’s the point of sticking a huge, painful obelisk up your ass if you can’t be ashamed of it?

Deke Dickerson in the Batmobile

Back home, I went to the opening day of the NAMM show, the musical instrument trade show that annually sprawls through every inch of the Anaheim Convention Center. I’ve been going to NAMM since the late 1970s, when it used to squeeze into the old Disneyland Hotel, and have tried to cover its trends in print for decades. I give up. There are no more trends. There’s just stuff, and always more of it: music modeling software of such limitless vistas that I can’t comprehend it; exacting reissues of some of the most unexacting cheap-ass guitars ever manufactured; and always dozens of new companies who seem to think there’s more room for yet another Strat or Marshall copy.

There were some fun things. The Voyage-Air company has added an electric guitar line to their series of acoustic guitars, in which the necks are cleverly hinged to fold over the body to store for travel in a backpack that also has room for your laptop, and can double for an umpire’s vest in a pinch. Hallmark Guitars introduced its bat-wing shaped Wing-Bat guitar by having Deke Dickerson play one seated in an actual Batmobile, one of seven made by George Barris for the ’60s TV show. Deke also organizes and hosts the terrific NAMM-adjacent Deke’s Guitar Geek Festival, which this year features Duane Eddy, 94-year-old Honeyboy Edwards, the Fireballs’ George Tomsco, and Meshugga Beach Party, billed as the world’s only all-Jewish surf band.

Another highlight for me was the rebirth of Kay guitars. Between the 1920s and 1970, if you got an American guitar so cheap, ungainly, and hard to play that it made you cry, it was probably a Kay. But the Chicago maker was a full-service giant that also made some mid-quality instruments that were possible to play, and were affordable to roots musicians. Everyone from Barney Kessel to Eric Clapton to Howlin’ Wolf’s unknown bass player has got the job done on a Kay at one time or another. And it pleases me no end that some of the most downscale instruments ever are now being lovingly recreated by a company based in Newport Beach.

Larry Taylor (Canned Heat and more) on a Kay Thin-Twin

The economy is taking a toll, and several manufacturers didn’t bother exhibiting this year. And one hears dire rumors about one of the most famous names in guitars, Gibson. It was recently named the worst place to work in America by glassdoor.com, which lists dozens of scathing employee commentaries about the hell of working there. Meanwhile the company is under investigation for possibly buying embargoed endangered woods. While they typically occupy a large suite at NAMM, they year they just had a few models on display at their budget-line Epiphone booth. Gibson’s chief electric guitar rival Fender already owns Gretsch, Guild, and other once independent brands. Will Gibson be next?

Another sad note of change: outside of NAMM, protesters had come all the way from Korea to inform people that there are far worse places to work than Gibson: they’re former employees of Cort guitars, whose Korean factories also made guitars for Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, and other name brands. Workers there made less than $24 a day, they claim, with unpaid daily overtime, dangerous work conditions and not even the right to go to the bathroom until they unionized, at which point the owner padlocked the plants and moved manufacturing to even-cheaper, union-shunning China. Just something to think about when you’re exulting about the great deal you got on a Chinese guitar.

Comments

Comments closed.