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He came up with his bizarre light guitar invention for the band after he was ousted from his position in the band.
Yes, and it was bizarre and he was always coming up with these bizarre things. We tried it a couple of times with him on the stage with his, “light guitar”. But then a lot of times when you played the bigger venues they had their own light show in the background. So here’s Robbie doing his little “dick dick dick dick dick” with his little tiny lights which were completely overwhelmed by the light show at the venue. So that didn’t work, Y’know, we tried it. But when Paul got there, Robbie was toast, ‘cos he knew that wasn’t gonna work.
Then Ralph came along..
And then Ralph came along too and we bonded, 'cos we were the new guys. Y’know they were pretty intimidating. Doug was the young “wunderkind.” He was only nineteen years old, and he had a bit of an attitude; and he always had an idea or an opinion. Y’know, this was big time Elektra; and the Doors, which they constantly brought up, “Jim Morrison wouldn’t do that.” “Well fuck you, go get Jim Morrison!.” The good thing about Clear Light was I was so intimidated most of the time by the people we played with and by the guys in the band and Paul Rothchild that when I finally left to be an actor on my own, it was hard to intimidate me. People would say “You’ll never work in this town again” and I would say, “fuck you! I’ve got the talent and people will buy what I’m selling,” and they have done. But when we were in the band, everyone was running scared. We had a great time but we weren’t successful enough for everyone to just chill, just relax and look around and realise how much fun we were having.
When we got into the studio I was really looking forward to doing Mr Blue, because Jim Morrison had never done a song like that, so they couldn’t say “Jim would’ve done it this way.” When I hear that record now I think, “This was a time when I wasn’t afraid of anything” That song is, for me, a liberating experience, as it was in the studio. I mean I couldn’t have let go anymore than in that one, so I put it all in there, got crazy. When they finally heard my rendition of that they thought maybe “ hey this guy isn’t so bad after all, maybe we don’t have to mention Jim Morrison in every other sentence.”
Did Rothchild select that song especially for you?
I knew you were going to ask me that question, I just cannot remember. You had two folk guys, you had Tom Paxton who wrote the damn thing; and then, the Street Singer song was some other folk guy, Steve Noonan. So someone had the idea of turning these into some kind of weird apocalyptic. The atmosphere of those two tunes is really unusual. Somebody had the idea, so it could have been Rothchild.
They seem to have been chosen as a showcase to your vocal talents
I think they were, maybe Paul was smart enough to say, “OK, you’ve got this singer who’s an actor, maybe I can play that,” so maybe that was Paul’s wisdom to do that. It was good for me as it actually let me do something that was unique and so I didn’t get criticised for not being all the other rock stars. The other thing was, mostly it was my insecurities, but because Mr Blue was so successful, when we started performing it, it would always bring the house down. Then the band would say, “God what a boring song to play, let’s not do that.” Then they would say to Paul, “Can we not do Mr Blue anymore? It’s so boring musically” And I’d think, “Fuck you! That’s my signature, the tune where I blow my head off! And you guys are saying let’s not do that anymore...” There was always that tension going on. The other thing was “You’re not a musician, you don’t play anything, how good are you?” But that was at the beginning, after a while we came together; and for about a year there on the road we had a good time.
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Lee sometimes joined you on stage for Mr Blue, dressed as a cop and brandishing a cap gun.
I hated that, he didn’t tell me he was going to do that. Mr Blue was my big number. I didn’t like having, Y’know, a partner on my big number. I think we did it one time at a concert that was the last performance of the Buffalo Springfield in Hollywood. It was a big deal and lots of bands were playing and it was the Springfield’s last big “hurrah.” We did our set and we got to Mr Blue (that always brought the house down) and here comes Lee out in some strange cop outfit and grabs me. I said “What the hell is this?” So whether it enhanced the performance or whether he was trying to get his foot in... bless him, you know.
I remember we had a terrible drive back from Boston, from the East Coast to the West Coast, which was like Abbot and Costello on the road. We were in a rental car and pulling a trailer with all the equipment in it. The two things I remember were there were a lot of toll roads in Pennsylvania, so you had to stop every 10 miles and pay a guy in a booth. We had this cash from the last gig in Boston; a couple of thousand in hundreds, and Lee had this great idea. “Listen, if we give the guy in the tollbooth a hundred, he won’t be able to break it and he’ll send us on our way,” I mean fuck this.” So here we are, five hippies in a car pulling a trailer in “Podunk” Pennsylvania. Lee gives the hundred and the guy says, “Could you wait a minute please?” and (makes siren noise) two cop cars pull up! “Pull over there.” They thought we stole the shit. They went through all the money. It’s a good thing they didn’t find our grass. We all said “Great idea Lee!” So we got through that. We were on the last leg of the journey coming into California and everyone was sleeping except Lee who was driving. We heard a siren. He was driving too fast, and a cop is saying “pull over, pull over.” I was sleeping in the passenger seat and Lee says “Oh god, I don’t have a license and I don’t have any insurance, you gotta switch with me” The trailer was at the back so the cop couldn’t see who was driving. “You gotta switch with me or I am going to jail, when this cop gets to the window I am going to jail, you have to switch.” So I changed places with him like I was driving and I got fined $150. He never paid me back the prick! There was always that stuff going on with Lee, these weird ideas where everyone would be so stoned they would go “ Oh! great idea” but it was never a good idea.
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Above: Cliff and a model show off the latest fashion for a Seventeen Magazine feature.
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Some people have said you guys were L.A.’s answer to the Grateful Dead, because of the family spirit of the group.
Well yeah, there was that. We all lived together and we did a lot of stuff together. When we went to New York we meet a lot of cool.., Y’know the whole Andy Warhol Velvet Underground crowd and Max’s Kansas City. We had some good things going for a while. Had we not been so insecure with the “Why aren’t we making it?” idea we probably could have evolved into a pretty..., You know there are hints of it on that first album, Dallas, god! Dallas was a great musician and with Doug they were a tight little rhythm section. And Ralph and Bob, I mean sometimes we just hit it, we were just cooking like a son-of-a-bitch. And then you’d come off stage and say “Ah damn that was cooking” and you’d get back “ oh well, Mr Blue was boring and ya ya this and ya ya that ya ya ya...” I’d be like “C’mon, get happy,” I’m a happy kind of guy!
So I guess Mr Blue was responsible for you getting the sobriquet “Hamlet on acid”
Well I never heard that till... I think that was after. Maybe it was from Mr Blue, it’s wonderful but I thought it was sort of an afterthought after I became an actor that somebody said now he’s an actor he must have played Hamlet or something, and he did a lot of acid. I laughed when I read that, that was pretty funny. I wish I would have got a review like that in one of the papers, that would have helped me.
The whole Ralph thing, where we got fired from the club. He wasn’t ready for all these up-towners yelling at us to turn it down, I mean c’mon, this is rock n roll, what the hell are you talking about? In retrospect he was right, at the moment I felt ooh, this isn’t good, to be in New York without a gig.
But I understand that incident got you a lot of prestige among the underground.
Oh yeah with the underground we got cachet from that for a year “You told those suckers!” Then I thought maybe this is gonna work for us.
Oh man, you know we were at the Scene and someone said hey this little trio is coming in you gotta hear these guys, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. What an experience! I almost fell out of my chair, what the hell? It made you wanna go home and not do it anymore. Then he became kind of a pal, he had these two girls, Donna and Denise, the two most beautiful groupies in New York. Dallas liked Donna and I like Denise, but in the interim they were Jimi’s girls, so between them, Dallas and I started hanging with this guy and it was just amazing. He was this brilliant soft-spoken, very gentlemanly, courtly guy. You’d say “You know the opening of that song is so beautiful” and he’d look at you and go “You kidding me man?” “No it’s brilliant, I’ve never heard anything like it before.” “Don’t fuck with me man. What are ya saying?” You try and give the guy a compliment and he wouldn’t listen, he wasn’t ready for it. But in retrospect that was a fun part, he did eventually come and hear us play somewhere and he was very complimentary and all that and that was fun.
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