Ralphie Remembers 2

Yes. I can remember three. One was a “surf” band called The Jolairs. The guys who started the band were named Joe and Larry, hence the name. We played a lot of surf music, some of which I/ we wrote. Later, we started doing covers of the Stones and The Animals and stuff like that and I was the singer.

I’m sure the two namesakes never went on to be pro musicians. They’re probably doctors or lawyers now. We had business cards and everything. We even recorded a single financed by a kid at school who fancied himself a record producer. I guess his parents gave him the money. My best friend in the group was also named Ralph. He played sax, and is now the Dean of a university. Somewhere in my attic are some business cards and our single which had the songs “County Line”, which we named after a well known surf spot, (even though none of us surfed) and “Ralphie’s Tune”, a melodic mid tempo tune which I wrote but can’t remember.

The coolest thing about the recording session was that it was at a great studio, which later became legendary for recording successful rock bands. It was called Whitney. It had a huge live room, which now I’d be really impressed by. I was pretty oblivious to the whole process, and didn’t appreciate how much I could’ve learned by paying attention and asking questions. We played two takes of each song, barely got a chance to listen back, and left.

The unique thing about that studio was that it had a huge old Wurlitzer theatre organ, with four or five manuals and gazillion bright colored buttons and toggles. It was built into the wall and the huge pipes were in the wall of the studio so when it was played the whole place reverberated. But the weirdest thing was that there was a drum kit and a bunch of percussion stuff mounted high on a wall and you could press certain notes on the keyboard and somehow they would activate these drumsticks and mallets, which would mechanically play the drums and percussion.

The closest thing I can liken it to would be one of those old merry-go-rounds where you could see drums and cymbals clustered around the center. These would boom and crash periodically with the music. I learned that those kinds of organs were very common in the early 20th century. Most big city theatres had them, with a guy who would accompany the silent movies. Evidently one of the great Fats Waller’s first paying gigs was doing that at a theatre in Harlem. I think Count Basie started out like that, too. Those contraptions were actually a crude precursor to today’s midi workstation/ drum machines.

The Jolairs always got paid pretty well for teenagers. That is amazing to me now, because nowadays most bands, in LA at least, play for free just for the exposure, and if it’s a club, they have to guarantee the club a certain minimum of paying customers. If not many show up, the band ends up paying the club owner in cash, whatever amount makes up the difference. But in those days we actually got paid. We played at UCLA and USC frat parties, community centers, Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.

a co-operative effort, but the real motivating spirits of the group were the upright bass player, Roberto Miranda and his brother Louie, a drummer. It’s hard to describe the effect these guys had on me. They were the coolest guys, with tremendous positive energy.

From one of LA’s (at that time) few Puerto Rican families, they were the school’s resident beatniks. They conversed in jazz/hipster lingo, which was sort of like black street slang, but with artsy/spiritual terminology thrown in. To Roberto especially, jazz was a religion. He and his brother radiated good vibes and were always supportive, not only to the guys in the band, but to their many friends, classmates and teammates. Roberto taught music at USC for a few years, and later moved to UCLA. Now he’s one of the foremost “out” jazz bass players in the country. By “out” I mean super wild, noisy, dissonant and experimental, like Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor.

Our school was one of the few racially and culturally mixed schools in the city. We had poor, working class Mexicans from my hood, Echo Park (now world famous for its music/art community). There were lots of Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, mostly middle class. There were the very wealthy, who lived in big, Spanish style mansions in the picturesque Los Feliz hills. This group had its sub-contingents—Jewish, Catholic and Protestant.

There was the Commonwealth Ave black community. There were Armenian, Lebanese and Persian communities, as well as Filipinos, Native Americans and East Indians. Let’s not forget the southern white, redneck “trailer trash” people, whose poor families had migrated to California during the “dust bowl” in the ‘30’s. A lot of people stayed in cliques, but there was cross pollination too. My friends were mostly the “arty” kids from left wing intellectual families. I’m still close with a couple of them.

Anyway, back to the music—Bobby and Louie Miranda had friends and supporters in every class/racial sub-group, who would all come to hear us play. We held forth Friday and Saturday nights at a tiny club called The Jazz Cottage. We smoked a lot of weed. We played all the popular hard-bop tunes as well as pop standards. The band was completed by my sax playing friend Ralph from the Jolairs, who was very good, and a swingin’, soulful trombonist who later went on to play with Bobby Womack and other soul bands. I, being self-taught, wasn’t technically a very accomplished piano player, but I really grooved and helped make our rhythm section solid.

Looking back, I realize that to play gigs with these guys, I had to lie to my parents virtually every time. I don’t even think they ever got to see me play with that group, because they would’ve freaked if they’d seen the neighborhoods we played in. They never found out that I was riding around late at night with a bunch of stoned out jazz musicians.

The other band I played with, I can’t remember the name, was mainly a Stones/ Animals/ Kinks cover band, for which I wasn’t the singer. We also played “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen (thee biggest party record around at that time),“Land of 1000 Dances” by Cannibal and the Headhunters, (a Chicano vocal group from East LA), and “Time Won’t Let Me” by Thee Midnighters, a large “horn-band” with the same background.

The guys in my second band were from the poor white/Southern milieu. They must’ve been pretty non-descript because I can’t remember their names or faces. I remember at one point we heard that The Headhunters were the opening act on the one of the first Stones tours. They lived just a few miles away from us and they knew the Stones! I think that was my first inkling that there was a music biz, and that the world I knew only from the radio, wasn’t that far away.

But the main reason I mention this nameless band is that it was through them that I first encountered the one, the only, Cliff De Young.

We didn’t actually meet, we never spoke to one another, but he and his band totally blew my mind. They changed my entire point of view about rock music. Cliff probably doesn’t even know or remember this. I only realized it a few years ago, long after my Clear Light days. Here’s what happened.

The nameless southerners and I got a chance to audition to play at a party in Hancock Park, which was LA’s “old money” neighborhood. Hancock Park’s lush tree lined streets, with their stately old mansions and well groomed gardens still exist in all their grandeur. It’s still the most beautiful, expensive part of central LA, a stones throw from the downtown center of town.

I think the party was some kind of upper crust “debutante” ball, something that was as foreign to us as the swamps of Zanzibar. I’d never had to audition for anything before, so this was a big deal. If we got the gig, we’d split, maybe $500! Big money for those