Tape 11, Side B

[Begin Tape 11, Side B]

So you got into some trouble.

We were in Fort Knox, Kentucky, also this was a little more serious—we could observe the basic training facility in Fort Knox, Kentucky too, and we could see that, well, there were a couple of us from Fort Bliss, Texas; the rest of the people were from all over. New Yorkers, first time exposed to New Yorkers, New York kids, New York Italian kids, yeah, real good singers, and you know, black youths from the ghetto and guys from the farm. It’s just like those old movies where there’s one of everything, there was one of everybody.

Were you good with voices in those days the way you are? Were you picking up the dialects?

Not really, no, I wasn’t, no, not really. Maybe you could imitate a sergeant or something like that; not really then; it was kind of a short time. But we were in these old World War I wooden barracks and it wasn’t so crowded, they were still barracks but it wasn’t so crowded as it was in basic training. Oh, the Fort Knox basic training, we could see those: that was much more serious than the Fort Bliss basic training; and jeez, we had it really good, ‘cause they were making them run all the time and before they could go into the mess hall they had to do ten chin-ups, recite their name, rank and serial number and the code of conduct, articles from the military code of conduct and the chain of command before they could get in [laughs]. Yeah, so they were some serious basic training places.

So had their basic training program been around longer than Fort Bliss or shorter?

Probably longer; probably longer and probably more… you know all these different training centers were connected with various different armies, you know, like the 8th Army and the 6th Army and the 1st Army, and you know they all had their different traditions and things like that so probably—I’m just guessing—in Fort Knox there was a strong infantry training tradition, so they were putting those guys through the ringer. I’d like to see their hand-to-hand combat drills; they were probably out there making contact.

[Laughing] None of that fairy stuff.

Yeah, none of that slapping. Hello sailor [laughs].

Bitch slapping men… [laughter]

So we were spread out in these old World War I wooden barracks; we had more free time; you could drink a lot of beer at the PX; you could spend a lot of time at the cafeteria; you could go off—one thing you couldn’t do at Fort Bliss was go off base—and in this phase of the training you could go off during the weekends, you could have leaves and things like that, so it was a little more relaxed, and in my spare time I would entertain the troops from time to time [laughter], and one of the things I did was shoot flame out of my mouth [laughter]. I used to do this driving around the beach at night, you know, as a passenger in somebody’s car.

Where had you learned this?

Some years earlier, when I was in the beach area, when I was living down there. You’d take a little lighter fluid and put it in your mouth, just squirt a little in there, and light a match and just spray the lighter fluid off onto the top of the match.

…proper embouchure…

Right, you have to have ‘ cause otherwise it just dribbles down, and you don’t want to inhale either. You don’t want to inhale! But if you spray it fine enough it shoots this wonderful plume of—depending on how much you have in your mouth—plume of flame right out into the air right over the match head, and it travels, it can travel for a certain distance. So we’d pull up to a corner, stop sign or red light, and somebody’d be waiting for the bus and I’d go [sound effect] [laughter]. It was harmless but it was startling. So I was showing ‘em about this, I was showing how you could do this and I shot this really long big plume of flame, you know, I was tilted up so it would hit the ceiling and then travel along the ceiling for a certain amount of time…

Was this in the barracks?

(In the barracks)… before it would peter out. And one of the other, you know, cadets, one of the stool pigeons! one of the other brown-nosers peached on me—he peached on me! Yeah, he told one of the commanders that I had done this, and I got called on the carpet and they explained to me that these are fire traps, these barracks, and there’s no way, so I could have been article fifteened, you know, that’s the next stage before court marshal, but all he had me do, this lieutenant, was for the next couple of weeks I had to, I was devoted to cleaning his office [laughs] in his office building there. I had to wash the windows and vacuum the little rugs and clean all the crevices out, every little crevice, you know, ‘cause he would come and inspect, you know, so that was my punishment.

So he made a little capital on your infraction.

Yeah, and had his officer buddies over to see how clean the place was and watch me scrub [laughs].

Did you have a little dé jà vu?

Yeah, I can do that. That ain’t nothin’. Throw me into the briar patch. This is all you can do? This is the worst you can do? In fact I had this, I had millions of little sayings or quips or things like that in my mind going around at that time—still do—and one of them was: Oh, you’re going to kill me? If that’s all you can do, go ahead and kill me. Something like that. If that’s the most you can do, go ahead, kill me, there are worse things. So this wasn’t anything; this was nothing, but I never did that again, you know, I didn’t want to burn up the barracks.

If they had caught you doing it away from the base would it have been okay?

If they’d caught me, no, not after that warning, no. I wasn’t supposed to do that anymore.

As a clerk were you learning about all these infractions?

Well I was learning more about article fifteen stuff, and you know more and more forms, different kinds of forms, DD2-14s, that’s the most valuable form of all, that’s the release form, you know, your discharge. Those were very controlled. But you had to know a little bit, you had to know how to read all these forms even if you didn’t generate them because you had to look at everybody’s folder as they passed through the company and maybe help the first sergeant or the commanding officer interpret these forms and all this information.

Really, ‘cause they tended to have a hard time with it?

No, it’s just that they didn’t know, that wasn’t their specialty; they had other things to think about, I mean some of these forms were pretty detailed, and there might be some codes or something like that that they wouldn’t necessarily know all that, or there might be an MOS that they’d never heard of so you had to know how to look up MOSs in the big MOS book and see just what kind of clerk are you, a company clerk, a personnel specialist, or what. So that was it; that’s what they wanted; that was what I was destined to do in the Army. So that was over and then I was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington for the remainder. The way they… the lore was—and no one would really explain this to you—that you would spend a year in the States, then you had to go overseas, you had to get some kind of overseas assignment, and I was still waiting to see how that would work out because I still had the idea that I was not going to go east [laughs].

And it could have been Nam.

Could have been, yeah, the odds were that that’s where, I mean that’s where people were going, most of them. So in Fort Lewis, Washington this was, they were trying to gear it, I don’t know what it was before but it wasn’t a basic training center; they were gearing it up to be a basic training center and it was being staffed, like I say, all these lifers from other places in the country and those that had wound up their overseas assignment, some from Korea, some from Europe, some from Vietnam, and that’s when I first started to see these zombies, guys that had come back from Vietnam, you know, guys who’d been in the army for twenty years and guys who’d been in the army for four or five years, and officers and sergeants, and almost all of them had the look, you know, they had that shell-shocked look in their eyes. I never talked to any of ‘em, none of them were in my immediate vicinity, but I talked to people who had talked to them. They didn’t want to talk about it a lot, they just didn’t want to talk about it but it was bad.

So you could see it in them.

I thought I could.

What was the look?

It was just kind of a hollowness, like somebody who’s gone through a traumatic experience or a big experience anyway, and they weren’t really fully back into a normal, walking around kind of life: they still had this on their minds, that was major feeling I got, that they couldn’t shake it, you know, they were going through the motions—that’s about it, that’s about all they could do, but they just couldn’t shake it. Some of them, it just seemed like they had that faraway look in their eyes, they weren’t focused clearly on where they were at the time. This other experience was still the major experience, they were carrying that around with them.

So it was overshadowing everything else.

Exactly, and that was just, you know, later on in Germany I did talk to some people and saw more of this close up and got a better idea of this but I was just beginning to see this, and I’m not even sure that I was putting it all together, making an equation, but I knew there were a lot of people there that seemed to be in that situation, more than I’d seen in Fort Knox or Fort Bliss, and I was pretty sure that that wasn’t the normal way that these guys operated, so that led partially to the lack of orderliness and efficiency in this basic training. These guys that were going through basic training in Fort Bliss, they were just waltzing through it; they didn’t have, I mean there were huge gaps in their training, things that weren’t ready, maybe they didn’t have bayonets [laughs], so would just have to poke their rifle barrels at these dummies [weak voice]: Kill, kill; what is the spirit…? By the way I think by that time they had stopped, the Army, they had stopped using ‘kill’ as the spirit—you couldn’t say kill anymore—that’s right! You weren’t supposed to say that, that was no longer the spirit of the bayonet, or maybe secretly it was the spirit of the bayonet, but you weren’t supposed to say kill as you...

Why?

I don’t remember, well, you know, it was the first wave of sensitivity, or distancing or… Terminate with extreme prejudice! The first wave of euphemistic… So you weren’t really killing anybody, you were…

And then the hand-to-hand combat was kind of fey.

Well that was fake anyway, yeah, right, so who knows what they were doing for hand-to-hand combat.

It was like synchronized swimming.

Right. And I wasn’t directly involved in this because I was in the headquarters company of a battalion and they’re sort of removed from the actual on-the-ground tasks of the battalion, ‘cause the battalion—so I wasn’t a company clerk, I was like the clerk of this battalion, well I was the company clerk of the headquarters company of this battalion, but the battalion was composed of other units further out in the… where they actually did stuff, and that held true when I was in Germany too; I was the clerk of a headquarters company, which is different than other companies where they actually do stuff; they don’t do nothin’ much in the headquarters company, they just maintain the motor pool for the high-ranking noncommissioned officers and battalion commanders and maybe monitor the supplies and handle the communications at that level.

So it’s more bureaucratic…

Yes, exactly.

…it’s a lot of paperwork and not too much action.

Right, not too much… I mean the people who are attached to a headquarters company are all specialists, as opposed to the grunts who are attached to some of the other companies in the battalion. And so I started in much more relaxed than these other two places I’d been, and, you know, it was more like a job: during the weekdays you did this and the rest of the time you were free. You still might have to pull CQ—CQ stands for control of quarters—which means you stay up all night in the… Yeah, that would rotate among people.

So it was sort of like being on lookout?

Answer the phone, right. So you’d have to do that, but you wouldn’t have to do KP, you wouldn’t have to do that, and you might even get separate rations which means you supposedly don’t eat on base—you got money so you can eat off post but then, you know, if you’re caught eating on post you get into trouble, but nobody was paying that much attention, so…

So were you on post for hours and hours?

You could stay on post for twenty-four hours.

I mean were you sorely tempted to eat?

Oh I did; I mean everybody did, everybody who got separate rations, extra money, almost all the time they ate there anyway. And I would do KP for money too.

What, for other people?

I would take somebody’s KP, yeah, ‘cause I liked peeling potatoes and washing stuff out and I could get an extra five or ten bucks, plus I was always in debt. The people who were, I mean there were real loan sharks in the army, you had to pay back twenty for ten: borrow ten, pay back twenty.

That’s heavy vig*.

Oh yeah, that’s heavy vig, yeah, it doesn’t get any worse than that though.

What were you spending the money on?

I don’t know, well by this time I’d found a couple of kindred spirits, and it was just great, I mean it was like now it was just having a job.

What, hep cats?

Yeah, hep cats and one or two of ‘em had cars, so we could tool around and we could get high and we could listen to music, I mean the music then was really exploding and I started getting into non-jazz types of music: Blonde on Blonde had just come out…

So this was your Bob Dylan, this was when you first got into…

Yeah, and then I had to go backwards to listen to Bringing It All Back Home and all that sort of stuff; and one of these guys was really into the blues, and in Seattle there were some great old record stores and so we’d go out and get Howlin’ Wolf records and stay up all night smoking dope and listening to records.

So now the blues must have been pretty accessible to you because of your jazz background. So much of jazz has got a blue…

It’s true but never this kind of blues, Chicago blues…

That’s kind of gritty, yeah.

It was always like… it was twelve bars but it had that jazz feeling too, stuff like… well I can’t think of his name right now … but all the Joe…[snaps fingers] can’t think of his name right now…

A singer?

Yeah, more of a jazz singer, more of a polished Vegas jazz singer, like Lou Rawls became.

Joe Tex?

No; ah I can picture him, know him as well as I know my own name. I’ll think of it. But Howlin’ Wolf and Mississippi Fred McDowell [imitating McDowell]: I do not play no rock-and-roll; I just play the straight natch’ral blues. And all these cats...

And did you get into the classics like Robert Johnson?

No, never did get into Robert Johnson, no, I still haven’t got into Robert Johnson, but both of the… Well they were really, one of these guys was really into it, he knew all this stuff: Sonny Boy Williamson I and Sonny Boy Williamson II: there were two blues singers named Sonny Boy Williamson [laughs].

Were these guys all white?

No, they were all black, although the Paul Butterfield Blues Band…

The guys you were hanging with?

Oh yes, yes, yeah. I don’t recollect… well, I don’t remember anybody else [laughs]. I remember these guys ‘cause we palled around a lot, but I don’t remember anybody else.

Do you remember where the guys were from?

Well George Hunt, he was from Massachusetts; he was a real Lovecraft freak too; he was a real wild dude. He had enlisted in the army and he had been in the Monterey Defense Language Institute in their Russian program and I think he was a problem character ‘cause he got bounced out of that for one reason or another.

Had he signed on for the four years?

Yep, so he was in for the four years and he had got bounced out of his specialty, so you know he was up the creek.

So what happens if you get bounced out?

You still have to serve your four years [laughs].

You’re stuck.

Yeah, you’re stuck.

And you don’t get to do the…

Yeah, you don’t get to do your thing. I don’t know what happened. He described the… the Defense Language Institute was just… you know there were all these people with high-level clearances studying languages and he described a situation where the whole Serbo-Croatian class got bounced out because there was one of them who was a CID agent, and that’s the military secret intelligence police, and there was always talk that—oh CID, that’s what they called them, C-I-D, I don’t exactly know what it stands for, but there always could be a CID person in your barracks: You CID! [laughs] you know that would be a big insult, so if somebody wasn’t playing along or if they looked like they might be chickening out of something: You CID! You a CID! And they would have to be shunned for a while because, I mean every now and then you would hear stories where there was a CID agent in some…

So it would be like a nark.

Yeah, like a nark. So there was a CID nark in the Serbo-Croatian class and they were all smoking dope and doing all sorts of things and the entire class got busted. I don’t know if that’s true or not but it was one of George Hunt’s stories; and he was kind of…

Was he an urbanite?

He was an urbanite, yeah, he was very, very cultured but he had a real taste for the bizarre and he had some kind of tremor in his head too that—he was always [demonstrates], his head was always shaking from side to side. When I first met him I thought he was high on something all the time ‘cause he used to wear these shades and was always twitching. He reminded me of Aubrey Beardsley for some reason, you know.

Do you think it was just the way his brain was wired, some kind of nervous disorder?

Yep, well no, I think he did have some… he explained it to me at some point, but it wasn’t enough to get him out of the army, whatever it was; I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he had the strange taste and he would come up with the strange things to do, I mean he was very interested in things that I had no conception of, like he really loved guns, and the Spanish Civil War, he was a Spanish Civil War freak, he was always reading about that, and he had some political talk too and I thought that was interesting because I didn’t, I didn’t have any of that.

Was that a new thing?

Yeah, I didn’t really, I mean just superficially, stuff I picked up in…

So did he turn you on to a lot of literary things?

No, the only thing I can think of is H.P. Lovecraft, ‘cause he was really into that and he would go off into whole things about the, riffs about the unnamable this and the unmentionable and the Cthulhu horror of—I saw a bumpersticker the other day that said: Cthulhu for president [laughs]—you know and the elder gods and all this stuff, that was all kind of cute, ‘cause that was his area, he was from that area. He said: Oh you know these things aren’t made up. So he allowed… The thing I liked [laughs] we used to go to the libraries on base and take magazines—you could smoke in the libraries—and go back there, and you know we’d be stoned out of our minds, and take our cigarettes and flip through the magazines and if you blow on your ash you know you get a nice little pinpoint and you can burn out the eyes in all the photographs and oh it would give them just a horrific aspect: all these people in all these advertisements with these burned out eyes [laughter] and that would just send us off into paroxysms of laughter.

Where was the dope coming from?

Well in the beginning somebody had some with them; now I don’t know who it was and it was kind of low level stuff.

So it might have been Mexican or homegrown or something?

Yeah, something they’d scored around the area, ‘cause we were out there going to movies and hanging out in Seattle and Tacoma, we made a little trip to Portland one time—would have looked you up had I known—and those were all, a lot of that was fueled by, you know a lot of the tripping there was fueled by alcohol and Gauloise cigarettes—those little stubby strong things.

Yeah, strong straights.

And you know we’d go to, there was a great folk club in Seattle.

Do you remember what it was called?

It had a Welsh name. I pronounced it as Langolyn but that wasn’t the right pronunciation I’m sure, it had two ls and it was spelled something like that.

Was it down in the old town?

I don’t know; I’m not sure about that. I had the feeling it was out by the university somewhere but I’m not sure, don’t really know because I was just riding along; I don’t know how to get anywhere [laughs]. I don’t know how to go anywhere or do anything. Saw Ian and Sylvia there and a couple of other people.

And you weren’t driving?

No, I wasn’t driving. Didn’t want any part of that. I was happy that they would let me tag along with them, you know; I contributed in some way I’m sure. Oh man, I’m trying to think of some other blues singer… but we all started getting into all this music and wherever we went we’d be listening to this stuff on the radio or on these little tiny, inch-and-a-half reel to reel machines, so we could tape stuff and take that around with us.

You taped off the radio…?

Record player, like they had record players; it was just a microphone hit, it wasn’t really direct so it was kind of tinny. They had, in some of these places we were in I remember they had crazy stuff on the jukebox. I remember playing, what’s that song: ‘Pledging My Time’ was on the jukebox, and that wasn’t a single it was just from Blonde on Blonde, so it was in the air. It was in the air and everywhere.

Yeah, Bob Dylan really almost single-handedly opened up the possibilities for the jukebox ‘cause I remember a live version of ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues’ or something on the Reed College jukebox around that time.

Oh yeah, really [laughs].

Yeah, it was the B side of something, and yeah, all kinds of unusual things, and also the first really long singles, I mean of course—what was the big one?

‘Like a Rolling Stone’?

Five minutes something, almost six minutes.

That’s right, and the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album came out, and that was a kick, that was sweet.

What was that? Super Session? No, was that later?

No, it had, I don’t know the name of it. It wasn’t the one later on, East-West; it was the one before East-West; it was the first one. East-West had that long cut on it, but you know it had all that crazy stuff like… well all of ‘em; it had all them songs on there that I can’t remember the names of right now. [Sings] Woke up this morning, people, and looked round for my shoes/ You know I got those mean old walkin’ blues… And crazy songs, you know, blues songs that he’d uncovered. You know a lot of blues songs are mysterious, you don’t know what they’re about: ‘Look Over Yonder’s Wall’, that’s the one I remember: I don’t know; what is that? [laughter] But it’s a great song.

Wasn’t Paul Butterfield the guy that had been hanging out with all the old blues guys in Chicago; he was like the white kid hangin’ out?

That’s right, yeah, he had all these, you know: Mark Naftalin and Elvin Bishop and Sam Fuller, so he had a black and white band and it was tough. So, you know, and we’d stay up all night listening to this stuff; I mean that’s why I remember ‘Pledging My Time’: we found ourselves in some café freaked out from the night before and hearing this [sings]: I’ve got a poisoned headache, but I feel alright. That was just how we felt [laughs]: I’ve got a poisoned headache.

We’re getting right at the end.

So I’ll tell you how we got the best marijuana… [tape cuts off]

[End Tape 11, Side B]