In a few weeks time I had kfmlnooze pretty well laid out, choosing to follow in Malcolm's footsteps and create a blog. In three more weeks I had twenty some-odd videos up in some semblance of a structure and that's how I got to where ever I am now. One of my chief regrets is that I didn't think to do this while Buffalo Chip was still alive. He was our all-night man and had worked at Tracy's Doughnuts on Haight Street back when I lived around the corner on Cole & Haight back in the mid-60's.
Buffalo probably had the most contagious laugh of anyone I ever met.
"In 1975, I rejoined my old radio bud's, Buffalo and his wife Cathy at KSML, The Secret Mountain Labratory in Kjngs Beach, North Shore, Lake Tahoe for a couple of months before I had to move on. Bill Ashford, The Warthog, Bob O'lear, Reno, and many another freeform refugee fell in and out of there by the time it crashed and burned by the late 70's..
By 1979 Buffalo and Cathy had migrated to Lake County and a gig as house parents to six wayward "yutes" in a nice little house on Clear Lake. I had limped up there from San Francisco in my Barracuda with little money, a heavy heart, and no drivers door window. I was there to kick back and charge my batteries. Within a week, I had contracted pneumonia. The "yoot.s" showed up and as planned I moved int a tent in the back yard. Within a few days the antibiotics kicked in.." ( continued at HOME SWEET LOOZIANA ) was a joy to listen to whether he was playing records or jokes, or laughing at all of the above. All of us that knew him, love and miss him dearly...
Lakeport had a daily feature on the local radio station called "The Trading Post," and it was about the busiest event in all of Lake County. About the time I shook the pneumonia, the clutch in the old Barracuda took a header, and I was more or less stranded a hundred miles north of San Francisco with very little money and no transportation. I started listening to the Trading Post daily and before I long a lady called in for someone to come paint her kitchen. I called her and told her that if she could come and get me and return me at the end of the day, I would be thrilled to paint her kitchen. I always had a steady hand and had worked as a painter several times by that juncture and easily got into a rhythm. I painted the kitchen, two baths, a living room, a dining room, 3 bedrooms, and finally the entire exterior.
My car was soon running again and beyond that I had befriended the owner of two Benjamin Moore Paint stores, one on each side of the lake, and started picking up work from him. This evolved into my working for him, he lining out the jobs and setting in the materials, me doing the rest. In 90 days I bought the 64' Chevy Pick-up that "Duke" had started his business with back in San Jose. Then I bought a used gasoline powered paint sprayer \ power-wash combo, ladders, a complete set of paint tools, i.e.. brushes, rollers, extension poles, sanders, scrapers, etc. I then traded half cash half paint work for a 22' silver bullet trailer from a retiring postman that had commuted to San Francisco where he had parked it for 20 years. It had furniture, pots, pans, utensils, air conditioner, central heat, and a set of brand-new tires that he had just purchased for the final trip home. I bought it for a total of $380, part cash, part paint work.
Now my buddy Duke Wilson has me painting store fronts, two-story houses, in and out, businesses, you name it. The biggest RV park and camp is called Willow Point, it's located on the lake, in central Lakeport and it needs a paint job. The work came to Duke and he passed it on to me. I made a deal for painting 8 cabins, in & out, 17 large picnic tables, the rest shop, the bait shop, fences and the laundry. Part of my deal was a space to park my trailer with electric and water for the 3-4 months I estimated it would take me. I stayed in Lakeport for about two years and finally loaded up and hit the road for Shreveport, Louisiana and a family reunion at Christmas time. I had bought a cab-over camper and installed it in a 1\2 ton truck bed that had been converted into a heavy duty trailer.
I painted my way across the country, stopping long enough to paint 4 outside buildings at a wrecking yard \ garage in exchange for a re-built Chevy engine. I worked out of the back of my truck, where I had mounted the sprayer \ power washer, so that the cab-over floated over it, and they worked on the front. By sundown I was back on the road with all 8 cylinders hitting for the first time in years. I painted a half dozen store-fronts in Grand Junction, Colorado, caught the Stones concert in Denver, and arrived in Shreveport by my birthday, which is one week before Christmas. I drove my mom to a hair dressing appointment, fell in love with her hair-dresser, a little bitty Jewish Yankee from Long Island, NY, that got marooned there when her boyfriend caught a 10 year prison sentence for robbing a card game in Baton Rouge.
Karen had met my family 20 years earlier when she came to Louisiana in my older brothers' school bus. Her and her husband were in Daytona Beach for the motorcycle races when they him and he just brought them on home with him. My mom used to go to Mexico every year and visit with her many deaf Mexican friends. Invariably she would bring as many as a van full home for a "visit" that would sometimes last for 6 months. But that's another tale.
Before I got the houseboat and moved to the lake, I lived with Karen for nearly 3 years. We lived in her trailer off the Flournoy Lucas Road in Shreveport. In the fall of 1984, Thom and Gayle came through and stayed a few days. This video is of their last day visiting and about to head home to Denver. They had been in Houston, visiting Thom's ailing father. I had'nt seen them in a good 10-12 years and tried to show them a good time. I took Thom fishing on Cross Lake, but it was windy and the water was choppy so we didn't do well..
When consumer cameras first came out in the early 80's, I took a sales job for the local Panasonic dealer, to learn about shooting video. I had just started a video production business by putting an ad in the paper advertising $250 weddings. I shot 6 weddings in the first month. I just followed the photographer around the first time and after a few weddings I new what to do. In the early spring I did a lucrative paint job, the Social Security Office, in Shreveport, and on completion I walked with a $10,000 profit. It never happened again, but that's not the point. As a Panasonic salesman, I got to buy stuff for wholesale, so I gave my girlfriend 2 grand to do whatever she wanted, and I shot the other 8 on an industrial strength video system. Lights, camera, action.
This was my first video camera and I had it for about a week when Thom and Gayle showed up. I wish they'd show up again. I think they would like the weather here in Greenbrae a little better. Back in 1971. when I had first met Thom in Denver, the law of the land in Louisiana was, if you sold pot to a minor, it was a capital offense, and you could wind up a dead man walking. I used Hank Williams' Jambalaya, and Tom Pettys' You Don't Know How It Feels, ("but let me get to the point, let's roll another joint, and turn the radio loud, I'm too alone to be proud") but YouTubes new filtering system "tilted", challenged my right to use those tracks and I was forced to replace the audio with YouTubes substitue royalty-free music bed and it aint' really all that bad.
Shortly after Thom and Gayle's visit, I decided it was time to head on back to California. The economy was in the dumper and for the three years I had been living in Louisiana, nothing came easy. In 84' several key industriess left Shreveport, Poulin Chain Saws for one, and Western Electric had built a new plant in Singapore and closed shop in Shreveport, leaving thousands of good souls with no jobs. They had built an enormous assembly plant there, one square mile under one roof.
I had given Karen the two thousand dollars in the hopes she would pay off her trailer and come on out to California with me. She decided to use the money as a down payment on a new Pontiac Fiero and stay. We parted company amicably and had a nice good-bye dinner with Rick Delisle. Rick was the Prudential Realtor guy that had given me the contract for the six buildings. When I first arrived in Shreveport, in 1980, I was offered an opportunity to bid on re-painting six buildings, if I could prepare a proposal in 6 day. Six buildings, seven colors, eight weeks. In our last meeting to determine the issue of a contract, he introduced the concept of a $50 a day late fee if I went over the 10 weeks I had to finish the job. I had bought the latest book on negotiating and was pretty well prepared at that 4th and final meeting. I countered with $50 per day early money if I should finish early. It was winter time and he eagerly agreed. I earned $500 early money, but I had estimated the paint at 650 gallons and it went to 900. I suggested that I could have easily watered the paint and made do, but opted to go ahead and put the amount of paint that the job demanded. In that the extra paint was in fact on the buildings and would serve him well over the years to come, I felt it only fair that he share the overage with me. He agreed, and that was pretty much the foundation of a friendship that lasts to this day..
At our good-bye dinner Rick told me that my bid of $29,000.00 was conservative in the extreme. The next bid was $59,000.00. After dinner he handed me an envelope with a thousand dollars in it for the road. I hooked up my bass-boat and camper and headed west. I stopped at a truck-stop in Arizona and encountered an elderly biker couple and shot this short video of them.
I spent a couple of months running around California and had just returned to Morro Bay when I got a call from Rick in Shreveport. They had just started a tract of 13 homes and wanted me to come head up the painting operation. $500 followed the invitation and I headed back to Louisiana. Upon arriving, I was presented with an incredible offer. I had a choice of a brand new 3-bedroom brick house by the air-conditioned race track in Bossier City or a 16'x60' houseboat on Lake Bisteneau. Either choice would cost me nothing down, a total of $64,000 in $640 a month payments.
This houseboat is sitting right where I used to park my own. This is Camp Joy, Lake Bisteneau, Louisiana. This boat is for sale for $50k and that's a steal. Mine was only 60' long, but it had a third deck, two band boxes, and It would carry 200 people, and a live band, and run around the lake all weekend for $50 worth of gas.
I sensibly chose to spend a weekend on the houseboat to check it out. The following Monday I signed the agreement and moved aboard. Two weeks later Sam, one of the sellers, came out to the lake for the day and showed me how to start and maintain the twin Volvo Pinta's and the 6kw Onan generator and in a couple of hours I was off to the races. This video is of the "big day", kicking the tires and lighting the fires. Karen had come along for the ride, the decision to take the houseboat over the new house pretty much canceled any future relationship between us. We remained friends but moved on otherwise.
Petit Mamou is one of my favorite Cajun tunes and my feelings for it are shared by most lovers of Cajun music. I have a tape I shot about this time at the Louisiana State Fair of the Dewey Balfa band and its one of the songs they covered that day. For now heres my friends the Cotton Kings doing Petit mamu (sweet maumu)
I used to trade out video promotion for bands to play gigs on my boat. One such band was called Loose Change, and I wasn't the only one that found them remarkable. They were invited to perform at the Olympics in Los Angeles the same year they appeared on my boat.
At the foot of my pier. Upstairs, was a seafood restaurant with a full bar, and downstairs was a beer bar with a pool table, noisey juke box, and a house band, "The Cotton Kings", that had just crawled back to Loosiana from a 3 year run living on a boat in Cape Cod or some such high end "watering hole", and if you remember the 80's, these poor bastards had been "rode hard and put up wet", and had to come home to survive.
Here's another clip of Loose Change with an old Patsy Cline tune. Note the Joe Cocker style she aplies to this performance.
Here's another offering from the Cotton Kings. this was a typical Saturday night at Camp Joy and this was going on literally in my front yard. After living in city's for years, it was really a fine thing to be able to "turn it up", the rule of the lake was, "let the good times roll", 24 & 7...here's "Frauline"
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