The Dirt (33 page)

There was a cool loafer in his twenties who lived nearby, and I called him Sundance. He had an old guitar named Blue Moon, and he taught me my first real song on Blue Moon: “My Dog Has Fleas.” Sometimes I wonder whether country music was my real calling.

Eventually, Sundance taught me how to pick melodies, like the murder ballad “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley.” I liked the melodies because they jumped out of Blue Moon, and, though I didn’t know the terminology at the time, I was already favoring lead guitar over rhythm, which seemed more like something that was played in the background.

If it wasn’t for Jesus being born, I never would have gotten anywhere in music. Because it was on another Christmas, a few years later, that my oldest cousin bought me a Stella guitar that he had found in a pawnshop for twelve bucks.

Soon afterward, my parents gave birth to their first girl, Susan (or Bird, as we called her). Bird was born with a collapsed lung, and in order to increase her chance of survival, her doctors suggested that we move to a more arid climate like Arizona or California. So ten of us—me, my brothers, my parents, my sister, my aunt, my uncle, and my cousins—crunched into a 1959 Ford. After three and a half days of stiff backs and oxygen deprivation, we arrived in Garden Grove, California. It was like
The Grapes of Wrath
, only California actually lived up to the fantasy: There were orange trees everywhere, and at night we could see the fireworks going off above Disneyland. But in California, country music and Skeeter Bond were foreign words. Surf music was what was happening—Dick Dale, the Ventures, the Surfaris.

My father worked at Menasha Container (which made cardboard boxes for one of my favorite companies, Fender) and my mother ironed shirts on weekends for extra money—two dollars a day if she was lucky. Though I had another younger brother and a sister by then, she still saved up enough to buy me a forty-nine-dollar St. George electric guitar. Now I could make surf music that sounded like curling and crashing waves, just like Dick Dale played it. Volume was also important to me, but my parents didn’t have enough money to buy me an amplifier or a stereo. Instead I took my little sister’s phonograph speaker, removed the wires from the tonearm, and made my own combination amp and stereo so that I could play along with my favorite surf songs.

My father, in the meantime, woke up one day and suddenly decided to become a Baptist minister. When he was a child, he had suffered from a crippling disease that attacked his legs. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for him except pray for mercy from God. When the disease cleared up, it must have planted a God trigger in my Dad’s mind, which fired that morning when he came running into the kitchen raving that he had seen the error of his ways and wanted to dedicate his life to a ministry.

Despite finding religion, my father never tried to discourage me from making music. He and my mother thought that the reason I was so obsessed was that my brain had been fried when I was three. I came down with scarlet fever and ran a 106-degree temperature for three days. A doctor came to my grandmother’s house, where I was in bed almost dead, and took off all my clothes, covered me with cold towels, and packed my bed with ice. Then he opened up every door and window in the house until the winter air filled the room, and after an hour, the fever broke. I was so sick, they said, that maybe I never recovered.

Surf music, to them, was just another disease. But soon after came an even more infectious disease, the Beatles. Overnight, surf rock was archaic and pop with vocals—melodies, harmonies, and lyrics you could nod your head to—was in. I decided that I had to sing, too. I practiced every day for a year until I was ready to show my family. I gathered them downstairs and sang “Money” by the Beatles. The cousin who had bought me my first real guitar went into a fit of hysterics. He said I wouldn’t be able to carry a tune if he wrapped it up and put handles on it. I was so embarrassed that I never tried to sing again—for the rest of my life.

At fourteen, I joined my first band, the Jades, a Beatles cover group with a few originals that might as well have been Beatles songs. I started off on bass but soon replaced their guitarist. Our first gig was at the American Legion Hall in Westminster, and we made twelve bucks to split between the four of us. We were never asked back, however: either we were too heavy or too terrible.

I had a friend named Joe Abbey, a Samoan who had never given up on surf guitar and could play so well he’d bring you to your knees. I wanted to borrow his amp and reverb pedal, but he said they belonged to the Garcia Brothers. He gave me their phone number, and that’s where it really began.

I walked into their house, and found three of them—Tony, Johnny, and Paulie. They were big and mean and led a street gang called the Garcia Brothers. Tony was a guitar player who would have his brothers beat up anyone who said they were better than him, Paulie was a tall drummer who was unhappy because he felt like he should be playing guitar, and Johnny was a bass player who had been put in youth authority when he was sixteen for beating up two cops. They also played with a nonbrother, Paul, a blind harmonica player who looked like Jesus. They were tough, and they didn’t play surf rock or the Beatles. They played the blues. Hard electric blues.

Their neighbors hated them, because they knew the brothers were doing drugs and fighting. For some reason, there were always blind, deaf, or handicapped people hanging around the brothers, and I figured it was evidence that they either had a soft, compassionate side or were running some kind of mysterious scam. At 9
P.M.
one night, the cops arrested us all because of noise complaints, and I received what they called summer probation basically just for playing my guitar. (That may be why I now have a pet peeve against neighbors who make noise complaints.) We formed a band pretentiously called Sounds of Soul, and played at underage clubs around Orange County like the Sandbox.

At school, I didn’t care about anything except for music. I was one of the three best guitarists there: the best was Chuck Frayer, who could solo like nobody I’d seen before, bending notes and letting them hang in the air forever. He ended up getting drafted into the marines during Vietnam, and the last time I saw him was on
The Gong Show
. He was playing the harmonica in a suit that made it look like he had two heads. And you can bet your mother’s horse-race winnings that he got gonged.

The other great guitarist was Larry Hansen, who ended up with the Gatlin Brothers. And the third was me. School was pure torture, and all I could think about was getting home to practice. In English, our teacher, Mr. Hickock, wanted us to write an essay on a poem. All the other kids wrote about Robert Frost and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I came in with “Pressed Rat and Warthog” by Cream. When Mr. Hickock returned the papers, he had written on mine: “F—which is a big understatement.” The next day, we had a test, and I answered one question by calling the teacher a square, music-hating snob, writing “which is a big understatement” beneath it. I handed in the paper, and when he read it, he sent me to the principal, who suspended me—which was a big understatement, he said, because I should have been expelled. I didn’t care. I only wanted to be taught by people who knew something about music. But now I wish I had paid more attention in English classes, because when I talk to people, I worry that I sound uneducated or use the wrong words.

When I returned to school, a substitute teacher in my science class kicked me out for writing guitar chord charts in my notebook instead of paying attention. As I walked out of the classroom, I turned back to him and yelled, “I know where you park your car! I know where you live! You better watch your back!” I didn’t think I was that intimidating a guy—I looked like a red-haired Duane Allman with a peach-fuzz mustache. But the teacher got so freaked out, he sent the cops to my home.

By then, I was living in a little garden shed behind my parents’ house, which sat alongside a creek. It was a place where I could play my guitar at any hour, stay up as late as I wanted, and let friends crash and drink some vino. When the cops saw the place, they said it wasn’t fit for a dog to live in. They lectured my parents and, though I was allowed to return to school, I guess I just stopped going after that. If school back then was like the ones they have today—with art classes, music appreciation, and computers—I would have stayed. But there was nothing there that interested me back then.

I never paid much attention to girls. I met my first love at the Garcia brothers’ house. She was fourteen and some of the younger Garcia brothers—there had to have been at least a dozen Garcia brothers running around—brought her home from junior high. We started hanging out, and I figured that we were dating after a while.

One night, I asked her to go out, and she said her parents were making her stay home with them. So I went bowling with Joe Abbey instead—and she walked into the bowling alley with another boy. I was devastated. I asked her what she was doing out and she slurred something, because she was drunk. As I felt my testosterone flow into my heart, making my blood burn, my friends dragged me out of the bowling alley and drove me off in their car. I gave up on women that day. All thoughts of girls, dating, and getting laid went down the chute, allowing me to spend even more time practicing. For Christmas that year, my Aunt Annie, who always believed in me even when friends and family didn’t, had bought me a beat-to-shit Les Paul for ninety-eight dollars. Then in May, a kid gave me a 1954 Stratocaster when he graduated because he never played it. By that time, I was no longer one of the three best guitarists in my age range. I was the best.

fig. 2

Mick with son Les Paul

I soon stopped playing with the Garcia Brothers: It had gotten too scary. Gang activities kept overlapping with band activities, and rival gangs were always coming over to start fights. One of the Garcia Brothers later landed in jail after accidentally killing a little girl in a drive-by shooting and another ended up playing in Richard Marx’s band. I told you they were bad.

The brothers used to work with a singer named Antone, who was probably one of the greatest black belters I’d ever heard. He tipped me off to a blues band in Fresno he was working with that needed a guitarist. So I packed up my two guitars, borrowed a reverb box from a friend, and they picked me up and brought me to Fresno.

It was exciting at first, because they were an all-black band and they wanted me to teach them about rhythm and soul. I sat down with them all day and showed them everything I knew, and at night I slept on a pool table in their clubhouse. But they became frustrated when they didn’t sound like John Lee Hooker after a week, though I kept telling them that keeping cool and relaxed and patient is part of where soul comes from. As I was teaching them a blues scale on the porch, an old black guy drove up in a 1960 Cadillac with a ratty acoustic guitar in the seat. He was so big that his arms practically dragged on the ground when he opened the door and walked out. “That’s the blues,” I told the guys in the band. “You are living the blues.” But they just couldn’t play it no matter how badly they wanted to. I was so let down, and I felt too old to be wasting my time like this. I guess I always felt like I was too old, even at seventeen.