As summer wound down, I met an interesting fellow who lived on Oklahoma Street, not far from CEP’s family’s business. Lawman, CEP, and I had been hanging around with a couple of good looking girls who lived on that street (one of the poor angels had recently been involved in a bicycle accident that damaged a couple of her front teeth), and one day when the visit broke up, instead of going home the usual way, I went another way down the street just to see what was happening there. As I walked along, I saw a guy playing a guitar outside a silver camping trailer in the middle of a shady lot. I walked up and introduced myself and we talked for awhile. He had a decent finger picking style (I had not encountered that type of playing locally before then) and as he played I realized he knew a suitcase full of songs. The guy’s name was Crawfish (not really), and he had at one time been the singer for the most popular band in Sweetwater. We hit it off pretty good and he invited me inside to pick through his record collection. Man, Crawfish really had a stack of singles. He played several for me, and even loaned me The Doors’ Light My Fire backed with The Crystal Ship. I later met Mrs. Crawfish (the trailer was their home) and had dinner with them (she invited me because she thought she had hurt my feelings when she became emotionally unglued in my presence upon hearing the news about Crawfish’s draft induction notice). In a strange aside, late one night Crawfish heard a knock at his door. When he answered, the knocker attacked him with a knife, putting three slashes across his stomach. A few nights later someone knocked on the door at my house, but dad scared away whoever it was (though one night about a week after that, as I was about to go to my grandmother’s house, a tall man was standing next to a tree in the empty house next door until my dad spooked the man, who then ran away).
Lawman and CEP came down to my house one night and invited me to stay overnight at Lawman’s while his parents were away. My parents were skeptical, but Lawman, whom they really didn’t like so much, and CEP, whom they dearly loved, convinced them that Lawman had his parents’ permission to host us. Off we went. Other than making a lot of noise, we really didn’t do much of anything except talk about girls, make a few crank phone calls, insult each other (I took most of the brunt of this), and watch The Joey Bishop Show. We did this for several nights before kind of tiring of it. Around Thursday night, Lawman and CEP showed up once again, but this time they wanted me to bring my organ up to Lawman’s place to jam with Billy D. Hell, yeah! I shot outta there like a bullet. Nothing one was going to stand in the way of my chance to jam with Billy D.
We had one really big problem, which was that we had guitar, organ, and microphone, but only a single amp. Normally that would not have been a problem since many of the amps we had seen had two channels with inputs for two different instruments in each channel. Most of the bands around used the spare channel of the bass amp to sing through, but CEP’s Estey had three inputs labeled Low, Medium, and High, and we weren’t sure the amp could accommodate us all. Long story short, it did. Problem solved.
The first song we tried was one Billy D called Jumpin Ditches, but which I now know to be entitled Baby What You Want Me to Do (amazing that my first serious song was a blues). We went through it as far as we could. When we hit an impasse, Billy D said, “When we get there again, try this.” I don’t remember the exact instructions, but when we got there again, we took BD’s advice and it worked. We went over the song several times until it began to sound sort of slick. Damn, I thought, how did that happen? We tried a few other songs, and in every case ran into some glitch, but Billy D always knew what to do to smooth it over. I guess Lawman was feeling left out, so he grabbed a couple of pots and pans and banged on them while we played. It still sounded good. It was fun. We played again the next night, and actually began by sounding better than the night before. Holy moly! The act of playing music with others had me completely under its spell.
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