Springfield Starship

More Oldies

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (or at least the concert stages) I was a misbehaving teenager attending acid rock shows in the Springfield area armed with a beautiful topshelf Yashica camera I got for a pittance from a B&E artist I knew (as in Breaking and Entering). In a bit of karmic justice, the camera was eventually stolen from me. Anyway, in that distant era they would let you bring cameras into concerts, these being the days before every moment of a rock and roll show became a copyrighted experience that no one can capture in any form unless somebody is being paid a royalty.

click photo to enlarge

So I took a bunch of pictures at a lot of shows and put them in a photo album. Then in the course of relocating hither and yon somewhere along the way I thought I lost it. I always hoped it would turn up someday, but frankly I had no real expectation that it would. Then one day when I was going through some of the stuff in my late Mom's cellar, lo and behold there it was, the book of photos along with some other local music memoriabilia such as the Martian Highway flyer reproduced above. Leave it to dear old Mom to always save the stuff I was careless about. As for Martian Highway, it was a popular local party band fronted by a cool spade named Carl Mayfield.



The following are pictures of the Jefferson Starship at the Springfield Civic Center, exact date unknown, but it was sometime in the late 70's. The earliest incarnations of the Jefferson Starship were more in the style of the revolutionary Airplane than the commercialized Top 40 hit machine they later became. My main memory of this show is how about a week before the concert, the aforementioned madman Carl Mayfield had some weird LSD-induced vision that the phrase "Bloated Oat a Goat Will Float," whose specific meaning he was never quite able to explain, must somehow be spread to the multitudes assembled and particularly to the Starship itself.

So he went about making stickers, signs, balloons and anything else he could think of to disperse to the crowd which had that statement (among other things) written on them. I think all eight thousand people who attended that show encountered that phrase multiple times; at the very least they heard it once when Grace Slick picked up something with the phrase written on it that was thrown on stage and asked, "Bloated oat a goat will float? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Ah Grace, just another one of the cosmic mysteries that will never be solved!

Grace encountering a bloated oat.



Spacey Gracie the Acid Queen



The voice that launched a thousand trips.



Paul Kantner



Craig Chaquico and Kantner.



The late Pine Pointer "Fuji" Cardinal (center) and crew at the concert. His real first name was Dave, and he was best known as a Boston Road Cumberland Farms cashier who also sold weed that he kept hidden behind the counter. The place sold more lids than it did gallons of milk. He died in a highway accident about five years ago.



Boston Road Car Caper



Want even more Springfield oldies? Okay, here's a funny true life story my friend Jordan Williams (above right) sent me in an email years ago.

It all began when I stopped by that used car lot next to St. Michael's cemetary in Pine Point, Springfield:



At the time I was searching for a replacement for the RX-7. As I drove down Boston Road in Springfield at around 10 PM, I spotted a vehicle on the Pine Point lot that I thought might be the ticket. I pulled up onto the sidewalk in order to get out of the way of traffic and got out to check out the cars. I'm in the habit of leaving the car running for brief stops like this one for fear that the intermittent starting problem I've been having might arise once again. This despite having invested $542 during the prior week because of a bad door, a major tune-up and that starting situation.

A couple of minutes into the tire kicking, I noticed a guy walking down the street on the other side who seemed to be making an effort to get my attention. Waving his arms and yelling some sort of gibberish. I knew I didn't know him and just sort of waved him off. Well naturally he stumbled over to talk to me - in Spanish. I said "No espanol," and just hoped he would go away. He spoke English just fine though, and offering his hand in friendship his first sentence was this: "My name is Manuel, I am Puerto Rican, and I see, my friend, that you are looking for a car. This is a very good business - cars. It so happens that I will be receiving twenty three thousand dollars very soon because of this injury (points to unmarked portions of one arm and one leg) and I would like to invest in such a car business. Me and you can be partners. What do you think? Would you like to be with me in the car business?"

Hmm. I sized up my potential new business partner. On the plus side he appeared to be about 40, in good shape, bilingual and would soon have many thousands of dollars. On the minus he was shirtless, drunk, stoned, crazy and dirty. It was a close call and one that, sadly, went against poor Manuel. I said "Well, that is certainly something to think about." But I believe that I saw in Manuel's eyes a sadness. A sadness that said "I do not believe you want to be partners with Manuel."

He then informed me that he was late to work and asked if I would give him a ride. I declined. He then asked me for a dollar. "Sorry Manuel, all tapped out." "How about 50 cents?" "No can do." And the litany began again, starting with a ride, moving to a dollar and ending with 50 cents. No. No. No. And again. And again. He was also getting more belligerant. By now I was simply ignoring him and just looking at cars. He wouldn't leave though and I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I drifted away in the opposite direction that he'd eventually leave. It worked. He finally walked away.

I was now about 50 yards from my car. Manny was gone. Wrong. A few minutes later I realized that Manuel had doubled back, screened from me by a house, and suddenly reemerged near my car. He screamed out the question "50 cents man?" It was all crystal clear now. I shook my pockets wishing I had a couple of quarters. Nothing. "No Manuel . . . NO!" I hollerd. But I watched in horror as he jumped into the Mazda and, as I screamed "No, Manny don't do it!" Manuel floored it, bouncing off the road as he left the sidewalk onto the pavement and laying a fair amount of rubber. The Mazda was gone.

Or was it? Coincidence, or perhaps destiny, can be a remarkable thing though and a Springfield police cruiser came around the corner just moments after Manuel's betrayal. I ran into the street arms flailing away. The cruiser swerved slightly to avoid me and though I noticed the lone officer looking curiously into the rear view mirror, there was no change in speed as he crested and then disappeared over the same hill as Manuel. Indeed - the Mazda was truly gone.

12 hours later I was on my way to the Poconos and wouldn't get a police update until the next night: "Mr. Williams…that car is still stolen."

Actually, I never saw it again.

Around Amherst

If you don't offer this you can't stay in business.



The Jolly Rogers atop a UMass partyhouse.



I stopped in at Amherst's historic West Cemetery.



I wanted to check in on Miss Emily.

Status Update: Still dead.

Some of the stones have been damaged by vandals.



If the vandals don't get you, time will.



Nothing lasts.

Today's Video

This was a monster hit in 1973.

Woodstock

Valley Edition



This week is the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. I was alive at the time but too young to attend. However, there was a place in Saint Michael's Cemetery in Springfield's ol' Pine Point where we kids used to party after dark which we called Woodstock. I'm not sure exactly why, although like Woodstock there used to be plenty of pot smoking and occasionally Karl Mayfield would show up with a guitar.



It seems weird to me now that we used to party in a cemetery, but at the time we thought nothing of it.

I'm surprised by all the attention the anniversary is receiving. The Academy of Music in Northampton is showing the film version this weekend.



I was never a big fan of the movie, which despite its excellent music is otherwise preachy and sloppily filmed. Especially annoying is the split screen technique they used. Oh well, I guess you had to be there.

Someone who was there is promoter Michael Lang, who came to Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley for a book signing recently and posed with local writer Alex Ross.



This is Lang (right) at Woodstock with Wavy Gravy.



Of course the whole thing is being commercialized. Have you bought your official Woodstock sneakers yet?





After the big bash of '69 there were subsequent concerts held under the Woodstock name, each of which had their musical moments (Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Woodstock 1999 below) but of course none of them could compare to the original.



The only Western Massachusetts resident to perform at Woodstock was Arlo Guthrie (below with Western Mass restauranteur Alice Brock). In recent years Guthrie has been a supporter of libertarian causes, and released this statement in 2008 in support of libertarian presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul.



“I love this guy. Dr. Paul is the only candidate I know of who would have signed the Constitution of The United States had he been there. I'm with him, because he seems to be the only candidate who actually believes it has as much relevance today as it did a couple of hundred years ago. I look forward to the day when we can work out the differences we have with the same revolutionary vision and enthusiasm that is our American legacy.”




Flashback

I like this old photo of the original Masslive crew in 1998: Jaime Damico, Scott Brodeur and Dan Muse. Dig how the screen is showing a primitive version of the site.



I'm sorry to hear that former Masslive boss Jeff Jarvis has cancer. May he make a full and speedy recovery.

Speaking of Masslive, I ran into Greg Saulmon the other day, whose Local Buzz has a great series on what is really going down regarding gang prevention in Springfield.



Check it out here.

Around Hamp

I am surprised and saddened by the closing of Dynamite Records on Main Street in Northampton. For decades it was a mainstay in the basement of Thornes, but apparently couldn't make it when they struck out on their own.



Once upon a time it seemed like there was a record store on nearly every corner in the Valley, and where there wasn't a record store there was a book store. Now both are nearly extinct; killed by the internet.

Speaking of the basement of Thornes, have you ever been to Acme Surplus? They have the cheapest batteries in town.



A poster lying on the ground.



Saturday night in front of First Church.



Last night in front of City Hall.



Today's Video

Here's another gem from Woodstock.

Out of Print

It's gone, but I saved it.

Over the years I've been involved with a number of small print publications, most of them shortlived. One of them was a Chicopee based paper called The Northern Sun Magazette, for which I wrote a column until the day, about a year after it started, when the Northern Sun headed towards the setting sun. What the hell was a magazette anyhow? Here's a good example of my column.



One of the low points of my otherwise wonderfully misspent youth was the time I got busted on charges of attempting to smuggle drugs across international borders. I was a freshly minted graduate of the High School of Commerce and spending the summer living in a gorgeous little town in northern Vermont called Jeffersonville.

On weekend a buddy and I scooted across the Canadian border and spent some time Montreal, a vibrant but divided city whose problems provide as good an argument against a bilingual society as you'll ever experience in real life. We Americans too often take for granted just how lucky we are to have (for the moment at least) a nation united by one language.

But that's neither here nor there as far as this story goes. What was really intriguing about the Canadians was their incredibly tolerant attitude towards illegal drug use. Marijuana, which is so common here in the USA, is hard to get in Canada, where the lousy climate impedes the homegrown market and the best imported herb usually has to cross two borders to reach that far north.



Therefore most Canadian cannabis based drugs come from Europe, where it arrives condensed and compacted into the form of slightly sticky bricks of hashish. What was amazing was that people in the bars and nightclubs of Montreal were smoking hashish openly without anyone seeming the least bit perturbed. Hashish was technically illegal in Canada, but desptie the unmistakeable aroma of hashish in the air, no one was running to the phone to call the cops, such as you might expect to happen in the good ol' USA. Suffice it to say that my friend and I adopted the old travelers adage about doing what the Romans do, and even went a bit further and tried to bring a chunk of that hashish (called "Brown Gold" as I recall) backe to the USA as a sort of temporary souvenir, if you will, of our Canadian sojourn.

It should have been easy to do, but sometimes things are not as easy as it seems they ought to be. To make a long story short, thruogh a maddening combination of bad luck and cruel fate, the hashish was discovered by the border police, setting in motion a very unpleasant series of events, much of which I would prefer to forget, if I could. Without getting into the details, let me assure you that whatever the carefree attitude of the Canadian people regarding cannibis, the border police have no sense of humor on that subject whatsoever.

Yet despite some tense moments when it appeared that I might be facing a fate that would have required me to write this column from a jail cell, nothing much came of the incident. Apparently I was hardly the first American kid to think of bringing some of that Brown Gold back home, and so the Canadian justice system essentially just scared the heck out of me by threatening but then not following through on prison time, and basically told me to just be on my way back home with the stern admonishment to never darken the door to their fair country ever again!



I'm pretty sure that had this happened to me in today's far more paranoid drug environment, that I could've gotten off so easy. The only lasting consequence is that I cannot legally own firearms in Massachusetts, something of a disappointment since, like all true red-blooded Americans, I have an almost erotic fascination with weapons of all kinds.

Now flash forward some fifteen years to a sunny afternoon in Westfield where I was hosting the late, great Tommy Devine Show on WNNZ radio. It was a beautiful summer day when only a fool would be indoors listening to the radio, and consequently the phone lines were dead. Forced to fill the airwaves with nothing but my own improvisational patter, I lapsed into a kind of stream of conciousness rap about what I would do if I were the Mayor of Springfield. I soon got a little carried away and actually announced that I was actually going to run for mayor against then incumbent Robert Markel. I would have thought no one could have taken my announcement seriously, since I was promoting such notions as erecting a geodesic dome over downtown and putting a memorial on Court Square to the victims of the Springfield Newspapers.

Yet apparently there was someone out there who was listening and taking my radio skit quite seriously, because within a week I received something very strange and ominous in the mail. It came in an envelope postmarked in Springfield, but with no return address. Inside was a single sheet of paper, typed in the old dot-matrix style, which appeared to be a print-out from some law enforcement database. It was about my Canadian drug bust. That and nothing more, no writing no commentary, no clue of any kind as to its point of origin.

Yet there was a very clear, if unstated message just the same, one which if paraphrased might read something like this:

Hey Mr. Wouldbe Mayor!
In case you ever get serious about elective office, be aware that I, Mr. Mysterious Somebody, have access to this little piece of information. So before you go announcing yourself running for any offices, bear in mind the places I could sent this document to.

At first I laughed at this clumsily implied threat, but once I got to thinking about it, that letter gave me the creeps. Who had access to this information? Were some kind of privacy laws violated in obtaining it? Wasn't there something immoral, if not illegal, in blackmailing me this way?

Actually, if I had been serious about runnning for mayor, that particular skeleton falling out of the closet wouldn't have discouraged me. I would have simply held a press conference and dismissed the entire episode as youthful folly. Then I would have argued that even if I were on heroin, I could still think more clearly on municipal matters than anybody in the Markel Administration could do stone cold sober. But since I never intended to run for office in the first place, I simply dismissed the whole thing as just sleazery as usual in Springfield. But I haven't forgotten about it.

I suspect there were probably a number of incidents in Valley politics over the years where so-called confidential records, criminal and otherwise, have found their way into the hands of those who had no business obtaining them. In fact, I'll bet it happens all the time. But that doesn't make it right.

Another failed but fun publication, for which I did not write, was the Northampton based V-Mag. Still, I knew a few of the people involved and got a mention or two in it for various things. To the extent that V-Mag had any focus at all, it was on cartoons, for which it was a pioneering crusader against censorship of any kind:



One time Northampton Mayor M. Clare Higgins denounced V-Mag as "a scummy little magazine" and when you're getting reviews like that from the powers-that-be then you know you're on the right track. An equal opportunity offender, many residents of Holyoke were offended by this issue, although V-Mag was hardly the first to declare Holyoke a horror story. (click to enlarge)



While we're on the subject of cartoons, the old artist from Martian Highway days Steve Lafleur was interviewed recently, and admitted he used marijuana for inspiration. What a shock!



When you connect with the muse, you're at the center of life, there is nothing like it. It frankly can't be put into words right here, with luck it comes through in my comics.
I freely admit I'm part goddamn hippy and I love reefer. Sometimes I take a couple hits and start drawing. You can get some cool surprises. You bounce in this matrix of story and idea. If you overuse weed as a tool, it flattens your stuff, and I suffered from this sometimes with Dog Boy.

To read the whole interview, click here.

Speaking of Martian Higway over 15 years ago I got this letter in the mail.



The envelope had scrawled on the back of it these words to live by:



I knew at once that it could only be from Karl Mayfield, the former lead guitarist for Martian Highway, a popular local psychedelic combo that billed itself as "The Valley's Only Space Band."

And how!

This letter reached me after a long period of having had no contact with him, so it was sort of a catching up letter sent to me after Karl discovered a copy of the Baystate Objectivist in the Pine Point Cafe during a brief visit to Springfield. After all these years it is still an interesting and amusing enough missive to be worth sharing. I'll type it for you so that you don't have to try to decipher the unique handwriting of the original:



April 3, 93 2:30 AM

Last night I filled my belly with the flesh of dead animals as I sat at a banquet to honor my induction into Who's Who among students of American colleges. I thin proceeded to my local pub to suck down pints of ale, while listening to young people that don't do drugs play music that has about as much to do wih transcendance as Mr. Murphy's cough echoing through the halls of Balliet.

The beer is stale, the band is lame, the lights come on, I return to my room cluttered with the debris of my journeys . . . . My never ending quest for the Tao. I need to listen to some of that good ole Grateful Dead. One jam in particular is needed to retune my nervous system . . . Dark Star . . . Copenhagen . . . 1972 . . . I've been to Amsterdam . . . Drugs are legal . . . Minds are free. Where the fuck is that tape? Oh yeah . . . My backpack . . ZIIPP Clack Clack.

What is this a band poster from Germany? A menue from the south of France? Some sort of newspaper. Must be something radical. Typical Left/Right/Center/3D wing paranoia? - The Baystate Objectivist - Must have got this in New England but where? Do they actually read this kind of stuff in the Pine Point Cafe . . . St. Paddy's Day . . . Drunk . . . On the phone . . . Stuffed into my pocket. This is weird, I see people in here that are the younger brothers and sisters of people I knew years ago. I turn the page - Tom Devine! . . . Not The Tom Devine? Good work, I enjoyed reading it.

We went through many good times, many weird and twisted times. I was really glad to see your name. Since I last saw you I've traveled all over the planet. I've lived in the forest, did peyote in the desert witht he Indians, fucked Englishwoman, I went in the Army for three years, I'm now a pre-med student in college.

One of the biggest influences on my life was our years of interstellar inquiry . . . Tattered Hot Tuna/Grunt shirt on the body of a wide-eyed youth in search of the next buzz . . . A lot of who I am was initiated by you.

But enough of this babbling spew!

Let's see what else . . . Oh yeah, I've been friends with Paul Kantner for the last few years, his manager is a buddy of mine. I've met Jack Cassady a bunch of times also over the years. He's cool. Jorma is still a friend, I see him all the time down here at this good club that has a lot of the ole good folks. In London I met Roger Waters backstage at Radio Kaos.

I think the best coup was meeting Neel Jung. A friend of mine raises horses in California. I was out west in LA just after the riots. I was invited to my friend's ranch to go riding. He said we should wait before we go because his bud was coming to ride with us. I lost it when it turned out to be Mr. Young himself. The guy was great, he even let me do a little jamming with him.

Oh well, I'm getting tired. I will always love thinking about the past - we were kids then but I tell ya we had some great times.

See ya,

K.