In the summer of 1975,Howard received a call from an old acquaintance from San Diego named Michael Mielnick, a wonderfully verbal street performer and fire eater who had performed for years as The Flaming Zucchini and had recently undergone a sort of transubstantiation to become The Reverend Chumleigh. As Major Chumleigh, he had run the circus in which Cock & Feathers (the K's early inspirators) had been The Bagel-o Family of Clowns. Chumleigh had visited Santa Cruz at least once and gave Howard a spaghetti strainer.
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Actually, to digress for a moment (already!), Chumleigh had been told by a doctor that he must give up doing The Fireball, in which he took a mouthful of White Gas and spat it through a torch, or he'd die of liver failure in five years. So he gave it up in three years. As The Reverend Chumleigh, he performed many non-flaming miracles, including The Human Anvil (having an audience member break concrete blocks on his abdomen with a sledge hammer), The Bed of Nails (pretty much explains itself), and the Stairway of Death (walking on machete blades). But mostly he talked - rapidly, hilariously, and outrageously.
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Now Chumleigh had a proposition: there was a Renaissance Fair outside Eugene, Oregon, for which he was organizing a vaudeville circus show, and he wanted the K's to join. It wasn't exactly a Renaissance Fair or rather it was a true renaissance fair. It wasn't about the 16th century; it was about Rebirth. In fact, the people in California who claimed to own the words "Renaissance Fair," and had the deep pockets to back it up, had recently threatened to sue this fair for illegitimately using their trademark phrase. The hippies who "ran" the event had backed down, so now it was called the Oregon Country Fair.
So Chumleigh had his own stage in the woods, was organizing a band ("oh, great! We play band instruments too!"), and had a bunch of lovely and talented friends and co-conspirators. All we needed was a way to get there...
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the same motorcycle in 1976 |
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And Tim had a motorcycle. Paul and Howard talked him into driving them straight through from Santa Cruz to Eugene, one long night and morning. One of them rode the back and the other in the side car, with sickles and torches in the side car's little trunk. After that experience, Tim decided to go visit friends in Gold Creek and missed the whole Event.
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note the berets, capes, and convertible leather pants |
Oregun Country Fair turned out to be a magical little city that formed a figure eight-shaped path through the woods full of booths and tents and an enormous population that appeared, Brigadoon-like, for a few days each year. The whole event was an amazing cultural and spiritual experience, fraught with possibilities and potential, like what the world might have become if we hadn't lost the cultural wars of the sixties. We still go every year if we possibly can; it's a way we recharge our spiritual batteries for the coming year.
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| The band, which Chumleigh dubbed The Fightin' Instruments of Karma, was lead by trombone/guitar maniac Carl Spaeth (since evolved into Thaddeus Spae) and featured Wobbly tubist Bill Knowles (since evolved into a fightin' labor lawyer). |
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Paul just reminded me that the band only had six pieces, so I guess there was Teasy on fiddle and Mitch on snare drum. (A photo I just discovered also shows some guy playing soprano saxophone.) Anyway, the show featured the talents of Chumleigh's extremely intelligent dog, Berdalone, and Spike Wilder, Woman of Steel, who in addition to playing guitar and accordion, sang a song parody to the tune of Meet Me In St. Louis:
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Meet me in Eugene, Eugene,
Meet me at the Fair
Don't tell me that there's a new scene
Anywhere but there
We'll relax and take it easy
We might even meet Ken Kesey
If you'll just meet me in Eugene, Eugene
Meet me at the Fair
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In between the four or five shows each day, the vaudevillians would parade around the Fair to attract an audience and lead them back to Chumleighland, as Michael dubbed his little clearing and plank stage (nobody official at the Fair ever called it by that name, although we all insisted they should). And in between parades, they'd do street shows and pass the hat.
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| The K's were trying a new trick they called the Terror Trick (which later evolved into something more elaborate and interesting but not quite so foolhardy called the Danger Trick) in which we'd each juggle a heavy rigging hatchet, a torch, and a glass bottle of gasoline and then pass all six objects between us. We'd soak the torch in the gas from the bottle and then light it to prove the gas was real, and we explained in some detail how much damage the front several rows of audience would sustain if we made a mistake, but nobody seemed to believe us. They all laughed merrily while we kept insisting, "No, it's really dangerous! You could really get hurt!" But nobody trusts a vaudevillian. |
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juggling sickles with the leather pants fully converted |
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After one of these shows, a big, sandy-red-haired fellow who looked like two Paul Newmans mooshed together into one immensely powerful guy came up and gave us a bottle of Pyramid Snake Oil, a nostrum he'd created from stones he'd taken from the very top of the Great Pyramid, which he recommended for healing our burns and hatchet cuts. Afterwards we realized that it had to be the Great Man himself, author and cultural revolutionary Ken Kesey, who lived not far away in Springfield and whose family's creamery had its own section of the Fair. It was the first of what turned out to be many encounters over the years, including a stretch of weeks where we lived in his barn. More on that later...
One of the traditions created that year, along with the ever-evolving Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra, which is now a fifty-piece band and one of the perennial favorite attractions at the Fair, was the Saturday night Midnight Show. Chumleigh moved by his eternal sympathy for the plight of working folk, suggested we do a show after hours for the Booth people, who were too busy during the day to see the show.
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Chumleigh is the one in the checked shirt,
who's the guy on the left? |
It began with a torchlight parade followed by a show at Chumleighland with a few guest artists. These days more than five thousand people attend the Midnight Show at the Fair's Mainstage, and the show runs three or four hours with dozens of performers; but then it was one more of the unofficial, anarchic activities (like the band parades themselves) that the people who ran the fair weren't sure they liked, but didn't seem to be able to stop us from doing. Somebody had the idea of doing a Naked Parade, and as we were all formed up in hats and shoes and not much else, Cindy Wooten, director of the Fair at that time, came running in shouting "Put your pants on!" Chumleigh had his revenge later when the band passed Cindy on the path. He stopped, called for a drum roll, shouted out "Present - arms!", and the entire parade dropped their trousers.
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Among the many lifelong friends we made at that first Fair was The Spoonman, our dear brother Artis, immortalized a few years ago by Soundgarden in their song "Spoonman" ("come together with your hand/I'm together with your plan"). At the Fair Artis tends to transmogrify into a new age John the Baptist character, berating the hippies on their failures and admonishing them to be more organic, more politically active, more resistant to the demands of corporate television monoculture. Artis joined Howard and Paul in hitchhiking back to Santa Cruz, juggling and spoon playing to attract passing drivers' attention; the photo here was taken in Roseburg, Oregon, on the side of the freeway, as the trio was interviewed by a pair of Douglas County Patrolfolk.
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Chumleigh had a plan: the shows in Eugene had gone so well that he invited the K's to join him on a round-the-world sailing and performing trip, starting with a shakedown cruise to Alaska. So Paul and Howard went back to Santa Cruz, got Seiza and their stuff, and began hitchhiking north to meet Chumleigh and his crew in Eugene. The trip up Highway 1 was pleasant, but eventually the trick of circling around each other juggling one set of balls while extending their alternating free hand with proffered thumb while Seiza gamboled about with the cardboard "Eugene" sign seemed to lose its magic, and they found themselves standing at one particular bend in the road, surrounded by redwoods and overlooking the distant sea, for an uncomfortably long period of time.
After what seemed like an eternity with no likely traffic at all, a woman sped by in an aqua convertible (with white interior), waving gaily, and vanished around the bend. Paul shouted, "That's our ride!" and charged after her. Howard and Seiza stood in silent astonishment for quite some time‹Paul had been a cross country competitor in high school, and was (and is) an incredibly determined individual, but the idea that he would try to run down a speeding automobile seemed a bit far fetched. As far as they knew he would run all the way to Eugene before he'd admit defeat. After a much longer dramatic pause than made any kind of sense at all, the car reappeared around the bend, Paul smirking triumphantly in the passenger's seat. The woman (whose name is, sadly, lost in the mists of time) drove them, after a refreshing sleep break in the verdant woods, all the way to their Eugene rendezvous.
At the precise second they pulled into the parking lot that was their appointed meeting place,Chumleigh and his crew arrived on their way down from LaConner, Washington. They had hitchhiked as well and gotten a ride from someone who was flying to Eugene in his own airplane and flew them right there. It all seemed like a wonderful omen.
The first step was to get to Seattle. Carl Spaethe had offered them a ride in his Volkswagen Beetle, but it seemed unlikely that it would fit seven people, a Labrador retriever, large horns, and a bed of nails. But after removing all the seats except the driver's, it was possible to fit a couple of people behind Carl and the rest lined up alongside like commuting tobogganists. I can't remember where in the car Berdalone was exactly, but the bed of nails was in two sections, folded face to face with the nails inside, while the tobogganists sat atop it. To pass the time crammed into this tiny shoebox full of hippies and animals, we read aloud the entirety of Errol Flynn's autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways,a remarkable work that begins with Flynn beginning to write aboard a boat in the Mediterranean with four fifths of whiskey and a shot glass and ends with three or four chapters of raving, drunken invective.
The first leg of the journey was by ferry to Friday Harbor, the now quite gentrified but then sleepy, rural main town of San Juan Island, where they were scheduled to perform at the county fair. Howard and Seiza had never taken the ferry to a small island terminal, only to Seattle, where the traveler has a fairly generous stretch of time to gather his belongings and find his way off the boat; but at the little stops in the San Juans, it turns out there are only a few short minutes to scramble off before the ferry heads to its next destination. They casually got their bags together and wandered down to the boat deck, in time to see their compatriots(Chumleigh and his girlfriend Terry, Paul and his Californian inamorata Michelle who had come up separately, probably by plane) on shore and to watch in horror as the boat pulled away with them aboard. The next stop? Canada.
When they arrived In Canada after quite a long trip, Howard and Seiza planned to stay aboard till the boat headed south, but the crew insisted they had to get off with all their baggage, that that was simply how it was done. On the Canadian side they turned around and got in the front of the Customs line. When the Customs officer asked how long they'd been in Canada, they laughingly explained that they'd just gotten off and were heading right back. His demeanor immediately became stern as he ordered them away from their bags and had a platoon of crewmen carry the luggage aboard. He was sure he had just broken up an enormous drug smuggling operation and was looking forward to disassembling their belongings bit by bit on the long trip back.
They weren't carrying any drugs, so they were able to watch confidently as Roger (we learned his name from the other ferrymen, who were by now a bit tired of his elaborate searches of obviously innocent counter-culturalists) carefully dissected their belongings. They watched with muted glee as he reached into a pocket of Seiza's pack that contained an exploded tube of birth control jelly, snickering silently as his face fell and he got up to wash his hands. Finally, crestfallen, he had to admit there was nothing there and release them from his thrall; later we heard from ferrymen we met that shortly after this debacle he left the Customs service to join the ministry. I'm sure everyone was happier that way.
Howard and Seiza marched triumphantly from the ferry deck to the shores of San Juan Island, only a few hours later than intended, and the show went on. At the end of the run in San Juan, we were met in Friday Harbor by our noble Captain and his good ship, the Lion's Roar. It was a wooden sailing boat, no more than 22-feet long, with a gaff-rigged tie-dyed mainsail. It had had a bowsprit at one point, but it had been lost when the Lion's Roar crashed into an island in a boat race. Our captain/owner was a jack Mormon named Myron who liked to wear an engineer's cap and a skirt when sailing (not a kilt, too warm I guess). His first mate was a jolly piratical-looking veteran with a big red beard, a bandana on his head, and a paratroop tattoo on his rear end.
The plan was to sail to Point Roberts, a little peninsula that attaches to Canada but is below the 48th parallel (or whatever it is), so it is American territory but can only be accessed by driving through Canada or by sailing. We were scheduled to perform at a festival there, so Chumleigh and Terry, Paul and Michelle, and Howard and Seiza all climbed aboard and began the great adventure, the first leg of the shakedown cruise to Alaska.
The voyage was not without its problems. My favorite incident was when we became stuck in a whirlpool between islands, rotating about once every minute and a half. If the boat had been equipped with an engine, an outboard, or even a decent set of oars, we could have escaped easily; but the Lion's Roar's equipage only included a pair of poles with boards nailed to them, and after several minutes of fruitless splashing we resigned ourselves to waiting six hours for the tide to change and the whirlpool to disappear. As we sat, we played music, which attracted a small group of porpoises, who sang to us as we slowly rotated.
After two days the festival was fast approaching, so in spite of unfavorable winds and currents we sailed through the night to get there, the boys took turns staying up with the crew while the girlfriends slept on deck, on top of the cabin, or on top of a toolbox (did I mention that it was a really small boat?). We arrived haggard and exhausted, began to perform, and suddenly the audience just walked away. We were offended until we realized that a pod of Orcas was disporting themselves just off the beach, a few feet away, and the audience had naturally considered them more interesting than we were right at that moment. We just waited for the whales to go away and resumed the show.
After the performance, Captain Myron let us know that he'd decided not to take us any farther. We got the impression that the three couple's rampant rutting eventually got on his nerves. Well, that was a short world tour. Chumleigh and Paul were ready to press on anyway, but Seiza wanted to return to Santa Cruz, and Howard's scholarship didn't provide for breaks, so after much discussion Howard decided to go back to UCSC, and Paul decided to join him. (Incidentally, we heard later that The Lion's Roar later met a bad end, and that all that remained was the fragment of board that bore her noble [is that a Mormon thing?] name.)
First, though, there was much summer left. Michelle went home; Chumleigh and Terry went who knows where; and Howard, Paul, and Seiza went to Anacortes to crash at a Grey House (one of a series of dilapidated grey houses owned by a consortium of hippies in Bellingham, Anacortes, and maybe Olympia, that seemed to be open to any acquaintance who wanted to crash there).
Each day Howard and Paul would get the morning ferry from Anacortes to one of the San Juan Islands, do a show on board, pass the hat, get off at the first stop, get on the next boat going back, do a show, pass the hat, get off at the first stop, take the next boat going back, do one show, and so on, about six shows a day. Just to announce our presence, we'd play nautical medleys from the superstructure overlooking the car deck on clarinet and baritone horn, welcoming the boarding passengers.
The ferry biz was quite lucrative and involved lots of down time looking out at the islands, the water, and the sky. Once we passed an incredible vision going the other way: a little ship that seemed to be mostly filled with a steam calliope playing merrily away as it steamed in the other direction. We were entranced, but it rapidly faded from sight, and we never saw it again. If anyone knows of a craft like this that plied Puget Sound in the early 70's, please let us know, we'd love to know more.
On one early leg of these trips we met some people who lived on Orcas Island, who invited us to stay with them. A woman named Gwendolyn and her two partners, Bradley and Alnis (a Lithuanian who imported amber and who taught us our only Lithuanian phrase: "lampos drudzis," meaning "stage fright"), lived in a wonderful house overlooking a cove, and we collected Seiza and all moved in.
After six days of harvesting this unexpected resource, word finally got from the Captains to the home office in Seattle, a decision was reached, and the appropriate people informed: as we strode up the deck of one of the stout little ferries, we looked up to see the first mate on the bridge, looking down at us with his arms folded, slowly shaking his head. After a little gestural conversation ("Us?" "Yes, you." "We should go back?" "Yes, scram." "Can't we come aboard?" "No, you can't." "C'mon? You know, it's just us." "No, it's all over, get outta here." "Really?" "Beat it!"), it became clear that the jig was up, and we might as well head back to Santa Cruz where our educations awaited us.
Note: as usual, we were ahead of our time. People perform on the ferries all the time now, with official approval, and I believe even receive a stipend. Don't just show up, though: the Washington State Ferries still don't like surprises much.
To be continued (eventually)...
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Links:
Thaddeus Spae
Reverend Chumleigh
Oregon Country Fair
Artis the Spoonman
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Go to The College Years Part One
Go to the main History page |
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