One thing I do remember is, we hired this guy, Dave, who had a van to help haul our equipment. Back then (Jane) Curtis used to smoke a lot of pot. So I’m driving the van, Dave’s van. Curtis, her roommate, and this guy were smoking pot. Since I didn’t want to have anything to do with that I was driving the van. There was another car behind us with the rest of the guys in it. We were leaving Perry. We had played something in Perry, may have been a high school job. Behind the second car you could see the police lights going. Now Dave had the foresight to have a hole in the floor of his van and he threw all the pot and stuff out. It turned out the cop was just stopping the guys in the car behind because they had a tail light out.
So we take the van back to Ames. His plan is to stay the night with Curtis. I said I kinda need to go back to Boone. Curtis’ roommate says, “You can come and stay in my room.” And so I go to her room. Her roommate is gone so she’s in her bed and I’m in her roommate’s bed. (Someone had put Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ on the stereo.) I hadn’t heard ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. There’s this point on (the album) where all of these alarm clocks go off. I was half awake and I hear all of these alarms go off! (laughs) And I about lost it!
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Later the following week I was talking with a friend who had attended the whole day of Summerfest. He mentioned he thought our set went well and enjoyed seeing us, but there was one thing he found interesting. He said that the PA had not sounded very good for most of the day until the last two groups played. It sounded a bit better for the next to the last group and then magically cleaned up and sounded very good for the last band—the band whose PA it was. I conferred with Dave, our lead player in Camel, and he said he had heard the same thing from one of his friends. When we talked about this at the next practice we were all amazed that this kind of subterfuge had taken place. For some reason it just didn’t seem right that musicians had done such a thing to fellow musicians.
Yeah! I’ll never forget one night. I can’t remember the lead player’s name, but he had gotten a new fuzz box or something–some distortion deal–(and used it) on every song they played–even House of the Rising Sun. I guess he wanted to get his money’s worth. (laughter)
The time before that when we played for Valentine’s Day, I think it was, downstairs (in what) was the art room. We nicked in there and I was carrying in my bass drum. I was still in 4th grade, because there is no reason why this teacher should have known me. I walk down stairs and he watches me set it up and get ready and goes, “Oh, that’s really nice. You’re getting the drums ready for your brother.” I said, “No, I play them.” “Oh,” he went, “What do you do? Tup-tup-tup-tup-tup.” (playing delicate air drums). So I played extra hard that night. He came up afterward and went, “Way to go buddy! That’s pretty good!” That was so much fun. So I was supercharged to play for the junior high dance, cause this was like 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, whatever.
At a couple of those shows we had the influx of “thugism”. We had the big guys you know? We were barely big enough to do this stuff. We were 15 and 16 and I guess Steve would have been 17. He was two years older than me. I think Dave was a year older than me. We were not tough guys. We were guitar nerds. We didn’t know that’s what we were, but that’s what we were. Now we can say it—we were guitar nerds. We had a couple of shows that the less savory element kind of came in. They paid their money. Actually there was no fights to speak of—it wasn’t rough—but it looked like it could be rough. So we’d spend the evening fretting whether we were in trouble or not. There was usually one or two dads that would come along. I think the dads were required for us to get the hall most of the time.
The recreation department in Webster City found out about us. They were having a 4 H dance at the swimming pool up in Webster City. This was probably in August of ‘68. It was going to be big. There were going to be a lot of kids. We piled all of our equipment into my dad’s ‘64 Ford station wagon and we headed north out of Boone. That was when highway 17 was barely wide enough for two cars. The bridges were dangerously narrow. We could (see) that the clouds were darkening up. We (figured) we had to head up there (even though this was an outside gig). This would have been somewhere between 5 or 6 in the afternoon. The dance was probably going to be a 9 to 12 dance.
We got north out of Boone about 3 or 4 miles and the car overheated and blew a hose. We didn’t know what we were going to do. Dad drove the thing back to the greenhouse that my family ran. Dad got one of the 18 foot flower delivery straight trucks and we loaded all of our equipment into the truck. (chuckles) We all piled into the back box with our equipment and he headed back up to Webster City. You can imagine the looks from the kids when this big old truck comes pulling up. (laughs) That was back in the days when the Rumbles were popular. And the Westminst’rs. We thought we (had finally arrived in the big time). We were hardly in the band for a year and we had this massive truck to haul all of our equipment.
We got up to the swimming pool and no more got unloaded and started to get things set up and a severe storm rolled into Webster City. They had to clear everyone out of the pool before we even got started. They said let’s move it over to the community building over at the Hamilton County fairgrounds which must not have been far from there. I think the 4 H were putting on the dance instead of the city dance, because they were very accommodating. We played that dance and outside it rained cats and dogs. I remember the humidity. You could cut it with a knife. And the smooth cement floor would sweat. We had to watch it and not touch the microphone and the our guitar at the same time. (laughs)
