CHAPTER 18 They Call It Mellow Yellow

I would not in a million years, have considered a career as a cab driver. You see, I had not completed my weaning from the dollar bill and still believed I was morally obligated to earn money. I was not yet a hippie. I was still attached to "real" life as a symbiant. Republic Bank and I shared co-dependent personalities.

Cab driving can teach you many things about people, especially one's self. I even learned something of my DJ self from one of the fares I picked up. I casually began talking about the Jazz Unlimited show on WRR with a black man who was my rider. He had listened often, he said. He didn't seem to recognize my voice. I asked him what he thought about the DJ on the show. "He ain't got no soul, man." was the only response. I took it literally. It hurt. It made me wonder about The Meaning Of Life. I wondered about it for several weeks while I learned about being a very good cab driver. I often again, found myself in that State Of Mind That Has No Explanation. I think it must be that Deja' Vu is really a form of prayer.

In Dallas in those days near the Market district, was a place called the Green Frog Cafe. It was rather like attending Mass to go there. It was expected of all cab drivers. For some reason I never dropped in but I often wondered if it were the same place mentioned in Jerry Jeff Walker's "Desperados Waiting For a Train". What a wonderful anthem that song was. Another Jerry Jeff Walker tune that got passed over (probably because Mr. Bojangles was such a hit) was "The Hulk" which was one of the most savage attacks on politics I had ever heard. Richard Nixon was nailed quite well in 1965, nearly ten years before his demise. What a song.

Coming off Dallas' Harwood Street south bound near the Southland Life building, one could time one's cab with the traffic lights so as to hit Commerce and Main safely, just under the yellow. It got to be a habit with me. I hit it night after night on my runs. Then one night, I got hit back. It was a new Cadillac gunning east bound out of the Statler-Hilton far too fast to be observing any kind of lights at all. The guy was definitely drunk although in those days, it didn't matter all that much. He plowed a Cadillac V-shaped dent right into the back right side of my cab where the radio was mounted. I took off for a couple of weeks and wondered how I would make the rent and buy food. Somewhere near the end of my rope, I was given more rope with a small check from the cab company. My case had proved out in court. They had been blessed by my work there, and I could come back if I wanted to. I passed. The checks were too small for the bet.

Amazingly, the phone rang again. It was Ron Chapman trying to assemble a staff for a Dallas radio station he and his group were buying - KVIL. It would be nice here to say "You know the rest", but this is not a Cinderella story. I did not become the Major Market Voice of the 1970's although it was certainly a perfect setup for it. I had shaken hands with Sonny Barger of the Hell's Angels - some of that lust for freedom had gotten into my blood. I could be a really great radio DJ, I knew that. I wanted something far most elusive and costly. I wanted freedom and sex and happiness and adventure - in any order at all.

During the next six months I was held on salaried retainer with literally nothing to do. The station's legal work was far from done and yet Chapman and his people wanted me to stay put. I got paid. I stayed. During that time I connected heavily with the man who would be the afternoon drive personalty; Bill Compton. Bill was one of those people with a great voice, incredible charisma and natural charm. We smoked a lot of stuff and dropped some other stuff and listened to a lot of stuff together. We drew closer and wiser with repeated playings of Jimi Hendrix' "Electric Ladyland", Dr. John's (known as the night-tripper) Gris-Gris voodoo album and the perfectly lovely Swingle Singers who had no soul whatever. It was a jamming of cultures and a turning of evolutionary generations. The times were heavy and we were so to speak, in DJ graduate school. Our Karma was becoming mixed as we searched the music to find the answers to the questions the music was talking about. In the process we changed each other's lives.

To add to the retainer pay, we were assigned a working vacation; Bill and I were to go to Las Vegas and develop a format for another station being taken over by Chapman's group. All expenses paid, food, hotel, whatever we needed except a car. We tried a small motorcycle for a while, but the taxi proved more reliable. We stayed for a month or so, shared a room and generally learned enough about each other to make our lives work in parallel lines. We had a near meeting with Mama Cass Elliot, marvelous experiences with Scientologists, psychic phenomena connected to Howard Hughes (who it was said, was languishing in a hotel room not far away), and had enjoyed mental extrapolations and fantasies that could only be experienced by the finest of friends, through enjoined brotherhoods. In short, Bill and I became soul mates.

I dropped the bomb on Carol that I wanted a divorce. She took it without blinking and signed the forms willingly when I presented them to her a few weeks later. There was no tumult, we both regarded it as inevitable and we were both quite civilized about it. I wanted my personal stuff, she could have everything else. While we waited for the documents to become formal, we remained friends. We even had Bill and other friends Hank and Peggy, move in with us in true, liberated hippie fashion.

Hank was a tall drink of water or whatever happened to be in the bottle. Peggy his wife, was a large and mischievous lady with fantastic long, black hair. Like me, she was a Scorpio. We were rather like brothers and sisters with some subdued flirtations. We were family. There were some fun times at the house. We were all mad with pot and "power". We were becoming what looked on the outside like a cult. In truth, we were just great friends trying to find ourselves and each other in the Great Groping Grotto of Greed that was our world in 1968. Hank and I were awakened one startled Sunday morning very early, after a night of partying. It was a surreal kind of experience, with both of us stumbling to the door at the same time. We were confronted by two young men in suits, carrying briefcases. We were incredulous, thinking it was some kind of religious assignment they were on. We were expecting to see a Bible or the Watchtower or other religious tract. Somehow we began to realize and deal with, what seemed a very unlikely situation. They were magazine salesmen. Unbelievable. Unforgivable.

We invited the young men inside and immediately began to intimidate them, controlling and manipulating the conversation at every turn. After all, WE were the professional mind fucks here, the men with the power, the communication skills, the energy to do almost ANYTHING. It was shameful for them to be disturbing people this early on a Sunday and we sat about making them pay for their transgression. It took about 15 minutes. When they left, they were carrying a large $2.00 souvenir plaster-of-paris vase from Mexico, and were poorer by $5.00. Cash. We chose not to buy any magazines. It was fair, all things considered.

KVIL, the divorce, and several other life-changing events all happened about the same time. We were on the air for about six weeks when the scene began to fall apart. Bill had a friend who had become involved with a flower child we called "Death Wish Nancy". She was lovely girl, but suicidal. Her dad was a retired Dallas cop - former FBI - who did not like us at all. It was a rock and roll hard place. Bill decided to split rather than have us all sacrificed to the gods of circumstance, I decided it was time to go also. Flatly, I could lose my wife, my job, my stuff... but not my friend.

You know, breaking up isn't really all that hard to do, it's the people around you who have to become comfortable with the empty box they've put you in. It is the friends, parents and other relatives that panic and freak out when the perfect world they perceive crumbles and leaves not even a picture of itself. I paid rent at my folk's house until I was almost broke. During that time I tuned up my recently overhauled 1954 Jaguar Mark VII Saloon for the trip to L.A. I figured that it would bring some real money in L.A. For company on the trip, I contacted one of Bill's old girlfriends and an old buddy of his as chaperon. A few miles west of Ft. Worth, I was overtaken by my dad in his 1960 Pontiac Ventura. It was a nice car and he wanted to see to it that I had good wheels for the L.A. trip and whatever my immediate future might be. We went back to Ft. Worth, traded cars and paperwork and crashed for the night. The next day Jim, Colleen and I headed west.