Pegasus Continuum: The Story of the Legendary Rock Group LOVE

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PROLOGUE

Adorned with paint the color of ripe cantaloupe, my father’s house stood serenely on a Los Angeles hillside, high above Echo Park on a street named Lucretia.

At night, during his final years, we often sat on his couch and talked and watched through his living room window, as airplanes took off and landed at Los Angeles International and Burbank airports, regularly ascending from and descending into the twinkling lights of the Wilshire District. Funny, but they always looked like rising and falling stars, which is what you thought they were at first glance... stars... because from such a distance they moved so slowly that they appeared to not be moving at all. But then the realization... no, just another airplane.

The view being somewhat northwesterly, the early morning sky would begin to brighten only ever so gradually, and the porch lights from houses on adjoining hillsides would extinguish one by one, as residents awoke and prepared for the day. Most late-afternoon and evening sunsets bathed the sky, if only for an hour or so, in a soft and stunning explosion of crimson and orange and yellow cirrus that took your breath away.

In the daylight hours, the San Gabriel mountain range loomed magnificently on the northern horizon, and several miles straightaway, clearly visible even on a hazy day, the Hollywood sign and Griffith Park Observatory sat virtually side-by-side in peaceful coexistence. Only a few feet from the window, birds of prey routinely patrolled the skies, searching the terrain below for moles and gophers and lizards, glancing inside occasionally as they passed by, as if to ask, What are you guys eating?

Around ten o’clock on most weekend nights, from mid-spring through late-autumn, a massive fireworks display from nearby Dodger Stadium, could be seen over the rooftops of the houses across the street; and every night, through the bedroom windows, the glimmering lights of the Los Angeles skyline dazzled brilliantly.

My dad maintained a cactus garden greenhouse with a redwood chip floor, a green mesh ceiling for shade, and two chairs, down the back wooden steps leading to what would have been the backyard, if it had been a yard... which it wasn’t. He had a lizard friend in the cactus greenhouse, and whenever he and I were down there watering or repotting or spreading new redwood chips, from time to time my dad would suddenly pause and say, Hey, look, and there our lizard friend would be, perched on his rock, just watching. Curious creatures they are.

I was there when my father died, in March of 2009, and for months after, actually, doing routine things, like painting and cleaning-up and pulling weeds and giving away to charity a few belongings, like empty file cabinets and the fold-up chairs my dad had stashed under the house, because you know... he kept them there for the birthday party he held for himself every year out on the patio, during the dog days of early September, when even the L.A. nights are really hot. He was big on birthdays, and you have to have a place for people to sit at a birthday party. Consequently the multitude of folding chairs. He had many friends.

When most of the work was finished, I began thinking about heading home to Tahoe, but somehow I couldn’t seem to actually schedule leaving. It was like when I would come to visit him when he was alive and we would find a project or two to work on... it was still that way after he died. My dad’s physical being was gone, but his abiding presence held me there. He dwelled in all his remaining possessions... his books and his furniture, and in the house itself, and in the very atmosphere... therefore how could he not be there, as well? It seemed simply a matter of deductive reasoning. So we continued to hang out and do projects together, he and I, as we always had done.

It was during this time that my friend Dennis Kelley came to briefly stay. An Irish Catholic intellectual with a philosophical bent to the strangely humorous, Dennis was a friend to almost every member of, not only our band, but members of The Byrds and Spirit, as well. He had come to L.A. in the mid-sixties, like thousands of others, to wander the Sunset Strip in search of his destiny, all the while honing his appetite for rock and roll music and art, before finally packing it in and joining the United States Navy.

He served his time as an Internal Communications Electrician on a repair ship, with a tour of duty in Viet Nam; I asked him one time what that was... Internal Communications Electrician, and he said, I repaired movie projectors. You know, like when everybody on the ship was all finished working for the day and they were relaxing and watching a movie after mess, if the projector broke, I fixed it.

When he got out of the Navy, Dennis settled down in Las Vegas, where he became a dealer at The Tropicana Hotel and Casino. In his later years, with his thin build, his long flowing white hair, and his neatly-trimmed beard, he became the spitting image of Johnny Winter and was often called on to try and explain to the autograph seeking fans that he wasn’t actually Johnny. But because of the striking physical similarity, nobody ever seemed to really believe him. The fans knew he was Johnny Winter, so they usually just nodded with understanding and backed off, figuring he just didn’t want to sign autographs, that’s all. I mean, he’s a dead ringer.

One morning, Dennis and I were sitting on the couch in the living room, drinking coffee and looking out the window, watching the hawk patrol and shooting the breeze, when he asked, Hey, Michael, you want to drive out and visit Arthur today?, and I said, Yeah, sure, because why not? It was a nice day and I knew Dennis hadn’t been able to attend the memorial service back in August of ’06. So, after a while, we jumped into my dad’s Toyota Rav 4 and headed over to Forest Lawn.

There was a guy at the front gate who gave us brief verbal directions and a map that showed Arthur’s plot (complete with a helpful numerical designation) and off we drove again... up a windy little asphalt road, past a group of loved ones standing beside the grave of somebody newly-buried, then up further until we saw a marker like a street sign that approximated Arthur’s location; so we pulled over and parked and began walking.

We started out walking together, but after two or three minutes of looking, we spread out, so as to cover more territory, because Forest Lawn is a big place and there are like a zillion graves, and a big part of the problem is that instead of standing upright, like the gravestones in film or on TV, the markers bearing the people’s names lay flat, so that you have to walk right over and look down to read them. In other words, you can’t read the markers from any distance at all, so we had to do a lot of walking and looking down, walking and looking down; and at first, as we walked, I tried to avoid stepping on the graves because it seemed disrespectful somehow, but it was kind of hard walking between the graves in such an exaggerated zigzag pattern, so after a while, I just walked.

Finally Dennis yelled out, Michael, it’s over here! and he pointed down where he stood. I nodded gratefully and made my way over and looked down again for about the hundredth time, and there it was, at last... with the LOVE logo first and largest at the top, then directly below it, Arthur Taylor Lee, the marker read. Then the dates he lived, and, Son of Agnes and Chester, and, Husband of Diane, and a few other things, and it concluded with a quote; Love One Another Because Love On Earth Must Be. Signed A. Lee, and the grave was decorated with two flower pots near the foot... pots filled with flowers a few days past their prime. I thought of Charles Laughton’s wistful soliloquy to death in The Canterville Ghost: To be buried in the soft brown earth, to have no today or tomorrow, to forget time, and to be at peace.

We sat next to Arthur for a while, one of us on each side of his grave, making small talk. I asked him how it was going and told him what a nice spot he had, because it actually was pretty nice... up on a little knoll overlooking a quiet valley; just the kind of place anybody would want to be buried. We asked him a few, Hey Arthur, remember the time?s and had some laughs, and then, after a brief lull in the conversation, Dennis abruptly and quite suddenly blurted out, in a pseudo-confrontational tone, Hey Arthur, where’s my five hundred dollars? Because come to find out, Arthur had borrowed five bills from Dennis back in the early seventies and never paid him back; and Dennis, being an understanding friend, and the patient type, hadn’t bugged him for it until this very moment. So now, he was finally mentioning it.

The funny thing is, Dennis always kept the cancelled check he wrote Arthur all those years ago, a check all properly endorsed with Arthur’s childlike scrawl signature on the back. I mean, he didn’t have it with him out at Forest Lawn or anything, but he showed it to me one time. Why did he keep it? He said it was because he figured Arthur might call him up after he cashed it and claim he never got the money and hit him up for it again... which is exactly what happened, of course. Why did he keep it after that? It’s hard to say. I suppose because it was a visual reminder of a good story.

Anyway, Dennis was only asking for the five bills to hand Arthur a laugh, because he knew all along the truth of what his wife told him when news of Arthur’s death broke. Now you’ll never get your five-hundred dollars.

CHAPTER ONE

East Texas is the land of freeze-dried winter days and sweltering summer nights. June bugs congregate in vast numbers under porch lamp destinations, and fireflies help the stars light the evening sky, illuminating the backyard games children play. It’s the part of Texas that features flat landscape, brick architecture and the best watermelon in the world. All in all, not a bad place to grow up.

My friends and I rode bikes and built model airplanes that flew. We fished a small stream and hunted giant grasshoppers with BB guns; played combat, and tied bath towels around our necks and became Superman and Batman. We played Cowboys and Indians.

The neighborhood kids had been warned never to visit the local abandoned haunted house, because it was in constant danger of collapse, and because bums used it as a place to hang out and drink wine. But we went there anyway, every Saturday morning. My family was middle-class. My dad worked at an aircraft factory during the week and played piano with a jazz combo, The Salty Dogs, on the weekend. Like a lot of children in our socioeconomic group, my sister, Gloria, and I were forced to take piano lessons, which she loved and I hated. Gloria has perfect pitch. She can listen to a doorbell go ding, dong and tell you what the notes are; when she was four she could play entire pieces and read music manuscript.

Although Gloria went on to become an incredibly accomplished classical musician, I was never quite able to master even the most rudimentary principles of doing something so completely different with the fingers of both the right and left hands at the same time. I didn’t have the concentration, or the digital dexterity or whatever, so after a few years of torture, I successfully begged my way out.

My family listened to jazz artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Dave Brubeck, classical music, show tunes, almost everything. And my sister and I listened to rock’n’roll a lot. Our dad laughed at rock. He called the Everly Brothers the Everly Sisters because they sang so high. Country music was the exception. We never listened to it at all, except for what they now call cross-over, like the Everlys and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.

In fact, it’s strange that country music is loosely associated with the South, because the whole time I lived there I never knew of anybody who listened to it, unless you count my great-grandmother, Grandma Ward. Grandma lived in a little house in the back of my grandmother’s place in Texarkana, Ark. Her folks were settlers, the kind that travelled west in a wagon train. They stopped in Oklahoma and Arkansas and sprouted roots, setting up shop as ranchers and farmers. Grandma was their little girl.

Whenever my mom and sister and I visited Texarkana from the suburbs of Dallas, where we lived, my mom would send Gloria and me back to spend a little time with Grandma so that she wouldn’t feel unloved or ignored, because she never left her house at all. And the scene never changed. She always sat in her wooden rocker, wearing her settler’s bonnet, as if posing for a painting by Norman Rockwell. Sometimes she churned butter as she talked, pausing occasionally to dip the end of a kitchen match into a jar of snuff and then quickly roll it into her mouth, between her cheek and gums, where it would do its work. Then, in a voice tired from age and from a lifetime of too many backbreaking chores, she told us stories of what it had been like, a long time ago. Tales of droughts and floods and gunfights, and feuds between our family and other families; feuds that spanned generations.

Occasionally, when the brown juice appeared at the corners of her mouth, she leaned over and spat into a jelly jar which rested on the floor next to her rocker. Background music for these visits that Gloria and I paid to Grandma was provided by a small bedside radio that always played country and gospel music, songs recorded by The Stamps Quartet and The Sons of the Pioneers. Even her daughter, my grandmother, was too hip to listen to country music. She and her boyfriend liked the boogie-woogie.

So, people that associate country music with the South, more than any other segment of the nation, are misinformed. Anyway, I have to rate the emergence of country music as popular as one of the most unlikely and downright shocking events of the twentieth century...and, apparently, the twenty-first. Seriously. In its pure form, it has to rank right up there with professional wrestling in the how-in-the-world-could-this-have-happened? category.

When I was twelve, my best friend was Tony Holman. He was a couple of years older and good-looking and girls chased him, and he could dance cool. He also had a knack for turning the most mundane and unpleasant jobs into a once-removed kind of entertainment.

In most parts of Texas, the summertime air temperature reaches 90 degrees about an hour after sunrise, and on one such typical Saturday morning, I was sweating myself awake and rubbing the sleep from my eyes when the phone rang. A groggy voice asked, Mike, you want to help me kill a chicken?

The lady that lived next door to Tony had won a baby chick in a promotional giveaway at Safeway. She dug up a cardboard box and made the chick a little bed, which she kept next to her own bed, because the bird was supposed to be a pet. I think she was all alone. But when the lady woke up, the very first day after she brought it home, she discovered that somehow the chick had broken its neck during the night, and the head was hanging way over to one side at a very unnatural angle. So, she called Tony’s dad and asked him if Tony would be willing to take the creature into the woods, somewhere, and put it out of it’s misery.

Tony and I went to the lady’s house, and she was visibly upset when she brought the chick to the front door. She was still in her pajamas and she was crying, and the damaged chick was still in the box-home that she had made for it. She thrust the box into Tony’s hands, Take it, hurry! she said. Then she turned away and closed the door. I looked down. Sure enough, it was a sad sight to behold. Head twisted grotesquely to the side, so that one eye looked downward and the other looked at the sky, the situation was clearly beyond hope. Unfixable, even by a chicken-surgeon’s hand.

On the way to the wooded area at the end of the street, we began to wonder aloud how the baby chick broke its neck. Maybe the lady got out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and, forgetting the chick was there, stepped on it. It was, after all, the first night in its new home. But then, perhaps embarrassed and angry, the lady might have concluded, Why cry over spilt milk? What’s done is done. I don’t know what happened. I woke up and it was like that, O.K.? If she stepped on her new pet chick and broke its neck, the lady must have suffered, too, in the hours before daybreak. Tony and I took the baby chick into the woods and found a tree stump next to a large anthill.

Michael, can you hold the chick over the stump?

Yeah, I guess, I answered. Pinning its tiny wings under my hand, I held the chick over the stump, as far away from my body as I could. Tony removed a switchblade from his jeans pocket and opened it. He took aim and, as he threw the knife, the chick seemed to look up at Tony with the one eye that could. He missed. He took aim and threw it again, this time severing the chick’s head cleanly from its neck. The head rolled off the tree stump, and onto the anthill, where the ants, sensing an easy meal, began to immediately gravitate to it. After Tony sliced open the body to expose the organs, he cut off the chick’s right foot and placed it in his shirt pocket. Then he threw what remained of the torso of the tiny beast onto the anthill.

Ants gotta eat, too, he said.

Later, when he and I were back at Tony’s house, watching TV and drinking Kool-Aid, I looked over and noticed Tony playing with the baby chick’s foot. Hey, Mike. Tony held the foot up and pulled on one of the three small tendons dangling from the detached appendage. The claw curled and, as if from the grave, the chick extended its middle finger to me...the finger chickens use to dig in the dirt. After that, Tony carried the dead chick’s zombied claw in his shirt pocket wherever he went, so he could use it to flip the bone to anybody that deserved it. E-e-w-w-w! What is it? the girls would ask.

Tony and I listened to a lot of rock’n’roll. Guys like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Mainly Little Richard. I knew that his drummer’s name was Earl Palmer, and that Earl had been a tap dancer before he became a session drummer. You could hear it, too, in his technique. I think that’s what made him so special, that sound of Earl literally dancing those immaculate bass drum patterns. It was beautiful. To me, the drums provided the foundation, the heartbeat, the soul of every band on every record I listened to, and when I was alone, I began to visualize myself as the session drummer that recorded those hits with the rock legends I idolized. I started to want to be a musician. A drummer.

CHAPTER TWO

Not long before I turned thirteen, my dad accepted a job offer from another aircraft manufacturing company located in San Diego, California, and my family moved to the West Coast. This was a part of the world diametrically opposed to Texas in every way imaginable. To start with, there was no real summer and winter, as I had come to know it, and the giant grasshoppers and the June bugs – all gone. In their place was the beach, and a beige-stucco junior high school environment that I was having a great deal of trouble adjusting to. Actually, the real problem had become my attitude, because suddenly, no matter how hard I tried, I could not make myself do my homework or study. As I entered my early teens, I found myself so obsessed with daydreaming while listening to music, that I really didn’t do much of anything else. In fact, I quickly became one of those scholastic underachievers who comes to class every day unprepared and, of course, suffers the consequences.

You know, the teacher says, All right, everybody pass your homework forward, and I don’t have mine, again. Then everything goes from bad to worse. Classroom humiliation delivered by somebody who’s real good at it. It was very stressful. In fact, I still have the occasional nightmare where I suddenly find myself wandering through the halls of my junior high school, books in hand, in a daze. I’m late... I’m lost... I’m totally naked; and I don’t need psychoanalysis to tell me it comes from that homework thing.

Eventually, I came to realize that, if I was ever going to turn my young life around and be happy in school, I had to become a better student. It was, in educational vernacular, a prerequisite. And as I embarked on this voyage of self-improvement, I decided this was a good time to channel my ever growing interest in music into something productive; something that would help me feel more at home in my new southern California, junior high-school environment. I joined the band. The school band, that is. And I played the drums. It was fun, sure, and it was a way to meet girls and other people who loved music as I did. The school music organizations gave me focus and identity and a real good reason to be there.

More than that, it gave me my first opportunity to play music with other musicians... in concert. It harkened all the way back to the peaceful harmonies of the youth choir at the Episcopal church where I was a choirboy in Texas, the rehearsals of my dad’s band, The Salty Dogs, wailing away in our living room, and the feeling I got when I heard the exciting sounds of early rock and roll on my little bedside radio... the sounds of Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the guys that backed them up on their records. It was the sound of musicians playing different things on different instruments all at the same time, and those individual sounds coming together and fitting so perfectly in a kind of magical auditory jigsaw puzzle, to form a musical creation as unique as a fingerprint. Music played and sung in concert was the ultimate and extreme example of the whole equaling more than merely the sum of the parts; and the prospect of being an integral component in something so special was nothing less than exhilarating.

The school band concept was simple. The program allowed each kid to select the instrument he liked and then, more or less, start from scratch and learn to play it by playing the songs the band played. This system of learning to play is the reason most junior high school band directors walk around with a slightly puzzled expression all the time. Like, Why me, Lord?

From the very beginning, I discovered I had what felt like a sort of spring- loaded elasticity built into the ligaments of my shoulders and wrists and elbows that allowed me to generate a lot of energy and control. Like built- in electronic jackhammers, the sticks felt as if they belonged in my hands. Playing the drums seemed so natural, and, strangely enough, doing something so physical seemed to have almost no correlation at all to muscle strength or size.

What I mean is, I was a real skinny kid with skinny arms. The kid who played the bass drum in the marching band was Kenny Larson, the push- up/pull-up champion of the school, and even though he was no more than fifteen, he was built solid, like an adult weight lifter, but when he played the bass drum, no matter how hard he hit the thing, he sounded weak. You know, bong, bong, bong. No punch. He couldn’t understand how to transfer all that muscle power into pounding the drum with the necessary enthusiasm to make it sound right. And, besides, he always hit it too near the rim, instead of closer to the center, like he should have.

So, one day I took him aside, Kenny, check this out. You see this place right here? I pointed to a spot on the head of the bass drum near the middle. This is the sweet spot, man. That’s where you’ve got to hit it...and HARD, so everybody can hear it, all over the school. Every time you hit it, it’s got to explode, man! It’s got to start from the tips of your toes and travel up, and you have to put total concentration into every blow. Kill it, man! Whip it! I mean, you have to lay into it, really. Like this. I took the beater from Kenny and hit the bass drum four times, FWOMP! FWOMP! FWOMP! FWOMP! The air shook.

Oh, I get it, he grabbed the beater out of my hand, ...like this? He bit his lower lip and struck the bass drum with what looked to be all his might, bong, bong, bong.

That’s good, Kenny. Keep practicing, I said, walking away. No use. The instinct just wasn’t there. He was muscle-bound.

My participation in these school bands and orchestras and choral groups continued into high school where it proved to be an effective way to accomplish my goals and have a good time. Along the way, my high school music buddies and I formed different kinds of bands to fit various occasions. We had a four-piece jazz ensemble that worked adult parties and local coffee houses, and a rock band that played the school dances. Subconsciously,

even though we played for pleasure, I guess I was beginning to enjoy the financial rewards of getting paid pretty good money to do something I enjoyed. Something I would have done for free, anyway.

As I entered my senior year, I made arrangements to accept a scholarship offer to Pepperdine University, up the coast in L.A.

One day, I got a note from my counselor to come to his office to set up a preliminary first semester schedule for my college freshman year. I don’t remember his name. He was, in every respect, the stereotypical high school administrator, locked into holding down what I perceived to be, at the time, a relatively boring and unimportant job at a place I was about to leave. But, I do remember he was a nice guy.

He welcomed me in and pumped my hand, as I sat down in the wooden chair near his desk. Michael, he started, "first of all congratulations on having received the school’s Outstanding Musician of the Year award, you’ve had a truly successful high school experience. I know you’re headed to Pepperdine. You’ll like Pepperdine a lot. It’s a great school with a fine music program.

By the way, I was a musician when I attended college. In fact, I was able to pay just about all my tuition with the money I made working nights and on weekends. I gave it up after a while, though. I wasn’t lucky enough to qualify for a college scholarship. I hope you appreciate your good fortune. It’s a wonderful opportunity.

I remember the feeling I experienced at that moment, sitting there in my high school counselor’s office. Pity really, and alarm. You gave it up?, I wondered silently. You know, that’s how careful you have to be. You can be cruising along, doing something cool, something you’re proud and happy to do, something that gets girls, and before you know it, you’re sitting behind a desk, wearing a wrinkled suit and working a dead-end job in a crummy high school. I remember thinking, as I walked out of his office at the conclusion of our meeting, That’s awful. I’ll never let that happen to me. But perspective is a funny thing. It can change with the passage of time.

I would find out something really interesting about Pepperdine when I got there and it was too late. The catalog described the school as a liberal arts college with a small enrollment... partially funded by, and affiliated with, The Church of Christ. In small print, it was, near the bottom of the last page.

George Pepperdine was the guy who founded the school back in the ’30s, with the money he made when he sold off his ownership in the Western Auto stores. He had a couple of little girls, and like all good fathers he began to worry about the time when they would go off to college and he wouldn’t be there to protect them; and I guess one day he thought, Hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a college with a Christian influence and a wholesome environment? A place where parents wouldn’t have to worry about their kids? So he started Pepperdine. I wasn’t concerned about the exaggerated moral philosophy. All I knew was, Pepperdine offered me the most lucrative scholarship so I took it.

Like I said, they didn’t really play up the wholesome Christian concept in the literature. I think the school figured it might turn some potential students off, and they needed all the students they could get, so the administration, more or less, depended on the word-of-mouth church grapevine to get the message out. Because I know when I got there, I wasn’t the only one surprised at the level of influence the church held over the school; and during the day-long orientation prior to the start of classes a lot of people were kind of looking at each other with expressions of amused disbelief and asking, What’s this?, because at Pepperdine there were three ironclad rules:

Rule number 1: Each student must attend Chapel every Wednesday morning at ten o’clock. Chapel is mandatory. You miss three chapels in the same semester you lose your tuition, your scholarship (if you have one), and you get kicked out of school.

Rule number 2: No booze-drinking, on or off campus. We find out you’ve been drinking booze, you lose your scholarship, your tuition and you get kicked out of school, and,

Rule number 3: No dancing. We find out you’ve been dancing you lose everything and you get kicked out of school.

The chapel thing was no big deal. We went to the school auditorium and sat in our assigned seats for a half-hour and then we were free to go. We were even given two units toward graduation for showing up. Non-transferable units, of course.

During chapel, the college big-wigs all sat on the stage in those enormous high-back chairs like you see on The Hour Of Power and, one at a time, each would get up and share a few words of wisdom and then it would be over. I mean, chapel was just like any other class, except it was shorter and there were no tests. I didn’t mind it. The no booze thing? I wasn’t really into booze. I didn’t want any booze. No dancing? I was never much of a dancer either.

The individual rules didn’t bother me that much. It’s just that the overall resulting atmosphere was so... repressive. You know, If you don’t be good, we’ll throw you out of school and later you’ll go to hell. Scare tactics never work. Everybody that wanted to drink booze, drank booze; and all the dancers danced. In fact, I began to wonder if the school meant business or if the rules were just for the benefit of the supporters. Then, on the very day I had planned to ask the really cute blonde who sat next to me in chapel for a date, I was greeted by an empty chair. So, I asked the girl on the other side, Where’s Cindy?

She says, Oh, didn’t you hear? Charlie caught a boy in her room last night. They were having sex. Today, she’s back home in Indiana,or wherever home was.

Actually, I don’t remember there being a rule specifically prohibiting sex between students, so I guess it was just more or less understood, or maybe they were caught drinking and dancing, as well. Whatever, she was gone.

Charlie was our lone campus security guard. Had a lot in common with Barney Fife. All business, he made it his responsibility to protect the girls from the evil intentions of the boys, even if they didn’t want to be protected.

Like, if he saw a couple sitting in a car, he would walk up and whack the rear bumper once or twice with his nightstick, just to