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| | EVER GOOGLE SOMEONE IN THE PAST
JUST TO SEE WHAT THEY'RE UP TO?
I FOUND OUT ONE OF MY MENTORS IS A
REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER
 It's 4:15am and I just woke up at the White Crystal Hotel. It is pre-season at the ski resort and nobody is here except me and Rabbit. I bought a suite from the Hotel which means we can stay here when the hotel is closed. It's dark, and it's a scene reminiscent of "The Shining". I woke up with the creepies and Rabbit is asleep and I don't want to wake her, but all of a sudden something popped into my memory that I had long forgotten. It's a weird story.
When I was 14, I formed a little garage band. We sucked, but we thought the louder that we played, the cooler we were. Of course it drove the neighbors crazy but we did it in the afternoons when everybody was at work. I had a friend from school named Tim, and we practiced at his backyard. I had this REALLY cheap imitation Gibson Les Paul because that's all I could afford and a silvertone amp. We just played blues progressions and one day a gold cadillac pulled up outside Tim's backyard and this guy (pictured here) pulls up and says that he is a big record producer, he drove by and heard us and we've got talent and we're going places.
My drummer Tim looked like Freddie Prinze Jr. I wonder if that's what he meant by we were going places - like ew maybe down anyway, he took us to his studio near Inglewood, CA and what did we know, we were kids! He showed us his studio and we were blown away. We thought this guy was for real a big shot.
It was a recording studio with a separate control booth just like the one I saw the week before on the Partridge Family... (but it was unfinished so it didn't have the soundproof glass) and what was also weird was that it had stage lights, kind of like what you would see in a pole-dancing scene. The studio was probably all of the size of a small 2 car garage, and so we would cram our stuff (guitars, drums) and we would practice our awful music as Mr. C would sit in the "control" room 3 feet away, smoking a cigarette and squinting out of one eye with a discerning look... then grab the gooseneck mike and announce on the loud P.A. into the "sound" room (3 feet away) "guys, try that again, but with a little more punch" What's punch? All we did was do the same song, but bobbed our heads up and down more violently. "Yes that's it! That's exaaactly what I'm looking for!" Our heads were so dizzy.
Picture sitting in the bathroom on the loo, and your friend is in the bathtub - taking a mike and talking into a P.A. system to him. That's how silly that scene was.
He told us that he used to be in the group, "The Turtles" ("I can't see me loving nobody but you... for all my life.... when you're near me baby the skies will be blue... for all my life..." - they did that song) ... so I bought all of their records to hear my new producer friend "Mr. C" play surf guitar on his silver metalflake Stratocaster. Only problem, was that he wasn't on any of the records. When I asked him why he wasn't on it, he said that he was in the Turtles "just before they got signed" Mmmm hmmm.
Anyway, I kept switching musicians, and Mr. C would be there at the auditions. Come to think of it, whenever I was auditioning players he had a say in it, and he picked people that weren't really that good, but they were what a pedophile would consider yummy. There was Alan C., with long blond hair and he looked like a pretty girl. And Tony V. who looked like a little latin boy from n'sync.
 Mr. C was weird, but we dismissed it as him being a superstar. Part of me should've thought - why is there no glass in the control room? Why are there stage lights in the sound room? (in real recording studios the rooms are spartan, with sound proofing - similar to one of those rooms they lock up crazy people.) Oh, also - come to think of it - this is weird... there was no recording equipment! We would all play in one room (awful sound! all those instruments mixing together with no stereo separation - also there was no stereo, because we would record on a simple monoraul tape recorder.
I was so naive years later I still believed him, and thought of him as a mentor. So when I went to college - I was writing originals and starting to do Latin Jazz compositions and thought music was going to be my career. But then I met Rocky Gunn and thought - whoa, maybe photography may be it for me. I put so much time into music and was about to leave it for good and felt a little lost, so I contacted Mr. C and asked if I could come by for advice. (I hadn't seen him in six years).
He said come over around 9:30pm, after his wife falls asleep, and then we could talk. So I went over there and he was shitfaced drunk. Kept saying, man - you look good. You know that? You look good. You grew up good. Handsome. Stared a little WAY too long. Then whips out his pecker and starts peeing in his beer can! Then puts the beer can down in the table right in front of me! I'm like - whoa this is surreal! Smells awful too!
So he goes "you're going to make it kiddo, you're gonna be a big star. (I wasn't there for that, I was there to talk about leaving music and going into photography) He said, "I remember when I was in the Turtles before we got the recording contract, I had to do anything to get it, and one night I was in the same position as you, meeting with a big record producer... and you know what? I had to go down on him. That's what it took, and I did it, and then next thing I knew, I was in show biz." (he forgot that I already knew that he never was really "in" the Turtles).
So now, you may ask - what did Gary do in that tight situation? Come back later and I'll finish the story. I'm sleepy and leaving cliffhangers like this really boosts my traffic. | | | Posted 11/21/2006 4:44 AM - 244 views - 26 comments
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