Daves Not Here!
By Mike Marino
That's not entirely true. He's just not all there, or is he in actually, more here than there, more hither than thither and a half a mile of yon away. Maybe he doesn't exist in this demented dimension of dementia but rather he came from some distant spaced out orbiter from across the outer reaches of outer space in a far off far out intergalactic quadrant of the Second Dimension. Dave was all of these, and more, more or less. Hell. he was a paper boy for godsake. Boy? No, he was a man-child who got left behind in the Veetnam rice paddies of Sixties nostalgia. A true LSD-MIA real "Deer Hunter" type contrary to the huzzah and battle cry of no man left behind. Dave wasn't left behind...he joyfully stayed behind of his own accord to play Russion roulette in the bullet riddled Saigon of his mind, crash landing, he looked around, the colors had never seemed so blindingly beautifully beatific, so vivid and vibrating, so enhanced...as only Dave could see them and share with those around him through ceregral osmosis. Dave didn't need acid...Dave was acid. Purple double domed oranged wedged. A dilysergic M-80.
Dave was and is a by-product perhaps impure thought of another pure state of mind, California. If he knew the way to san jose, he would turn around and go the other way, forward towards the opposite direction...to say, old beat Bolinas or the anarchist enclave of Arcata. He never cared for Burt Bacharach anyway. Instead, Dave would head north, of Muir Woods, nestling in former dairy land north of the Gate. Once the Sixties began it's decline to a shabby bag of seeds and stems, the microbial refugee tidepool sprang to life, took shape and crawled out of the water and onto land to stake it's claim. Old and young hipsters relocated to Bolinas. The broke beat ones anyway, while the rich bitch beach hip moved to saucy Sausalito to ride side saddle on thousand dollar mountain bikes.
Sausalito is a haven, Ritchie, of voodoo houseboats and effeminate artsy gallerias and the bayside rich. The colony started simply enough in the eons ago in the finest traditions of "what ever floats your boat" era of nautical housboating homesteading where you could tie up and drop anchor in safe harbor. It welcomes the chosen few with open arms as tourists flock like seagulls to see gulls on wing and see girls in hot shorts walking the beachside strand, some hand in hand along the sand, this is California afterall. You need Diners Club to club here. Wine and cuisine and art are an artform in themselves and an affectation of the "damn I wish I really were sophisticated and not so damned sophmoric" self-proclaimed yuppie who professes to an overnight epiphany of jazz and all things sensitive. The same people who wear geekoid bicycle helmets when riding bicycles and tight pants with lo chastify belts to make a fashion statement and are afraid of the world at large. The helmet tells the whole story.
So now you know where Dave came from, and where he didn't come from. Now just what the hell is he? Dave was and probably still is a newspaper boy in the old tradition of delivering the news to your doorstep in rain, sleet, snow, sober or stoned. One of the legendary Hearts minions, turf wars in the Lindy Lands in Paris Twenties over circulation. "Read all about it" before the death knell sounded in the age of the internet and only the hells agers obit readers were left, merely waiting for thier own demise to be duly noted in the Records Section of this once mighty dinosaur, and the newspaper itself cancelled their subscription due to inability to breath anymore or pay the bill from six feet under.
In the Nineties, I was working at a radio station in San Francisco doing the morning show and like all good morning shows you have a newpaper delivered so you have early morning crap to make fun of, if the news warrants it. The obits were a particular favorite for us to use, but don't ask why. The gang was a perverse lot to say the least and we did and still do find them a plethora of humor. Dave, would deliver our paper to the station each morning at 5:30 a.m or so, jsut before airtime, and would engage us in conversation before he left to deliver more nasty newsprint to others and we had to disappear into the studio, put on headphones and get ready to rock n' roll. Dave too was a rock n' roller....he played Cream and Deep Purple songs on his forearm...and I'm not kidding. Using his fingers running up and down his arm, in perfect tune, humming as he went to emphasis the notes...you ain't heard nuthin' till you heard "Smoke on the Water" played with index finger and thumb on human flesh. "Da...Da...Da...Dadadada...da.da.da....da.da" Repeat Ritchie Blackmore riff half a dozen times and insert here or in that cerebral jukebox you wear atop your neck like fancy pansy headgear.
Dave did play in bands, once, maybe twice and kept plugging his lifes amp into the wrong socket, overloaded with chemical electricity in the brain that ate amino acids like candy, that eventually short circuited, causing him to burn out and explode due to his own faulty wiring, like the Challenger spacecraft ka-booming and crashing back down to earth..hard landing, incoming! The Sixties passed, the Seventies passed, (thank god) and then the V-Eighties and finally the Nineties emerged as hungry locust from a deep sleep and Dave emerged too, took a job that didn't require a whole lot of three dimensional thinking as Dave preferred the comfort and anonymity of the second dimension of which he spoke longingly all the time as though he had missed a bus connection in Amarillo and had to spend the night sleeping shotgun on a filthy Texan floor littered with bodies and thieves and tired old insects that had been stepped on over and over throughout the course of the day until the old black man would mop up the next morning and empty the garbage cans filled with old cardboard coffee cups with cigarettes floating in the bottom in the brown residue. On the weekends, this old timer got out of town and went fishing with his grandson.
One day, Dave was a little past due of his (ab) normal arrival and departure time. Stalled on a runway no doubt we thought until we heard the backfiring of his beloved jap ricer car. Actually we could smell it before we saw it looming U-boat style in the slick dark of the night with fading moonlight illuminating the target, or were we the target of this smoking belching beast? Smoke was pouring out of the back windows, thick smoke that would best be described as one that accompanies a volcanic eruption. This one was however accompanied by .38 Special at ten decibels and Dave furiously pounding on his stereo steering wheel to the beat.
With the curtain going up fast on the very first act of the mentally unstable surreal drama/comedy unfolding before us, we mad dashed, and dashed mad to witness a sight that was inconceivable and unbelieveable and incomprehensible...the father, son holy ghostbuster trinity of disbelief. We stopped dead in our tracks on the steps of the station as Dave's car came to a rolling stop, e-brake in place, Emerging as an escaping Houdini who done it, Dave ejected jet pilot style from the front seat, and not missing a beat, reached into the ember burning backseat of the car to extract a smoking pile of newsprint that was smoldering and he handed one of the papers to me. "Dude, sorry I'm a little late with the paper," he offered without any other explaination as if the smoking gun were a mere hallucination. "Dave," (I had to ask, as my morning partner was doubled over in a fit of laughter) "What the fuck happened?" He smiled in acknowledgement, "Fuckin' joint I was smokin' ...it got caught in the wind with the windows down and landed back there so I raced as fast as I could to get here, freakin' Bonneville Flats speed, man, flatout...whoooeee." I didn't press him on why he didn't stop to put out the flames and fire as driving fast and drawing in more wind only added much needed fuel to burn a forest down. I didn't ask, not because he would not have an answer, but I didn't ask, because I knew he would have a perfectly logical one, and in due time it would actually make sense. I didn't want to jar my own sense of reality off the shelf just yet crashing down and smashing like a mason jar of peach preserves.
Dave came inside the tto fill a bucket with water so he could dowse the smoldering pile of print black ink, sure, it would be one wet pile of shit, unreadable for the most part, but at least sparks and embers would be extinguished, as Dave may have decided to pull up to a gas pump, flames spewing to fill 'er up and blow 'er up. We lived in an area with numerous valleys with numerous names. Valley this, this valley and that valley. One of the valleys 30 miles away was hit with torrential rains and the newspaper Dave delivered had the headline emblazoned in huge font across the top..."Storm whacks valley!" I looked at it and knew Dave lived near there so showed it to him commenting on the destruction...he saw the headline and commented "Where's Whacks Valley?" I knew then he had the potential to commit murder on command from the voices inside his head. Another time, we had cut a Swatch watch from a magazine, glossy print perfect cut and gave it to him one morning as a joke to help keep him on time. He thanked us and tried to put it on his wrist and exclaimed. "This is cool. Is it solar or what?" Columbine would have looked like a pep rally by the time he was finished with a lunchroom full of jocks and cheerleaders at noontime.
But...Daves big claim to personal fame was as a songwriter with many unheard and unsold and unheard of original tunes to his credit that he played with zeal and mucho gusto on his bare forearm for hours while sitting in the dark rehearsal room of his kitchen as he had no equipment, no keyboards, no guitar, not even a metronome to keep the gnomes dancing in tune or in time to the beat. Just a forearm with invisible current and electricity and invisible stadiums of fams to play to. "We love you San Francisco!" Even though the venue may have been in the East Bay...nobody knows Hayward or Fremont, but everybody knows San Francisco.
Then it happened. "Dave, look. We go on the air in 20 minutes, how would you like to come on and play your new song on the air. Great exposure Amigo, and who knows, Cap records talent scouts might be listening in and you could end up on tour in a stage with smoke and fireballs and classic rockers like Gene Simmons lighting Bic's while high on crack. European tours would follow and culminate in Japan with Black Sabbath as your warm up act live at Buddokan." It was a Dave dream so he debuted that morning and I could only picture the incredulous faces of those caged in morning traffic snarled on the Golden Gate or Bay Bridge, rush hour in full tilt stalled boogie. That morning we unleashed a genuine genie genius from the rock n' roll bottle and there was no turning back.
Dave was an instant hit, like the hula hoop and Minute Rice. Just add water. The phone exploded with requests. Requests! He'd do classic rock, while mesmerized drivers, passengers and those at home getting ready to bang out to Sacramento on a lonely I-80 commute were kareoking all the way to the state capital. It was madness and insane and trying to understand it was like trying to explain mommies needless death in Iraq from a car bomb. Dave became a regular feature, and encores were not uncommon. One day on the air he gave a dissertation on thinking and living in the second dimension. He could have been a guru with a following, Charles Manson with a cult ready to kill on command. He was now one of those known by only one name...Prince...Bono...Madonna...Yanni, (yes, Yanni!) now, Dave, a real old testament Yaweh.
Dave was a delightful pipe bowl. He added laughter to mixture. Not at him, but with him, and he didn't even know it. He was not the court jester, but the holy seer of childlike simplicity. He retained that innocence of childhood, that perhaps only too much drug use can seal hermetically. I eventually moved on but ran into Dave many times before leaving the station. We'd drink, we'd smoke, we'd laugh, we'd joke. I was learning at the feet of the Master, the sound of one hand clapping was now loud and clear. Dave was zen, pure and simple. I was seeing the world simpler now, thanks to him. I guess you could say....I was now, through him, living and seeing in the second dimension in a three dimensional world. I don't know where Dave is today....but one thing is certain...Dave's not here...instead he's everywhere. I know that for a fact, because when I hear "Smoke on the Water" only one person comes to mind.
Fifties & Sixties Pop Culture!
Classic Cars, Rock n' Roll, Elvis, Route 66, Drive in Movies, Route 66, Roadside Culture, Kerouac & The Beats, Haight Ashbury, Easy Rider & Vietnam
Pop Culture guru Mike Marino looks at the '60s and beyond through his own kaleidoscope, where rock met revolution. Spewing quips like a psychedelic lawn mower run amok, he drags us, more than likely kicking and screaming, through a past few of us knew and even fewer would admit. This is Truth barred from the history books--- or as Marino would put it, the Red, White and Screwed. Could cause nausea, night sweats and loss of appetite. Void where prohibited.
Frank Gutch, Jr.
Available in US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Netherlands & Japan
BBQH BABY BOOMERS HEADQUARTERS MAGAZINE
This is the epitome of a boomer roadie book for the boomer roadie. It's funny, it's nostalgic, it's interesting. Route 66, fins, fuzzy dice, carhops. It's all there. This would be a great gift for the roadhead in your life.
