The Outline of my Life

1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974

1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991

1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004

 

1979

20 years old.

Funk lab days.

Living with Linda was getting difficult for me, since she didn't want to have sex with me, thinking of me more as a kid brother. Watching her go out into the street and pick up strange guys was simply too much for me to bear, so I moved out into a Boarding house on Russell near Jefferson. But I didn't last long there, partly because it was a little expensive, and partly because it was so weird, living in a boarding house. Do people still live in boarding houses anymore?

Patrick and I were getting more serious about our music, and had amplifiers set up in the attic of his new rented house on Victor by the old Falstaff Brewery. We called this place the Funk Lab. A bail bondsman named Homer Townsley rented it to us for less than nothing.

I was working at Duff's again, I think, and around this time I bought my beloved electric guitar from the head chef at Duff's, Jimmy Voss. It was an ancient black hollow-bodied Hagstrom with flaking gold-plated pickups and fittings. We also played our first gig ever at the Euclid Festival, an outdoor neighborhood block party on south Euclid, as Malcom's Bliss.

We decided we needed copyrights our ten best songs, so we copyrighted some together and I copyrighted "Change Me Blues", "Plucktress" and "Back to Back Again".

Jerry Udell, David and Patrick's alcoholic old man, moved into the room upstairs from me. The house had 3 floors: The first floor had a divorced mom with two kids, 12 and 14, who used to hang around with us a little, and I lived in the back room on this floor in what used to be the kitchen. It was nice for me because I had a kitchen sink in my room and a back stoop. But the place was crawling with roaches, especially my room, where they swarmed and bred like crazy up in the dropped ceiling over my bed. The second floor was where Patrick, Tracy Wynkoop, Moe and Joe Ramsey slept, and the attic was where the kitchen, dog food and the party room/practice room was in the front of the house.

Jerry Udell was the first of the old-time Gaslight Square era hipsters I ever met, except for his ex-wife Carol, who used to live across the alley from us on 18th Street. He was a huge black haired barrel-chested long-limbed half-American Indian guy with a big Wild West type mustache and a hyper little dog named Saloon. I loved Jerry immediately, he was the very essence of cool. He was a poker-playing itinerant bartender around town and one of the sweetest cats you could ever imagine. He was into Bix Biederbeck, and introduced me to "real Jazz", the Jazz of the 20s and 30s. He delighted in drinking us young pups under the table night after night while we listened to his scratchy old collector's item 78 rpm records.

Girls started coming around a lot, and I hooked up for a while with a pretty little brunette named Pat, the friend of Patrick's girlfriend Lisa. I remember sleeping on the roof was a big deal back then, that summer. Of course we had no air conditioning.

 

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