| The Savvy Stories by Steve Jones (continued) |
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Chapter Three – Settling In At Savvy's There weren’t many VCR’s around yet in 1979. In fact, back then they were known as the VTR (video tape recorder) and could cost upward of $800! We only knew of one person who had one - our old bartender friend from the Hungry I, Ryan Brennan. Ryan had been a really close friend to the band up until about the time we transitioned to Savvy; then he stopped hanging around with us. However, Ryan did hear about my upcoming appearance on the Mr. Peppermint show and offered to tape it for me. He did tape it, and I saw it once, but I never was able to get him to make a copy for me. (Every time I’d run into Ryan over the years, I’d try to get him to make a copy of the Peppermint appearance, and he would hum and haw about maybe getting around to it someday, but he never did. Eventually, I lost complete contact with him, and short of hiring a private investigator, I have tried many times to track him down on my own. I’m at peace with not having a copy of my TV debut for my media collection, but not knowing why Ryan walked away from our friendship continues to be a real mystery when I allow myself to think about it for very long.) Savvy had a vacation coming up in May. Rick Miller and his roommate Paul Bennett asked me to vacation with them in California. After barely a hint of this to Lilly, the entire plan was nixed - at least my participation in it. In order to avoid another fight I bowed to her pressure and backed out of the trip. This created a lot of tension that lasted for days. At least we finally had a reason for the tension for a change. One night during this period Lilly invited some of her friends over to my apartment. Lilly and I got into a big argument and I just wanted to disappear. So I climbed out my bedroom window and went for a walk. I ended up in some nearby woods where I just sat and let the anger burn off. It was cold, dark, and damp and I was still wearing my gig clothes. I must have sat out there for over an hour stewing until I figured I’d taught Lilly a lesson. That was a sad miscalculation on my part because when I returned she gave me a ton of crap about being such a baby. She had some choice one-liners that referred to me as "Houdini" because of my vanishing act, and "James Bond" because I'd sneaked out like a secret agent or something. The worst part was that I'd had it coming. I'd acted like a spineless moron. I should have just left out the front door like a normal person -- but our brand of normal was much different from the society standard. Better yet, it was my apartment! Why should I have had to leave in the first place? Everything that happened in those days seemed to be steeped in high drama. Lilly still had her own apartment, but had been spending more and more time at my place than her own – until the "Houdini" stunt. After that, her routine changed dramatically. She took longer getting home from work and went on a lot more "errands.” While I'd been trying to find a way OUT of the relationship, I discovered that I was getting very suspicious and jealous about her whereabouts. Then one day she said she was working late. I didn’t buy it for a second and was hell bent to bust her. What happened next goes unexplained to this very day. Feeling compelled to find her, I got in my car and started driving. There was no compass, or rhyme or reason to where I was going -- I just drove wherever the car took me. It was sort of like being a divining rod looking for water, or a human planchette moving about on the Ouiji board of life. I’d heard her mention something about an ex boyfriend moving into the Woodhaven area recently, so my subconscious pointed me in that direction. Woodhaven consisted of dozens of huge luxury apartment complexes spread out over a very large area. If Lilly was indeed with this ex, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack - but I couldn’t help looking for her. It was a compulsion. I drove straight to Woodhaven, pulled into the main area, made two or three random turns (out of a possible hundred or so choices) and ended up in a parking lot. I parked and shut off the car engine. Questions began filling my head as I asked myself what in the world I was doing. After a few seconds of contemplation, I cooled down and was just about to crank up the engine and drive away when I looked up and couldn’t believe my eyes! Less than 20 feet away from me, parked in front of a row of apartments, was Lilly’s Mustang! The sick feeling took over again and I fell back into the hypnotic type, obsessed trance. Considering where her car was parked, she could’ve been at any one of 5 or 6 different apartments, but I was on autopilot, and walked right to a particular door, as if being drawn to some kind of invisible beacon. I knocked and a guy I’d never seen before opened the door. I didn’t have to ask – or say anything. Lilly was standing behind him, and she looked like she’d seen a ghost! I just looked at her and shook my head and said, "Just wanted to see for myself." I smiled and left. She followed me all the way to my car, but I was cold as ice. She followed me home and launched into a story about how he (Mike) had her tennis racket and she’d gone over there to pick it up. I wasn’t buying it, and I gave her the silent treatment for a few days. I wanted her to stew in her guilt, which was horribly hypocritical when one considers that I’d never let up in doing exactly whatever I wanted to do whenever I could get away with it. Most musicians I knew, including myself, were masters of the double standard. The important fact was that we were young and stupid, and basically only together out of dysfunction and co-dependence. We were not married, engaged, or even headed in that direction, so all was fair in love and war, particularly now that I'd caught HER in such an awkward spot. Down deep I didn't really believe that Lilly was there to cheat on me with the guy, but it seemed convenient to play it out that way for a while. I was so busy playing rock star that I never realized that Lilly truly did love me. About a week after the Peppermint show aired, the phone rang at the club during a band rehearsal. Wayne Addington, our drummer’s brother-in-law, and part owner of the club, shouted across the empty, dark dance floor to tell me I had a call. The voice on the other end of the phone sounded very business-like, and legitimate, but asked if I would be interested in a job portraying the world famous hamburger spokesclown, Ronald McDonald. Because of my red hair, this wasn't the first time I'd been called Ronald McDonald, so I simply hung up the phone and went back to rehearsal, assuming it had been a prank. Moments later the phone rang again. After a few minutes of discussion I realized they weren’t kidding. Someone from the corporation’s ad agency had seen me on the Peppermint show and had tracked me down. They were serious! The more I looked into it, the more I realized this could be a great acting / performing gig that I could do during the day, and still do the band thing at night. I agreed to meet with them for an interview. The offices of Moroch & Stout and Associates were located on the Road to Six Flags in Arlington. I took a trunk loaded with props, puppets, photos, and tricks, along with my banjo, and met with Pat Kempf. I never had to interview for a job before, and had no idea what to expect. Here was this longhaired hippy looking youth carrying all this wacky stuff through a conservative corporate office. In that instance, ignorance was bliss, and my ally. Pat Kempf was a tall, thin young man with a friendly face and incredible sense of humor. He reminded me a lot of a young Dick Van Dyke. I brought Jimmy, the ventriloquist figure they’d seen on the Peppermint show. I also brought a raccoon puppet named Packy. Pat seemed intrigued by Packy more than anything else. I showed Pat a few photos of me performing in various homemade clown outfits when I was growing up, and then played a song for him on the banjo. After a nice visit I was sent home and told they’d think about it. Think about it?? They called me! I was sure I’d been so completely unprofessional and unpolished that I’d never hear back from them. I later learned they had been so desperate to find a replacement for the previous guy that I probably didn’t have to interview at all. It seemed like something I could do, and the money sounded excellent, but by the time I got home from the interview it didn’t take long for me to completely forget about McDonald's. I already had the world’s greatest gig! I didn’t want to push my luck and get my hopes up too high about the other thing. Back in Savvyland a lot was happening. We had a birthday party for mom at Savvy’s on March 22. I bought a microwave oven for her, which I presented to her on stage during the Savvy floorshow. Microwave ovens were sort of like VCR’s in 1979. They were expensive and not a lot of people in our circles had them. I do remember that whole deal being sort of like Bob Barker presenting an appliance to a contestant on the price is right. But it was fun and mom loved the microwave. [As of April 2007, that old Microwave is still in the kitchen where mom used it until the day she died. My brother ended up with it, and he's bought a few new ones since, but none of them have outlasted the old Montgomery Ward unit I bought for mom almost 30 years ago.]
On March 29, 1979, another really freaky thing happened which would impact me for years to come. The incident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear facility was major news. To this day it stands as America’s worst nuclear accident. Aside from nuclear physicists, not many of the rest of us had a clue about what was going on. Even the talking heads on TV were getting facts wrong and blubbering on about things they didn’t understand. At one point during the ordeal, I was at the bar inside the club taking a break from an afternoon rehearsal. The TV over the bar was on and a news reporter came on with a special news flash. The way I understood the story, unless a miracle happened within the next three days to stop it, the reactor at Three Mile Island would melt down into the core of the Earth and destroy all life on the planet! I was stunned. Sickened. The world was coming to an end and I’d just heard it on TV. Yet life went on and nobody besides me seemed to have heard that particular report. Either I didn’t hear it correctly, or that reporter had been reading a lot of hogwash that was handed to him and hadn't checked the facts. Of course the whole ordeal was over within a few days and the world didn’t end, but it was the first time I’d been that frightened about anything in my entire life. Except of course the time when I was a kid and saw "The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" at the New Isis Theatre. The following month, on April 18, 1979, a guy was killed in the parking lot of the club as we were playing inside. The police swarmed the club and stopped the band. The house lights came on and everyone in the building was interviewed before they were allowed to leave. I don’t know who was killed – or why. I just know that it was a horrible tragedy and I didn’t do it. We’d become friends with Bobby Albin’s band, Push. They played a concert at Flagpole Hill in Dallas with Budgie and Wet Willie. I went to that concert. It was a beautiful day and Push sounded great. Particularly their lead guitarist, an 18-year-old kid from Longview, Texas named Ricky Lynn Gregg. Ricky had sat in with us once or twice back at the Hungry I, but I hadn’t talked to him much. He was an amazing guitar player and had a really good voice with a high range. But in addition to all that, he really knew how to move on stage to drive the rock and roll audiences into a frenzy! Girls loved him!
Around this time, some dude claiming to be Alice Cooper’s manager came out to the club and was dropping names and getting in good with anyone who would buy him a drink. Of course one never knows if those people are legit or not, and back then we were pretty gullible. For me, a good indicator that he was full of crap was the fact that he was hanging around Savvy’s. We’d run into many more of those types in years to come, but it would become harder and harder to sort the genuine articles from the fakes once real celebrities started coming out too. So far, we had become friends with the likes of Lee Pickens from Bloodrock, and Rusty Burns from Point Blank. To us, those guys were the real deal. We’d had the drummer from Boston drop in, and so it was no longer completely out of the question for an authentic agent, manager, or other celebrity to be hanging out at Savvy’s. That meant it was open season for con artists. We got word that my ex-Desperado pals, Wade and Boogie, were booked to play Spencer’s Corner with their band RIO! That was great news because Spencer’s was still the premier club to play in Ft. Worth at that time. RJ and I were thrilled for our old friends, and maybe a tiny bit envious of them too. I’d made a complex board game a year earlier in which the goal was to start out as a garage band and end up playing Spencer’s Corner! What we didn’t know was that in only a few short months, Savvy’s would become the premier place to play in town. Not only that, but it wouldn’t be long before Savvy would become a premiere band as well! |
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SAVVY STORY INDEX
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