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Attention campers! Don't forget to listen to the music before you leave here - (click on this)

Here are some classic photos which were taken of me playing live in a couple of my very first bands. I've also included a review of Magic that was written by Joel Selvin who used to be the number one music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Underneath this montage is what I have to say about all this.

Starting with Joel Selvin's article:   My second band Magic was playing at The Orphanage in San Francisco when I met Joel. We got that job because we knew the owner, William Von Sultzer (who we called "Von Alka Seltzer"), from years before when my first Magic band was the house band at his original Orphanage in Laguna Beach. Joel literally fell off his bar stool when I sang my Hemorrhoid Song and then he fell off it again when we performed Shameful. Poor Joel just couldn't stay on that bar stool for very long each time we ripped into another one of my songs and during our break, I discovered that we had another common interest - smokeables! The very next day he wrote the rave review that you can read here and we became personal friends. I used to visit him at his house in Oakland and I was impressed with his fantastic record collection which took up his entire living room and one other room as well. Joel was extremely "well connected", as you might expect for someone in a position like his who knew just about everybody worth knowing, and he helped me secure what I wanted on more than one occasion. Other than our two common interests (my music and the other thing), I actually didn't like him all that much because he had some pretty offensive attitudes and also because he refused to help me get the important people he knew to listen to my music. So we parted ways and I've never seen him since that time.

And now starting at the center top:   This is some original art work from the Record Plant days with Gary Kelgren. From left to right in the drawing it's Don Bosson (from Steam), me, Pat Craig who was a temporary keyboard player that we used, and the intensely offensive David Raeder. The inscription is mine and I wrote it to my mother when I sent her my Record Plant Magic tape for her birthday. I was trying to make peace with the woman in the only way I knew how - by giving her what I thought was my most valuable possession at that time. The entire true story of what actually happened to my mother as the result of a spiritually charged apple is in The Swami and Me.

Moving to the right:   That's me and Tor Pinney, cut out from an old photograph that was taken by Tor's mother when we were in our second band together called "The Haymarket Riot". I came up with that band name. The Haymarket Riot was actually a real riot that occurred in the early 20th century and I thought it was a good name to convey the wild and uncontrolled energy that our band really did project. But my mother hated it because of the violence it implied and the band broke up pretty soon all of its own Honda Accord.

Moving down the right side: This is the only photograph that exists of The Dolphins as far as I know. The Dolphins were my very first band and Tor was the leader who I knew because he was in my sixth grade class in elementary school. The story of how I got into Tor's band is in The Interview with Peter Cross, Part 1. This photograph was taken on New Years Eve when we played at the Larchmont Yacht Club. My high school sweetheart's family belonged to the Larchmont Yacht Club at that time and I used to hang out there with her all the time because it really is one heck of a classy yacht club and that's where her parents anchored their yacht. My classic lyric line "Make out naked on the Fourth of July" from my song Mona actually occurred on her parents' yacht on my birthday, July 29th. I would have said that in my song but I couldn't think of a good rhyme for the 29th at all - and I still can't. All the rest of the photos you see here were taken at various locations when I was playing with Steam. At the center of the montage is a clipping from some newspaper in Orange County and I'm not going to list the band members because one of them doesn't deserve being immortalized on an historic web site. He's a complete shithead - absolutely the worst facsimile of a "human being" I've ever known who had the gall to call himself my "friend". You don't want to know what this atrocious thing did to me but I will say that he's a lying Culligan Water salesman. Watch out people! And I really don't want to end one of my own web pages on such an angry note so I'll end it with a "la de da, la de da" and say "Oh thank you very much, Annie Hall!