That's a tee vee up there, so there will be no mistake. No blurring, no squinting. No mistake at all. They’ll all be able to see.

On both sides of the stage, and up a ways, the giant mandolin swings past and the mouth, open like an O, scoops down on the mike for the high harmony. Bass, banjo, guitar, mandolin, Vern and Ray, with two rather younger men, lickettysplitting though the bluegrass, pinched — perhaps even too pinched — voices straining out the high lonesome sound and there is no mistake at all in the audience, the giant mandolin swings back across the screen, the song is over, and the over-half-full Oakland Coliseum knows the sound of polite applause for Vern and Ray.

Vern and Ray aren’t who they’ve come to hear, of course, but they do appreciate them. True, the music is kind of old-fashioned stuff, more what Grandma used to listen to, but the fact remains that Vern and Ray are good; it is just not right not to clap for good musicians. And Vern and Ray are surprised at the reception. “Thanky!” one of them says brightly into the mike. He lets out a pent-up gust of air from his lungs. “Thanky vurr much.” They begin to loosen up. They hadn’t expected this.

Back in Team Room B, nobody’s too loose, even though Jack Daniels, cheeseburgers, fries and cokes are passing around. The door opens, and in walks George “Commander Cody” Frayne. “Well, boys, you’ll never guess who’s the only band here tonight in Western duds. Us.” The room breaks up in nervous laughter. “Well, what’re the Strangers wearin’?” somebody asks. “Kinda mod country shit, yot know.” There is a silence. Oh, well. Bassist Buffalo Bruce Barlow gets up and starts pacing again, singing “We don’t smoke marijuana in the Coliseum/Because we’re all to paranoid ...” Enter, immediately,, as if on cue, roadie Neil with a handful of joints. Fine. Next through the door is the promoter. “Hi. Oh. Ah! Ha ha ha. Good. Ha ha ha. Great!” “Ha ha ha,” adds Joe Kerr of OzOne Management. “Twenty minutes,” says the promoter, and he’s out the door.

“They got tee vee out there?” asks Andy Stein, the fiddler. “Yup.” “Oh.”

“Where’s Gene? somebody else wants to know. Gene is Gene Vincent, whom the band is backing up. Still, he’s not the headliner. He might have his own dressing room, but he’s not who all those people out there came to see.

That’s why Cody’s so uptight.

The other man, the headliner, is Merle Haggard.

And you kin guess what kinda audience he attracts.

I first saw Commander Cody in Crockett, California. Now, most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area couldn’t even tell you where Crockett is, and truth to tell, 1 don’t believe I could at the moment. But Crockett is a small town that had, at the time, a burgeoning ballroom that seemed to feature one of the Nick Gravenites/Mike Bloomfield crowd every other week, and this week, they were featuring Nick, Mike, and assorted friends from the Mill Valley Floating Membership Blooze Band. Surprisingly enough, the stars came on first. Even more surprisingly, they were superb. There is just something that happens when Nick Gravenites steps up on a stage ...

The set finished fast, and on came Cody. The audience was puzzled, and then, as if a sign had been flashed, the way they do to television audiences, they got it. They stood up and danced. Having the night before experienced the stultifying ambience of the Fillmore West, I was astounded. But the real test of the evening came towards the end. After the Mill Valley sooperstars had left the crowd diminished by about 3/4, and some strange late-night-Crockett types had come in. One couple looked particularly out of place. He had short hair, a nylon windbreaker and looked like he might have just gotten off of his shift at an electronics plant. She had a classic beehive, a Montgomery Ward pantsuit, and a gleam in her eye as she inched her man closer to the stage. I huess she wanted him there, for protection because the gleam was reserved specifically for Billy C. She kept on calling out requests to him and Billy, seeing that she wasn’t alone, tried to mollify her as best he could, and the man by her side kept insisting that they go home. Finally, she couldn’t take any more and just whomped him upside his head and gave out with a “WEEEEEE=HAH!” that must’ve been heard clear down to San Jose. The man rubbed his head sullenly for a minute, kind of stood back and assessed the whole situation and then grabbed the woman by the ear and dragged her, cussing and kicking, out of the hall.

About a year later, I asked the Commander if he remembered the gig in Crockett. “Was that the one put on by that middle aged woman and her nymphomaniac teenage daughters?” he asked.

“Gee,” sez I, “I don’t remember anything like that.” It might well have been. Cody plays some pretty strange places sometimes.

“Joe,” 4 sez, as the Ozone Brass hack out a street-corner rendition of “St. James Infirmary,” “could you just run down a list of some of-the places the band’s played?”

“Well, we just opened up a new club down the Peninsula ways called The Walrus, and we’ve played of course Mandrake’s, the New Monk, Keystone Korner, the Fillmore West, the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati, the old Family Dog, which is now the Friends and Relations Hall, the Borough Theatre in Boulder Creek, UC Davis, San Ramon High School, whole lotta high schools, in fact, the Montclair Rec Center, Diablo State College, the Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, Cal State Hayward, Alcatraz, we played out on the island one time, Crockett, the Lion’s Share in San Anselmo, Brown’s Hall in Mill Valley, a whole lotta benefits , .

“What about that place in San Jose, that C&W club, what was it...”

“Cowtown!” comes back the answer with a roar. Yeah, we all went down there on amateur night, one of us every week. Tichy won first prize, Andy, Cody, some of us sat in with the house band. We even went down there with Alice Stuart and the Toilettes. They won first prize^ (The Toilettes, like the Reefaires, the Flesh Tones, the Glue Tones, the Ozone Brass, and who knows what else, are another integral part in a fiendish plan for total domination of the entertainment business devised by the Cody troupe called the Ozone Revue.)

So, in case you were wondering, that’s what a good, unknown, struggling California rock and roll band does to keep themselves alive. The wonder of it all is that they have so goddam much fun doing lit.

Fifteen minutes. “Somebody better go and check and see if Gene’s ready.” “Oh, he is. He says just knock on the door when we’re ready.”

Through the door of Team Room B comes a flushed Vern, followed by an equally rosy Ray. “Sure is a good audience out there tonight. Whew. Sure is good,”

“Is it full,” asks Andy.

“Dunno, but it’s packed fur back as you can see.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly the door swings open ahd a tall, distinguished, silver-haired, W.C. Fields-nosed man strides in. “That’s Cotton C. Clark,” someone nearly whispers. “Who’s he?” “Wow, he started it out herb on the Coast — he was one of the first disc jockeys to play hillbilly music on the radio out here, and he used to emcee all the old Bob Wills shows ... We’ve stuck a Bob Wills number intp our solo spot in there when Gene goes off to change his shirt. He got his first big break out here in Oakland, with the Texas Playboys. Wonder if any of them will remember. . .?” And Cotton C.. Clark walks over to Cody.

“Howdy, son.”

“Hello, sir.”

“You’re the leader of this band?”

“Yes sir.”

“And it’s called . . .”

“Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.”

“Whoo-ee,” says Clark, reaching for a 3x5 card, “Could you run that by me one more time, please.”

“Sure,” says Cody, a little more tense. “Commander . . . Cody . . . and the . . . Lost. . . Planet; ,. Airmen.”

“Well, I think I got it. Thanks. You boys go on out there and do a good job, now.”

There is a crush at the door, mainly because the Yem and Ray fans are trying to get in and the Cody fans are trying to get out, and the Clark fans, seeing that he is standing right in the middle, have congregated around him, all the while he’s talking to Joe.

The CREEM teem is on the way out the door; heading to our seats. We finger brass knuckles, wish we’d remembered the switchblade. We’re so out of place, we even get funny looks from the guard.

If you think we’re scared, you’re right."

The New Monk is perhaps the most egregious club I’ve ever seen in Berkeley. It would not be out of place at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Neither would the majority of it clientele. You walk in the door, pay your two bucks to this scrofulous Mediterranean type, and walk through the entry way, after getting your hand stamped. Along the right wall are booths, each with the obligatory candle in the obligatory Chianti bottle. To the left of them is a maddening crush of tables. In the back is the back room, with bikers lounging around, trying to look tough. Like the “hippies” in the place, the ?“pikers” are strictly the weekend variety. But the New Monk does have one saving grace — it provides yet another place for the East Bay’s bands to play.

Of course, the stage is tiny, and on the wall in back of it, some aspiring — or perhaps expiring — artist has painted something that looks like what you’d see if you were peeking on psylocibin and your dog came into the room and shat worms, all over your oriental rug./One of the best aspects of playing the New Monk is that while you’re on stage, you don’t have to look at it.

Cody plays the New Monk a lot. There is a lot of dancing there, for one thing, albeit tight-assed dancing. The drunks make fun of the country music, so the band plays a lot of requests. It doesn’t even matter if they remember the words or the melodies. The audience is usually too drunk to care. (In part, incidentally, this may be attributed to the management’s policy of 10c beers, which may be purchased until the band goes on).

On this particular night, it’s pretty much like that. The band is up on stage, playing something or other, and Joe Kerr is sitting at one of the front tables with a Berkeley street person whom the band knows slightly. This street person has a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand, and Joe keeps declining drinks from it. The band doesn’t, though.'The bottle passes from hand to hand inbet ween songs. Bill Kirchen drinks deeply, and he hands it to Billy C. Billy C drinks even more deeply, hands the bottle to Creeper, and steps to the microphone. “R’member, we’re still takin’ requests up here, y’all.” “Polk Salad Annie!” someone cries out from the floor. Sounds good. The band gets into it.

Suddenly it seems like they’ve been playing it for a long time. An awful long time. The cat with the bottle of Jim Beam has vanished. So have a few other people from the audience.

Kirchen falls off the stage.

And Billy C starts preaching. Eyes closed, head cocked back to one side, preaching with all he’s got, telling all those people to repent, reaching back in his memory to the time he was studying to be a holiness preacher back in Alabama, remembering the hymns his mother taught him, preaching for ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes, some of the audience transfixed, some of them bored, some of them drunk into numbness, but jeezus, you can tell that Billy really wants to make his point. “Y’all goin’ tuh hell,” he says for perhaps the hundredth time.

Right about this moment, it occurs to Joe that Billy C is about to die.

“Y’all goin’ tuh . . . HELL!

And Billy C pitches off the stage, taking the mike with him.

Joe sits, stunned, for a minute. He realizes that he,' too, feels strangely leaden. Rallying every last bit of strength, he jumps up. Billy’s heart is still beating, but slowly. Kirchen seems to be conscious. “What the fuck,” says Joe. “Goddam Jim Beam wuz dosed,” Kirchen says, slipping back, to sleep. Joe shakes him. “You all right, Bill?” “Yeah, but we bettei get Billy C to the hospital.”

Somehow, everybody gets it together and the instruments aye packed while Joe rushes to the hospital’s emergency room. Billy C is taken inside. Joe waits. Suddenly, a thought comes to him, as such thoughts will come when they are least welcome. Tomorrow, they have to play the Haggard show. It is now. 5 in the morning. In tjwelve hours, they have to be at tfye Coliseum for a sound check.

The doctor comes out of the emergency room. “You got him here just in time, Mr. Kerr. Fifteen minutes later and he’d have been dead.”

Oakland is to San Francisco as Newark is to New York City. Even more so, in fact, since nowadays it’s sgetting mighty hard to tell Newark from Manhattan as the latter slides into the general overall squalor of the former. Oakland is a very deceptive town, too. It’s got a couple of lovely lakes, some delightfully unpretentious early 20th Century office buildings, and some of the most godawful grinding ghettoes you’ll ever see this far north of Mississippi. Inbetween the two extremes lies mile after mile of Average California.

Average California is one of those paradoxes that makes it so difficult for an Easterner like me to live here. For instance!, you take this average Oakland house. It doesn’t look like it’s tjeen painted since the end of the War, and you don’t even want td speculate, which War that was. The stairs have this funny slant to them, and they kind of bend in the middle when you walk up them. The house may. be occupied by (choose one): a) A black woman and her five children; b) An Okie family and their ten children; c) A hippie painter and his old lady; d) An old mail who used to repair cars; e) A seemingly transient population of long-haired creeps, their old ladies, dogs, children, trucks, etc. The back yard may have a dozen decaying automobiles, a set of swings, an incredible and prolific selection of fruit trees and flowers, all of these things or none of these things. Nobody worries too much about anything, because the temperature only varies by about twenty degrees the whole year round (mostly on the cold side, incidentally, so don’t do the same thing I did when I first came out here for a visit, and dress expecting palm trees and orange groves), and if it doesn’t leak when it rains, it’ll do. Sometimes these houses cave in. More often, they flame up like a tinderbox and kill everybody within. To complete the picture, let me say that next door, the neighbors could be an old retired couple, some cat who works at a dry-cleaning plant, a) b) c) d) or e),-and the house could be in a condition ranging from brand-new-prefab-suburbia, to lucky-antique-hunting-hippie 19th Century, to ordinary Middle America. 'We Easterners like to' know what things are in front. Such diversity is hard to adjust to.

So anyway, you drive from the city over the Bay Bridge, keep going towards Walnut Creek on I think it’s 41, watch for the Claremont Avenue exit, get off on it, cross by the Safeway, take your first right, and it’s in the first block, about 3/4 of the way doWn. You can’t miss it, really. What else could it be?

Welcome to Ozone Oaks.

File it under e), but with reservations.

Inside the Coliseum, the audience is filing back after the intermission. Surprisingly enough, we are seated next to a couple of friendly-looking people. The people in back of us are a bit shocked, and make the usual isitaboyoragirl jokes. In front of us is a jtnan with a tight-pinched face, wearing a red hunting windbreaker and his wife. He looks up to us, his eyes open a bit wider, and he whips his face back, stony. His jaws are clenched enough , so you can see the muscle. FPWAH! he spits on the floor and then looks back at us.

But the lights are dimming and Cotton Cv Clark is moving toward the microphone. The tee vee camera focuses in on his face. S

“Boy, you’re not gonna believe what we have for you next. Now, I want you to know that I’m gettin’ to be an old man, and I’ve been around country and western music for a long time, and never in my career have I ever seen anything like this. Tonight we have the honor of presenting to you one of the grand old men of what they used to call rock and roll,” and while this is being said, Cody’s coming On stage, and they’re plugging in their instruments and a murmur starts to rise in the audience, “from down Virginia way, the man who hand such hits as ‘Be Bop A Lula,’ and his name is Gene Vincent. He’ll be here in just a minute, but first let me introduce the band that’ll be backing him up, and I want to say again that in all my years in country and western showbusiness I’ve never seen anything like Gene Vincent” slight applause starting up “with . . . uh . . .” adjusting his glasses ,'‘COMMODORE CODY AND uh THE LOST PLANET AIRMEN!!!” . >

Pandemonium, folks. Pandemonium.

That’s a tee vee up there, so there’s no mistake. No blurring, no squinting. No mistake at all. They can all see.

A spotlight. Gene Vincent braces his wooden leg and starts in singing. Pandemonium.

After two numbers, the boos start coming. After three, they mount. We finger our brass knucks.

Pandemonium. Outrage. They can all See. No mistake at all. At all. That’s a tee vee up there. .

In the palatial living room of Ozone Qaks, the West Virginia Creeper is talking to a crack team of reporters from FLASH magazine about his love affair with the pedal steel guitar.

“I dunno, I thought if had started when I was in Nashville, but the other day I saw my old Santo and Johnny album, and there was my name, written right across the axe . . pjp

“How did you get the pedal steel you’re now using?”

“Well, I was down in Nashville, and I started looking for all the steel guitar records I could find. And I picked up this one which had a picture of Shot Jackson on the cover. And I was working in a car wash at the time, vacuuming out cars. So anyway, when I had the money, I thought I’d call up Sho-Bud and order one. See, Sho-Bud ia Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons, who just about invented the pedal steel guitar, so that was the kind I wanted to have. So I called up Sho-Bud, and the woman who answered the phone asked me if I wanted to talk to Mr. Jackson. And let me tell you, I almos't fell out. But I talked to Shot Jackson, and he outlined the axe he was gonna make for me, and he said that it was the best instrument to learn on. Well, I thought, I’ll maybe hold on to it for a year, maybe two years, but I really wanted to plunge right in to the whole machine, but I tell you, it just don’t work that way . . .”

After five years, he’s still got the same machine. And he’s still learning, too, even though he has every other rock and roll musician who plays pedal steel beat hands down.

Continued on page 76.

Continued from page 43.

“I guess I’m just about ready to move on to a double ten, but that takes money, of course. What I really need is some new strings, and I can just about afford them!”

“Okay, you guys, I gotta question to ask you.”

“Is that tape running?”

“Yeah. Look, here’s the question: How has California changed you?”

“As a band?”

“We got more money!” In chorus.

“We’re more uptown!” “More uptown?Who said that?” Laughter.

“We make more money, and we got arrangements!”7

“Yeah, and we make more money, too.” V

“Uh, Ed, if you do an interview with the band, I’m gonna stay in the background,” says the Commander. “All the other interviews have been mostly me. They’ve also mainly been about the old frat days in Michigan, and they’ve all been called ‘Lost In The Ozone Again With Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.’”

“Don’t worry about it. The name of the article is ‘Cody In California.’”

“Fine.”

Did you know that the Commander paints? And real well, too. On one wall in the Ozone Oaks living room is a picture of an early gas station with an old car in front of it. Another wall has a great painting based on a photograph of Mick Jagger that was in Rolling Stone, showing him looking just slightly like Bette Davis in a big floppy hat and round large-lensed sunglasses. And above the stove is everbody’s favorite — Elvis.

Everywhere the band plays, the Ozone Art Collective makes up little handouts. These handouts usually are designed by the Commander’s brother, Chris (who also painted the huge decal that is on the side of the band’s van). Occasionally, Chris will send the necessary materials from Long Island, where he lives, and Joe’s wife Bonnie will put then! together. Thex Ozone Art Collective has been responsible for a whole lot of really fine handbills, and the supply of graphics looks bottomless at the moment. The scrapbook is full, mainly with old pictures of trucks, which are Chris’ obsession at the moment. If they ever get an album out, it’ll be fun to look at, for sure.

The boos are still coming, but a strange realization seems to hit us all at the same time — they’re not booing Cody. They’re actually booing Gene Vincent, who has really gone soft, and writes songs like “Raspberry, Strawberry/Chocolate, Vanilla/m take the last one/Cause I’ve got no fella ...” Of course, they may well be booing Cody, too, but it’s just about time for Vincent to go off stage and change his shirt. That will be the real test. One more number..

Vincent leaves the stage. The camera swoops in on Tichy, who is wasting no time to rush up to the microphone, a worried look on, his face, to begin singing “Diggy Diggy Lo,” which the band launched into as soon as Vincent turned around.

There is a hushed silence, and the boos die away. A 400-pound woman in the front row closes her mouth, which had fallen open with surprise, and starts stomping her feet. She jams her elbow into the ribs of the woman next to her, who likewise begins to clap her hands and stomp her feet. The people in back of us are upset. “Who are they, anyhow?” “I dunno, but they got a steel guitar, so they must be good.” And the very uptight honkie type in front of us calls out weakly, after the song is over, “Ain’t you never hearda soap?”

His wife clouts him. “Shut up, Earl.”

And the band starts another song.

After four numbers, Vincent mounts the stage again, and the boos start coming back. Somebody yells “Let ’em play!” and this is followed by a small burst of applause. At the end of Vincent’s last song, there is mixed applause, and Cotton C. Clark is back, grinning from ear to ear.

“What’d I tell ya, folks? Aren’t they great? Thanks a whole lot, you were really great, let’s hear it for Gene Vincent, folks,” and the applause comes back, the band stands, shaken, and then begins unplugging their instruments, “and for Commander Cody,” more applause, “thanks once again — you were real good, boys.” The applause has just about died down, and the band is off the stage.

“Least, I think they was boys ...” Huge roar of laughter.

He had to do that, I guess. Merle was up next.

Gee, kids, didja ever wonder what it’s like backstage at Bill Graham’s fabulous Filmore West? Just think, the dressing room used by every star worth the name, the place where all the real cream (you should pardon the expression) of the West Coast groupies hang out, vying for the favors of the biggest names in rock showbusiness ...

It’s the second time Cody’s played the Fillmore. The first time, they were on the bill with the Byrds and Poco (Popular Misconception Of The Nature Of Country Music At the Fillmore), and, luckily for us, Poco cancelled out and the new Big Brother and the Holding Company played instead. Cody was up first, and they played it real safe. They’d just gotten back from last summer’s rather disastrous trip to Ann Arbor, where the Powers that were the Powers That Be (but now are Were) denied them access to the ballrooms because they also played for free. About the best thing that came out of this whole trip was the fact that they picked up John Tichy, Cody’s old mentor in country music, the cat who turned him on to it in the first place. Tichy adds the mainstream-country touch to the band, with his strong, even, voice, excellent command 6f phrasing, and solid rhythm guitar work. He even looks like Porter Wagoner a whole lot, so it’s easy to see why he won all those prizes down at Cowtown.

But anyway, for their Fillmore debut, they played it pretty safe, featuring all their well-known songs, featuring Tichy on 6nly a couple of numbers, including “Diggy Diggy Lo.” They got polite applause, and they left the stage. If you like to see Joe smile, don’t ask him how mucji they made that weekend.

i The second time they played the Fillmore ' West, they were still billed last, but there was another group, a horns-and-keyboard-and-guitar band from Cincinnatti, playing bottom of the bill. This meant that they had time to relax a little backstage before they went on.

The backstage at the Fillmore West is just like the backstage anywhere else, except cleaner.A bunch of Salvation Army couches are arranged around the perimeter of the room, and one wall is painted with photographic images of what the Fillmore people consider to be rock’s leading lights: Airplane, Dead, Joplin, Hendrix, Santana, Beatles, you get the picture. On one wall is a closed-circuit TV set so that you can watch the action on stage from the dressing room. In the bathroom, there’s an ad for a custom guitar manufacturer.

The band and the CREEM teem sit around on the couches. Somebody, digs into the seam of one of the chairs and comes up with a flatpick. Speculation runs rife: whose pick could this have been? Hendrix? Clapton? King? Lonnie Mack? No, couldn’t be Lonnie Mack. He’s over by the door talking to Joe. He’s a real fan of the band’s too, and there is a rumor circulating the room that maybe he wants to talk Elektra into signing them. But no, he’s talking about the neat farm he’s bought outside of Cincinatti.

A green plastic garbagecan full of ice and beers is brought in by a Fillmore worker, resplendent in his jersey. “Don’t drink it all,” he cautions, “Save a few for the band that’s coming off stage in a couple of minutes.” “Don’t worry,” someone says before getting trampled in the mad rush for the precious substance.

After Lonnie Mack leaves the room, someone asks Joe “When are you guys gonna sign with someone, anyway?” Joe talks vaguely about several deals that are hanging in the air at the moment. “Someone told me that the' offer you guys made to Buddah Records, if they’d accepted, and then recorded you, and the album had gone gold, they’d still have lost money. Is that true?” “Yeah, well,” Joe winks, “that’s the deal we offered them.” Like many a good band before them, they’re in no hurry. Some people fear that by the time they do get into the studio, they won’t be able to capture that magnificent ambience they have on stage, but I’m not sure. For one thing, as they noted, they’ve now got arrangements. The whole band has become incredibly mojre sophisticated, musically speaking. What it seems they want to be able to play now (in addition to the stuff they already do) is some kind of country/western jazz-Sort of Bob Wills Western Swing brought into the ’70s or something. Already their inroads into Western Swing have had fantastic results, and when they rehearse it* and fall into a nice mellow groove, you can hear the birds in the backyard of Ozone

Oaks go “Ah-hah, take it away, Leon ...”

Haggard’s part of the show was quite disappointing. If you want to hear it, word-for-word, except with some of the pee-pee-doo-doo jokes left out, buy either the Okie From Muskogee album or the Fightin’ Side of Me one. Hag is a little, tiny guy, which I certainly didn’t expect, and he’s got a short-guy complex, which is obvious when you see him on stage.

The first half of the show was the standard run-through-the-hits number, with a verse from each. Then he did his impressions of various country stars (including his wife’s ex-husband, Buck Owens), and so on. We waited nervously for the climax of the show — “Okie From Muskogee.” By this time, most of Cody’s band was standing on the sidelines, down by one of the exits.

Well, Haggard telegraphed the punch — with a huge whatcha might call shit-eating grin on his face, he walked up to the mike and went “We don’t...” and he really didn’t have to go any further, because there erupted from the 15,000 assembled throats a rebel yell that honest to god made my blood feel like it was ice and raised every single hair on my body to erect, attention, “...like the hippies... in San Francisco do,” sings Merle, gesturing over his shoulder as if at a turd. Someone commences kicking at the back of my chair in time to the, music. The uptight cat ahead of us, strangely enough, has drunk himself to sleep, and is nodding from time to time. Girls with Instamatics are rushing the stage, and the guards are being playfully stern with them.

But look at the tee vee up there, look at Merle’s face. His jaw is clenched, and his eyes look strange. The pupils are a bit small, it seems, and this sounds like a very perfunctory performance. His attention seems to be elsewhere. The tee vee doesn’t lie. Poor Merle. What could be the matter? Drunk? Strung out on drugs? Bored?

And just as I start to ruminate on these questions, a huge man with murder in his heart approaches the Commander. Their eyes lock. Holy shit.

The sound check is at 5:30. The band is still mightily affected by their tangle with the dosed Jim Beam, but they’re trying to work out a couple of Vincent’s songs with him one more time, to make sure they’ve got it. Billy C’s at home.

“We found out what it was,” says Joe as he watches the proceedings on stage. “PCP, that animal tranquilizer.”

“Jeez, I think that affects the liver. Better tell Billy C to cool it with the booze for a while.”

“Does it? Are you sure?”

“I’ll check.” (I did. It doesn’t. But it still ain’t good ferya.)

“Too bad Billy’s missing this concert.”

“Yeah, it really is one of the biggest breaks you’ve had yet.”

“Billy digs hell outa Haggard, too.”

The sound check is over, and the equipment is taken down. The Strangers, Merle Haggard’s backup band, starts setting up. Creeper walks over to their steel guitar player, NOrman Hamlet, and silently admires his axe. Pretty soon, they’re trading technical talk, and Hamlet turns out to be a real nice guy, friendly and open. With a wink, he shows us the little drawer in the side of the instrument that serves as an ashtray.

We’re all still laughing when Beef Adams, the Strangers’ drummer, walks up on stage. He truly deserves his name, let me tell you, and he wasn’t quite as friendly-acting as Hamlet. We then decided to go find the dressing room, Team Room B.

As the calls for an encore mount, the CREEM teeth decides that if we want to shake hands with Haggard, we’d better get backstage right away, so we leave our seats and get back there just in time to see the star come down the backstage steps. Immediately, he is surrounded by well-wishers, and we start pushing our way through the crowd towards him. He sees us coming, and then a strange thing happens. From nowhere comes a short, swarthy little man in a shiny green suit. As Haggard turns to us, he grabs his arm and drags him, dragging his heels, to an awaiting Cadillac. The doors slam, and they’re off.

The snuff queens (country music groupies) are disappointed, and, undaunted, they board the Strangers’ bus. From inside the bus, there is a tinkle of glasses being filled with ice.

Inside Team Room B, there is also merriment. Andy is jamming bluegrass with Vern and Ray, Joe has just come upon a copy of John Grissim’s excellent book Country Music: White Man’s Blues, and is trying to find the section on Cody. Cotton C. Clark is talking to a bunch of people including the Commander. Oddly enough, the Commander looks fihe.

“What was that deal with that huge character who walked up to you, anyway?” I ask.

“That was really far out. He walked up to me, singing along with the song, you know: ‘We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee . . .’ and starin’ me straight in the eye, so I did the same, singin’ along with the song and starin’ him straight in the eye. So when he gets right up to me, he stops singing, but he’s still staring me in the eye, and he says ‘You know, I gotta son about your age, looks a lot like you .. Eyes still locked. Pointing his finger. “Then he taps me on the chest. ‘An y’ know, I love him!”’

“And then he just walks away.”