DARK TOWER

Vocalist Rick Stevens had left Tower of Power and descended into a junkie lifestyle of drugs, pimping, and singing with second-rate soul bands far below his pay grade, anything to keep a steady supply of drugs coming. In February 1976, this downward spiral led to a tragic confrontation that ended in him shooting and killing three people.

He sang the hit “Sparkling in the Sand” on the band's 1970 debut album, East Bay Grease, and by the time the group decamped to Memphis to record their second album, Bump City, with producer Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the whole band was so strung out on heroin, scoring dope was more important than cutting tracks. Stevens left the band during preproduction for the third album to pursue his dope habit full-time.

After serving 36 years in California prisons— once his death sentence had been commuted—Rick Stevens stepped out in the sunlight and wanted to tell his story. We spent many long sessions preparing a manuscript that has remained unpublished until now. This is Rick’s account of the murders and his arrest.

I met a guy named Roy Davis in Berkeley. I already knew his older brother, Frank Davis, drummer in Cold Blood, as well as, before that, the Loading Zone, the Berkeley R&B band that was an early inspiration to the Motowns, the first version of Tower of Power. Roy was a roadie for Cold Blood, and we struck up a friendship. He was a good-looking young guy with a great spirit and good attitude. He also had good dope connections. He was the one who knew the Austin brothers.

We did some concerts together through the Central Valley, but the drugs always took their toll. He was speedballing like I was—shooting cocaine and heroin—and all the money that he made from the concerts would go right into his arm. He booked shows with Donny Hathaway, Herbie Hancock, the Blackbyrds, but we did a lot of dates for him with Cold Blood in places like Modesto and Fresno.

It wasn’t long before I stopped performing altogether, although I continued to utilize Roy’s services. I had some royalties coming in the mail, and I had all these ladies taking care of me—I was living with five Scorpios, including a set of twins; oh my God, so I started doing a little pimping on the side. Those Scorpios were stinging me like crazy, but they also showered me in good love and money.

I never had a drug problem. Not as long as I had the money. Roy would come around with good dope, but I could always cop with his sources or some of my own. That’s what I was doing with my life.

Eventually Roy introduced me to the Austin brothers—Andrew and Harry—who lived up in the dark forests of the Santa Cruz mountains. We would go to their house, kick it, get loaded. They had good dope. We copped from them. Their ladies would always get real excited when the Tower of Power singer showed up. Everything was cool.

It turned out that the Austins were in bed with some junior mafioso who were selling drugs to the brothers. They were already under indictment by the Santa Clara Grand Jury, as well as under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration for international wheeling and dealing from Canada. They kept a serious cache of weapons on the premises, although I knew none of this at the time.

They did start acting tough with us. They would front us goods, but I was always good for it. At some point, they decided we owed them a lot of money. “You and your partner, you guys have been using a lot of our product, and we’re going to need you to make that right.”

Roy and I split, but it was trouble. “Where are those motherfuckers coming from?” said Roy. “They must be crazy.”

I got in touch and told them I would pay them the two thousand I owed them, but no way was I giving them the five grand they were demanding. The most I was into them for was twenty-two hundred, tops. I told them I had the two grand. “I’m going to give the money to Roy, and that’s all you’re going to get,” I told them. “I don’t want to hear from you motherfuckers no more.”

Roy set up a meeting at a BART station, and they started to get tough. They thought Roy had more money than I gave him. They slapped him around pretty good before they let him go. “You tell that fucking singer, that Rick Stevens guy, that we’ll be in touch with him and he had better be careful because we know where he lives and we know where his family is.”

They suggested I work off the rest of my debt selling dope to Santana and all my other contacts in the music business. “If he wants to sling a little dope for us, he can pay off his debt,” they told Roy.

Roy and I talked it over. They were playing us for punks. They were calling me out. They were questioning my manhood, the way I carried myself around the ladies and the fellows. I hung out with bikers. I hung out with dope dealers who were armed and dangerous. They respected me for the way I carried myself. I wasn’t a punk. Roy was a tough guy. He played football. He was bigger than me. He could sling, get down with his fists. We decided to rectify the situation.

Roy knew these small-time dealers named Sam and Scooter who were close associates of the Austins and knew how to get to their place in the woods. He told them there was going to be a big party with Tower of Power, Santana, the Pointer Sisters; everybody was going to be there. Everybody has money, he said, and they could come and sell their stuff. Roy arranged to meet them at an intersection on top of the mountains.

I WASN'T PLANNING ON HURTING ANYBODY.

I woke up that morning in my rock-star pad on Twin Peaks in San Francisco, down the street from Willie Mays’ place. I kissed Miss Chinatown goodbye and headed over to Papa Derouen’s house in Oakland, where my half brother Sonny was laying up. When I got there, Roy was stretched out with his feet up on the couch. He said he had made a connection with Sam.

I felt the need for some reinforcement against these dudes who thought they were such badasses, even though I had never before in my life picked up a gun. Sonny knew some cat who ran a pawnshop in Oakland and had guns. I had gold. I gave him a gold bracelet and he gave me a .38 with a hair trigger and the bullets. Now we could talk. We copped a bunch of dope before we left the city, and Roy and I started shooting speedballs while Sonny snorted up.

Our little escapade didn’t start all that well. We were parked on the Felton Empire Grade in the Santa Cruz Mountains waiting for Sam to show up when a police car pulled in behind us. I had no driver’s license—I had no identification at all. I didn’t have the registration to the girl’s car I borrowed. I got the piece under my seat. Roy has warrants. Sonny is wanted for probation violations. We’re going to jail before we even get started. But that didn’t happen. The cops ran a check on us, but for some reason, they let us go.

As we started to pull out, up drives Sam and he’s got a couple of chicks with him. I walked over to his car to talk to him. “Man, what the fuck you bring the women for?” I said.

“They wanted to meet everybody,” he said, so I knew he believed the story that Roy told them about the party.

We told him to follow us and drove off to a secluded spot. There were houses in the distance. We all got out of both cars and I pulled out the gun. “Everybody be cool,” I said.

Sonny held up his hands and walked away. “Oh no, no, no,” he said. “Not me. No. Don’t do this.”

I locked one of the ladies, named Ida, in the trunk of their car and put the other one, Linda, in our trunk. Roy and Sonny got in the front, Roy behind the wheel. I slid in the back seat next to Sam with the gun at my side. “Motherfucker, you’re taking me to Andrew and Harry’s house. You playing me for a punk? We’re getting ready to deal with this right now.”

I put a coat over his head and periodically would lift it up so he could give us directions. I was jacked up to my eyelids on speedballs. As we rolled through the winding, dark forest roads, I harangued him the whole way. “What is wrong with you motherfuckers?” I said. “Why are you treating me like a fucking punk? I showed you guys class, invited you to concerts. Everything was cool. You could come to the dressing room, sell your goodies.”

Sam told us that the Austins were getting ready to make a big buy and putting pressure on all the dealers to come up with cash. They were getting ready to make one of their big runs to Canada with a load of coke and prime weed and they were squeezing everybody.

I wasn’t planning on hurting anybody. I didn’t want to kill those guys. I wanted to stop them from threatening me and my family. For good measure, I was also going to take back the money I did pay them. The gun was merely a negotiating tool.

Eventually, Sam pointed out the turnoff. We parked and got out. Roy stayed in the car. Their house was deep in the woods. The dogs barked. I told Sam to go to the door, and I went with him. “Whoever answers,” I said, “tell him it’s you.”

I stood next to him, the gun by my side. I was not drawing down on him or anybody. Sonny was a couple steps behind us. Andrew opened the door. Sam cowered and dove through the door, leaving Andrew and me face-to-face. “You know why I’m here, motherfucker,” I said. “We’re going to talk.”

He spied the gun and made a move on me. We exchanged a few blows and I was still holding the gun by my side. “You stupid motherfucker,” I said and raised my arm to slap the side of his head with the gun.

He reached out and grabbed the gun. It went off straight at his forehead, right between the eyes. He slid down and closed his eyes like he was going to sleep.

Sam was on the floor, trying to climb under the rug. Sonny went saucer-eyed. “Don, you shot the motherfucker," he said, calling me by my real name.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” I said. “You saw what he did. He moved on me.”

We went looking upstairs and found a naked lady and her daughter. I handed her a robe. In another upstairs room was another young cutie wearing nothing but panties. I told her to put a top on. “Where’s my money?” I said.

“There’s a safe in the closet,” she said.

I shook the safe and heard paper rustling and some clinking (it would turn out much later that there was nothing in there but some useless papers and a couple of loose screws, but at the time I was convinced I had found the mother lode).

“My child has a cold and needs her medicine,” the mother said. “Can you get it for me?” I’m holding a freaking smoking gun and she wanted me to get her kid’s pills out of the bathroom. I got the pills, brought her a glass of water, and asked her name.

“Cheryl,” I said, “who else is here?”

She told me there was someone else downstairs and, when I told her to show me, led the way. Through the partly opened bedroom door, I could see some dude sprawled out on the bed in his clothes, facing away, with a bunch of silver rings and a large watch. Cheryl moved away from the door.

“Hey you, motherfucker, get up,” I said. “I want to talk to you, too.”

He raised up and turned toward me. As he did, he drew his arm out from underneath him and, in an instant, I was certain this fool had a weapon. I blazed. I shot him twice. The second bullet ricocheted—they found it later in the floor, under which, it turned out, they kept a large cache of automatic weapons and other stolen property. That was it for me. I turned and walked out.

HIS ARM CAME UP TO FIRE AND-BAM, BAM-I DROPPED HIM RIGHT THERE.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Don’t tie nobody up. Don’t hurt anybody. Just split.”

We got in the car and drove off through the woods. We could hear the sirens through the trees from the Highway Patrol and Sheriff’s cars already converging on the crime scene. We drove for almost an hour and parked the car in some nowhere suburban neighborhood in Milpitas. Sonny went his way, Roy went his way, and I went mine.

The Austins did a lot of coke and weed, but they didn’t have any heroin, and I was hurting for a fix. I called my man Ray Whitecliff in Oakland. He had the dope bag. He was home and I invited myself over, grabbed a cab straight to his pad. He and his old lady didn’t shoot dope—they had what we called stomach habits; they only tooted the stuff—so I went into the bathroom to shoot up. Everything was cool again.

I spent three days with them, staying up watching the all-night movies with the waterbed-salesman host. We went out to eat and played the radio but didn’t hear a word about the killings in the Santa Cruz Mountains on the news. I was sitting on the stoop of his basement room when he got a phone call. I heard him say, “Oh yeah, is that right?” He hung up and disappeared into the next room.

When he came back, he was pointing a piece at me. “You punk motherfucker,” he said, “you come over to my house and you killed some of the brothers up in the mountains. Some of the other brothers are coming over to deal with your jive ass.”

“Let me explain,” I said. “Let me talk to you, man. Let me tell you what happened.”

“I don’t want to hear nothing,” he said.

Later I would find out that this cocksucker had bought a phony laminated ID at the flea market with my name, Rick Stevens. He had leased a car and his house in my name without my knowing it. I guess my credit was still better than his. I didn’t learn about all this until I went to court.

Ray didn’t know I was armed. I knew there were a couple of bullets left. The gun was in my shoulder bag right by my side. He was stomping around the den, talking shit about how they were going to deal with me and dump my body. He turned away to look over the swimming pool like somebody was coming. I pulled out my piece and I drew down on him. “It’s your ass or me, partner,” I said.

His arm came up to fire and—bam, bam—I dropped him right there. He was through. I rushed upstairs because I knew his woman, Renee, packs. I jumped right on top her, dead in the middle of her chest. “Don’t you move, bitch,” I said. “Don’t even move.”

Under her pillow I found a .25 automatic. I reached under Ray’s pillow and came out with a .45. Finelooking Renee, stark naked. I made her put on a robe.

She was so shook, she pissed herself. “Rick, I’ve got to use the bathroom,” she said.

I opened the bathroom door so I could keep my eyes on her and let her pee. I half-ass tied her up with her robe’s belt. I stole two or three ounces of Ray’s black tar Mexican brown heroin, took his white Cadillac Brougham, and drove off, leaving behind the syringes I was going to need if I was going to shoot dope, so I just started snorting Ray’s stash as I drove down the road.

I had stopped caring. All I could do was shoot dope and stay out of it. I no longer cared about myself. I sure didn’t care about Ray once he started talking shit about me. I didn’t care about his lady. I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care about anything.

Renee immediately got loose, ran next door, screaming, “Rick Stevens just killed my boyfriend.” The cops came quickly.

As I drove, police cars were rushing hither and yon. Sirens were everywhere. I could hear the flapping of the police helicopter blades. I see the cops. I lose the cops. I drove up the hill and ditched the car. I wrapped up all the guns in a jacket and tied it up. Down the hill, where there was a construction site, I saw where they were laying a foundation, getting ready to pour concrete. I dug a hole and buried the guns where they would never be found.

I felt squirrelly walking around, snorting Ray’s dope. I wandered into a park and spied a large, shady tree. I lay down under the tree and surrender flooded through me. It was all over and I knew it. I felt immense relief. Sirens were buzzing around everywhere. The police helicopter hovered overhead, but I was done. A motorcycle cop rolled up on me in the park. I heard him coming. He climbed off the bike, pulled out his gun, and moved toward me cautiously. “Don’t move,” he said.

Stevens kicked drugs cold turkey in his jail cell and took Jesus into his heart as his savior on the floor of the cell. Initially sentenced to death, he was spared by the California Supreme Court, which ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1977. He spent the next 35 years in various California prisons before gaining parole in 2012.

He was reunited with Tower of Power—bandleader Emilio “Mimi” Castillio had long before given up drugs and embraced Christianity—at a nightclub engagement at the Oakland jazz club Yoshi’s, where Stevens took the stage with his former associates and, at age 72, freshly freed from half a lifetime in prison, he sang his hit, “You’re Still a Young Man.” The sold-out audience, including two of his grown children, knew what was happening and showered the old con with a standing ovation filled with love.

He spent five fine years in the fresh air before cancer took him out at age 77 in 2017. “He was an angel in disguise,” said his lifelong friend and Santana founding member Michael Carabello.