Long as I can grow it my hair....

As you will soon learn, this has nothing to do with hair, mine or the musical. This has to do with those youthful memories I am so want to share.

In the early 70's, when I had finally reached my majority, I took a job doing building maintenance at night. I made somewhere around $5.00 to $7.00 bucks an hour doing that job. That may not sound like much until you consider that minimum wage back then was some where around $1.65 an hour. I got paid monthly, by the job, not by the hour. The faster I worked, the more money I made. The more buildings I could clean between 10pm and 5am the more money I made. Vic turned me on to this gig. Vic turned me on to 2 things in my life that have stayed with me forever, the ability to clean professionally and the only real guitar pick I know how to do (everything else I made up).

Theoretically this job was supposed to allow me the freedom to work at night and go to college during the day.  Sometimes it worked out that way, more often than not it didn't.

Basically what college was like for me was this:

At the beginning of each semester, I would elect to take somewhere around 16 to 20 credits.  About 2 weeks into said semester, after I had had the opportunity to go to each class at least once or possibly twice, I would drop everything except maybe two music classes. If two music classes appeared to be cramping my style, I would drop down to one just in the nick of time. This was how I maintained my 4.0 average too. It's also why I never graduated.

At 19 I was making way too much money cleaning medical buildings and having way too much fun buying motorcycles, cars and partying down with my friends. 

After 6 months of having way too much fun, I found myself not only finding school cramping my style, but work too. I started dropping contracts so that I could have just a little more time to party before work. In the end, I got myself down to doing occasional odd contracts where it lasted maybe a month or was maybe just a one time gig. It still paid the bills and that's all I cared about.

Which is where the Aquarius Theater comes into this story.  One Saturday night Vic needed someone skilled in professional carpet cleaning to help him clean the Aquarius Theater.

The Aquarius was located on Sunset and Argyle, not exactly the heart of Hollywood, but close enough. It was a monolith that any Angeleno knew well.

My first time at the Aquarius was in 1971 when Sue Winchester and I went to see the LA production of the rock opera Tommy. That was a bizarre evening for me. We started out at a party given by some of the lowest teen life Simi Valley had to offer. I believe the house was on Alamo, just a short distance from Tapo Canyon. I'm sure it's all strip malls by now. I had a glass of Boone's Farm or Strawberry Hill (tell me what the difference in either one of those god awful teenage rot gut wines were? Oh yeah, they weren't Thunderbird, that was the difference), I didn't finish it because frankly, back then I hated drinking alcohol of almost any kind.

From the party, we drove the 30 some odd miles to Hollywood and the infamous Aquarius Theater. I have to say that at 17, I was pretty impressed with the Aquarius Theater. I was even more impressed with Tommy.  Here I was this innocent teenage kid with hardly any life experience seeing the real world for close to the first time. It wasn't my first time in a theater to see a live production, but it was my first time to see a rock opera (and my last come to think of it). My first theater experience was seeing Diana Rigg play Heloise at the Ahmanson Theater in the LA production of Abelard and Heloise.

Sue and I headed back to Simi after that incredible experience and decided to see how the party was going. It was probably close to 1 am when we got back to the party which had grown exponentially since our departure for the theater. There must have been close to 200 kids there by the time we got back. We grabbed some more Boone's Farm/Strawberry Hill and stood around talking with people we barely knew. Within moments of our arrival, some bad ass low rider got his shorts in a knot over some kid who had hit on his girl and stabbed the poor sob. That was our cue to exit stage left. 

Funny how that one moment in time is the thing I remember in greatest detail of my first ever evening at the Aquarius.

So back to Vic and the shampoo job, I took it cause I was going to get paid a fortune and cleaning carpets is a piece of cake. This was probably somewhere in 1974. I was probably close to 20 by then if not already 20.

At that particular moment in time they had been shooting TV specials at the Aquarius. I honestly have no idea what they were, I just knew that was what was going on there at the moment.

So we get in there and of course, it's just me and Vic. So we are walking around looking at shit, thinking this is a pretty cool theater. It smelled like most old theaters. Lots of layers and years of high gloss enamel on top of each other and the sweat of thousands upon thousands of theater and concert performers and goers.

I remember standing on the stage looking out at the sea of empty seats and thinking I would look mighty good up here to anyone out there willing to watch me sing.  That lasted all of ten seconds, it's hard to keep a fantasy going in your head when you know the real reason you are standing there is because you came to clean up after all that enamel and sweat.

We wandered on back to the dressing rooms (Vic decided to start in the back and work our way up to the front). We had gone maybe one or two doors down the hall when I saw the name Lily Tomlin posted on one of the doors. I actually got excited. I loved Lily Tomlin.  I remember standing there staring in that room, looking at the chair in front of the mirror and thinking that Lily had sat there. By the age of 19 or 20, the only famous persons I had ever met was Ronald Reagan and Gale Storm and frankly both were stars who were fading fast into obscurity (Ronnie figured out a way to actually stage a lasting come back though).  I had met the near famous on many occasion, but never the truly famous.  So standing there in that doorway actually had a real impact on me. It wasn't like I was actually meeting Lily, but for me it was close enough.

Had I known at the time that the Doors had recorded a live album there back in 69, I might have been even more impressed. But I was never a Doors fan, so maybe not.

Over the next 18 years after the Lily Tomlin dressing room even, I managed to meet many famous people (it's an LA thing, you can't seem to help it when you live there, you always know someone who knows someone and you end up meeting people just because).

That's my Aquarius story.