When Christopher left, it really made it necessary for Lindley to make [sure that] Vidican left. Because Christopher was a strong enough bass player to keep a lot of rhythm happening in the areas that it did. Quite honestly, what Vidican could not do was play multi-rhythms or Arabic or any of the really far-out things that we wanted to try. And as a live unit, we got a whole lot better, because we added Lagos, the drummer. Well, Lagos's credentials were...we had our choice of, we had open auditions. We had our choice. The two finalists were Jim Keltner and Paul Lagos, and we took Paul Lagos. Because he had a much broader range of drum styles than Keltner did. Keltner was great, hell of a drummer. But he only had two or three things he could do.

My favorite story is, driving down Sunset Boulevard in Solomon's truck, which just looked like some fucking gypsy van. [We] came to a stop and Little Richard's running down the street in a pink jumpsuit. And he jumps on the dashboard of the car, and sticks his head in the window, and yells [falsetto shriek], "Paul Lagos! Come back to my band, Paul Lagos!" And Solomon doesn't know who Little Richard is from anybody on the planet. He's just about ready to take a baseball bat and knock him out and push him out. And Lagos is saying, "Richard, Richard, you sonofabitch. Stay away from me, you crazy faggot!" It was one of the greatest scenes of my life. I have never had more respect than I had for Paul Lagos at that time. Because Little Richard always had two drummers. But when Paul Lagos played there, he had one.

It was a much better unit live than it had been before. But it didn't have anything to do with Christopher being there or not. It was almost like a totally different unit. Stuart Brotman, who had been Canned Heat's bass player before Larry Taylor, was a more than competent rock player and played with some other big groups. It didn't make any difference if he was even there, because Lagos could have done without a bass player. Hell of a talent, and his ability to assimilate the stuff that Solomon had to teach him was instantaneous. We couldn't have gotten that from anybody else. He was a great jazz drummer, he was a great rock'n'roll drummer, and he was a real good fusion drummer.

There were whole long snatches of things where, either eastern or western, things we used to work into it. We could do that for almost 40 minutes and just change up how we did it. I can't help but sometimes think that there was a small influence on bands like the Dead, who at the time were playing songs four or five minutes, you know? The only band I saw do extended stuff in that period of time was Quicksilver Messenger Service.

Q: Why did you use all those pseudonyms on different albums?

One of the reasons I made up all those names was because, I knew they were just going to fuck it up anyway, and I wanted to play with them. 'Cause jazz was my background and to this day is my passion, when we got our first review in Downbeat, I shit in my pants, like Beacon from Mars got two and a half stars. I've always done this literary thing where I fuck around. So I wrote them and told them that I had died and replaced myself with another name. And they printed it! And I thought that was hysterical. I did many such things. There was a Downbeat review, a live review, it's about two and a half pages long, by Pete Welding. It describes the act so accurately, and how convolutedly lengthy it was, involving belly dancers, flamenco dancers, a blues segment, a rock'n'roll segment, a country and western segment--I mean, it's all very laudatory, but it correctly describes what a circus the fucking act was.

Next: "I'd never know who was in charge."