He doesn't remember the place right. It was in the Crystal Dog in Portland, Oregon. The Crystal Dog was one of the three or four Family Dog operations they tried to run out of as a chain. The last six months that I was with Kaleidoscope, we were under Stigwood Organization. And although we were on salary, and it was pretty good, they wanted every dime back. We played five of every seven nights, and Monday was Detroit, and Tuesday was Nashville...a month of that, and I said, I don't even care if there's money involved. That was far too intense for me.

The place had been a roller skating rink. It was on the second floor, and it had ball bearings in the floor. Don't ask me why. A couple feet-thick ball bearing in the floor. So they were going to repossess it [the organ], and David had a succession of managers that he picked were just fabulously bad. And this particular batch really soaked us, so I decided I'd throw it off the stage and destroy it. 'Cause it was like an eight-, nine-foot stage. And we were playing there two nights in a row, and I tossed it, and it hit the floor, and it bounced. And I mean it bounced, I don't know, eight feet in the air. It was a Hammond M-3. It went down, and it went across the floor, and people scattered like this fucking train was coming through. It must have got about twenty, thirty feet out onto the floor, and it didn't destroy the fucking thing! So I did it again the next night, and when it hit the floor, it separated in two halves, and they flipped off in different directions. It was very spectacular.

Q: Like a lot of bands, it seems that Kaleidoscope didn't have the most organized or sympathetic management.

In one six-month period, David picked two managers who were celebrities' sons. One was Forrest Hamilton, who was Chico Hamilton the drummer's son, and he had managed the Watts Band, so we did like black dance clubs for three months. Then he got Milton Berle's oldest son, whose name was Marshall Berle. He was like an early Rodney Bingenheimer, you know? So he got us all the strip clubs for three months. We couldn't have come up with worse management. But it never mattered. All of them ended up with lots of bills that we incurred for them, I'm sure.

Q: What happened to "The White Man's Suite" that was going to be the concept that the fourth album was based around?

I guess that's like late '69, '70. The political climate was pretty radical at that point. It blew over pretty quickly, but after the Chicago convention, things were kind of at a flashpoint. And what we had written collectively was "The White Man's Suite," which was--it was kind of Zappaesque, in ways. If you listen to the fourth album, there are a couple cuts which did survive, like "Lying Hide" and "Sneaking Through the Ghetto." But I think there were like five or six of these things. Pete Welding, the guy who had been big in promoting us for many years, had been made the head of Epic...talk about managers, while we were there, I think Epic had six or seven heads during the four years we were with the label. One tenure it was Larry Williams and Johnny Watson. They were the head of the label for like three months or something.

In four years, all of these guys left in three months. I'd never know who was in charge. And they'd phone us up, and they'd say stuff like, "Well, we've got a new singer, and we think you should be their band, all the time." The first meeting I ever had with the guy who was the head of Epic Records, and I couldn't tell you the guy's name to kill myself, he was a shoe salesman. And we sat down and he said, "You know, what you guys need to do is record Bobby Vinton tunes. Because you've got it all. You all play all the instruments, so you should record Bobby Vinton tunes, because we've got a catalog of 'em here." Kaleidoscope's knowledge of pop amounted to, before Chris Darrow came in the door, somewhere between "Three Itty Bitty Fishies" and Leadbelly's version of "One Meatball."

Q: How do you see the reunion albums as being different from the ones you did in the '60s?

Whenever we can engineer getting together to play together again, it's just a revelation as to how much farther our own paths we've come down, and also how incredibly smooth is to put it together without any kind of the old hammer-and-tongs shit. Again, we did work out a thing that worked out where we would sit down and say, now, you get one-fifth of the pie, you get one-fifth of the pie, how are you gonna spend that? And Solomon would say, "we're gonna do one flamenco tune, and we're gonna do one Arabic tune," and David would say, "we're gonna do one country and western tune, and we're gonna do one Appalachian tune." And I'd say, "we're going to do one jazz tune, and we're going to do one R&B tune." That always worked out real well. But now, they let me and Chris pick 'em all.

I think you'll like the records in that they are a further exploration of the styles, and also, like I was saying earlier, I think that it was certainly not conscious that we were trying to fuse things. But at the same time, it was the only way that we could make it work out, so that we could all get a piece of what we were doing. I couldn't play Arabic fiddle on "Seven Ate Sweet," not just because I couldn't--I learned the lines and all that--but because that's not what I play, that's not who I am. So in extended versions, I played jazz violin there. That's the first time I ever really did it, and it really worked out well for me. That's what I do now.

Q: Do you think that Kaleidoscope's had an influence on other musicians?

I really can't think of anything specific. But like I said earlier, I can't help but think because of how many hours we pounded the boards there, doing what we did, and because it was so unusual. And also because it was risk-taking. I think that a lot of people assimilated the risk-taking. In the initial years that we came on, what ended up to be even the most radical rock groups were very very polite in their live presentations. The English guys weren't, but the American guys were. The first time I saw the first wave of San Francisco bands, and I think we did have kind of an influence in that area, the first time I saw their first sets, the only one I would say would be an exception to this would be the Moby Grape. They were trying to make a stage presentation that would please a record exec. They were doing singles-that-weren't-even-recorded-yet kind of presentations. Big Brother did like four three-minute songs in a row. And they were all terrible. And even though Big Brother doing something extemporaneously wasn't much better, it was more in the spirit of the times and what people were there to...people didn't respond well to having a set of singles played for them.

I blame all this crap on Bill Graham, by the way. He was always supposed to be the champion of the local bands and all that, but I heard many a harangue about how if they hadn't sold a record, he didn't want to see them in his goddamn place kind of thing. It was like "I'm the magician, I'm the guy that does all that shit." The first and last times I ever saw Bill Graham--the first time we're playing at Stonybrook in New York. We'd been called in by somebody that said that they needed an opening band for the Airplane, because blah blah blah. And we were in New York starving. "Go over there and pick up some good money." So we drove over, and there was this huge auditorium, and it was full of people. And we set up and played. The phone rang, and they said it's for you, and they said the Airplane won't be there for another 40 minutes, keep playing. We played for almost two hours.

The Airplane got there, or at least the bus got there, and Bill Graham and looked at the place, and I mean, apparently he booked the band to play two or three times that evening. And then shook these poor kids down for I don't know how much money with, oh, the contract specifies that the speakers have to be so big. And this is the worst piece of piss I've ever seen in my life, and blah blah blah. And he told them what crap they were, shook 'em down for some more dough. The Airplane came in, played for maybe 25 minutes, he pushed them out the door and onto the bus to get down to the next gig, and gave us $200, and said, play till the riot is over. That was the first time I saw him.

The last time I saw him, it was the same deal. We worked for other people, so we shouldn't work for the Fillmore. Well, there was a cancellation. And it was a Dead show. I think Steve Miller was the other act. Well, "can you guys come on down," okay, okay. So we're playing, and we get offstage and we go into the--by then, it was like the new Fillmore, which is at the Carousel--and the dressing room was full of the Dead and their entourage, and Steve Miller and his entourage, and they're all partying heavy. And outside, the place is packed to the rafters with people stomping and screaming for the Dead. Bill Graham comes in, and he says, "uh, hi guys. Uh, blah blah blah." And they start pushing him around the room like a pillow. "Hey, it's fucking Bill Graham." For about six minutes. And he's trying to tell them to get out on stage, and they're really working him up, but they're really pummeling the guy. "The people want to hear you." "But we want to play with Bill Graham." So finally, he wanted to kill every guy in the room. He really did. But he could hear that money in the till. "Come on guys, please go out." I'd never seen such a wonderful humbling in my life by such doofuses.

Next: " It was five very ugly-looking hippies who had entirely different ways of approaching things."