At Newport though there was no one to touch them. They started with a Buck Owens tune, then a couple of Kaleidoscope things, then "Taxim" on special scales they had picked. They followed that with a dynamite "Seven-Ate" and ended up mixing Greek and Turkish popular and traditional tunes. They subsequently discovered that you shouldn't mix Greek and Turkish music, but at the time they didn't care. In any case, according to Lindley, Turks tell Solomon that he plays the saz like a Greek bouzouki and Greeks tell him that he plays the bouzouki like a saz. Lindley said about Newport "We were there with people like Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, Doc and Merle Watson and Roy Acuff. I've got an autographed rosin package from Roy. He told me that all I had to do now was play a yo-yo at the same time that I played the fiddle. At the end everyone got up on the stage and played, Kweskin's band, Richard Greene, the guys from Kaleidoscope, we all knew each other from LA. It was incredible."

Kaleidoscope often indulged in "spectacular, orgy endings to sets" as Lindley put it. The best he reckons was at the Anaheim Convention Center with Canned Heat. "I played electric fiddle and Lagos played congas with sticks with Fito, and Solomon got up and played harp with Al Wilson, it was monster. Henry (Vestine) and I would trade off fours and things like that. Great times, those guys could mess around. The audience had never seen that shit before, we didn't know we were going to do it, and at the end we did 'On the Road Again' and I blew up one of Steve Miller's amps. He said 'Plug into my Marshall.' I did, and it just went kavroom! Electric fiddle through a stack of Marshall's is really frightening!" Other monstrous gigs included one at the Jazz Workshop in SF which they did because the lady who owned the place liked their stuff. "It was just off the wall." Actually lots of jazz musicians liked what they did, like Don Ellis, who apparently was a big fan.

Many people consider the first two Kaleidoscope albums to be the best but I disagree and definitely think that Incredible is superior. Admittedly, it lacks those lovely acid/folk/pop tunes that Side Trips had, and I also accept that the track "A Beacon from Mars" is great, except that it always seems like a build up to something that never arrives. (Actually very often it did, live. Lindley reckons that on occasion it would end up as a great atonal psychedelic guitar orgy.) Despite all of that Incredible is for me the most consistent, contains the best playing, and has the best production. Lindley agreed "I think of it this way. I think you can tell the people who have no taste if they say that they like the first two better than the Incredible album. It's a good indication of who's full of shit and who's not. There is some good stuff on the first two and there is some hokey stuff on Incredible, but we did pull off 'Seven-Ate Sweet' which we had wanted to do for a long time. It's a bit long on the album but there are some live versions, like Newport, which would just frighten you." Well, I don't think it's too long. It's one of my three favorite pieces of extended (recorded) rock music., the other two being "Dark Star" and "Who Do you Love." One thing that I had often wondered about was the words, obviously in some sort of foreign lingo but not recognizable. The answer is very much in character with Solly. "He's singing Turkish obscenities. He speaks Turkish like a Greek and Greek like a Turk. He'll take from any language and string it all together. You should hear him curse. I don't know how many languages he knows, but he doesn't study them, just enough to swear." I suggested that there may be some English words in there. "Yeah, maybe. I haven't heard it in such a long time, I don't recall it. The only thing that I really recall is the live versions that we did. I don't listen to Kaleidoscope records any more. They're documentations of a lot of hardships. The best Kaleidoscope stuff was the show, with the flamenco dancers and all of that. Some of that was taped, most of it has been lost. That's what I remember most, and sitting in a circle, rehearsing, learning songs on traditional instruments - that's what it was all about. It was a lot of fun."

For years people have told me that some pressings of Incredible do not have Solomon saying "Glarp" at the end of "The Cuckoo" and apparently it's true. The band refer to them (with great originality) as the Glarp and the non-Glarp records. The expression comes from S. Clay Wilson's amazing pirate orgies in Zap Comix. Wilson was a bit influence on the band. Bernice comes from "The Checkered Demon Meets Bernice, the Dyke" and indeed Wilson gets a credit on the back of the album. Wilson was also a big influence on David Crosby, who apparently identifies totally with Captain Pissgums. Anyway, "Glarp" was apparently cut off because of CBS policy. Still, I pointed out, it added to the who mystique of the band. "Added to the whole mistake of the band, the CBS part of it" Lindley replied. It seems that they also remixed all or part of Beacon without consulting the band and they still do that sort of thing today, Lindley told me. I suggested that we hadn't moved far in 10 years. "No, we haven't. Quad? I still play a lot of my records in mono. I don't care, I plug both channels into a Fender Deluxe and get a real funky sound." Incidentally, for trivia buffs (and you must be if you've got this far) the cover photos of Incredible were all taken at the Cucamonga Winery ("Yes, I'm the Pride of Cucamonga"), which is close to Claremont and Riverside.

Next: "There was a lot of hate in 'Bernice.'"