Darrow: “I remember the first gig we did at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco; the bill was Country Joe and the Fish, The Sparrow (later Steppenwolf) and Kaleidoscope. I could hardly believe it; you could walk out into Haight Ashbury, and it was all beatific smiles. Now we can see it all much clearer in retrospect, but this was right at the start of the peace/love days and my memories of the place are incense burning, good music coming out of windows…… it was exactly how I imagined it was going to be, from reading and hearing about it. This was before it had developed into a commercial situation, of course. It was fervent, real, and very enticing – though I personally find Northern California too cold and damp; I prefer the sunny south!”

And so do I, mate.

Everyone traveled to gigs independently – they all had transport, including two Volkswagen vans belonging to Sol and John Vidican. Darrow recalls Sol’s modus operandi. “We would arrive in a town, and chances were Sol knew at least ten belly dancers living right around the corner – so he would round them up to come and perform with us….. and frankly, I didn’t like the dancers. I couldn’t see the point of it; it was unnecessary and distracting. I can remember playing somewhere in San Francisco, and this chick with huge tits was doing things right in front of me as I was trying to play…… it was just so disconcerting, and had so little to do with the music. That was definitely one of the reasons for the rift that began to develop between us.”

“Sol really loved flamenco dancers and belly dancers, and he wanted to get more of a troupe idea – a big happy family traveling around together. He was really into the gypsy caravan idea, which didn’t appeal to me quite honestly…… and, as I say, I couldn’t take the idea of belly dancers gyrating to my music”.

“We were all serious, but there was this underlying implicit humour in everything we did. In fact, the great thing about the early months of Kaleidoscope was that we were musically very happy” says Solomon. “Everyone had a strong point of view, but our aim was common; we all worked towards the same end. David was the leader, but didn’t make all the decisions. We all took turns to talk on stage, and we got into a band consciousness…… but after a year or so, the unity began to crack”.

“The root of the problem”, Darrow reckons, “was a combination of business hassles, and the fact that we weren’t a success commercially. The effect was astonishing; friends started acting like enemies…… and, in the end, I just passed. I said “that’s it…… I’m going”, at which point David said “you’re fired anyway” – it was he who fired me…. wasn’t it, David? So I quit and got fired at the same time. It just ceased to satisfy me all of a sudden – something had to give, and the obvious solution was a change of personnel”.

So, after only a year, Darrow walked out of Kaleidoscope – only to be asked back immediately. “It was at that time that the group got the offer to go to New York, and do our first gigs outside California”, says Darrow. “….. they asked me if I’d go along and do it, and I agreed. It was 6 weeks on the East Coast, which I’d never had the opportunity to visit before….. so I said I’d go….. but told them that I wouldn’t go with them in the Van”.

“Borrowing the money for the fare, I flew to New York, rather than travel the 3000 miles by road. The others went in 2 Volkswagen buses, and I understand that it was one of the most horrendous and uncomfortable voyages ever undertaken by any group – with one van eventually being left to rot by the roadside somewhere”.

“When we arrived in New York, we were huddled into two rooms at the Albert Hotel. Some of us had women, there were instruments everywhere…. It was awful. The Albert was in a real cheesy part of Greenwich Village – you could walk out and see guys coughing up blood in the streets – and it’s “legendary” status was absolutely no compensation. To go from living in the middle of a sunny little lemon grove in California, to being marooned in the middle of New York at the beginning of Winter just shook me to pieces….. I was scared to death quite honestly. And I was ill too”.

“I decided to get out of the Albert, and I moved into a room tenanted by an old friend of mine from the bluegrass days, Charles Zetterberg. He was living up in Spanish Harlem, and that was marginally better”.

Lindley: “That tour was probably the lowest point in Kaleidoscope’s career….. we’d been hired to play at the Café Au Go Go, but the management just cancelled our engagement after they saw us play….. they didn’t like us – decided we were too far out. So they fired us, and we had to go and get work playing at this disco place on 42nd Street….. the worst”.

“We also did a gig at The Scene – we were second on the bill to Nico – then we went and played in Boston, after which Stuart Brotman said he could join the group earlier than he’d envisaged…. So Chris left during the tour”.

“I couldn’t give a toss by that time” says Darrow, “and I just left there and then – and then Stuart Brotman, who they’d contacted before leaving California, came in to replace me”.

“Understandably, I was pretty despondent at the time, but looking back, I have to say that when it was good – it was great….. it was simply amazing. But personality conflicts brought on by financial stress weakened the ship and I was the first to jump overboard. I also thought that we should be getting into country rock more heavily; my preferences lay in that direction and it seemed to me that we could have attained more popularity…. But David and Sol both thought they should become more Eastern and avant-garde – so we were at loggerheads over that, and that was one of the breaking points. Brotman reinforced the Eastern approach”.

“So there I was, stuck in New York City without a gig….. what a way to spend Christmas (1967). I was hanging around with Zal Yanovsky, who had been in the Spoonful, and Bobby Neuwirth, and was going around looking at groups. There was a moment of real fantasy when Neuwirth, Zal, John Herald, Buddy Miles, Richard Greene and I were going to put a group together; Neuwirth had access to Dylan’s basement tapes, and we thought we could have a hit with an unknown Dylan song….. but things never came together”.

“Then it happened that the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band came to town – and they offered me a gig, which I took”.

“Bruce Kunkel, a group original, was leaving. They were kind of Kaleidoscope rivals; a bit younger, and coming from a completely different point of view musically, and initially I was going to turn the offer down – but I was stuck in New York without money, had 2 of my guitars stolen, was sleeping in a miniscule room, and it was a real limbo situation…. So the job saved me.

“I went to see them play at Hunter College in New York, opposite the Doors, and they really impressed me. Their stage presentation was professional and well-thought out, and they seemed to have a distinct musical direction, so I decided to swallow my pride and go along with them”.

Kaleidoscope, with the memories of a dreadful experience, retreated to Los Angeles, with their tails between their legs – though they subsequently returned (to the Newport Festival) to be cheered long and loved by an ecstatic audience.

Darrow: “John Vidican left not long after I did; everyone except John was getting better apparently, and they felt he was the weak link. He now lives next door to Fenrus, and he’s working in electronics. He helped to build a studio, is involved with synthesizers, and played on some demos Fenrus made…… he still plays, but his real enthusiasm is for tampering with equipment. He was always the sound system/amp guy in the band”.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is the end of Kaleidoscope; after ‘A Beacon from Mars’, their records just didn’t make it.

Darrow: “Brotman, who’d been in an early version of Canned Heat, and the new drummer Paul Lagos, both fine musicians, came along, but I didn’t think the group’s material was commensurate with their instrumental ability on the third album. I really liked ‘The Cuckoo’, ‘7-8 Suite’, and David’s banjo thing, but then when ‘Bernice’ came out, I really didn’t see what they were doing. I liked Solomon’s singing on ‘Slow and Easy’, but the rest of it didn’t grab me at all”.

“By that time, law suits were flying about and things were in total chaos, as I understand….. I don’t know the full facts, because I wasn’t there and I wasn’t involved – but things weren’t working out as planned”.

No-one wanted to talk about the end of Kaleidoscope; Fenrus mumbled a few incomprehensible grunts, and Solomon gave me one of the longest coldest stares in the history of eyeball language. Lindley shrugged his shoulders, as if to indicate his having erased those painful weeks from his memory.

Unreleased Kaleidoscope remains in the can – probably a whole album’s worth, if not more, cut during that first year. Darrow: “There are at least 3 other songs, by Van Earl Shackelford, who wrote ‘I found out’…….. he’s a Claremont guy, still around and playing. In fact, he wrote a really good acid-lyric song that we used to do. We tried to get Epic to re-release a load of our stuff a couple of years ago, but they refused us point blank – and I haven’t listened to the tracks in 8 years now. Tunes like ‘Midnight in Moscow’, we recorded a beautiful version of that, and the old Coaster’s hit, ‘I’m a hog for you’. Then there are some great Fenrus-songs like the original ‘Little Orphan Annie’ and a couple more lost b-sides, ‘Elevator Man’ and ‘Rampe Rampe’, and a track we did with Johnny Guitar Watson and Larry Williams – ‘Nobody’, which was Three Dog Night’s hit…… that had David on harpsichord, me on bass, Vidican on congas, Earl Palmer on drums, and was pretty far out…… too far out for the black stations and too far out for the white stations”.

And that, I think, just about wraps it up – but just let me examine the bits and pieces which remain littered around the desk unused. Apart from about 6 hours of taped conversation and the wad of notes, clippings and jottings with which Frame thoughtfully provided me for my Californian sortie. Among these are the following: an article by our old friend Arnold Shaw (merely an expansion of his ‘Side Trips’ sleeve note), in which Lindley asks “will my life be but mere numbers plus letters in the file of Epic Records?” and later confesses that he “was once going to be a Catholic priest – but I liked breasts too much”. (That’s the god’s honest truth).

Another cutting, which brackets the group with Taj Mahal as “new stars on the horizon”, talks authoritatively of Fenrus Ulf (yes, ULF), assures us that John Vidican’s father was the Duke of Romania, and is trite and ephemeral tripe from start to finish.

Then we have another bizarre piece which describes how “they pushed a full-size Hammond organ off a six foot stage while creditors were waiting to repossess it backstage”, claims that they were well known for “the chocolate sperm whale, their 1937 GMC truck” and maintains that they are pursued by the ugliest groupies in California”.

It also insists that the group started at the Jabberwock coffee house in Berekeley (arrant nonsense), and subsequently performed “under names including Oat Willie and the Dream Band, Liquid Giraffe, Cowboy Ramar and his Bongo Boppers, Martha’s Laundry, and The Floating Congress of Wonders”. Not a word of truth in the whole shebang…… all bullshit – I checked it out.

There’s also a very exact and complimentary review of a Carousel Ballroom gig in San Francisco (written by Pete Weldling in Down Beat), the sheet music to ‘Bald Headed End of a Broom’ (torn from Sing Out magazine), and a scholarly review of their first 2 albums by Jonathan Eberhart (also from Sing Out) which ends rather lamely by going on about “the mind expanding plaything after which the group is named”.

Finally, there is an interesting interview with Lindley (done by Pete Enoff), which I would like to have reprinted here….. but certain powers-that-be who seem to rule the roost around here, say I’ve already exceeded my welcome and should terminate this article forthwith. And who am I to argue with 14 stone of vile standing tuck?

The pages of Zigzag are littered with the wreckage of rock groups that never made it big. But they made it to our hearts, and that’s better than the junkyard.

Quite obviously, I’ve barely scratched the surface, despite cramming as much as possible into my allotted page-space…. I’ve merely managed to sketch the outline of the group’s first year. Nothing about Darrow’s days with Linda Ronstadt and John Stewart, or his solo albums, or The Rank Strangers. Nothing about Lindley in Terry Reid’s band, his work with Jackson Browne and Crosby & Nash (from whose tour he’d only recently returned). Nothing about Solomon’s Mexican Border Raiders, or Fenrus’s “pizza house bands” or his years in Hawaii. And, more importantly, nothing about the re-formed group.

At present, I have only a cassette of the new album, which I’ll review as soon as it’s released – on Michael Nesmith’s Pacific Arts label, any day now. And I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for details of my scheme to make ‘Side Trips’ and ‘A Beacon from Mars’ available to Zigzag readers. Keep your fingers crossed. Keep your legs crossed too.

You know what? I spent 6 days hanging around Kaleidoscope…… and (shades of the Lone Ranger) I still couldn’t discover Fenrus Epp’s real name. Still, I had a great time – and if you read this, thanks for your time and your hospitality….. and best of luck with the album.

It was time to be off. Not that I’d overstayed my welcome or anything, but I had to get back to Miss Phillips’ place in Lose Angeles, and then a flying visit to Sparks, Nevada to see my good friend Mary Ann Siemer…… such a sweet and dear lady.

MAC