Janis, Peggy and the Garden of Glass - Part II

A satirical imagination can be a dangerous thing.

Since I originally posted this imagined fantasy of Peggy Caserta's rock-star party cottage that once sat on my property in Coon Hollow, I received several comments from readers that I was unaware of until now. (I thought Blogger platform was supposed to notify me with comments...maybe I need to adjust some settings or something.) Anyway, the comment below from username "Brass Ovaries," is ostensibly from the real Peggy Caserta.

Hello Jeb, It's Peggy Caserta. I'm here to set a few things straight about what did and did NOT happen out at Stinson under my watch. This home was not a party house. It was a retreat, a sanctuary, a much treasured HOME. If I even saw a piece of paper blowing across that canyon I would scramble out and get it. Throw bottles? Never! Anyone who knows me knows this is ludicrous. I don't drink, and Janis would never, EVER be so classless and thoughtless as to throw trash into a pristine setting. No one threw bottles, trash, or anything from that deck while I owned it. They wouldn't dare. There never were any "parties". None of that is "Janis Joplin's Broken Glass". Not a chip, not a shard, nada. Heroin did not come in bottles, and there is no such thing as a "tie off widget" that I've ever heard of. Butterfield was never a guest, nor was Jerry, or Pigpen. Who ever trashed that canyon is no friend or guest of mine. So, there it is Jeb. The truth. Verifiable.

If I could, I would paste Peggy's comments into the original article with a disclaimer that reads "WARNING. The descriptions of Peggy's house and the activities therein are entirely products of my IMAGINATION! My apologies to PC for fictionalizing her Coon Hollow cottage in what some may perceive to be a squalid light." Unfortunately Blogger doesn't support the editing of old posts.

Yes, there was a cottage that belonged to Janis's girlfriend, Peggy, on Buena Vista Ave. in Stinson Beach. Yes, the property is littered with broken glass. Nobody knows how it got there. Perhaps Coon Hollow, which was probably choked with vines and creepers, was once a dump. I was 15 in 1970. I didn't go to any acid tests, but I read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, the story of Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster's odyssey across the US in a day-glo bus, around that time. Is it any surprise, then, that I imagined a non-stop bacchanalia in Coon Hollow?

It is even more bewildering, to me, that someone would look at the picture of the broken glass and take it literally. I mean, really?

So, now that your curiosity is piqued with frothing slobber, I'm sharing the original post below.

Janis, Peggy and the Garden of Glass

Ever since we moved into our house here in Coon Hollow overlooking the mighty Pacific, I have been hearing things. Besides the constant crash and flow of the surf on Stinson Beach, the foghorns in the summer, the mysterious ghost moan coming from Bolinas and my very vocal pup Mister Boo, I've been hearing faint strains of Big Brother and The Holding Company. (In sixth grade I didn't quite get the double entendre of a "Holding Company", which had nothing to do with corporate subsidiaries in the Haight of 1966.) I'll find myself humming "looks like everybody in the whole wide world/is down on me" or "take it/take another little piece of my heart now baby", or, in particularly desperate states, just the "whoa whoa whoa" of Ball and Chain over and over.

I wore the grooves out on those first two albums, the only two legit Big Brother records, and I think of them as Janis’s truly inspired and beyond-compare efforts, despite everything that came later especially the travesty of Me and Bobby McGee and Mercedes Benz. That’s not to say that her singing wasn’t still beyond compare, but you can start to hear the fame and the money and the dope, especially the dope, in those later recordings when at first it was just this raw Texas orphan nerve snapping and sparking like a severed high voltage wire. There wasn’t anything like Janis and there hasn’t been since, and those that tried were only successful in mimicking the death by syringe scene and not much else.

We had heard rumors after we bought Coon Hollow that Janis had hung around the party cottage that originally stood on our property, but it wasn't until this New Years Eve while having rather comedic and borderline pathetic dinner at the Parkside Cafe that a guitar player named Milty suggested that we google Peggy Caserta. After trudging back up the hill to our Coon Hollow residence we logged on to learn that hippie boutique owner and millionaire Peggy Caserta and Janis Joplin were lovers right here at the original Coon Hollow cottage, right up to Janis's death by overdose in Hollywood.

In 1973, Peggy Caserta's book about her relationship with Janis: "Going Down With Janis", was published, but has since gone out of print. Too bad. There's nothing like a little gay junky depravity. But there's also something rather run of the mill and predictable about the fallen angels of the Summer of Love: the swirling vortex of junk, speed, psychedelics and every other form of dope, initially tuning in, turning on, and completely dropping out and off the face of the planet. The stories are all the same: archetypal, once married to H, you're married for life until death doth part you and corporeal world. In other word’s I’m not about to go drop $100 to get Peggy Caserta’s out of print book just to read about another H bomb, even if it is about a bixsexual rock star and her rather comely lesbian lover. As Peggy said in an interview with the documentary TV show, BIO, in 2009: 

“It worked for what it was. We had a lot of fun. We made a lot of love. It wasn’t a relationship that people think of or look at today as a ‘lesbian relationship.’ It was not like that at all. We were compatible and young and wild and interested in each other.”

Peggy Caserta

What’s curious about Coon Hollow and the inhabitants that preceded the razing of the falling down cottage in 1983 and the building of the spacious, wide open, high-ceilinged two story building we’ve called home since fall 2012 is...the glass. Shortly after we moved in around September of 2012 my son Jack was playing with Mr. Boo on a gopher 

ridden patch of the former lawn - just clumps of fescue that the gophers would methodically pull under their mounds, leaving fewer and fewer clumps - when he came back up to the top story where the living room is and said "we can't play with Boo down there. It's nothing but broken glass." He was right. An area about thirty by fifty feet was strewn with shards of glass: brown, green, mostly clear, along with broken ceramics or perhaps the household plates, bowls, cups and so forth, a few pieces of clay pots and some weird ribbed, white siding or some other composite. The pieces range in size from almost full-sized bottles (only one has been found intact) to big 4" x 6" pieces to tiny shards that glimmer in the noon sun.

The earth is not much more than dirty rocks alongside a spring fed creek. A run over the dirt with a rake churns up more and more rocks - mostly golf-ball sized but some big daddies - and more glass the deeper we dig. It's hard to imagine what the Buckleys, the family that built the current house, did once they cleared it of ivy, blackberries both regular and pricker-less/fruitless (aka The Luther Burbank Blackberry), scotch broom and other brambles. We've found some of the green netting that sod is grown in, so it's likely that they Buckley's simply covered up the rocks and glass with several yards of topsoil and a big sod lawn.

The following owners, who moved in around 1994, let the place completely go to seed, so by the time we got here the glass - Janis's and Peggy's glass - was practically jumping out of the rocks and dirt. It's not difficult to imagine cadres of stoned hippies showing up at Peggy's beach palace, sitting on what they might have imagined was a buried treasure under brambles ten feet high, so high the creek was a tunnel of water running through Coon Hollow, heard but not seen, and pitching their bottles into the brambles, listening to their delightful destruction on the rocks.

Not Peggy's cottage, but similar

It is an image of a big party and a little party, of times intimate between the lovers applying suntan lotion to each other's naked loins on the sun deck, completely hidden from prying eyes in the folds of the hollow,  hearing the surf crash on the beach below just barely masking the squeals of the kids - always the squeals of the kids drifting up the creek as if they were right in our backyard. Regardless of how ramshackle the original cottage was, there must have been some rip-roaring parties here in Coon Hollow.

I can see the jittery, writhing, multi-colored 20-something hippies in their beads and stovepipe hats gobbling down and shooting up every drug imaginable, back when all the shit was pure as the driven snow: China White, Peruvian Flake, Thai Stick, Owsley Acid, Crystal Meth, orange barrels of Mescaline and Psilocybin Shrooms oh joy of joys! Boys and girls and girls and girls and boys and boys and girls and the little kitty cat going off in threes or fours to the back rooms of the cottage, a copy of Naked Lunch in hand, or in the main room on the overstuffed couches and bean bag chairs, watching the sunset while the back door was slammin’ and the kids were rammin’ n’ jammin’ on axes that would now be worth thousands - the ubiquitous Gibson 335s, the Country Gentlemans, Strats, Tellys, Les Pauls, Firebirds and SGs, Vox Continentals, Jaguars, the vibra-wiggling Farfisa, polished wooden Martins and Guilds ringing clear and true against the perpetual crash of breaking glass on the rocks below. 

Falstaff and Lucky, Busch Bavarian, San Miguel and Mickey Big Mouths - that’s what the Redwood high kids were drinkin’ down in front of The Castle on the beach in 1970 while Janis, Peggy, Pig Pen, Bloomfield, Butterfield - the bluesers - were shootin’ up in Coon Hollow, tossing bottles over their shoulders: Seagrams, Royal Gate, Beefeaters, Jack Daniels, Early Times, Hiram Walker and his brothers Johnny the Black and Johnny the Red, Jose Cuervo and the sweet syrupy nastiness that Janice was famous for drinking: Southern Comfort. I remember seeing Janis on stage with the Dead at Pepperland, playing Love Light for hours while she goosed Pig Pen and fondled Jerry with one hand and wielded her ever-present bottle of SC with the other. She sat in with the Dead,  but Janis sang the blues, played the blues, lived the blues, like Pig Pen.  Stick a loud Farfisa and slap a little tremelo on the ES 335 with a shuffle chuggin’ underneath and you got the San Francisco Sound.

All happening right here in Coon Hollow at Peggy’s little love getaway, next door to Cold Comfort, the name given to the house uphill from ours over 50 years ago, perhaps after Cold Comfort Farm, a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932 and made into a TV series by the BBC.  The phrase? Shakespeare, of course:

King John, 1595:

KING JOHN:

Poison'd,--ill fare--dead, forsook, cast off:

And none of you will bid the winter come

To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,

Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course

Through my burn'd bosom, nor entreat the north

To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips

And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much,

I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait

And so ingrateful, you deny me that.

There is a curious connection between Shakespeare’s morgue vision and the silly, fatalistic parody of Britain’s country gentility in Cold Comfort Farm. Sometimes these hidden yet powerful ironies make the most sense in light of senseless death, like Janis Joplin’s. As Sam Andrew, her bandmate in Big Brother and the Kosmic Blues Band once put it:  

“Janis had a big appetite for everything: living, having a good time, everything,” he

recalls. “If it was food, she wanted the most and best of anybody in the room. If it was a good time, she wanted the most. She had a big appetite for drugs, too, and she had the opportunity and money to indulge it. Maybe if she would have had less of an appetite, it would have turned out better. She didn’t have a lot of caution at times.”

Peggy Caserta is still around, according to the available info, living somewhere in the Inland Empire of SoCal, clean at last after a long career with the needle. But Peggy’s a business person, not a musician. My theory is that the forces that drive the creation of truly inspired music - that yearning for complete catharsis and the accompanying mindless euphoria - are the same forces that can get a blazing heart and head to run for cover, shoot the moon, drink a case of Miller bottles and a fifth of Early Times and heave the bottles off the porch. 

I might have to give it a try myself, except that I've cleaned up all the rocks and am in the process of transforming the garden of glass into a field of grass. And let me tell it's just such non-stop euphoria and catharsis I can't hardly stand it.

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Balls on Toast - A Eulogy

When someone dies, whether it's completely unexpected like the recent death of my (closest, dearest, bestest, thooper dooperest...) friend and longtime musical partner Ted O' Connell, or it's Mom or Dad's long awaited final breath after a long illness, I fall into a state of suspended animation. My tongue becomes thick, my voice barely audible even to myself, and my brow knitted as if the question "what just happened?" or simply "No, forget it, I ain't buyin' it" were scrawled across my forehead.

This is how it's been so far with Ted, despite all the beautiful paeans, memoirs and expressions of heartfelt gratitude from the wide circle of people he considered good friends. This childlike wish for Ted's return, like awaiting the clatter of reindeer hooves on the roof every Christmas eve, might last weeks, months, years. The fact that I won't be able to sing, play or drink tequila with Ted until we meet again on the other shore may never sink in. Which I suppose it isn't that unusual considering a large swath of the world's population are waiting for Jesus's encore. Why not Ted's, too?

Over the past 25 years, I imagine that over 75% of the gigs I've played have been with Ted.  Unless the client wants polka, hard bop, big band swing or opera, it's just been assumed that we would be on the date together. There are others that have played more gigs with Ted than I, but I haven't played very many without Ted.

When we met around 1988 I had never played with a guitarist who had such care for tone, nor had I played with anyone with such smooth, pitch-perfect rock chops. Ted had come from a very popular New York area poprock cover band, The Vibe Bros, while I was recording and performing originals with Call Me Bwana. We met in the middle and started playing winery gigs with Bwana's bassist, Pete Anderson (a wine industry dude) and drummer Dave Casini. I bought a Japanese '52 reissue Telly at the Magic Flute, accompanied by Ted and Kathy Terlicher, and a 60s Fender Deluxe Reverb. Aside from the built-in tremelo and a Cry Baby I plugged straight in. Ted had an array of pedals that added meat to my bones. Pete, Ted and I sang like little birds while Dave (aka Sleepy Hacienda aka Slee) whacked away. We played the annual Santa Barbara wine festival at Zaca Mesa near Solvang several years running (thanks Jim Fiolek), Chalone Vineyards near the Pinnacles National Monument, and wineries all across SonomaNapa, weddings and parties, the occasional club gig with the Bwana band. Ted and I always traveled in my rig du jour together with our ancient Peavey PA and always returned home with several bottles of wine, miraculously avoiding DUIs and other worse fates.

One Friday night Ted asked if I would like to play guitar with him at the Coffee Roasters in San Anselmo, as his regular partner, Frank Bohan, was unavailable. The coffee shop was in the old cheese shop past the Royal Sweet Bakery on San Anselmo Ave. It was early for a new dad, but the coffee was plentiful and the folks dug it. When the Roasters moved to the old Nine Iron Grill across from the old Rexall Pharmacy, Kevin Hayes joined us on snare and kick and I moved to bass. The lineup hasn't changed much in the decade or so since, and I can't count the times that Ted and I remarked that we would be playing Saturday mornings into our 80s, watching little kids dance while endlessly ogling the female talent parading through the place. Ted, Frank, Kevin, BurnZ, Bowen, Michael and all our special guests knew that this was a gig from the Gods. We called ourselves The Treble Makers. We improvised freely, drinking coffee, and appreciating the finer things in life. It just didn't get any better. For two and a half hours we were "winning", as Ted often put it.

Ted wasn't only a uniquely distinct one-of-a-kind guitarist - he was an iconoclast from head to toe. A swarthy Adonis that lived according to his own code of don't-fence-me-in ethics, Ted was a faithful, steadfast friend, ever-ready to go bar-hopping on fat-tire bikes or fix whatever needed fixing in a friend's home, or a friend's bicycle, or, more often than not, a friend's amplifier. Over the last decade his low watt amps - Tube Steaks, Bass Boys, Freeways etc. became high demand items for the likes of Bob Weir, Jimmy Dillon, Erik Schramm, Bonnie Hayes and Tommy Castro. And a problem, in a way, for our wandering star. Like the girlfriend that wanted to give up everything and move in, the more Ted was wanted the more he shied away. 

Ted (aka Theowhore O' Cuntal the Turd among many other names) defined his world with his playing, his friends, his girlfriends, his gear, the grain of the wood, his bikes, dogs, tequila, the biking trails and hiking trails in the watershed and with what he was willing to do and what he wasn't, and perhaps most of all with his ever-evolving musical and spoken language. His sense of twang, both on strings and in his spoken presence, was a constant reminder that we should really stop being so fucking serious about everything. From "oh, balls on toast" (an expression of frustration easily combined with "fuckballs" or "shitballs") to "thooper dooper" to "spank u berry mulch", or his mysterious and as yet untranslated last words "ifor no streaky," and other expressions that many of his friends have at the tips of their tongues but presently escape me were his way of saying "I want to establish a friendship with you that is unique to you and me." Like the way he referred to me as "Uncle Jeb's Cabin" or "Jeb of the North."  Or how he referred to our wine band El Kabong cohorts as "Pick n' Slee." It was his way of creating a world of characters that he loved and trusted and that he could call upon when things got shitty. Which, unfortunately, he rarely if ever did.

As Frank Bohan, our Treble Makers bandmate and Ted's BFF often said Ted had a twisted sense of musical humor that pervaded his improvising, and, to a lesser degree, his instrumental songwriting. The "whammy bar bravura," as local columnist Paul Liberatore put it, was truly, unabashedly, uncompromisingly funny, as if his notes had been dropped into a house of whacky mirrors: fat here, thin there, wambly with tremelo, swelling and shrinking, ploinking, plinking, scratching, dropping de-tuned strings below audible, tinkling above the nut and below the bridge - playgrounds of sound on Saturday mornings. Of course Ted played all manner of important, high-profile gigs under the hot lights where the audience is out there in the dark, but his rote parts on the big stages paled in comparison to Saturday mornings at the Roasters when he could to stretch out, as it was for all of us. It was our opportunity to invent, live. If just one eighth of Ted and Frank's playing (along with drummers Mike Israel, Kevin Hayes, Dave Burns and Bowen Brown, and bassist Michael White) at the Roasters had been recorded, the world would be a better place. 

Not to cast aspersions on the relationships of ordinary human beings, but relationships between musicians are different. Communion of heart and soul may happen randomly in the space of a few bars (ahem...Peri's, Mattucci's, The Log Cabin and Iron Bed Springs notwithstanding) and it's those brief, fleeting moments of truly harmonic convergence and communion that we - Ted, Frank, myself Kevin, Bowen, Burns, Bon, Schrammy to name a few - sought and continue to seek. Once that connection between two players is made, when spontaneous invention coalesces and lightning strikes, the unspoken bond that forms is stronger than NASA's strongest polymers. Like a musical orgasm, it's that moment when you look across the bandstand, your eyes meet, and your smile says "this is it, right here. Bingo. We're SO winning." 

But now we're not. The bond is broken, and there's a palpable sense of the heart getting torn out and tossed in the chipper. And while I have faith that Ted is now in the best of all possible hands in God's Celestial Twangfest, the tears of all the people he touched with his generous heart are flowing through the streets of San Anselmo and on the trails of the Watershed, on the beaches and the Mountain from Marin to Greenwich, out to the tip of Long Island, in the Atlantic and the Pacific.

But for me, as naive and blind as I am, these tears of pain are also tears of joy. Because I have faith that we'll be winning again, together, soon enough on the other shore.  I can wait. So I say "bye for now, Ted of the North. Save a place for me on the bandstand."