Growing Up in the 60s Wasn’t All Fun and Games
By
David W. Dilley
Copyright 2012 David W. Dilley
ISBN: 978-1-4658-0964-3 F
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From an early point in my life I was headed down the path of might makes right in my understanding of how the world works. The examples I saw of how the people closest to me dealt with life only seemed to bear this out. My father was a hard man who was raised by an even harder man. His father worked in paving construction and built most of the paved roads in the central area of Illinois in the 30s and 40s. My grandfather’s outlook on rising children was based solely on discipline and did not involve affection.
One of my earliest experiences with the concept that physical prowess was the answer to any conflict was when I was five. I was playing with a neighbor boy in a sandbox when he hit me with a metal teapot we were using to make sand castles and it caused my forehead to bleed. My father just happened to be there when I came home bleeding and he told me that I had to go back and defend myself. When I returned to the sandbox I said, “I am sorry I have to do this” and then I hit him. Figuring that I had done my duty I continued to play in the sandbox, not expecting what happened next. What ensued was probably the most distressing thing I have ever experienced.
The young boy came back a few minutes later with his mother who obviously had much the same philosophy as my father. She stood him up in front of me and told him to fight back. Each time he approached me I would hit him and knock him to the ground. She would then pick him up and tell him to go back and fight. Toward the end she was picking him up and sort of tossing him at me. I guess I finally become disgusted with the entire scenario and walked away with her yelling at him and me both to finish the fight. To this day I still don’t understand why anyone, let alone a child’s mother, would ever do that kind of thing to their own son!
There was another situation that happened regarding my father’s insistence on defending myself which occurred a little later when I was seven in grade school. I had come home crying because some bullies had knocked the books out of my hands and pushed me down on my way home from school. My father just happened to be home early that day also and was outside fiddling with the car when I got home. The main thing I remember is that he took me in the garage and in what I call the pretense of teaching me how to fight, he basically smacked the crap out of me. When he had finished “teaching me”, he said “If you ever came home again crying I will give me a lot worse than you will ever get out there.”
I came to understand that my father’s point of view was that if I didn’t learn to defend myself I would always be at the world’s mercy and he was going to make sure I learned even if it killed me. I sometimes thought that he truly believed that if it did kill me then I would probably be better off than I would have been getting my ass kicked all the time. I am sure that this attitude, which I eventually adopted in self defense, was responsible for me getting kicked out of school for fighting numerous times before I graduated.
What sticks in my mind is that my father never said a negative thing about being suspended all those times, except for one occasion. I had gotten into a fight and almost broken the nose of the Sherriff’s son. I was standing in the back yard that evening after he got home from work. He walked out to me, put his arm around my shoulder and said “Listen, I understand that you have to defend yourself, but the next time, can you make sure it is not the kid of someone who can cause us problems!”
My father pretty much followed the philosophy that the best defense is a good offense. One of the things that pretty much set him apart from the rest of the neighborhood was that he built concrete wall five foot high and 2 foot thick around the back yard to keep people from “trespassing” on his property. It was a major subject of discussion around the neighborhood and had become a neighborhood tourist attraction sort of like the “Great Wall of China”. When neighbors had visitors they would always bring them out to see the “Great Wall”! I remember one incident that involved the wall that was both funny and sort of sad when I think back on it now.
My brother had always been a dead eye when it came to throwing things and he eventually become a top notch pitcher in triple A baseball. One summer evening my brother, a next door neighbor, and I were playing in the back yard when a neighbor’s kid from behind our house decided to stand on a box to peek over the wall and yell taunts at us. After about the third Nanny, Nanny, Booboo, I turned to my brother and said “When she pops up like that again why don’t you throw a dirt clod at her.”
My father had been working on some ground fill in the back yard and there was a small pile of dirt with some clumps on the top next to where we were standing. When she popped up again my brother took aim and threw a dirt clod that hit her in the forehead right between the eyes. It was just like one of those inflated cats in the carnival that you throw baseballs at and she fell straight backwards off the box. When she got up crying and began running to her house I realized that we had probably made a mistake in judgment and I rounded everyone up so we could go hide in the garage.
Although looking back on it I now realize that hitting the little girl with a dirt clod was rather dumb and a rather sad thing to do, what followed afterwards was probably one of the most amazing and funniest feats I have ever witnessed. We were all sitting on the running board of my dad’s ‘40 Chevy looking out large knot holes in the wood siding of the garage when the father of the neighbor girl my brother had hit with a dirt clod jumped the back wall, ran through our back yard, and opened the back door of our house yelling. Well, I could have told him that was the wrong way to approach my dad, if I had been brave enough to leave the garage at the time.
The next thing we saw was my father holding the neighbor by the back of his neck and the seat of his pants while running him back through the yard towards the wall. When dad got to the wall he put one foot up on it and tossed the neighbor completely over the 5 foot height. We could see the man flying through the air with his arms and legs flailing like he was trying to fly and then we heard the loud thump when he obviously hit the ground on the other side. I thought at first we were all going to get killed by dad for what we did. However, he was so mad at the actions of the neighbor that nothing was ever said about it and the whole incident was dropped. It was only about few months later that the backyard neighbor moved!
I don’t want to give you the impression it was all bad between me and him. My father taught me a lot of great skills that have helped me in a lot of different jobs and personal situations. When I was around eight, my dad decided that he wanted me to be an Electrical Engineer and began teaching me as much as he could about electronics. By the time I was ten I could read electronics schematics, determine the rating of a resistor by the colored stripes, and knew how components worked and what they were used for in circuits. For my seventh grade science project I put together a board system demonstrating some of the basics of electricity and electronic components.
Although my mom was my greatest musical influence and my strongest musical supporter, my dad did put up with my growing interest in playing music in a band with some prompting from her. Mom exposed me to rock-n-roll early in my life. I remember her playing 78 RPM recordings of Elvis Pressley on the huge phonograph player she had in the living room back when I as in elementary school. When I showed interest in playing an instrument, she took me to a pawn shop and bought me an electric bass guitar with money she had earned working nights a few times a week. She couldn’t afford an amplifier so I played the bass for a while without an amp. She finally talked my dad in buying one for me.
Way back in early 1965 I played my first rock-n-roll song with my first group of "musicians". It was performed in a friend's basement and we had to use jury-rigged equipment in order to do it. The other guitar player had a microphone duck taped to his guitar, and the drummer did not have cymbals. Showing a true musician’s ingenuity he removed the light bulb and glass cover from a pull down ceiling lamp that had a round shaped metal top and use it as the cymbal. The song we played was the Beatles version of "Money" since we had head it a lot on the radio and none of us had ever heard the real Motown version written by Barrett Strong. After a lot of "practice" our group, we had named “The Varmits”, eventually played the high point of its career at a private high school party.
Personally, I thought we were getting pretty good, with Dave playing drums, Mark playing rhythm, Gerry playing lead, Scott singing, and I was playing bass. Just when things seemed to be going good, something happened that changed things a lot. The drummer, Dave, who lived only two houses from me, suddenly died in his sleep. We had known each other for years, and had both been interested in playing music. We had gotten together with several other kids we knew and starting with that first improvised session in the basement, we had reached a point where we both were beginning to realize our musical desires.
It was a Saturday the day Dave died and as usual we had planned to have a practice in his basement that morning. I was supposed to go down and help him set up his drums and get things ready about nine AM. For some reason I kept sleeping that morning when about 9:30 I was woken by sirens. My mother came in my room a few minutes later to tell me that David had died in his sleep. His brother had gone down to his room in the basement to get him and found him. I kept thinking that if I had gotten up when I was suppose to and gone over to his house it might have been me that found him. His family asked members of the band to be his pallbearers at the funeral. I was fifteen and I remember carrying the casket, along with several other teenage friends, of our young friend to his early grave site. I kept wonder which of us carrying the casket would be next. It took a while before any of us really wanted to play music together again.
A few months later I was sitting in a ninth grade English class when a new kid named Michael came in to join the class. His father had just moved to town and they were still settling in. I immediately noticed he was carrying drum sticks in his back pocket. When he sat down he pulled them out and laid them next to his books. I keep an eye on him during the class and noticed that at one point when the teacher left the room he picked up the drum sticks and started playing the top of his books. When the class let out I stopped him to ask whether he really played drums or just played with drum sticks.
We ended up going to his house after school where he impressed me with not only a very nice Slingerland drum set but also with his abilities. When he did a one handed drum roll I was really impressed. Needless to say Michael eventually took over Dave’s role playing drums with our little group. We played a number of gigs together after that, but by the late 60s the members of our group each went on to play with some very popular bands in that region. I joined an Acid Rock group called “The Electric Underground”, while most of the other members went with either “The Fenchley Boys” or “The Seed of Doubt”, which later became “The Seeds of Love”. Both were excellent performing groups with large followings. They played well written songs that spoke to that generation’s struggles.
By '67 I had moved on to work with several other groups and even had opportunities to play some rather large venues with several regional rock bands before 1971 when I left the music business. I still have a lot of memories that go along what that time in my life, some good, some bad, and some that still make me laugh out loud like the time I mumbled the entire first verse of "Proud Mary". I was working with a well paid cover group that played a number of large venues and fronted for several national bands. We were performing on the stage of a large high school auditorium with over a thousand people in the audience. I had a mind block and couldn't remember the words. The funny part is that no one seemed to notice including the band! I guess that was a good example of the fact that most people hear what they expect to hear.
By the time I had reached my late teens, I can honestly say that if things hadn’t changed in my life I would have probably ended up either dead or in prison because of the programmed path I was taking. I left home when I was seventeen because of a major fight I had with my dad. He was on one of his rampages, and was ready to kick the crap out of me. I had grabbed a bat and ran out the back door in an attempt to escape his wrath. My mother was standing at the back door shouting “Stop this right now” and I was standing in the back yard with the baseball bat and swinging it wildly while yelling “Stay away from me or I will hit you with this bat I swear!”
He kept throwing punches and tried to circle around me like a boxer and I kept backing up and swinging the bat until I reached a place that I felt I was far enough away from him that I knew I could out run him. That’s when I tossed the bat down, started running, jumped the back fence, and took off for parts unknown. I didn’t come back home again for several years. But it was about six months after I left that some things happened that brought about a new way at looking at things for me and a whole new outlook on life.
I had gotten a lot more serious about the money side of it when I had to make my own way. After leaving home I started playing in more well paid rock groups and traveling a lot more with bigger bands in order to make more money. It was during this time that I stumbled on to something that had a major influence on my personality and character. Before I go on, I want to say that I am not advocating illegal drug use for anyone or trying to recruit others into the use of hallucinogenic drugs, but it was LSD that provided me with a look at things from a different perspective. It eventually helped me to see that I had been programmed by my early childhood experiences and could if I wanted to change that programming.
My first experience was a “jump in with both feet” type. My girlfriend’s brother had just returned from New York on a buying trip (no pun intended) for hallucinogenics. He had dropped off a sample and I when I found out I immediately swallowed it because I had really wanted to try LSD. The only problem was that he hadn’t told anyone the tablet was what they called a dealer’s tab. It contained four doses of LSD 25 that could be divided up later for individual use. Although I took many acid trips later on, this experience was probably the primary factor that set me on the road to finding out who I was and why. I believe that the extremely high dosage I took brought on not only a lot of surreal and unimaginable scenarios, but it also provided me with a peek into my true subconscious mind and nature.
Among all the surreal visions I experienced, there are three that stand out as the most vivid and mind altering in nature. The first I remember is thinking that if God truly spoke the world into existence then the vibrations that words produce must have tremendous power when combined in a particular manner using a particular vibrational pitch. During my acid trip I came to believe that if I could discover any form of the original vibration that God used to create the universe and could reproduce it, I could bring into existence anything I desired. As I embarked on my personal search for the lost chord, I attempted to produce vocally a sound, pitch, or phrase that could move the very molecular structure of atoms. I was told later on that what I was doing was vocalizing random words, musical pitches, and strange vocal sounds while looking rather crazed!
The second experience was also spiritual in nature and seemed to revolve around the idea of becoming god like through the process of acquiring knowledge from a central God-mind source that was the Being of the entire universe. I don’t really remember exactly how it worked, but I remember that I knew if I became more open and willing and learned more from this source, my existence in the physical world would changed from a shell like form inhabited by a spirit to more of a living being soul.
The third one was more scientific in nature and I actually think it may have been an idea that was somewhat realistic. You know how everything vibrates, liquids, solids, gases, all at different rates. And how magnetic wave forms and light wave forms vibrate each at specific varying frequencies, and also how molecules vibrate, atoms vibrate, and sound vibrates. What occurred to me at that time was what I call the Interactive Vibrational Construct. I remember thinking that there were so many applications with implication that were physical, emotional, psychological, mental, and maybe even spiritual in nature that it is hard to imagine all the different things that could have come out of this one concept. In my opinion, ultra sound and resonance imaging is just two application that we have discovered and employed that I believe were derived from this general concept.
During that acid trip at one point I knew, not thought I knew, but knew I knew, that I could pass through just about any solid object I wanted if I could learn to control my body's vibrational frequency. Since atoms vibrate and everything is made of them, if I could adjust the vibrational rate of the atoms in my body I could pass between the vibrations of the atom in any object by synchronizing the timing of the vibrational rates. I called the idea synchronicity, long before Sting made the term famous. I had a lot of ideas about what could be done with the concept at that time, some about self healing and other such non-conformist ideas. I probably still have a few floating around in my brain somewhere but I don't think about it much anymore.
There were several other unusual and strange things that happened that night, and I remember that even saw a being that looked like a giant eyeball with spindly arms and legs that floated in the air and a pupil that open and shut like a mouth when it was talking. Specifically none of the experiences I had during my first acid trip really helped me to see my prejudicial programming patterns, but generally it headed me down a path that opened me to looking at myself from a very different perspective.
In my mid teens I became associated with the hippy movement and by late teens I lived in several commune like housing arrangements. Like I mentioned previously, by that time I was playing in some regional rock bands. They were being booked by a friend I had met who owned an agency he had built from scratch. Most of the groups I was working with traveled a lot and preformed in a rather large region of the Midwest, stretching from Ohio to Iowa and running from Kentucky to Minnesota. I needed a place to stay when I was not on the road and I found that the shared living arrangement provided inexpensive living with benefits that were not available in a rooming house or an apartment.
One of the most interesting improvised living arrangements was an old house near the campus of a large Midwestern university. I had become friends with a diverse group of people through my music and the time I spent playing on college campuses and in clubs throughout the area. Several of the people I had grown to know fairly well decided to get together and rent some property where we could all live and share our life’s philosophy. It was probably one of the strangest collections of personalities I ever saw gathered in one place.
The primary character was a tall thin black guy we called Meeco, who sort of fashioned his dress after Jimi Hendrix. He even wore a brightly colored sash tied to his bellbottoms and a black flat brim hat that had a band of silver metal circles around it. He had an aura of leadership about him being sort of the king bee of our group and the one who made most of the major decisions. He owned a big black hearse that was equipped with a complete stereo system and hidden stash compartments. He drove it around as if it was a special award he had earned for being a true non-conformist. Later on in life I was told he became a high school teacher.
The rest of the group was a mixture of odd and unusual people who were just searching for their place in life. We had rented a large three story house and divided it up amongst the group by rooms so that most everyone got their own place. The first floor was mainly used by a Korean friend named Sing who had brought his entire family along. He was a great fish cook and dabbled in I Ching. One of the second floor apartments was given to a girl named Liz who said she was a witch. She mostly stayed to herself. Her room was always dark and she always had candles burning. I remember that wax covered the floor in one place where she would constantly be burning candles.
Then there was the country boy named Benny that kept a dog named Jack in his second floor room. Jack was a friendly dog and very well house trained so most of us didn’t really mind that he live in the house too. A couple of people bitched about Jack not paying rent but I think it was more of a joke than a real complaint. The other second floor room was taken by a flamboyant hippy named Charlie who was a real lady’s man. He had long bright red hair formed into an afro cut, rosy red cheeks, and a laugh that rang out like a church bell that could be heard for a great distance. His basics philosophy in life was get what you can now because you never know what’s coming tomorrow. I guess he had sort of a premonition because he died later on in life at a fairly early age from a heart attack.
The basement was taken by a guy who had been sort of a football star, but had gotten injured and lost his athletic scholarship. We called him Greaser. He decided to drop out of school and rebuild an old Harley motorcycle from scratch. It had a tank side gear shift lever and a suicide clutch. He eventually got it all put together and running so he rode it up the basement steps to get it out of the building.
I lived in a third floor apartment that had a small balcony off the back along with my close friend Jimmy who was working as a roadie for the band I was playing with. Meeco, our elder leader, all of probably 19, was living in the other third floor apartment. This improvised living situation not only provided cheap living, it also exposed me to a lot of different personalities and provided me with some very good lessons on how to get along with different people.
There is one specific object lesson story I would like to relate about this time in my life. The reason I want to talk about this is because I believe it is a good example of what can happen to you when you become discouraged and don’t improvise your plans when they fail. There is one big difference though, and that is most of the time it is outside factors that trip us up and foil our plans, but I believe in this case it was bad judgment on this person’s part that caused the problem. Never the less, I believe if he had learned to improvise better, things may have turned out quite differently.
This story is about the person that gave me my start in the music business and provided me with a chance to play with several popular rock groups during the 60s. When he started his Midwest booking agency, the only agency around that booked rock-n-roll bands at that time was a large company in Chicago named Robert Morris. They didn’t work with local bands much, but mostly managed big name acts. He started his agency in a small office located inside a local bohemian hangout called Turks Head near a large Midwestern college campus. All the want-ta-be musicians used to hang out there a lot trying to become noticed. Bob was overly generous and would usually toss a few jobs here and there to those hanging around just keep us young musicians from becoming discouraged.
Within a few years of opening the agency, he was booking most of the jobs throughout the Midwest for a large number of local and regional rock groups, some with a very large following of fans, and was also working with a few of the national acts. In order to keep up with the growing business he eventually hired and became partners with a fellow he had met and became friends with, who had grown up in one of the medium size industry oriented cities in Illinois. His friend appeared to be a very skillful negotiator and spent a lot of time on the phone successfully arranging good paying gigs for many of the agency’s bands.
From what I have been told, this is when things began to go bad for the owner. It is important to point out that what I am telling you is second hand information, and I was not witness to what actually happened. All I can tell you is what I was told about the incident, and what I have observed over the years following. From the recounting of the story I was told, his agency had signed a group of musicians who had become very popular regionally and he was beginning to introduce them to larger venues in order to develop a national following.
In order to promote the group and gain better exposure the owner’s partner convinced the owner to allow him to take the rock group out to California. He set up a west coast office and began booking the band in LA clubs. Once everything was set up the partner called the owner inviting him to come out for a visit and have a little party to celebrate. Again I cannot vouch for the truth about what happened next because I was not there. What I am relating is what I have been told by those who say they were privy to the actually situation.
Apparently, the owner’s partner put together a little party and during the festivities the owner partook of a lot of alcohol and cocaine his friend had arranged to be available. At the end of the night the partner brought the owner up to the new offices to sign some papers he said were basic legal requirements needed to run the LA branch. What the owner actually signed instead was a document giving his partner ownership of the agency and all rights to any groups they had been managing, including the rock group the partner brought out to LA that was now becoming national known.
In the end the owner’s partner from a small town in the Midwest became associated with a large number of nationally famous rock groups, and grew to be sort of famous himself and quite wealthy. The original owner however, became a broken man, and never really came out of the fog. Over the years he had a lot of personal problems and several bouts with alcohol. To this day the original owner is working low paying part time jobs and riding a bus around town in the city which he originally opened his booking agency. The last time I talked to him he was still hoping that his friend would own up to what he did, and pay him back something for at least giving him his start in the business. Even though it appeared that he had been cheated by a dishonest person, in my opinion, once he realized what had happened, if he had owned up to his mistake, changed directions, and developed other plans, he might still have been able to become successful in his endeavors. But the real object lesson here is never sign ANYTHING if you are under the influence. You could end up giving away your dreams!
Remember the old three story house I told you about where I lived with a group of people in sort of a commune arrangement? Well, one of the most stressful situations regarding my use of hallucinogenic drugs occurred when I was living at that location. The group’s unspoken leader that owned the black hearse was also selling LSD that he would pick up from various contacts around the country. One time he came back from a visit to the east coast with over 5 ounces of orange powdered LSD. He had needed something to put the doses in so he sent my roadie friend to the drug store to get some gelatin capsules.
When my friend returned he had some of the largest capsules I had ever seen. We all decided that we could not fill them completely with LSD or the people that took the doses would probably freak out from taking that large of an amount. What we did instead was fill the capsules part of the way with the powered LSD and the rest of the way with orange Kool-Aid that was approximately the same color as the powered acid. Over the course of the evening, as we continued to fill the capsules, we were getting the powered acid on our hands and occasionally licking our fingers to get it off.
It was around eleven at night when we all became rather buzzed and decided to take a break and get out for a while to let the acid trip we were now all on flow more naturally. We gathered up our goodies and all the fixings, and headed down the old familiar inside stairway to gather anyone else for the trip that wanted to come along for the ride. As we picked up members along the way we headed all the way down to the basement to see if Greaser wanted to come along. Finding that he was not there, we then headed out the back basement opening which was a seller door that opened up and out of the basement into the back yard.
As we exited the basement and headed for the hearse the Charlie noticed that several people were going into the house from the three first floor entrances and someone was climbing the back stairs going to the third floor balcony. He pointed up and shouted, “Hey, what you doing on our stairs?” That was when all hell broke loose! What was actually going on was that Meeco had apparently sold some LSD to an informant and now a squad of drug agents was actually raiding our house.
Once they realized who we were an army of agents converged on us like chickens going to roost. I believe the entire incident lasted for over an hour or two. When they had completed searching the house and found nothing, they started searching the hearse and then they searched each one of us and finally searched the hearse again. After all the searching and finding nothing they were rather puzzled along with most of us who were sure that someone had brought the large amount of LSD we had out of the house with them.
After most of the drug agents had left we all climbed in the hearse and just sat there inside it for what seemed like forever. After some prodding the owner of the hearse revealed that he had tossed the paper bag containing the LSD under the hearse before anyone had really noticed what was going on. He was waiting to be sure all the drug agents had left before he was willing to reach under to get the bag so we just sat there for probably a half hour or more longer before he got the bag and we drove off to the country side to unwind.
After that incident Meeco made some friends on the local police department through some of his drug sales contacts. He was very outgoing and personable, and people tended to like him so he took advantage of that fact and sort of covered his tracks with the law. It wasn’t long after that a second raid was planned for our house that also turned out to be unsuccessful. This time we were ready. A half hour before the agents came to raid the house Meeco received a tip about the raid from the friend he had made on the police department. By the time they arrived, we had removed everything and had put it all in a hole in the ground under the doghouse in the backyard. Even though we were fairly confident that our stash would not be found, it was extremely stressful for me to watch all those agents tear the house apart looking for drugs.
After three more years or so of experimenting with other hallucinogenics in addition to LSD I eventually came to a place that I decided I would continue on with my discoveries without the assistance of an artificial source. I quit using hallucinogenic substances in order to allow my mind to follow its own spiritual path. It is important to point out that not everybody should follow the same path to awareness, because we each need to explore our deeper self in a way that suits us best. Being individuals we each need to find the best path to discovery for ourselves and follow the way that will provide us with the most insight.
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