More Stuff about The Bubble Puppy...
Only 17, I was just a kid when I joined up...
I quit high school and moved to Austin to join Bubble Puppy because I saw their first gig and they rocked! They opened for The Who at the San Antonio Coliseum and completely blew my mind. Opened for The Who on their first gig! A sign of things to come. However, I didn't know it was their first gig until just recently. I thought they had other gigs with Clayton Pulley or Craig Root on drums, but Rod Prince, guitarist for the Bubble Puppy, sez no. Rod and I had been friends in Corpus Christi since we were in high school. We skipped school together, rode our motorcycles to San Antonio just to visit a music store, and generally went to every party we could find. At these parties Rod would entertain everyone with his renditions of songs like Boris the Spider Man and Davy Crockett. He had this guitar style that would just crack you up. We made the obligatory journey to California together to put together a band. We never managed to put one together, but we did have great time in sunny California, and to this day I still miss the weather and promise of California.
So after Rod called and asked me to join I packed up my 1961 Volkswagen bug with my drums and little else. I arrived at the Puppy house in the afternoon to find Rod, Roy Cox, Todd Potter, and Gene Corbin our roadie all living in a limestone cottage out in the sticks. Until we moved to California and changed our name to Demian we always lived together. We were brothers in spirit and besides it made getting together for rehearsal a snap. Our little house was then "out in the country" on East Riverside Drive. We would get up late, go swimming at Campbell's hole behind Barton Springs, and come home and play cards till 11:00 pm. Then someone would say "Well, should we practice?" So we would practice and jam 'till about 4:00 am, go to sleep and do it all again the next day. We played and sometimes practiced at the Vulcan Gas Company on Congress Avenue. We drew decent crowds, nothing to write home about. (That would all change when "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" came out.) In Houston we would play at a club called Love Street Light Circus and Feel Good Machine. It was on the 3rd floor of a building by the bayou. Love Street was a classic sixties nightclub. You laid on these vinyl covered mattresses on the floor to listen to the band! The lighting crew in the balcony wanted you play in the dark so they could do their show of squiggly amoebas on you. We compromised by playing our first set with the lights off. It was a jam, our whole first set was improvised. One night I was on the top floor landing hanging out with one of our crazy Bandito biker friends, who was on acid, when 3 identically dressed cowboys came up the stairs. I don't know where they thought they were going, but they were in the wrong place. The biker leaned over and kicked the lead cowboy in the face. After they had fled he turned to me and said "Why did I do that?". A biker examining the existential nature of the universe, one of the many wonders I would witness on my journey with Bubble Puppy.
Roy and Rod went to Houston to do some session work. Todd, Gene, and I got a telegram from them saying something like "Got record deal, pack up and move to Houston"! That was all it said. Turns out International Artists, the label the 13th Floor Elevators were signed with, liked the original songs Roy and Rod had played for them, and wanted to sign us.
To be continued.......