For fanatics of the Garage Rock genre, few bands produce such interest and enthusiasm as The Music Machine. Both the band's sound AND look have endured in the Garage scene up to the present day. The first time I heard the Music Machine was in the mid-'80s when Rhino Records released "Talk Talk" on a volume of their Nuggets series. Shortly after that discovery a like-minded friend and roommate turned up a copy of the first Music Machine album, Turn On. With this artifact we discovered to just what extent the influence of the Music Machine had been on Rudi Protrudi and Co. The Music Machine eventually gained a permanent place in my own pantheon of favorite bands. I was definitely not alone in this. Years later I was living in England; meeting European Garage fans (especially the Italians) I found the Music Machine's influence to be pervasive. One incident sticks out in mind: I was coming home after a show and was approached on the street by an Italian fellow (obviously a fan of the genre) who, in very broken English, was trying to inquire if the "Sixties Club" whose flyer he was brandishing was worth going to. I tried to explain that it was pretty much a mainstream sort of place specializing in Motown and the like. It was obvious I wasn't making myself very clear. Finally I just said to him; "No Musica Machina." This he understood clearly!


I eventually returned to Vancouver. One night in September of 1996 I was cutting vegetables on a music paper that I'd picked up in a local bar a few nights before. Suddenly, through a mash of cut mushrooms, I spotted the name "Doug Rhodes." "Surely not the keyboard player from The Music Machine" I thought to myself as I scraped the page off. Indeed it was! Turns out that Doug Rhodes is a resident of Victoria, British Columbia, where he had settled a few years after his tenure in the Music Machine. In the 1970s he toured with Canadian folk artist Valdy. At the time of this interview (September 1996) Doug was working as an expert in the field of tuning and repairing pianos (his ad was published in the same local music paper as the interview that I'd discovered). After some thought I decided to give Mr Rhodes a call. We talked for a while and he graciously arranged a time where I could conduct a phone interview with him. Said interview was eventually conducted over two consecutive evenings and took up about four hours worth of tape. Doug Rhodes impressed me as a very down-to-earth fellow who has more than a passing interest in music. He was rather surprised at my knowledge of the band's background and even more so at the amount of interest the group has generated years after its demise.

In the interest of conserving space I have dropped many of my conversational comments from the following interview. The piece has been edited to approach the story from a chronological perspective. My thanks to Doug Rhodes for his time to answer my questions about things he genuinely hadn't thought about in years.

What year were you born in?

I was born on May the 28th 1945... and Bonniwell was born on August 16th 1940... in fact I have his TIME of birth, if anybody wants that!

(bemused) How come you have this information?

Well, he got me into Astrology.

Oh really?

Yeah! He was the one that turned me onto it. I used to kind of laugh about it. Then funny things would happen and he'd laugh at me because he'd see my mind was blown over something or other.

Really! Are you still involved in that?

Yeah! Just for fun, and sorting out things that I can't understand otherwise. (He then tried to recall the birth dates of the remaining Music Machine members, all of whom were also born within a year on either side of Doug's birth date.)

So Bonniwell had five years on the rest of you. Did this mean that there was a sense of 'seniority'?

Oh absolutely. He was a lot more 'worldly' than the rest of us. He had already spent a number of years touring with a group. Not that some of the other guys in the group weren't pretty seasoned professional players - like Keith and Ron. They had really done their share for as young as they were. They had both been around. They'd gone from Minneapolis to New York. Keith had played string bass behind Gail Garnett (of "We'll Sing In The Sunshine" fame) and he'd played bass with Jimmy Rodgers before that - so he was a pro and an educated musician. I think he started out on the road when he was between 17 and 19. When he got out to LA he was living with one of the girls that was in Curt Boettcher's group, The Goldebriars, that Ron Edgar had come out to the coast with. Bonniwell was peripherally connected to the band, I think he met them in New York and had a thing going with the other girl in the group, the sister, Dottie Holmberg. I think he'd came part way across the country with them as a road manager. But, yeah, the five years made a big difference. He told me one time -and even if he may have exaggerated I'm sure that there was more than a grain of truth to it - that when The Wayfarers busted up he got dumped in New York City with 50 cents in his pocket and he didn't know anybody - and he survived! Well, even if he had 20 bucks or 50 bucks in his pocket I bet the rest of the story really is true, because he was TOUGH! He was real tough and a very, very strong character and there was no denying it and we respected him and looked up to him and generally speaking he was a pretty good band leader. The biggest problem with him was that once he got some fame and notoriety and some money he separated himself in a lot of ways from the rest of the group...

At what age did you develop an interest in music?

There was always music in my house. My grandmother started performing in a Christian Minstrel show down in Missouri, playing piano and singing songs and telling stories. My dad played guitar and sang and had done so for various kinds of gatherings for years and years, mostly college kind of stuff, 'around the campfire', that sort of thing, but he was pretty darn 'professional' at it. All of my brothers played, there was a piano in the house and all kinds of instruments that my Dad had collected over the years, so when I was a kid I could pick up a saxophone or coronet or banjo or play the piano or whatever.

That's very fortunate. I think that shows a cultural difference between now and then, in that 'music in the household' is much less common now.

Yes. And they were all old instruments. I've managed to do the same thing here. I've kept up the tradition but there's hardly anything new! I got an old beat-up upright bass and the piano here is 90 years old and I've got a bunch of saxophones, etc. So I grew up playing, and I played flute in High School Band (in Garden Grove, California - MS). In football season I would either play piccolo or tuba. I was indulged by the Band teacher, he liked me. Sometimes during parade season I'd play field drums in the marching band. My oldest brother is a big-time well-known piano player in the Traditional Jazz scene in the United States and Europe. His name is Robbie Rhodes. He got me my first professional gigs. I think the first pro gig I played was playing soprano saxophone along with him at a pizza parlor when I was about 16 years old, and made five bucks. He pulled me into a New Year's Eve gig when I was about 17, playing soprano and bass sax. (chuckles) It was kind of a sleazy roadhouse. We were playing Dixieland, Trad Jazz really. I was 17 years old, you're supposed to be 21 down in California but I was the piano player's kid brother so nobody said anything.

So this was about 1962?

Yeah, somewhere in there.

Were you a 'folkie'?

No. No, I didn't really care that much for folk music though I did like the blues stuff. I had a big collection of New Orleans and Chicago Jazz on LPs, I also had a big collection of 78s of American popular music from say 1905 to 1925. I still collect old records, I've got a big collection of old records.

Yeah, I'm a bit of a record collector myself.

It's hard not to be. When you've got it in your blood, boy... So anyway, all this stuff was around, I had lots of music around. I didn't care that much for the folk scene. When I was in high school I met some guys who were playing Folkie stuff. One of them played string bass but preferred playing guitar, so he let me play string bass and I used to play with them. It was fine, you know. I could get a lot more female attention that way, 'cos I was shy. But I didn't care for that folk stuff much, I thought it was boring.

What about rock'n'roll?

I didn't pay an awful lot of attention to rock'n'roll until after the Beatles and Rolling Stones started happening. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.

With hindsight it seems that the early '60s were pretty dry as far as real rock'n'roll was concerned.

It was pretty boring. Nowadays I listen to old stuff on a CBC program where this guy plays these old 45s, doo-wop and that stuff. 'Cos us white kids, we didn't hear them. We didn't hear the rhythm'n'blues, we didn't hear the black stuff that much, not like the kids in Britain did. You know, we had to have Stevie Winwood reintroduce Ray Charles to us.

Like the whole thing about the Stones selling American culture back to the Americans.

Yeah. We turned on to The Beatles first, but the Stones... well, I just love the Stones. So I got into this group, The Spats. Their piano player, the only really good musician in the group, was aspiring to be a jazz musician. Their drummer pulled me in to do a gig at Disneyland.

Spats singles turn up on compilations but I haven't come across any info on the band. This might be a bit much to ask but do you remember who the band members were and what they played?

(straining) The only thing I could really tell you was that they had a record out before I joined. I can't remember what.

Was it "The Roach" and "Gator Tails and Monkey Ribs"?

Yes! That was them! I could never have told you, but yeah, that was the one.

I've heard "She Done Moved" on a bootleg compilation.

I played Hammond organ on that. I had a big hand in arranging that tune.

Tell us a bit about the band itself.

There were three brothers. I think their last name was Johnson. The youngest played bass, the oldest played guitar and was sort of the group leader, the middle one was a real pretty boy and all he did was sing; sometimes he'd play the guitar a little bit. I'm pretty sure their first single was out before I joined. Their father financed the whole thing. The drummer's mother acted as manager. He was a year younger than me. His name was Mike Sulsona. They were high school kids. I was probably the oldest, a year or two more than the other guys, who were 16 or 17. They had to do some pushing to get a gig at Disneyland, it's not easy to get work there. They were real straight. They had uniforms and the lead singer wore a fancy cravat, you know, it was a 'sucky' kind of band. And they wore spats on their shoes. Somebody had put a lot of thought into this! I worked with them until... there was a certain point where we were playing a gig somewhere and the other guitar player was this sort of small Italian kid, I can't remember his name, but he was a neat guy and a pretty good player. We were in the washroom where we were playing this gig and he and I were grousing about how the Johnson brothers' old man was kind of a jerk because we were off playing freebies...

I think I already know the punchline to this one. He was in one of the stalls, right?

He was sitting in the can. I didn't get any more work with that band. I was OUT!

(laughing) This was after "She Done Moved" was out?

Yeah.

This may sound trivial, but what can you remember about playing Disneyland?

Disneyland wanted to have a Teen Rock'n'Roll Dance set up someplace. They weren't very loud in those days. The guys were probably all using Fender equipment that the maximum was probably 45 watts per amplifier, so it wasn't particularly loud. Probably a Wurlitzer electric piano. I remember seeing this girl I had dated in High School showed up by the bandstand with some other guy and I thought "Hey! I'm up on the stage here! Rockin' and rollin'..."

Revenge! (laughter)

Yeah! Revenge of the Rejected Musician! But in all it was a pretty sucky band. But it was fun. And for a very short time the record "She Done Moved" got a fair bit of airplay in LA and that managed to get us a few more gigs.

What do you remember about the recording session?

It's pretty vague. A couple of the Johnson brothers had written the tune and, again, Mummy and Daddy had financed going into one of the cheaper studios up in Hollywood, I don't remember which. I do remember that when we got to the studio there was this B3, and the B3 is a very inspirational instrument and it may well be, I can't tell you this for certain, but my feeling about it is that I developed the organ line, which serves as a bit of a hook line in it, I probably developed it right on the spot.

It's very distinctive on the record.

Yeah, it was mixed prominently. I think it was the inspiration because I don't recall playing an organ before that. Somewhere back there I recall having the use of a Farfisa organ, which I hated. Those guys that love those things, they can have them! The parents of the kids in the band organized this network of people that were telephoning the radio station long-distance from Orange County to get them to play the record. For a few weeks it got quite a bit of radio play. I don't know how well it sold but every so often it would be the top request of the hour.

Have you heard "Gonna Tell You All About It Baby" by The Spats?

I draw a blank there.

Sort of a Stonesy thing with a discordant guitar-crunch going on.

I doubt it would be the same band - these guys were pretty straight (NB: It is the same band - MS). Another thing I can tell you about that session was that the Army was after me.

Oh yeah! 'Cos you were of age at this time.

I sure was. I remember I suspected I was going to get a draft notice. Some of my other buddies had gotten drafted; we'd already been in for Pre-Induction Physical and all that stuff. We were all 1-A.

That must have been terrifying!

Oh boy, I tell you, you just can't imagine. And the school deferment hadn't come around for me at that time, I was not doing very well at all. I was in my third term at university. I had enlisted in the Air Force because I figured I could probably snake my way out by faking being crazy or something, I don't know.. (laughter) ...something like that. But I knew I could never get out of the Army. The Recruiting Officer had said "Well, you can ship out tomorrow, or... Tuesday's the next day we got a bus going out to Fort Ord." I said "Well, I want to see my girlfriend first." I'm pretty sure that recording session happened right in that interval there, that weekend. After the session I went up to see my girlfriend in Glendale and we had these tearful goodbyes. Then Monday morning I got a School Deferment in the Mail.

Whoah!

I called up the recruiter and said "Hey Sarge! Guess what!"(laughter)

Someone was smiling on you.

No kidding. Seems to me that was late November or December of '65.

I saw The Yardbirds about six months after "I'm A Man" came out. They were touring the States on the strength of that hit. Jeff Beck was with them. I saw them at a club that used to be known as the Old Moulin Rouge in Hollywood and had been renamed The Hullabaloo. And there were about ten people there, Mike Sulsona and I had gone up to hear them. About ten people there and The Yardbirds were just fantastic!

I bet!

They were just awesome. In the six months since the record had come out, "I'm A Man" was almost unrecognizable. They were evolving so fast and they were so fluid.

They were getting more 'out there'.

Way out there! They were playing like, kind of approaching it like jazz. I won't say Free Jazz because they had a good sense of structure, but they were large long structures.

They were getting heavy.

They were getting heavy. (sounding very much in awe) It was a great band. During the same time Mike and I went up and caught Wilson Pickett at a club called The Trip. The opening band, who I had never heard of, was Paul Butterfield's Blues Band, with the original lineup.

Around the time of the first Elektra release?

That's right, when the first Elektra album came out.

The label's first non-folk or jazz group I believe.

That's right. And about three months later I went up to LA again to see The Byrds when they were plugging "Mr Tambourine Man" and "Turn! Turn! Turn!". Paul Butterfield opened again. I got to see them twice. They were fantastic, just so good. It was about that time that I moved up to LA. I moved there in January of '66 after I'd floundered and flunked my out of school completely. Somewhere in that period I met Curt Boettcher. Curt Boettcher is a real important figure in my life. He's dead now. I first heard his group The Goldebriars, which Ron Edgar was in, at a Folk club in Orange County. I thought "These guys are kind of weird, they've all got earrings in one ear and they've got black hair". The lead singer, Boettcher himself, seemed real faggy. But I thought that, as weird as these guys were, I really liked the music. The music was really really good. This was 'Folk Rock' with drums and electric bass and guitars and so forth. The vocal harmonies were just superb. I thought "I gotta meet these guys!" I hit it off with Curt Boettcher. That group was busting up and I played with him awhile, and another group. He did a whole bunch of work in LA. I guess it was about Spring of '66 and he got me some work in the studio where he was doing overdubs on the second album he did with The Association. I played celeste on "Cherish". It's real prominent, right on the middle eight you can hear it distinctly. It became a big record. It must have sold a zillion copies. It made a lot of money for everybody but Curt Boettcher.

Did this win points for you on the music scene?

Well, it sure wasn't bad to mention that I'd played on such a big record. I didn't have much studio experience by then. I was working with Curt that Spring. Ron and Keith were playing with Sean Bonniwell in this little band, The Ragamuffins. Just playing clubs and stuff in South LA. Doing covers and playing lounges. Sean had a pretty broad range of vocal stuff that he could do. He could croon, he could sing real straight ballad material, very nicely. He was learning how to sing rock'n'roll. As rock'n'rollers go, he was really outside the pale. He appreciated The Rolling Stones and The Beatles but he wasn't a fanatic the way I was.

He wasn't a product of that stuff?

No, he wasn't. Anyway, Ron had been living with Dottie Holmberg, who was part of The Goldebriars. She kicked him out and I found him on my doorstep when I got back from a trip to the desert, around Easter of '66. He came to live with me and he kept saying "Hey, you gotta hear this group" or "You should think about joining this group", because Bonniwell wanted to expand it at the time. I'd said I didn't want to because I didn't want to play in bars. I was scared to, I thought it was a low-class sort of thing. I came one night and heard the band, I thought they were OK. Ron introduced me to Sean. He asked me if I was available to play in the band and did I have any equipment. I said "No, I don't have a keyboard." But my 21st birthday was coming up which would have made it legal for me to play in bars. Keith and Ron had phony ID's, I was skittish about that, too law-abiding for that sort of thing. Right after I turned 21 I joined the band. Bonniwell had found Mark Landon somewhere. I never did know where Mark Landon had been before the Machine. (author's note: throughout the interview Doug referred to the group as simply "The Machine", which I guess would have been the insider's term for the band). I think what was great about Mark was that he had such clear ideas about showmanship and stage deportment. He'd get on stage and... I mean he was the homeliest character you could hope to meet, we used to just kid him mercilessly. He was so good-natured!

I understand he had a big nose.

He had a big schnozz, he was like... he was born in China, the child of Russian Jews! His father worked playing the bass in an orchestra that was a small Society, or Dance, orchestra that got work at the American Embassy, as far as I know. They left China not long after he was born because things were getting too out of hand with the Communists. They moved to Burbank, he was in the same high school class as Cher... but just homely, and we used to just kid him mercilessly: we'd say; "Mark, you know what you are? Not only are you ugly, you're a KYKE!!!" (laughter) And he could take it! You know, just a wonderful guy. By golly, he'd stand up on stage and he had a certain stance - he'd bend his left knee slightly and turn his toe out.

He's got some of the more imposing photographs on the album..

Oh, he had attitude, and, I tell ya, the girls just fell all over him! We were just astounded by this because we thought "He's so ugly!"

Well it's amazing what can happen when you stick a guy out on stage with a guitar in front of him, you know?

Well, and not only that, because he knew how to use it. I mean, we all had our share of action because we were onstage but he wasn't just a guy with a guitar. By golly, he could just look out and he had smoldering looks that he would give out to the girl at the front that he wanted to hang out with that night. The interesting thing was that after all the action he got during the time we were on the road, after we got off the road he worked with Ike and Tina Turner for quite a few months and then he became celibate for a year or two. He was a very strong character. His given name, by the way, was Zarrettin. It was shortened to 'Zarrett' when he was in school, then he took 'Landon' when he joined the group, or shortly before then. At any rate, I think Bonniwell had originally found Mark in a bowling alley. It was typical then that bowling alleys would have a bar associated with them, there'd be a bar and a dance floor. We started playing lounges and bowling alleys, a lot of clubs. There were lots of clubs to play.

Nowadays that whole notion of the small or mid-sized venue has gone completely out the window.

Yes, it's so sad.

When Bonniwell approached you was he actually trying to start The Music Machine or was he just looking for new players in his band?

He was wanting to start something new. More than a germ of the original idea was there. I don't recall using the Ragamuffins name with the five-piece group. I don't know where and when he made the contacts with the people that were willing to record us. I remember sitting in one of these bowling alleys and being introduced to Brian Ross. He was just a rich kid. A nice guy but no sense at all of the music biz. He had a wealthy father who was willing to put up some bucks. He wanted to play around at being a record producer. Bonniwell saw it as an opportunity. So Brian put up the money. We used to practice in Sean's garage down in San Pedro. So, yes, we were a garage band. I'd hitch a ride with Keith, who was living in North Hollywood. He had this funky little Fiat. Halfway down and halfway back we'd have to stop somewhere south of Watts, a heavy black area of town, to get oil for his transmission because it had a blown seal. Anyway, we'd practice in Sean's garage and the neighborhood kids would come in and watch us play rock'n'roll. We were learning Rolling Stones tunes, Paul Revere & the Raiders tunes, the odd Yardbirds tune too.

The staple material of the era.

Yes. And I remember that in the back of Sean's garage there was a big old upright piano. I remember going back with Sean and working out the arrangement to "Talk Talk", him on guitar and me on piano. We worked out the basic bones of it, then came back to the guys and worked out the other bits. Ron filled in this incredible drum part. I think Sean had originally tried the tune with The Ragamuffins but we basically completely changed it around. The amazing thing was that I'd joined the band on May the 28th and on July the 30th we went into RCA and recorded "Talk Talk".

Tell us about the "Talk Talk" session.

We were with Dave Hassinger, who'd done great stuff with the Stones. I think it was done to four-track and Bonniwell overdubbed the vocals on top. Bass and drums would have gone on one track, lead guitar on one track, and organ and rhythm guitar on another. I doubt we did more than two takes each on "Talk Talk" and "Come On In".

I think "Come On In" is great. It's like The Doors but it was before they were really happening.

Well, The Doors were gaining some notoriety in town but I hadn't heard them. Before "Light My Fire" had come out we did a set at The Whiskey-A-Go-Go one night. We never had a full-fledged gig there, we only had a guest set, for which we didn't get paid. What's-his-name, Jim Morrison came and watched Bonniwell for most of the set. I vaguely remember him getting up and sitting in with another band. I never did like The Doors. But back to the session; I used a B3, Keith would have been using a Hofner bass through a Bassman.

I thought he had an Eko?

He did have an Eko but he had a Hofner before that. We got Vox equipment sometime that fall. Somebody had negotiated a sponsorship with them. Their equipment was pretty crummy. We used the amplifiers for awhile, they were loud. Not very reliable but they sure were loud! It was our intention that "Come On In" was to be the single, that was the A-side and "Talk Talk", which was short and snappy, was going to be the B-side. We wanted to be known as a more professional band than just going in and doing rock-em sock-em type Rock'n'Roll.

By the time that was recorded, probably a few weeks before, the band had pitched down to where the guitars were tuned down a minor-third low. The Ragamuffins had tuned down to a D instead of an E on their guitars because Sean had decided he wanted to do it to save his voice. A lot of these tunes were written in E and A and G and that. Working six nights a week with a small group he didn't want to blow his voice out on full-fledged keys, so he dropped it down a full step. He kind of liked the sound and when the five-piece got together he said "Let's drop it even more." Which was a real hassle, but it sure made a deep gritty sound. It kind of made it hard for anybody to cover our tunes 'cos they were in such odd keys. A lot of people couldn't figure out how to do it. When we got the acetate dub about two or three days later we were at Sean's place in San Pedro where he lived with his incredibly beautiful Mexican-American girlfriend. He brought the acetate in and we put on "Come On In" and we went "Wow, that's great, it sounds super!". It sounded really good. Then we said "Let's hear what 'Talk Talk' sounds like". We put it on and when it was over we knew it was gonna be a hit. Not 'knew' in the sense of "Oh Boy, maybe that'll be a hit", not hyping ourselves. Just listening to it and going "Wow. Shit. That's gonna be a hit". Here we had fully intended "Come On In" to be the lead side and when we heard the acetate there was absolutely no question, we were just slack-jawed, we could hardly believe how good it sounded. I think the single came out in September.

Did you have the 'look' going by the time you cut "Talk Talk"?

He was working on it at that time. I don't think we'd dyed our hair yet or had the glove but we were close to it. I remember it was in place by the time we went on the road in September, when the single was released. We got a bunch of bookings. I remember we played in Fort Collins, Colorado. Shitty gig. College town. College kids were just the worst audiences possible. Arrogant, stupid people. They aren't anymore, folks, but they sure were then! Just to have some crewcut kid come up to you, wearing a button-down collar with a tie and shined shoes, looking straight as hell, have him come up to you on the side of the stage and say "Hey! I wanna kick your ass!" Bonniwell would say "Where do you work?" To which the guy would respond with such and such. Then Bonniwell would say "Well, I work here. I'm working right now. Get it?"

Very good.

Also we got gigs at the Classic Cat in Burbank, which was a pretty hot club. Little Richard had played there.

When did Vox get hold of you?

We got the Vox sponsorship probably in October or November, it was certainly a result of having a record out. It was like kids being let loose in a toy store! Especially as far as the guys with the guitars were concerned. They were looking up at the stuff on the wall and going "Hmm, I kinda like the look of that..." Then to actually hold it in your hand and play it, it was not so hot. Sean tried his best to use the Vox guitar quite a lot of times, certainly when we were on television. He played a Gretsch, I think Mark played a Guild. Keith would use the Vox bass if we were on TV, that was about it, he didn't like it that much. It was pretty clunky. The amplifier we used was the 120 watt amplifier, their first generation of transistor amps, it was real crude. But it was loud! We had an extra one that we took with us on the road. In those days bands didn't pack their own PA system, you just made do with whatever you found at the job site. Typically Shure PA's, just awful, terrible PA's in most of the places we played. So we got into using the Vox SuperBeatle amplifier hooked up with the PA. We really only needed two microphones, maybe three. Sean did 98 percent of the vocals, I did one tune, Keith and I would do background vocals. So it wasn't like we needed a lot. There was no such thing as roadies, we'd set up all our own equipment. Unless it was the sort of club situation where we could just plug in and play, which was pretty bizarre sometimes.

Tell us about recording the Turn On LP.

The first album was done at Original Sound Studios, with the exception of the first single which had been done at RCA. Paul Buff was the engineer there. He was a genius. He had come up with a one-inch ten-track head for recording and playback whereas the standard of the industry, as established by Ampex, was an eight-track one-inch head. He changed the dimensions of the recording head so he got ten in one inch and that was more tracks than anybody had in all the recording world at that time. Plus he had developed one echo machine that used something that I think was similar to what is used for the pickup head on a VCR. It was a whirling head that had multiple tape pickups on it. So it was tape-delay-echo but it was multiple delays and multiple feed-back. I can't describe it, all I know is he used it on "Hey Joe", which we recorded live in the studio. That was all done at once with no overdubs.

(shocked) Really? Because that's such an amazing piece.

Yeah. That was a real showstopper too. I remember performing that at Hullabaloo when we were at Number One. That was an absolute showstopper. That tune should have been released as a single. But I also want you to know that we were doing that tune slow before any of us heard of Jimi Hendrix.

I'd always assumed that.

I mean, anybody could have done it slow. I don't know whether he picked it up from us or what. But he might have, who knows?

What sort of feeling did you have the first time you saw your record in the racks?

The first time I saw the Turn On album we were playing up in San Francisco, it was probably early December. I was appalled at how ugly it was. I could just not believe the artwork that had been done on it. Just so crappy!

I think it's really charming because it's sort of like the last of the old wave as far as that look on an album goes. It's almost got this sort of '50s feel to it in that they're working on an angle or gimmick and they're really pushing the gimmick in your face. And then way underneath the gimmick is the photo of the band!

Yeah.

Then a scant few months later everyone is being Picasso on their LP covers.

That's right. Well, even by then The Beatles had done Revolver. We were out on the road a lot, playing wherever the single was generating interest. I remember touring in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle, Bellingham and Olympia and all that for ten days. It was raining the entire time! (The two of us being Northwest residents, Doug and I cracked up at this.) One place I can remember playing in the Northwest was, like, the little community hall, way back in the bush somewhere, like in a small town. It sticks out in my mind because it was all muddy, we helped some guy get his truck out of the mud, pouring rain. And there was this funky old little community hall. The reason it sticks in my mind is that in the 1970s I lived on Salt Spring Island and I played in bands that played all over the Gulf Islands and we played in six or seven different halls that were just about identical to that one. An old place with fur paneling and the people were really nice. Thing was that while we working that circuit we were the only rock'n'roll band, of the new generation of long-haired bands, that most of these people had ever seen! We'd blow into town with the long hair and the glove and everything and we'd walk through the crowd to get to the stage. We'd have guys razzing us saying "You're fags!" and "We're gonna kick your ass!", all this stuff. We'd get up on stage and we'd know that we were dead meat! Unless we blew them away. We would always open with "Talk Talk" and that was just an incredibly powerful thing to play. It was so concise. It was about a minute and 56 seconds and that is about exactly the time we'd play it in, every time. The tempo was exactly like the record. It would just blow people away! They just couldn't believe it! They couldn't believe how much it sounded like the record for starters. What they'd heard on a record that had excited them on their crummy little fold-up stereos or on their car radio - when they heard it live and as loud as we played with the brute force Vox amplifiers - people were just slack-jawed. And it's a good thing too because otherwise we would have been in real trouble. We had more than one occasion where guys would come backstage in the middle of the show and say "Hey! We thought you guys were a bunch of fags and we were gonna kick your ass, but you guys are great and if you have any trouble with any other guys let us know and we'll take care of things!" This happened to us more than once. We never got into any bad scrapes that way. There were a number of times where the potential was real high but we never got into any fights. Which is pretty amazing because we looked just outrageous compared to the local standards of the places we played, particularly in the South.

We once worked for this promoter in Birmingham, Alabama who later became famous for burning all the Beatles records. He was just an opportunist, a real shyster. We had one situation where we played in Fort Smith, Arkansas, kind of a heavy place to be playing. It was basically a high school dance, but in the Civic Auditorium. These guys were wearing sportscoats and ties and the girls were wearing hoop-skirts, real old-fashioned, it was almost funny. At the motel where we were staying there was this Fraternity up for some sort of conference. Well, they crashed this dance! They got into a fight with the local guys. I'd never seen anything like it. I'd seen fights in bars but this was all high school kids! We were on-stage and, typically, didn't stop playing. The sort of thing you do in that situation, but this was like something out of a John Wayne movie! There were tables and chairs flying, guys everywhere, girls screaming. It was like "Wow!" This guy, the sheriff, jumped up onstage. He was probably in his late-50s, great big pot-belly, Stetson hat and a gun on each hip. He motioned at us and says (southern accent) "Stop playin', stop playin'!!" Then he grabbed the microphone and he shouted into it: "Hey! You-All stop that fightin', or there ain't gonna be no ball, y'understand?!" (much laughter) And they stopped! They put the tables and chairs back upright and the dance continued. I said "We should hire this guy. Let's take him on the road!" It was absolutely amazing.

One time we flew between gigs in two small planes. I think Mark and Keith were in the plane ahead of us. We lost sight of them in stormy weather. When we touched down they hadn't arrived. It was very worrisome, we waited for about 90 minutes for them to show up. Turned out that they had hit the worst of it and turned back. We hadn't seen them turn around. Another time we flew to Tulsa in a twin-engine plane. It was snowing heavily, so we couldn't fly all the way to the gig. The promoter met us at the next nearest airport with a car and station wagon. We were supposed to play at nine o'clock and we arrived at ten minutes to. There were only about ten people there, no-one figured we'd come because of the blizzard. We played anyway. We got paid our guarantee and headed back to the airport. When we found the pilot he was drunk. Drunk as a skunk! We didn't want to wait around. We were the last plane to get clearance and as he was taxiing he missed the flags on the runway and put the wheel into the ditch! We slogged back to the terminal and found some guys with a pickup truck. They came out with some chains and we pushed the plane back onto the runway and took off in the storm. Keith had taken instruction as a pilot, an unlicensed student. He helped fly the plane because the pilot was just stinking drunk. We arrived at daybreak, obviously wrecked.

Sometime just before Christmas 1966 we drove from Kansas City to Los Angeles non-stop. I think it took us a day and a half. I remember being in the desert in Nevada and knowing that the road was straight but the yellow line was wandering back and forth. Yet I knew I was the only one competent to drive, Mark and Ron were hopeless driving. Keith and I were spotting each other and Sean drove the other vehicle. We rolled into town sometime that morning. That night we were booked in to play as the feature act at The Hullabaloo. It was the club to play in Los Angeles and our record was at Number One in LA! We hadn't been in LA when the record had gained airplay, we were always out on the road. When we got back it was at Number One. We got to the gig and it's packed with people. I think it held close to 2,000. Great place. It had a great big revolving stage. It was where they used to televise the show Queen For A Day. There was room to set up three bands and they'd swing the stage around one band at a time for their set. Seems to me either The Leaves or Grass Roots were there, one of those LA bands. One had Mickey Rooney Jr in it. We started to set up. We were wrecked from this drive. The guy who was serving as sort of a road manager was this little guy named Bill. He carried around newspaper clippings in his wallet stating in effect that he'd had a parachuting accident and lived. He'd broken practically every bone in his body. He used to travel around with a briefcase full of drugs. Pain-killers and things. Bill came up to me and Ron and said "Hey! You guys need a little pick-me-up. Here, just take some of this". He had some white powder. I said, "Well, what do you do with it?" "Just (sniff) snuff it up yer nose." I'd never actually quite done that before. I'd always taken pills or smoked dope. So we snorted the stuff. It was just some cheap methamphetamine, but it was the first time I'd ever snorted it. And one of the last times, I'm happy to say! But I'd never snorted that stuff... Well, what a BUZZ!! (much laughter) When I went up to the dressing room there was a dentist's chair there and some of the guys from the other band coaxed me into it. I thought they were just gonna crank it up and down, but they spun it round and around - and I have real trouble with getting dizzy! At the height of this spinning Kevin Deverich gave me curtain call! I staggered downstairs, I was just wrecked! The curtain opened and the place went into pandemonium. We were fresh off the road and we blew the entrance to our second number and had to start again we were so wired. Halfway through one of the tunes the electricity went out onstage. I have no doubt that one of the other bands deliberately pulled the main power cord. Ron Edgar didn't miss a beat, he went into this fantastic drum solo. Just blew 'em away out front. He managed this 16 bar drum solo before the juice came back on and then he counted us back into the tune. Just raged, people cheered and went crazy! It was great. There weren't many bands that could have done that. We played Melodyland, I think we opened for the Beach Boys. It was a circular stage, like 'Theater-In-The-Round'. There were no monitors. We could not hear each other or ourselves. Ron's drumming was so concise with the intros and transitions that he lead us through the whole 25 minute set. An incredible performance.

What can you tell us about your television appearances?

All I really remember is that we almost entirely lip-synched. There were one or two shows where we were prepared to go in and Sean could sing over a track. Paul Buff had prepared some mixes for us, probably on reel-to-reel, where the vocal was missing. So Sean could sing live. We would lip-synch behind him. We never did a live TV show that I can recall. American Bandstand was all lip-synched. We met Dick Clark, real nice guy. I vaguely remember meeting Paul Revere & the Raiders. A couple of years later I did some work for Mark Lindsay doing background vocals on a solo project he had. I remember meeting Johnny Rivers on one of the LA shows we did. I remember meeting The Turtles. They were toads. A couple of fat guys. They did some good stuff but they were not particularly friendly characters, I remember that much about them. One show in New York I met Jose Feliciano and I was very impressed at how down-to-earth he was. He was real big then because of his version of "Light My Fire". I remember working one show with The Animals. Not the original band, the second one with that tall red-haired guy who played fiddle. I think they actually played live. Eric probably insisted on that. The drummer and the fiddle player came back to Ron Edgar's place with me and we sat and smoked dope and listened to Yardbirds records. That was our first contact with genuine English musicians. They were different. Nice guys, real professional, but funky at the same time. Neat guys though.

Did you have any inkling at the time, with all this great stuff going on around you, that these artists and records would be so durable?

Well, when you're that young you don't think about what people will be saying 20 or 30 years later. But certainly the Beatles stuff, everybody knew that that was just timeless. A lot of the Rolling Stones stuff too. When Hendrix came out though, that was the amazing thing. Mark turned us on to Hendrix. The first time I heard it I thought "Anh, that's just a bunch of noise, I'm not gonna listen to these guys". Then one time we were down in Biloxi, Mississippi. We were staying in a motel right on the Gulf Coast during off-season. We dragged out a long extension cord and we set up one of the Vox SuperBeatle amplifiers out at the head of this little wharf stuck out in the ocean. I'd brought along a turntable. There was nobody else in the motel, because it was off-season, so we just cranked up this amplifier and got completely immersed in Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced. Mono. But then the copy of Are You Experienced that I had was mono. I'd love to have a mono copy again. They were different mixes of course.

Ron and I were scoring dope at that time. Mark never smoked dope. Sean didn't smoke dope. Sean would have just garroted us if he'd known we'd had any with us on the road; it was very dangerous. I had a camera that I'd take the film out of and hide the dope in there. We were extremely discreet about when we'd smoke. I don't recall ever smoking before a gig, we'd just come back after gigs and get loaded and stay up all night and listen to records. I remember buying the Solomon Burke record and a bunch of Booker T & the MG's stuff in Biloxi. And Otis Redding. Kevin Deverich had booked Otis and James Brown so those were our heroes too of course. But the Hendrix stuff was amazing, we were absolutely moved by it. Even Bonniwell couldn't deny that there was something special going on there - and Bonniwell was remarkably aloof from the rock'n'roll scene in general, other than to figure out what was 'happening' and how he could make use of it for his own purposes. We spent quite a long time in New York City, probably five weeks off and on. We worked out of New York in to Pennsylvania. One of the times we worked a show with Question Mark & the Mysterians and Clyde McPhatter. I remember meeting Clyde but not knowing who he actually was. Question Mark was this little Mexican guy, nobody in his band liked him.

What was the Question Mark show like?

I didn't see the show, I just remember he wore a cape and looked like a low-budget Superman. He was kind of a funny character, I remember talking to one of the guys in the band and he said they couldn't stand him 'cos he was real arrogant. Another band we played with was Baby Huey & the Babysitters. Their singer was this great big black guy. He died not long afterwards, I think. Another gig we worked was in Newport, Rhode Island. I think it was called The Bastille. Great big old place overlooking the water, real neat location. We were playing alternating sets with a band called The Pigeons. They later changed their name to Vanilla Fudge. They were doing a real James Brown-styled act. Real showy, dropping to the floor and throwing the microphone around. We got there before they showed up. I noticed they had a B3 onstage, which had me excited. Then I noticed a bunch of the keys were missing at one end! Ron Edgar was looking at the drummer's kit, which was really banged up, one of the cymbals had a big crack in it. So Ron opted to use his own drums. We watched them play that evening, they had this real heavy act. One of the reasons there were keys missing from the guys organ was he was doing this thing where he'd flail them back and forth. They were just being bashed out! The drummer was banging on the crash cymbal which was sounding terrible due to the crack in it. He was getting madder and madder. Finally he took a big swing at it and knocked a pie-shaped piece out of the cymbal! It was pretty amazing.

We also did some recording out East. I don't remember what. Maybe some of the bed tracks for the Bonniwell Music Machine album, but I think some other stuff too. I don't know what it was or where it went. Around this time we were working on this concept of doing a non-stop show. Sean had the idea that since it was 'The Music Machine' that we would do a whole set that was non-stop, it would have no breaks whatsoever. I think we worked it up in New York and we first started really playing it when we got back to LA at the end of March. But it was grueling to play and the guitars would go out of tune. There was no opportunity to re-tune them because we didn't stop playing! I doubt we ever did more than a half-dozen performances of it.

What did the audiences make of it?

I think it was too much. The only other time I've seen someone do that was when I saw James Brown in Vancouver in 1981. I don't think Bonniwell's idea was absolutely original but we were probably the only white band to tackle it. During that period though, the band was getting so good. I listen to the difference between the two albums and it really was a cut above playing-wise. There were three or four tracks that we'd done in New Orleans which included "Something Hurting On Me". That was me playing on bass for the first time in a studio. We put some horn stuff on it in LA, which I'm kind of disappointed with, I thought the horn stuff was pretty dopey. But the basic track was real strong especially with that real out-of-tune piano which I overdubbed. That was in New Orleans. Funky, funky studio upstairs in a warehouse. The person who ran it, we didn't know if it was a man or woman. She was this short, dare I say it, dyke! I don't even know who that was. She was OK. We were very efficient, partly as a result of having to go onstage and doing a first-rate performance of original material night after night. I remember we worked for a promoter in New Mexico that just worked us to death! We were working double-shots virtually every day of the ten days we were working for him. Sometimes we would work three shows a night.

How long would an average set last?

In those situations the shows would be pretty tight, half an hour. He made a lot of money, that guy. Towards the end of the tour he and Sean and Kevin Deverich got into a big poker game and Kevin and Sean cleaned this guy out! But none of that ever filtered down to the rest of the band. We worked a lot in the South. We worked all through Louisiana. In the Spring of 1967 we were working for this promoter named Eddie Arsenault, who was a Cajun. They called themselves 'coonies'. He was a real nice guy. He booked us all the way from Shreveport to New Orleans, I guess. He was based out of Lake Charles. We had a real good time there. When we were there was when Sergeant Pepper's came out. I can remember smoking some wonderful Acapulco Gold that somebody had scored for us and sitting on the couch in Eddie Arsenault's living room with this really nice local girl sitting next to me and listening to Sergeant Pepper all the way through for the first time. I'll never forget that, that was one strong experience.

A defining moment, I'm sure!

Absolutely.

Did the band ever gain anything akin to a devout following? Were there any characters that you recognized from show to show?

Well, no, because we were always moving. For the, roughly, one year that the full band was together we were on the road for about eight months of that time. We didn't play in LA an awful lot. Once the record hit we were recording and rehearsing and then we'd go out on the road again.

Did you ever have people come up to you in public?

Yeah, that certainly happened after the band had hit. Whatever town we were in Sean insisted that we wear the black gloves. Which I found sort of embarrassing, but "that's showbiz". We'd have people come up to us and say "Hey, you must be the Music Machine, you guys are amazing!"

The 2000 Dollar Question: everyone wore the glove on their right hand but you wore yours on your left...

(laughing) Why?

Yeah!

I wasn't much of a keyboard player. But to play keyboard I had to be able to play things articulately with my right hand and you just couldn't with that damn glove on it! The other guys were either holding a drumstick or guitar pick so it wasn't that big a deal.

At what point did the dissolution of the original group occur?

We worked really hard touring January through to March of '67. We came back with a bit of money. But all things considered, for the amount of time we'd been out, there just wasn't a lot of money there. We didn't quite understand this. We went out again after that. We were feeling kinda down because the second and third (single) releases hadn't done so well. The second had done pretty good in the South, but the third didn't do very well at all anywhere. The real disappointing thing was that "Talk Talk" was put out by Original Sound Records, which was this small label. They had never put out a 'current' pop record before. Virtually his whole catalogue was 'oldies but goodies'. He'd bought up the rights to reissue old one-hit R&B bands. The record got distributed through Liberty's distribution network. Liberty was a middle-of-the-road outfit. I can't remember who-all they had, Martin Denny comes to mind - Hawaiian music and crooners, stuff like that. They were not into rock'n'roll and had no concept of how to distribute it. Our manager was shooting out promo copies of the record to radio stations and promoters all over the country, The radio stations would get this thing and they'd throw it on their playlist. It was a lot freer and easier then, it wasn't as tightly controlled on a national level as it is now.

Yeah, it's ridiculous now.

It's just absurd. You can't get a record on. So, the record would get played, the local people would go "Wow! We like that! We want to hear it again, where can you buy it?" Well, they couldn't buy it. And we'd roll into town and the record would be Number One in requests at the radio station. The kids would go crazy when they'd see us perform, but they couldn't buy the record. As a result, since Cashbox and Billboard based their ratings on weekly sales, that record never hit Number One. But compared to other records, if the sales hadn't been spread out over so many months due to such poor distribution, I have no doubt that we would have had a Number One national record out of it. And if we'd had that then we would have had a lot more leverage to do other things and maybe the later releases would have done more. I have no illusions that the second and third releases were not hot records though. I still think "Absolutely Positively" should have been released. I thought it was a helluva good record. So by the Spring of '67 we were getting disillusioned because we weren't trading on a current hit anymore. So the fees we were getting were going down. I think the best we ever did was five grand for one performance. We were typically getting anywhere from $800 to $2,000 at the peak of the record. We were making money but our itinerary was crummy. I was complaining that "We're flying out to Seattle then we're flying down to Denver and then we're going back to LA and then we're going up here" or whatever. If our manager had to take his cut after travel expenses he wouldn't have booked such stupid itineraries. It was really expensive to travel. We did a lot of driving, we did a lot of flying and all kinds of ways.

Sean was getting weird too. He was getting strange. I think he was having difficulty back home with his girlfriend, I'm not positive of this. He was a lot more removed from the band too. He bought Gene Simmons, our original manager's, Cadillac. Here we were driving around in Volkswagens and he was in a Cadillac. He always roomed in his own room whereas the rest of us would double up in pairs. Which was alright but he kept saying, "Well, don't charge any meals or telephone calls to your hotel bill, pay for it out of your own pocket." But he was always having room service come up to his room. He was getting testy and irritable too. I'm sure he too was disappointed that we didn't have another hit to work on. The second album's worth of material never got released while the band was together, other than on singles. Here we had all this stuff, I didn't know what the resistance was, whether someone was trying to get out of contract. We were in the dark on that. We were pretty young. But at one stage Keith and I got to thinking "Man, we're just not making any money," and yet we knew that there'd been a lot of money changing hands. The gate receipts for some of these places we played were really pretty high. $1,200-1,500 was a lot of money back then. Yet we were just barely making $75 per week per man as a wage. We never really saw any more than that. Out of that we had to pay our meals. We got back into LA and Keith and I decided that we'd go up into the accountant's office and look through some stuff to see what we could figure out. I don't know what we expected to find but the first thing we looked at were the airline bills. They were horrendous, we knew that was the case, but we couldn't really make any sense of it. Then we pulled out the hotel receipts; all the invoices were itemized and done up on a per room basis. So it was "Hmm, here's Mark and Ron in this room and here's Keith and me in the other room... and here's Sean." And Sean's hotel bills were horrendous! He was charging all of his meals to the hotel which was in turn paid off the top by the band, by our income. He was making hundreds of dollars worth of phone calls back to LA, which he justified by saying "Well, I have to talk to our managers", but most of the calls were to his girlfriend back home. I don't know if this is true or not but the rumor was that our accountant was hitting on her while he was out of town, which of course drove him crazy. The scuttlebutt was that if he made a big stink about it then the accountant would juggle the figures and steal a bunch of money from him. At any rate Keith and I were looking at these figures and seeing that Bonniwell had effectively made a whole lot more money than us. Not just a little bit but a lot more money than us, just purely from stuff he'd billed in hotel rooms. So Keith and I drafted a letter, which we sent to everybody including Sean and our managers. It basically said that the way the money was being divvied up was inequitable and that, considering what looked like pretty heavy gate receipts, if we couldn't realize 75 or 100 dollars a week in our pockets then we didn't want to do it anymore. Sean basically said "Well, fuck ya, you can take a hike" - and he fired the whole band at once. Which tells you a lot. When an entire band splits from the group leader then something rotten is going on.

How did the band take that?

Well, everybody was kinda shocked but in a lot of ways we knew it was gonna happen. Because Bonniwell was getting real strange. He was under pressure. He'd put himself into debt. I don't know what was going on with him domestically. I'm sure he was disappointed too that the records weren't hitting the way they should have. But he'd removed himself from the band. He was no longer the guy you could share a joke with, he was the guy driving the Cadillac. Which has happened to a lot of bands.

What happened immediately after?

Keith, Ron and I continued to work together in various session/studio projects, some with Curt Boettcher. Mark hired on with Ike and Tina not long after the bust-up of the group, which was real good for him, looked real nice on the resume. He learned a lot.

Did you ever see Bonniwell again?

About a year after the band busted up, maybe 1968, Ron and I hooked up with, I think, Mark. We decided we'd drop in on Sean down in San Pedro. So we went over. It was kind of neat to see him at first but real quickly I got this feeling that "this guy's weird, he's gotten real strange". He'd gotten real dark, kind of twisted.

So he'd changed quite a bit?

Yeah, real strange. We knew the guy who was the guitar player who'd gone on the road with him. A guy named Joe Broomey, from the second band. Real nice guy, good guitar player. He said that he figured Sean was taking acid by that point. There'd be nights when he'd go hang out with Joe after a gig and just start crying. Just kinda flipped out. I don't know what was happening. That time we saw him wasn't a nice experience. He was too off the wall. He played some tapes of the stuff he was working on. It was weird. Just heavy, all these minor chords and strange structures that were fragmented. I didn't like it, didn't like it at all. If I didn't know better I would have said he was a junkie, but I don't think that he ever got into junk.

Have you kept in contact with the other members?

I spoke to Keith Olsen in 1987 when Curt Boettcher died. I've lost track of Mark, I'd really like to hear from Mark. I don't know where he is. I keep in touch with Ron Edgar, he's in Minneapolis, his hometown. He's got his own jazz band.

After you moved to Canada in the early '70s did The Music Machine fade from your memory?

Pretty much. I once saw a copy of the Bonniwell Music Machine album in Kelly's Records here in Victoria in about 1978. It was in the cut-out bin. Also Rolling Stone or one of those magazines ran a 'Where Are They Now?'-type feature in the mid-80s. That's about it.

Considering the whole phenomenon of Oldies Radio, I find that "Talk Talk" nearly never gets played. Have you ever heard it?

I think I've heard it once in the last 25 years, whereas I've heard "Cherish" a hundred times probably. The time I heard it I was surprised, and thrilled.