Ah, so many memories and so much time! Should I go in chronological order or strictly for laughs? I've always found that the best place to start is at the beginning of the yellow brick road...
1967, the first week of 8th grade. I'm standing outside in front of Chula Vista Junior High School, and someone re-introduces me to a drummer named Carl Nelson. I had already known him from grade school. He was a year older and already known in the area as the "boy wonder of the drumstick". We start yaking about music and bands (remember, at this time all anyone could talk about is "Sgt. Peppers"!!), and Carl mentions a boy he knows named Jim who plays the bass guitar. He said that his older brother was in a band called "The Generations". I'm afraid that I didn't know the name. They had never played across the street at Vista Square Elementary school! And then Carl told me that Jim was possibly interested in starting a band. He was also telling me about how successful The Generations were and why. To this day, I remember him saying these EXACT words to me. "Well, they have Dwight Squibb." So, who the f--- is Dwight Squibb??!! A few days later, I introduce myself to Jim Youtsey and he takes me over to meet Dwight at Bonita Recording Studio. At that time, the studio basically consisted of a few old tape recorders, a record cutting machine and a beat up pool table sitting in the middle of the room. (The pool table was probably there because he couldn't afford sound baffles.) Pretty impressive stuff for a 13 year old!! As it sounds out, this introduction was not only the front door to the wild and wacky world of the Generations, but also the start of my equally as wacky life in the music business, but that's another story and another website (are you listening, Mike Crammer??).
The band of prepubescent midgets that we started was called "The Colony" and our brush with "Generational Greatness" was just beginning. We couldn't afford real guitars and amps like the big boys, so Dwight would cart us all over to Doug's house so we could use the bitchen equipment that The Generations had acquired with the flowing wads of cash from their many gym and high school dances. I remember Doug's Super Reverb and how new it looked and Wayne's drums. They sounded just like the ones on the my favorite records. We would listen to them rehearse, and hear them work out those three and four part harmonies just like the Reprise of Sgt. Pepper's. Wow! How did they do that??!!
Dwight's job as a crack artist manager was to get us some experience playing in front of large groups of teenagers to better prepare us for the road ahead, so what better way of doing that than having us play during the breaks at The Generations' gym dances? We were in heaven. Thirteen- and twelve-year olds playing in front of blossoming teenage girls, using The Generations' equipment (in 15 minute increments) and having our names blasting out of every AM radio within a 30 mile radius...
Now, that's entertainment!! As we progressed as a band, we would call on the Big Boys to help us as often as we could without over-wearing our welcome. Wayne would come to the studio and tune Bennie's drums for him. Greg would help us with songs by mostly showing his younger brother Jim how to play the bass parts. I remember Greg saying "Boy you really have to know how to use that fuzz box to get a sound like the guitar on "Revolution". And boy was he right! And just by watching Doug, I would learn the subtleties of bending notes and vibrato. And those vocal harmonies!! Were we ever going to get those right??
Back then, Jim and I were great friends and the Youtsey house was a second home to me. There were times when Greg and I would just jam or he would drive us all to the studio in my future Camaro down Pepper Tree Lane. Great times, they were!
Over the next five years, our paths would cross many times. I still remember when "Songmeister John" came into the picture. We were playing at the Battle of the Bands at the old Community Concourse (remember that one guys??) and Lonnie's band "Dragon" was also competing. We were in the Junior division and they were across the room on the bigger stage playing in the big time competition. I do remember that almost every band there played "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (loca)". How many times was I supposed to sit through that damn drum solo!?! When Dragon started playing, I remember Lonnie doing some sort of musical soliloquy for the opening. Very cool stuff! They had this guy who played the organ and the keyboard bass at the same time. How could he do that? Did he have two brains??!! And they played mostly original songs. I was still trying to figure out the extended guitar solo on "Light My Fire"!!
Now I come to the "scattered memories" paragraph of this grizzly little story. Some disjointed Generations/Tacoma thoughts.....
The posters that The Generations hung up at the gym dances ("tease a narc"?? Does memory serve me well on this one??) Doug never wearing shoes on stage. The pink Mustang. The Yamaha [EB: it was a Wurlitzer] Brass Horn that Doug loaned me that made my brittle guitar sound even more obnoxious. Greg telling stories of recording vocals in a "big time" studio in LA. "Wow, we double tracked those background vocals for days!!" Our hand-me-down white busboy outfits that we used to wear. The three-piece incarnation of The Generations and how well they did those Grand Funk songs. Using the ever-loud and obnoxious Acoustic amps that were on loan from (John?? Lonnie??) at the studio... Hey, the Doors used them so they couldn't be all that bad!! "Set Me Free." The box of tapes and 8mm films of the band the Dwight had acquired over the years. We used to listen to the tapes, but mostly, we would watch the movies. We especially loved the one where the curtain closed on Wayne at the end of "Slow Down."
As the years went on, we saw less and less of each other, but there are a few really good memories like the time Tacoma came in to record "Looking for a Way" at Bonita Recording Studio and I engineered. The band I was in at the time was called "Vision" and we were booked to play someplace with Tacoma a few months after. As a tribute and just for fun, we decided to learn "Looking for a Way" note for note and play it as our opening song. We learned it verbatim, including the "sliding sawtooth synth solo" and the four-part harmony middle section (and let's not forget Wayne's two bar drum break which Mark Spriggs copped quite well). I feel like I was at the beginning of Wayne's career with mixing boards when he ran the entire mix of my band through a phase shifter at a battle of the bands. Go Wayne!!!
Those were great days, guys. We should all stop and say a big thank you to Dwight for showing us the way and that you really can have fun and make a few bucks at the same time. But most of all, when we all feel too "heavy" and "adult", we just need to play some of those tapes and think about those wonderful times. So what if Bonita Recording Studio is a storage space now. When Wayne sent me a CD of The Generations about a year ago, it all came right back. It's amazing how magical music can be.