Dad's Oral History

It’s 8:26 p.m. He is still in his work clothes, jeans and a sweater. He’s dressed casually, because as the boss of his own consulting company, he designates the dress code. The reception is bad when he answers the phone. He speaks slower, trying to get his voice heard over the hundreds of miles between him and his daughter. She wants a story about his past, about the 60s. He scratches his head, a mop of salt and pepper hair—inclining toward the salt—that will never go bald. His soft blue eyes wander longingly to the UCLA basketball game playing on the TV in the family room. Standing in the kitchen, white sports socks keeping his feet warm on the cold tile floor, he begins to tell her a story.

I was about 17 years old. This was my second band. We were just your typical rock ’n roll band. We played a lot of Rolling Stones songs and stuff like that. This was the psychedelic era, around 1967 or ’68, so we’d wear loud colors and wild ties. Two of us used to wear double-breasted jackets from the 30s that my dad had. Of course, you have to understand, if you’re wearing heavy clothes to play in a band, you sweat like crazy. It was cool, but it was hot.

We played different places around town. There was a radio station in town that played rock ’n roll music. It was a small, local station in Garden Grove only a few blocks from my house. They decided they were going to have a festival where lots of rock bands would play. The whole purpose was so that they could make enough money to keep the radio station in existence.
The bands would play for exposure, they wouldn’t get paid to play. Our band went down to audition. Two guys in the band actually got to know one of the disc jockeys pretty well. The disc jockey would be on the radio in the afternoon. The name of our band was Destiny. One day, I was driving home and I heard the disc jockey say, “This is Gentle Dental. I’m talking to Bill and Scott from Destiny,” and I said, “What?!”

Anyway, we were feeling pretty good about playing in the festival, and actually the radio station said, “Well, you have a good band, you can pick when you want to go on.” There were like thirty bands at the festival that played all day long. So, of course, we were young and we didn’t know any better and it was going to be at this big speedway, the Orange County International Speedway. It was torn down years ago to build houses, but it was in the Irvine area.

So we decided, let’s go on during the evening about 8 o’clock, the featured time. Well, what we didn’t know was that it was going to be very cold out. It was wintertime, probably in the 40s. By the time we even got there, it was so cold, there were not really even that many people. Most of the bands who had any crowd at all were during the day.

And there was another problem in that we showed up to play at the stage and they said, “Oh, you can use your own instruments, but you have to use the amplifiers that are up there.” They played like three bands at the same time on different stages. We were on one of the main stages, and we couldn’t use our own amplifiers. So, when we got up there I was up on one side of the stage and I was playing keyboard. Our guitar player was playing on the other side of the stage and the drummer was in the middle. And I absolutely could not hear anything.

They’d be playing and strumming their guitars, and I couldn’t hear a thing. I couldn’t hear the guitar player. I couldn’t even hear the drummer. I could hear myself a little bit. They couldn’t hear me at all. We couldn’t hear anything. We thought this was going to be our big break, we’re going to be great and all that, and it was a complete and total disaster. People would come up and start to listen to the band, shake their head and walk away.

We were supposed to play for about forty-five minutes, and after twenty minutes, we just packed it in. We were so disappointed. This was supposed to be the big day. We really thought, “This is it. This is our big break. We’re really gonna make it now.”

We couldn’t wait to just get out and never look back. It was horrible.

The amplifiers that they used were just terrible. It was a terrible sound system. This was before Woodstock and all those other festivals, when they really started to learn how to put on a festival. Now, they understand sound systems.

We hoped to make all this money, but as it turns out, there was damage to the speedway from people trampling it, and the money they made from the people coming to the show they had to pay back to the speedway to pay for the damage. They didn’t end up making any money, and as it turns out the radio station went out of business.

That was before festivals were really well organized or anything. This was back in the 60s. It was my second band.