Russell Buddy Helm

David Crosby, Steve Stills, Phil Everly and bumch of other rock n rollers had all thrown in support for the Dolphin Project

excerpt “History of the Groove, drummer’s story” Russell Buddy Helm

© 2013 all rights reserved

David Crosby, Steve Stills, Phil Everly had all thrown in support for Ric’s vision of the Dolphin Project.

1972. Ric O’Berry had a different name when Barbara Bananas introduced us. He had a can of Japanese cat food sitting on a shelf over his narrow stairway entrance.

“I look at it everyday.” he said with quiet conviction. It contained dolphin meat.

He was very happy in his intense, subdued way. The Dolphin Project was getting it’s legal status as a tax deductible organization. People would be able to donate; money and dolphins…

Bobby asked me to help by driving the Asylum’s eighteen foot GMC truck with a 3 ton lift gate out to a lumber yard in South Miami and load up a donation of wood for the pier in the lagoon that old man Ryder had donated to the cause.

“You will have great good karma from this act.” Bobby said to me as we drove the huge truck out through the weekend traffic onto the bridge connecting to Key Biscayne.

Barbara and the other grove girls had worked on the owner of Ryder truck rental company for months at the restaurant and bar where they all worked atop the only high rise in the grove. The old gentleman finally agreed to donate the use of a deserted piece of property at the end of Key Biscayne that had a man made sailboat lagoon, perfect for rehabilitating dolphins.

We could sit in the port-o-let set up among the pine trees, next to the broken coral rock ruins of the old Belcher Oil Mansion and look into President Nixon’s sliding glass doors over on the next finger of developed land owned by B B Rebozo, a businessman of dubious connections.

Hugh Downs donated the first dolphin. Ric worked with him until the dolphin could hunt for himself, then he opened the chain link sea fence and let him go free. If you want inspiration in your life, look to someone like Ric O’Berry. Over forty years later, Ric is still carrying the good fight. This week in Taiji, Japan, September 2013, he is in the water with local demonstrators enlightening the Japanese fisherman about the useless slaughter of dolphins every year as part of their cultural compulsions.

excerpt “History of the Groove, drummer’s story” Russell Buddy Helm

© 2013 all rights reserved

www.buddyhelm.com

Hot Tuna jammed at the Grove Pub on a Sunday afternoon once. It was packed. The place to be. Miami news was shooting. They were using Bethlehem Asylum’s equipment with reluctant acquiesance from the Asylum band members. These guys were rock stars, they destroyed things. Joey Covington broke my snare drum head. He wrote me a check to cover it and I think it actually cleared..

Below downtown Miami, turn off Dixie Highway, through the jungle bungalos and dead end at the Grove Pub, adjacent to the Coconut Grove post office and Winn Dixie. Army green little bar owned by a retired Miami police officer. When the Asylum arrived in 1969, it was a sleepy local tavern. Not much happening. He offered free cold cuts on Sunday afternoons. There were a few regulars. A dart board. A pool table in back. This was the Coconut Grove that had existed for a long time as a stopover for end of the roaders, fishermen, spooks, and poets.

Living on avocados was not good. The bus was parked behind Lease’s house, he was still missing in action. Animal swore that he was hallucinating from too many avocados as he worked on fuzz tones by the light of a candle. We had to do something so I approached Dick and offered to bring in a jazz trio on Sunday afternoon. I had much bigger designs than that but we had to start small so as not to scare him away. We needed his cold cuts.

The effect was like lightning striking a dry tinder box. Word spread; live good music on Sunday afternoon. Christian bounced through the changes of “Work Song”, Charlie shined on flute and I kept up while a cougar draped her leg over Christian’s Wurlitzer electric piano. We were an instant hit. Soon we added Jim and Danny. The dartboard still got used when we took a break.

The recluses of the Grove started to appear. The beatniks retired from the Village. The writers, the photographers, the real artists of American culture who had found a way to successfully hide away in the lush embrace of Coconut Grove. The crowd grew steadily every Sunday. Dick got rid of the dartboard and put in a stage. We were the only band playing live music in Coconut Grove. The live theater next door suffered silently through the thin walls. Vince Martin came in; flip flops, Brooklyn to the bone, and full of heart. he saw the importance of what was happening, he played with us and encouraged us like no other. Then Fred Neil appeared, wild eyed and full of party, I realized that we had accomplished something. Freddie jumped up on the stage and proceeded to play conga drum and sing with us. His followers were aghast. This was not the Freddie they expected. Some of them immediately wanted to make money off of his musical inspiration since it had been a long time since he appeared in public. I saw it as healing. Freddie was in pain, just like the rest of us and the music we were doing was a good voodoo. It healed people.

Otis Redding’s people contacted us, so I went up to Georgia. Duane Allman was playing slide on a mandolin. His scuffed boots were kicked up on the dashboard of his new Winnebago, parked outside a saloon on a desolate country road outside of Valdosta.  He was using his tiny coricidin bottle; high, pure pitched with no string noise- divine sounds. Somewhere outside of time, there will always be a moment where Duane is playing slide on a mandolin under the starry Southern Georgia night, making the most inspirational sounds I have ever heard.

“So what’s goin’ on, man?”

“What do you think of your new record company? Are they treating you right?” I asked, desperate for some solid business advice. The Bethlehem Asylum was still not signed but had been approached by a new label in Georgia. Otis Redding’s  people.

“Well, they got me this Winnebago. And we’re working. It’s OK. You know what I mean?”

He could have been reciting the alphabet and I would have believed him and considered it gospel truth. His playing could bring tears to a stone. If Duane Allman said Phil Walden and Capricorn were OK. That would have to do. We signed some contract that smelled of Dixie Mafia, but what the hell.  We commuted between Macon, Georgia and Coconut Grove. A tough fit for our jazzy, political, folk, psychedelic street theater. The Georgia based Paragon booking management agency that handled the growing roster of Southern Rock bands was not really a good fit for us. Our road manager/liason with the label had been Otis Redding’s road manager. He reminded me of Ike Turner; tough, ex-con. Dangerous. Technically he was white but with the patina of the soul music world.

One of the first things he did was push me out of a second story window, gashing my right shoulder requiring eighteen stitches in the Jackson Memorial emergency room in South Miami, just across the street from the deconsecrated church we had accidentally desecrated a few months earlier. Marilyn, one of our guardian angels, got me a good surgeon in the middle of the night. The upside was that we got to play with the Allman Brothers- the original band with Duane and Berry. Night after night we traveled all over the South. And they never had a bad night.

“Duane is now playing ‘Love Supreme’ by John Coltrane.” Charlie, our sax player, explained to me in the middle of Duane’s slide solo. There was so much great music.

Johnny Winter, Duane Allman and Dickie Betts were jamming with the band in the middle of the swamp in the middle of the night in the middle of Florida that today is Disneyworld. The Winter’s End pop festival had been roadblocked by state troopers. The only bands that got through were Bethlehem Asylum, Allman Brothers, and Johnny Winter. We played for the mud soaked kids for three days. This was a moment of epiphany for me. The improvising between Duane and Johnny and Dickie went to new heights. They were creating new licks, never repeating themselves. Not falling back on cliches. It was fresh, spontaneous, original, flowing effortlessly. They were creating the new vocabulary of rock blues licks that every pimple faced kid has been practicing in their bedroom ever since. This was where it was created. Stuff I had never heard before. In the middle of the swamp with a dead horse not fifty yards behind the stage. I wanted to play like that forever. I wanted that effortless flow forever. I sensed that their source of creativity was different than anyone else’s. They had found a note, a place, a state of mind, a state of grace, where the music was spontaneously created, eternally swinging, fresh and new and totally funky and soulful.

My mother saw us on the news, horrified. Animal, our roadie was sitting on the roof of the school bus she had helped purchase, with women wearing no shirts. Family Easter dinner was painfully strained.

I was sleeping soundly, listening to the rigging on the sailboats, humming and clinking in the trade winds a few blocks away. A clap of thunder woke me. “Something heavy just happened.” I said. Duane had just died.

Capricorn Exit Ampex records got two albums out of Bethlehem Asylum. “Commit Yourself” and “Tales of the Citadel”. Our earnings went up Phil’s nose and into the election campaign of a certain Georgia Governor that became president. The Macon, Georgia music mob threw a lot of weight, for a little while. Hy Shore said we should sue. He felt very confident about the case. I just remembered all the great music I heard Duane play and figured we were even.

Duane Allman’s mouth dropped open. I could see it all the way from up on the stage. His long blonde muttonchops dipped down, almost dusting his paisley pointed shirt collar. He could not believe what he was seeing. He had come down from Macon and dropped by the Bethlehem Asylum’s coming out party at a deconsecrated church in South Miami to give us some moral support.

“It was the scariest thang I ever saw. Me and Red Dog, we got outathere!” He said later.

BAM! Out go the lights…

1971. It was a packed church of record company executives from every label; Capitol, London, EMI, Mercury, Polygram, Warner, RCA, Columbia and over a dozen other companies, all dancing frenetically in the middle of the trashed cathedral. The folding chairs had been discarded as had most of the clothing on most of the record executives. It was a sweltering hot Miami night. The air conditioning kept blowing fuses because the camera lights were draining too much power, and also, there was enough LSD in the drinks to blow everyone’s mind. Electric Larry was a clown type of figure in the Grove; riding a mini bicycle, sporting bright red frizzy hair, wearing circus type clothing. He was Bozo the clown. Harmless. But tonight he took over the bar from Rick and dosed everyone with LSD. Bethlehem Asylum had no idea this was happening. They were backstage drinking Sprite.

Howard was presenting the band to the world in style. He was semi-retired after running the Cafe Au Go-Go in Greenwitch Village for many years. He also handled business affairs for the legendary recluse singer/songwriter Fred Neil. Fred had written “Everybody’s Talking”, the theme for the Midnight Cowboy movie. No, it was NOT written by Nilson. If you want to hear the way it should be sung, listen to Fred’s baritone twelve string version. Fred had also written “Candyman” for Roy Orbison and many other great songs. He was keeping a very low profile in Coconut Grove with occasional trips up to Woodstock. If he ever decided to play music again, Howard was ready; state-of-the-art Ampex four track portable recording machine; larger than a Maytag on wheels. Tonight the four track was ready to capture the Bethlehem Asylum’s historic debut. Plus Ron’s 16mm film crew with lots of lights to capture the magic of the Asylum’s live show. The venue was unique to say the least. The church stained glass windows had been bricked up, the pews replaced by folding chairs and there was a portable wet bar. A large stage with lights and sound system was built up from the alter….

The first couple of songs went well, the crowd was a little stiff. But then record executives were notorious for being unresponsive to even the greatest group’s heated performances. It was a sign of being too hip or something. “Bam!” The circuit breakers blew. The film lights were too draining on the old circuitry in the church. The air conditioning also stopped. We retired to the backstage dressing room and the audience went to the bar. When we returned to the stage after the breaker switches had cooled down, everyone was willing to give it another try. We started playing and the audience started to loosen up. They were drinking heavily from the bar. It was a hot and humid night in Miami.

“Bam!” The circuit breakers blew again. The lights were sucking up electricity and sending out heat. We again retired to the backstage dressing room and waited for the circuits to cool down. By the next set, if we hadn’t been so self absorbed, we would have noticed something odd happening. The audience was REALLY getting down. They were taking their ties off, their shoes, their socks, their dresses, pants. “Bam!” We left the stage and the crowd  groaned in coitus interruptus. They had been dancing and  swaying to the beat; most un-executive like. We came out again, the scene was now Hieronymous Bosch; Garden of Earthly Delights. People were getting very casual, removing most of their clothing. It was very humid and hot in the cathedral. We played some more and they got going. It was a great night. But a very weird audience. I caught a glimpse of an unsettled Duane Allman at the back of the cathedral, by the vestibule with Mike our long time friend and original manager. Then the place went dark again with another circuit outage. We went backstage and waited one more time. The final time on the stage, we looked out at chaos. The chairs were thrown to the sides, clothing and people were strewn about as if a hurricane had passed through. People were wandering around with the thousand yard stare.

We ended as best we could. The music industry executives still present looked totally wasted. We were sweating and hungry so we collected Mike, our manager and headed for Steak and Eggs in the middle of the night down on Dixie Hiway. After we all sat down, I noticed Mike sitting very quietly with his Cheshire grin slightly lopsided. His pupils were pin pricks. “Are  you tripping?” I asked him.

“Everyone was.” He said pulling hand fulls of cash from his pockets and dumping the booty on the table along side the pancakes. “We all got dosed by Electric Larry.”

“What’s all this money?” I asked.

“People just gave me money as they were leaving. All I could do was stuff it in my pockets.”

“No second Chance” is definitely the front runner of all my CDs posted on CDbaby and iTunes. Its getting used for soundtracks as well as streams and downloads. I recorded this as a tribute to the greatest martial arts teacher in the world; Guro Dan Inosanto. He is 75 years old and was Bruce Lee’s partner, appearing in all the movies with Bruce. He contacted me through Francis Echinard, a championship French Savat (kick boxing) champion and great slide blues guitar player who had played with me over the years. Dan wanted me to teach him drumming so that he could use it in his training. He is now considered the father of martial arts drumming and he  still teaches mixed martial arts as well as the” little dragons”(kids), Hollywood celebs like Angie, etc, also real people like the SEALS. The drumming CD is being used all over the world to train to, and for who knows what else (-:
http://www.cdbaby.com/AlbumDetails.aspx?AlbumID=rbhelm2

Jerry Wexler, Aretha Franklin’s producer sat in the empty theater, fourth row, center. “Play another one.” He said mildly.

Bethlehem Asylum surveyed the bleak results of their first self promoted concert in Coconut Grove. One guy.

“Okay.”

We had many angels in Coconut Grove; including Gamble Rogers and Liz Corrigan. Two great, very successful folk singers with a whole lot of heart and soul. Liz notified Jerry Wexler, vice president of Atlantic records. He and the soundman, Kevin, were the only people attending the band’s first gig in the Grove. The bandmembers did not know who he was. We had so much attitude we couldn’t see the incredible gifts that were being given to us. On first arrival, the band  crashed with Liz and Gamble. One of the coolest moments was to cruise the Grove with Gamble Rogers driving his 64 Mustang.  Gamble and Liz were very gracious. Gamble deserved to be a famous singer, storyteller, picker and all around good gentleman if he hadn’t sacrificed his own life a few years later to save a tourist from the deadly St. Augustine undertow.

Charlie took a great sax solo on “Talkin ’bout Love”. Christian switched from Wurlitzer electric piano to trombone for an instant horn section.

The guy didn’t clap. The sixty seat theater on the second floor above the Coconut Grove Post Office had been the venue for existential events like ping pong balls under a black light bouncing on the strings of a grand piano. Right now, it was as silent as a tomb. “You want to hear more music, man?” Danny asked the dark stranger.

“Yeah.” The voice replied calmly. “Play another one.”

John, our first friend and manager along with Animal, our biker/roadie, had loaded the band into our schoolbus after playing Beaux Arts Coffee House, up in Pinellas Park, site of Jim Morrison’s first poetry readings, and headed to Daytona for a rowdy frat party then down to the Palm Beach Pop Festival, performing with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Iron Butterfly, Santana, Johnny Winter, and a bunch of other incredible groups. The Collonades Hotel was an otherwordly jam/riot for about four lost days.

Now we were living on avocados in the grove behind our next new manager’s house. He was gone into rehab on the other side of the state. Great. I was walking with a cane. My feet were painfully swollen. My blood sugar spiked from the rich fruit diet. Males purge yeast through their feet, back then it was just athletes foot. It messed up my thinking too. We  fended for ourselves quite nicely though. The band had social skills. Christian met everyone of importance in the first several days. We posted fliers around the Grove announcing our concert.

We played another song, “Sea Rider”, Charlie and Christian showed off their chops. Robert Christian Ghandi was from Jaipur, India, a Brahmin transplanted to Harlem and raised on jazz. He was the greatest piano player I ever played with. How Christian got to St. Petersburg, Florida was a mystery.

“Would  you like to come over to my place and talk?  Jerry asked strolling up to the stage.

We agreed. There might be food.

After a bewildering night drive through unfamiliar Miami and its beaches we found ourselves sitting in his waterfront house. A huge Cris Craft power yacht floated outside the glass doors.

“Your rhythm section reminded me of Aretha’s players.” He nodded as we listened to outtakes of Aretha. Great stuff that no one would ever hear. Jerry nodding here and there and saying stuff like. “Yeah. You guys are like that.”

We cleaned his kitchen out.

He played priceless conversations with Dr. John at the piano playing and talking about growing up in New Orleans.

Jerry cornered me. “What is it you want to do? You look like you’ve got a plan.”

“I want to have a record label where everyone plays together. They share. A label that’s a family. I want to call it Asylum Records.”

Jerry’s eyes lit up, “Nice name for a record label…..”

We spent the next few weeks in Criteria studio with Bones Howe as engineer, who would go on to engineer the Allman Brothers live at the Filmore, Derek and the Dominos, and many other immortal albums. During these sessions there was tension among the Asylum members.  Jim dealt me a blow when he said he did not like my drumming on his songs. He insisted on re-recording the drum part himself. He was dubbed “Captain Ego” soon after this.

By now we were living in a stucco rental house on Loquat avenue. I picked up the phone extension and heard our next new manager talking. It took me a moment to realize he was talking to Jerry Wexler.

“…that’s it, then. We’re not recording for Atlantic.” Lee said and hung up the phone while Jerry was still talking. I came out and stopped him. “What was that?”

“We’re not recording for Atlantic.” he said coldly and walked out the door. He soon faded out of the picture. I never saw him again.

Fourteen years later, Jerry Wexler walked into my downtown LA art loft accompanied by Glenn Frey of the Eagles. We were shooting video of a singer from Austin they were producing, Lou Ann Barton.

Jerry walked in then stopped when he saw me up on a ladder hanging rear projection screen.  He tried to place me but then said,

“Refresh my memory.”

“Bethlehem Asylum” I said.

“Why couldn’t we sign you?” He asked immediately, and with sincere disappointment.

“Our manager.” I answered lamely but I had other suspicions about why we did not get signed to Atlantic.

“What happened to your sax player?”

“Hall n Oates.” I said.

Jerry nodded, there was a movement of pain in my heart. Maybe his too. The life that could have been. Then we both put it behind us and got on with making Lou Ann Barton the star she deserved to be right now.

Music is fulfilling different roles than it used to. Healing is a big growth market. Thinking about having a hit song in the healing music market is odd, inappopriate. More like drumming therapies that can be streamed at a moment’s notice when the persons need them. This creates a different revenue model for the composer/performer. It is a slow growth market but steady.

Thanks to Barbara Nicolazzo

It was on this day in 1935 that George Gershwin officially completed the score for the opera Porgy and Bess. Nine years earlier, during tryouts for his musical Oh, Kay! (1926), Gershwin picked up the novel Porgy by DuBose Heyward. Set in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina, the book told the story of a crippled beggar named Porgy, a beautiful drug addict named Bess, and her abusive lover, Crown. Gershwin immediately envisioned it as an opera, and he wrote to Heyward asking if he wanted to collaborate. The novelist agreed, but not before he and his wife finished adapting the novel into a play, which had a new ending and became a hit on Broadway. The play became the basis for the opera. Gershwin intended to call the opera Porgy, just like the novel and play.

For several years, the opera was put on hold as George and his brother Ira worked on other projects. Then Heyward wrote to Gershwin with a dilemma: he had received a request for the musical rights to Porgy from a famous white actor, who wanted to play Porgy in blackface and collaborate with a different composer and lyricist. Heyward preferred to work with Gershwin, but he had lost money in the stock market crash and was feeling desperate. He asked whether they could consider bringing the white actor into the project, but Gershwin was adamant that he wanted a black cast, and convinced he could make his own version of Porgy a success even if someone else beat him to it. The other version fell through and was never made.

Gershwin kept hoping to find time to devote himself to the opera, which he called “a labor of love” — but he needed money, so he continued accepting smaller jobs that promised a decent cash flow. Finally, he found the break he needed: a lucrative gig hosting a radio show in New York, Music by Gershwin, which was sponsored by a laxative chewing gum called Feen-A-Mint. Gershwin became the target of plenty of jokes, but he said afterward that without Feen-A-Mint gum, there would be no Porgy and Bess. It took him almost two years to finish the opera — 11 months to write it and another nine months to do the full orchestration. About orchestrating, he wrote to his brother Ira: “It goes slowly, there being a million notes.”

While he was writing Porgy, Gershwin received a letter from a young soprano named Anne Brown. She was a star graduate student at Juilliard; she had heard that Gershwin was writing an operaand wanted an interview. At his request, she came to his apartment to sing for him. She brought music by Brahms and Schubert, and Gershwin played along as she sang. Then he asked her to sing a spiritual. Brown was offended and told him so — she didn’t think black people should be expected to sing spirituals. He backed off, but she changed her mind and sang “A City Called Heaven” a cappella. Gershwin was so moved that he was speechless. Not long after that, he called Brown back, told her that he had written the first 33 pages of his opera, and asked if she would come over again and sing the role of Bess. From that point on, he wrote with her in mind, and she often came over to sing new parts for him. Before the show opened, he asked her to meet him a café for an orange juice, and told her that he had decided that her role was so important he was changing the name of his opera from Porgy to Porgy and Bess.

Rehearsals for the opera began in August of 1935, before the finishing touches were put on the score. After the first day of rehearsals, the opera’s director felt overwhelmed and depressed, but that night while he was in bed, he got a call from Gershwin, who said: “I always knew that Porgy and Bess was wonderful, but I never thought I’d feel the way I feel now. I tell you, after listening to that rehearsal today, I think the music is so marvelous — I really don’t believe I wrote it!”

Despite many positive reviews, Porgy and Bess was a commercial flop, running for only a few months and losing its initial $70,000 investment. The composer used his royalties from the opera to pay back the copyists who had prepared the score. Gershwin died unexpectedly of a brain tumor two years later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWtEeqXwh7I