This post originally appeared on my MySpace page, now dormant. I have slightly edited it for inclusion here.

Instrument Make and Model: Klira Bass Guitar

Color/Finish: Brown Sunburst

Arrival Date: 1968

Departure Date: 1972

Price Paid: $80

The Klira was my first electric instrument, and the first instrument I bought with my own money (not counting the harmonica I used my mother’s Green Stamps to buy a few years earlier). My best friend at the time, Marc Lydiard, had a rock band that rehearsed up the street, and their bass player was leaving because he was graduating high school. Marc offered me the job, but I needed an instrument! I worked a paper route for two months to get the money to buy a bass and an amplifier. It was the only time in my life I have voluntarily risen before 6 a.m. Of course the band broke up before I could join it, but we started another one, Synopsis, that played Doors and Vanilla Fudge songs. Depending on the song, I switched off between the Klira bass and the Harmony guitar now resplendent in its psychedelic model-paint finish. (See the next installment for more about this instrument, coming soon to this space!)

I played both instruments through a Gibson Thor bass amplifier, a justly obscure model that weighed a ton. Somewhere I also acquired a Goya fuzzbox with a treble boost, which I mostly used with the guitar. (It was the sixties, and psychedelia was very popular in West Simsbury, so occasionally I plugged the Klira into it too. Its microphonic pickups screamed like a pigeon caught in a push mower, and my bandmates quickly convinced me that it was a more appropriate effect for guitar.) I can’t remember what it sounded like but it must have been nightmarish.

Synopsis only played one gig, a benefit for the American Indians, and it was a complete disaster. Not only did I want to actually play in public and become a rock star, I desperately wanted to impress Alison Sarvis (a cool hippie girl in my class who helped organize the benefit), with the fact that I was in a band. Alison was a tall, craggily pretty brunette in jeans and turquoise jewelry who swore, made out with boys, and did drugs. She was brighter than she let on, although she did badly in school.

For some reason Alison was one of the few people my age who did not automatically write me off as a hopeless nerd. I think she liked my sincerity, as well as the fact that I was too timid to be as obnoxious as most of the males my age were. Her friendliness, as female friendliness so often does, planted the seeds of yearning for a closer affiliation, although I had no real clue as to what such an affiliation would entail, or how to go about cultivating it.

I did once walk several miles to her house to visit her during vacation. Alison’s mother, Mrs. Dolby, and brothers were much wilder than she was. (The idea that she had a different name from her brothers and mother was hard enough to digest. No one my parents knew had ever been divorced.) The brothers were really half-brothers, products of an earlier marriage. Neither marriage had lasted. Although I was familiar with the concept of half-brothers from my extensive study of English history, I had never actually met any. Nor had I ever met a family where people with different last names lived under the same roof.

Every time Mike Dolby, the oldest one, got out of jail he would celebrate by getting blitzed at the same club, get busted for crashing into things or cars in the parking lot, and go back to jail. He did this for years and years, at the same nightspot in Tariffville. It changed names several times, and yet every time I went back to Connecticut and read the Simsbury news in the Hartford Courant, it seemed that there was an item about Mike Dolby being arrested in the parking lot for drunken driving. It was a family tradition.

When I went to visit Alison, her mother gave me a warm, somewhat offhand welcome, despite the fact I had showed up without warning. I was invited to stay for lunch. While watching Mrs. Dolby prepare the meal, I noticed that she kept the butter in a kitchen cabinet instead of the refrigerator. Rather shocked, I asked her why and she pointed out that if the butter was left out of the refrigerator, it would stay soft and could be spread immediately on the white bread they toasted in copious quantities. The traditional New England belief in delayed gratification was not big in the Dolby household.

I wasn’t sure whether the thousands of microbes that had to be growing on the butter or the lack of nutrition in the white bread they proudly served me was more unsettling. (We ate only Pepperidge Farm Whole Wheat because it was more nutritious. My mother would have cut off her hand before opening a loaf of Wonder Bread.) It was clear that not everyone lived as we did. It didn’t stop me eating the toast, though. I rationalized that the intense heat probably killed whatever germs were waiting to leap off the bread and give me bubonic plague. Besides, I was a teenager, I was hungry, and it tasted good.

In the normal course of events, I would never have dared to speak to Alison, except that we had both worked on the junior high school’s underground newspaper together. This daring and revolutionary journalistic endeavor consisted of two to four mimeographed pages surreptitiously printed on the school machine and then stapled together by hand. Marc, being obsessed with the Zen of cool and sharing a fondness for illegal behavior and substances with Alison, already knew her and dragged me along, as he tried to do with everything, good or bad, that he did.

I knew my parents, who were politically very active, wouldn’t mind if I got busted for writing something. I could tell them I was trying to emulate Tom Paine. It also seemed like something at the cutting edge of cool that I might actually be able to do. (My brown shoes with laces, white socks, loose pants, and sober shirts, combined with my terror of alcohol, drugs, and petty mischief otherwise condemned me to terminal unhipness.)

I never got around to committing any illegal acts, but I did write articles for the paper. As I remember it, the primary topics were the Vietnam war (we were, of course, opposed), cool bands (all the usual psychedelic suspects), feminism (Karin Norton’s contribution: Karin was another beautiful brunette who became a friend later, and was way ahead of just about everyone I knew, including me, on this issue), and the right for students to smoke in school. Unfortunately (or not), I don’t have any examples of my first endeavor into journalism. I can’t even remember the name of the paper.

I do remember one of Karin’s opening sentences in one of her feminist diatribes: “One thing that really pisses me off…” I was amazed that she would say something this crude in print. Of course, we were an underground newspaper, but still, this was not the sort of reasoned philosophical argument I was used to seeing. Nobody ever swore (meaning saying “damn”) in my house, except when discussing Richard Nixon. I was appalled, but intrigued, at Karin’s courage and audacity. And her writing was direct, well reasoned, and forthright. Between Karin, Alison, and Marc, I was beginning to realize that there were other ways of doing things than those I had been brought up to believe in.

Which brings me back to the story. Prior to the gig, I had entertained triumphant fantasies of our rapturous reception, instant status among my peers, an end to the sneers and taunts of upperclassmen, and the wonder and amazement in Alison’s eyes as she witnessed my emergence as a Superman of rock from the phone booth of mundane high school existence. Maybe she would want to go steady!

It was the first time that the music business would disappoint me, but far from the last. To be polite about it, we were awful. The other guys in the band, who were supposedly more experienced than I was, froze with nervousness when confronted by a jury of their peers. Guitarist Greg Allen, Marc’s good friend who had moved away the year before, came all the way back from Newtown just to sit in on our big psychedelic version of “Shotgun,” the climax of our set. Marc had assured me that Greg was the best guitarist he had ever seen, and that with him aboard, this song could not fail, no matter what happened before it.

Greg tried his best. He riffed madly and at length, to absolutely no response. Then I took a bass solo. I summoned every ounce of my feelings for Alison—my muse, my bad, but not too bad, dream girl—and attempted to channel them, to turn them into glowing lightning bolts of devotion aimed directly at her heart and soul. This, after all,w as what music was for: the declaration of undying love to the object of your devotion, for the world to hear. Wasn’t it? Few are more romantic than those who know nothing of romance.

Unfortunately, I played an F when I meant to play an E, and panicked. My fingers wandered aimlessly around the fretboard. I felt nauseous, like the stage of the Eno Memorial Hall had opened into an elevator shaft gaping at my feet. I couldn’t figure out how to stop, but I couldn’t think of anything coherent to play either. The song fell as flat as if it had been… shotgunned. Almost everybody, including  Alison, went outside while we were playing and smoked cigarettes. Nobody clapped. Nobody.

About the only way the gig could have gone worse was if we had closed the show. The other band, Burnt Suite, came on after us and absolutely killed. Everybody came running back in as soon as they started playing their awesome Creedence Clearwater Revival covers. Even as competitive as I was, I had to admit that they sounded great and I thoroughly enjoyed their set. As a result of the gig, Alison ended up dating Billy Florian, their lead guitarist. The resulting trauma nearly ended my musical career before it started.

Synopsis rehearsed for a while longer and played once more, at a private party at Marc’s house that his older brother gave while his mom was away. We had gotten better. And this time we actually got eight bucks each, my first professional gig. But since our audience consisted of ten or fifteen couples under blankets and cushions making out with each other under the glow of a couple of black lights, our performance was met with the same indifference that we had endured at the Eno. It was shortly after this that we gave up.

After Synopsis broke up, I decided I was more interested in the guitar than the bass, and stopped playing it. My junior year in prep school, I auditioned for a group in town named Granite that was already up and running. Despite initially forgetting to plug my amp in, and enduring five minutes of terror until somebody else figured out what the problem was, I played well and got the gig. Soon we were playing church functions, school dances, and battles of the bands, and getting paid for it. I was a working musician at the age of sixteen.

Granite’s bass player, Kim Goldich, was unlike anyone I had ever met. One of the few Jews in an overwhelmingly WASPy world and from a family that was even more left wing than mine. Kim was ballsy, outspoken, passionate, fiercely dedicated to music, and brilliant with tools of all kinds. (He built an entire PA system from scratch for one of our later bands.)

He and I really hit it off at the first rehearsal, and I invited him over to visit the next weekend. He brought with him “Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade,” a two-album set of nonstop classics, most of which I had never heard. By the end of the day, we were friends for life.

Since I really wasn’t interested in the bass any more, I ended up giving the Klira to Kim,who was unhappy with his current instrument, a Vox teardrop bass with a built-in fuzztone and a tuning oscillator. Unable to afford a new bass, in typical Kim fashion he decided he would build his own in spite of the fact that he knew nothing about how to do it. The Klira died a noble death as he disassembled it for parts, many of which resurfaced on his new instrument, which was more functional than it had any right to be. Although he did play his creation for a while, eventually he bought a Fender bass like everyone else did and life went on.

Alison eventually went out to the Southwest to work with Native American tribes on reservations. Kim and I went to college and continued to play in bands together. Shortly thereafter I lost touch with everybody else I’d grown up with in West Simsbury, including Marc Lydiard, except my cousins. (Karin Norton would reappear briefly in my life at a later date.)