A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER VIII
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
Being down in the city could be fatal, literally fatal. I must maintain my Santa Fe high. So, I sang with the record player overhead in the tower. That was what I did all my life. Whenever I was sad, and horny, lonely, rejected by chicks, empty, I’d ask to be lain down in my room with the record player or the radio on full blast. Alone, I’d sing with the music … moving around the bed dancing, being the lead singer on stage. By being totally free in that way, I got rid of the pent-up feelings and energy. At first, I had to be alone to do this.
When someone was listening, I’d tense up and the sounds wouldn’t come. What do they think; do they think that my sounds are awful, or do they think I’m crazy? These were my thoughts when I wanted to sing along with the car’s radio. I would start, but something blocked me. In high school, I broke through something and sang along whenever I felt like it, ignoring people when they asked, “Do you want something?” or “What’s the matter?” Weird. I couldn’t talk, but I could carry the melody when the radio was on, or at rock concerts where no one else could hear me. I couldn’t sing by myself. I always wanted to ask the speech therapists about this, but never did.
Magical Mystery Tour was on. The people in the shop didn’t know that I was the lead singer beckoning them.
“All aboard for the Magical Mystery Tour! Step right this way!”
It was me, “Day after day, alone on a hill, the man with the foolish grin keeps perfectly still. Nobody wants to know him. They can see that he’s just a fool and he never gives an answer. But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and in the eyes in his head, sees the world spinning around.”
I was always the singer, always the deejay too. Had a few hits. Do you remember “Tennessee Waltz”? That was my first hit. Worked in Dayton, Ohio; before that, sang “On a Bicycle Built for Two”. I exercised my legs on the bed. After trying to get Kellogg’s Sugar Pops off the bed into my mouth with my tongue. I wasn’t satisfied with those songs. So, I went to Morocco for two years to study the Arabic music. Weird flowing sounds come from human guts. But it didn’t feed me, so I got a job in the Armed Service Radio in Casablanca. Between radio shows like The Breakfast Party, Ozzie and Harriet, The Green Hornet, Fibber McGee and Molly, and the classical and jazz shit, I sang my songs. At first it was things like “Rockin’ Robin” and “Rock Around the Clock”. It was better, but still my songs were missing something.
“Well on the way, head in a cloud, the man with the thousand voices talking perfectly loud. But nobody ever hears him or the sound he fears to make, and he never seems to notice.”
When I sang “You are Nothing But a Hound Dog”, it made a change. ‘They’ were still writing the songs that I sang, and ‘they’ were still hiring the band and the singers to back me up. But ‘they’ allowed me sexual image and I expressed the real feelings of The Teenagers.
I was a smash, the biggest thing to hit the world … I was hired by the radio station KLO in Salt Lake City and Ogdon, Utah. I signed a nine-year contract. At first, I did good shit like ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘King Creole’, ‘Wake Up Little Suzy’, ‘Suzy Q’, but at the end of nine years, ‘they’ were having me do things like ‘Splish Splash’, ‘One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People Eater’, and ‘Teeny-Weeny Itsy-Bitsy Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’.
After the contract ran out, I hid in Germany for two years doing a new show, ‘The Stars and Stripes’, for the Armed Services radio, but ‘they’ were still into 1940 soap operas and comedies, canned jazz and boring classical music. Radio Luxembourg finally hired me to do a rock ’n roll show in English every night from seven to midnight. So while the U.S. LISTENED TO THE MUSH BY Fabian, Bobby Ridell and Paul Anka, I was experimenting in Europe.
“And nobody seems to like him. You can tell what he wants to do, and he never shows his feelings.”
I came back to the U.S. in ’63 to make a different kind of music: ‘folk’ or what I thought was folk. ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, and ‘Daddy Let Your Mind Move On’. I wrote these myself.
Out of work. I hid in the piavika Birdcage with a short chick with a tiny mole on her third eye who was in the Blue Grass Band. I demanded the total control over my music. ‘They’ gave it to me, but ‘they’ couldn’t understand why. My lead was my first real friend, Bill Webb.
Bill wore an old green Army jacket, blue jeans and black stovepipe knee boots. His glasses kept slipping off his babyish face and his brown hair kept growing longer and longer as time went along, which freaked most people out because long hair hadn’t come into fashion yet. We got the rest of the band together and called it The Unicorn.
After our first few hits, ‘I Want To Be Your Man’ and ‘She Loves You’, we could do anything. With the money that was pouring in, we bought a mansion with a farm where we, the band, could live along with our friends. Our music studio was in the attic, and we had a nightclub in the basement where we sometimes played for our friends. Sometimes we charged money that we gave to the civil rights and the peace movements. I always had a reason for being in the group. To meet a lot of people worth knowing. That was the fun about being me. It was fun jamming with all of those people, melting them into the group, into the Unicorn.
Our always changing was the secret of all our hits. I picked people who had a lot of talent. While they were developing their talent in the group, they made The Unicorn grow and change. When they matured enough to think- or to know- that they could make it on their own, they left The Unicorn, returning sometimes just to jam. The back-up group kept changing for the next two years, but I, as the lead singer, and Bill, as the lead guitarist, remained the focal point for the group. Then, in the summer of ’66, Bill split to San Francisco to do a folk protest gig. I wanted to go too, but I was under contract to ‘they’, who built a bigger studio to ease my sadness. I found another lead guitarist, but I wasn’t close to him like I was to Bill.
“He never listens to them. He knows they are the fools. They don’t like him.”
Alone again. I had the group, The Unicorn, but I wasn’t close to them. So, I started rebuilding the band. Finally, during the winter of ’67, The Unicorn was the way I wanted it. It was our best year under ‘they’ with acid rock. We were a queer-looking band, but we were close to one another. For a short while, we changed our name to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, but we changed right back to The Unicorn.
We were a queer-looking band to ‘them’, but we loved one another, and we loved our fans. We were close; that was the important thing. There was Phil DeWitt, the lead guitarist. Hitler would have been proud of Phillip, outwardly the ideal of the master race. Blonde crewcut and pink skin. He was a tall, skinny scarecrow with blue dreamer’s eyes who, when he was in his suit, could con any store clerk. But when Phil wasn’t on his straight looking trip, he went around unshaved and in rags. Phil was from the planet Slarnis. So was one of the band’s chicks – the chick with the two names, Diane and Grace (I never knew which one was her real name and which one she was a going by at that moment). There are a lot of freaky beings on earth who are from Slarnis.