In 1970, I left Fleetwood Mac to come to America to work with the Byrds. Quite the stranger in a strange land, my first month in California found this Englishman building equipment for the road, moving into a new house in Sherman Oaks with Jimmi Seiter, the Byrds road manager, and meeting all the group’s families. Roger, his wife Ianthe, and his two sons, Patrick and Henry, lived high in the Hollywood Hills. I have fond memories of playing pool there and checking out Roger’s toys, including a huge Moog synthesizer with wires going back and forth in organized chaos.

During the pre-cell phone days of the 1970s, CBs (citizens’ band radios) were kings of the road; everyone who spent any time on America’s highways had a CB for communication. They were an essential road tool—great for speed traps and accident alerts, as well as for finding gas stations and places to eat while traveling. Popular among truck drivers, Roger had a CB base station at home, units in his Porsche and other cars, and a portable one that he carried with him. Clarence had a CB unit too, and he and Roger would talk to each other all the time, using the 10-codes and other CB lingo, and sometimes setting up practical jokes on the other band members.

However, Roger’s most spectacular toy at that time was his low-powered laser. Sometimes at night, Roger would point his laser across the canyon road through a window onto a white wall in the living room of an unsuspecting neighbor watching television. The laser burst would shine a spot of light on the living room wall, freaking out the man who would look everywhere searching for the light source. Roger, of course, used binoculars to watch the man and would turn the laser off just as the man turned toward the window. In those pre-terrorist days, Roger often took the laser on the road, amusing the band as he annoyed bewildered victims with his practical jokes.

Clarence lived in the San Fernando Valley with his wife Susie and children, Michelle and Bradley. Their hospitality was unbelievable—Susie made me feel at home the first time I met her. She turned me on to grits and biscuits and gravy for breakfast. The rest of the White family lived near Clarence, except for Roland, his mandolin-playing older brother who lived in Nashville. I immediately hit it off with Clarence’s dad, Eric Senior (to distinguish him from Clarence’s bass-playing younger brother, Eric Junior). A gravely voiced French Canadian from Maine, Eric Leblanc had a quick laugh and contagious musical wit—it was he who imbued his sons with a love of country music and taught them to play at an early age.

Like many men his age, Eric had many talents, including carpentry skills. Shortly after I arrived on the Byrds scene, I had Eric build some speaker enclosures for Roger’s Moog. Constructed with Russian Birch plywood and filled with JBL speakers, the cabinets were huge and heavy. We carefully loaded them into Eric’s old pickup and set off slowly for Roger’s home. As we were going up the ramp to the freeway, a car suddenly shot out of nowhere into the wrong lane, hurtling towards us. Twisting the steering wheel, Eric turned us away from the oncoming car, stepping on the gas pedal at the same time. The pickup’s front end raised up like a neighing horse as the car veered off to our left. Eric quickly eased off the gas, and the truck clanged back down to the road. We continued on as if nothing had happened.

“Them cockroaches get big on Friday nights,” Eric chuckled. “Now, let’s get these speakers to Roger!”

Skip Battin, the Byrds bass player, lived in Laurel Canyon with his wife Jackie and son. As Skip and Flip, he and his pal Gary Paxton had a hit single back in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, a cover of “Cherry Pie.” One of his friends was Kim Fowley (“They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha”), an LA music scene fixture who has worked with Jonathan Richman, Joan Jett, and Warren Zevon, as well as on the soundtracks for American Graffiti and Ciao Manhattan. Kim was making punk records years before punk was a music genre. He had a beach apartment, where he brought his dates, with nothing in it except a bed.

One Christmas, Skip’s father, a retired school teacher and football coach, came to visit from Ohio. A Nichiren Buddhist, Skip was fond of good herb, and often smoked before he began chanting. His father was unaware of his smoking habits, so one afternoon, Skip baked brownies full of hash and grass to keep the notorious smell of pot out of his house. The next morning, Skip’s dad had arranged for one of those tourist bus tours of the stars’ homes. Awaking a little late but before any of the musicians in the house were up, he left for the bus tour with a cup of coffee and a couple of brownies that he took from a plate on the kitchen counter.

When Skip got up, he noticed some of the brownies were gone. As he began interrogating his family, Jimmi and I arrived. Every one denied taking the brownies. Jimmi began to smile.

“Um, Skip, maybe your dad took them?” asked Jimmi. “When did he leave?”

“Ohhhh…” said Skip, as he backed off from accusing his son. About supper time, Skip’s dad returned, obviously tired but happy.

“Where’s the brownies?” he asked, pouring a glass of milk. “I’m really hungry, you know, and those sure are good. You know, Skip, this smog is so bad they had to close all the windows on the bus. It’s so bad that it made me light headed—I was a little unsteady. But, man, those houses are amazing—what amazing colors! And the landscaping! I’ve never seen such green! Now, where are those brownies?”

Skip’s dad had a relaxing time in LA, a triumphant tourist visiting Disneyland, the LA Coliseum, the Rose Bowl, the Griffith Park Zoo, and the planetarium, always taking a brownie or two with him, even after Skip told him that the brownies had been laced.

Gene Parsons lived in West Hollywood, very close to the Troubadour club, with his wife, two kids, and a big, red pickup truck. A real-life throwback to the gold miners who settled California, Gene is the real deal when it comes to Western homesteading. Sporting a handlebar moustache, the man can build roads and houses where there are none. Just find him a piece of land, and he’ll do the rest! Gene worked with Clarence in creating the B-Bender, a modification of Clarence’s Telecaster that bends the B-string to give a pedal steel sound.

Anyway, Gene knew I was interested in the old West, a fascination that started when I was six and won a contest to met Roy Rogers in England. One day, Gene picked me up in his red truck and we drove to Yucca Valley, near Joshua Tree and Twenty Nine Palms in the Southern California desert. Gene turned off the highway onto a road that turned to dirt in about two miles. Suddenly the road ended and right in front of us was a small, one-room house built from mud and logs on a verdant plot of land with a natural spring, looking incongruous in this barren landscape.

Jumping out of the truck, I followed Gene into the house.

“This is where I lived when I was a kid,” said Gene. “My father and some Indians who worked with him built this place—the house, the water towers. They cleared the land, grated the roads, cleaned the spring, and prospected for gold in a couple of the streams in the valley. My dad only found a bit of dust now and then, but he loved it here.”

“One day in the 1950s, a federal agent showed up while my dad’s welding inside a huge water tank. Now my dad don’t believe in paying taxes—he homesteaded, cleared his land, and built his house on his own. Don’t need help from the feds and don’t expect they need help from him either. So the agent goes to my stepmom, who says she
don’t know where dad is. Tells her he’s here checking for communists, and he’ll wait. Well, sir, after an hour or two in the 100 degree temperature, he finally decides he’s seen enough and leaves his card for my dad to call.”

Gene’s dad eventually moved to Northern California, taking his heavy machinery with him to mill trees and to build more roads and houses. If you look on a map of Yucca Valley, you’ll see Parson Ranch Road, just off Yucca Trail. That day, before we left the area, Gene took me to a ghost town that dated back to the 1880s. I stood in the middle of the main road with tumbleweeds blowing by the swinging doors of a dilapidated saloon and the lonesome frames of decrepit buildings, imagining I was six years old again and dressed in the cowboy outfit that Mum had made for me when I met Roy Rogers.

Watch: “Old Blue” [at youtube.com]

Tags:The Byrds, Dinky Dawson

Read more from My Life Is the Road:

The Kinks Do the Felt Forum

The Return of Spanky and Our Gang

Fleetwood Mac: Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London