My Travels With Charlie….(Gatewood)

Charlie Gatewood became my best friend, right away..I mean right away, from the minute we met.

Before I ever met Charlie I blew up his Kalamazoo guitar amp in my 9th grade talent show at Roland Park Junior High School. (It was only a blown fuse, actually) I had borrowed it from Courtney Sappington. (A great session guitar player to this day!) I was playing Whole Lotta Love-Led Zeppelin with a band Mike Sciuto put together out of classmates.

Shortly after that  I met Charlie. We we 14 and 16, me being the elder. We hit if off. We were young Hippies, we smoked weed together and LOVED music. We hung out at Govans Presbyterian Church on York Rd-BALTIMORE and oddly enough both his and my Mother are buried there. Charlie and I were both raised by single Moms. We smoked on Mr. Green’s tombstone, in the cemetery, whoever he was…..

Charlie was a musician that I idolized and partially responsible for where I am today. When he was 16 and at The Baltimore Experimental High School he was the lead singer for The Backstreet Blues Band…A REAL BAND!! They were awesome.

When we lived on Seneca Street we had a house band called “Lips on as String” after evidence found in Ed Gein’s house, Ed was a cannibal. A bunch of us lived together in 3 pre-Civil War row houses. Hammond Brown-guitar, Larry Shapirio-drums, Ken Hebden-keys, Charlie-guitar and me on bass.

Lips on a String gear.

In the photo, above, is a Meisel bass that Hammond and I stole from Towson State College. Another time, Hammond and I stole 2 trombones and Charlie cried and told us they belonged to some students so we took them back.

Seneca Street

In 2010 we had a great reunion dinner, 17 of us, most of whom had lived in that house and hadn’t see each other in 35 years. It was funny because Charlie and Larry  just clicked right back, as if no time…..Charlie and Larry (below)

 

One night when we are all drinking heavily, our friend, Dutch, told Charlie to punch him in the stomach. I can hear it to this day…(Dutch) “No, go on…hit me. I won’t hit you back just hit me” (Charlie) “No. Dutch I don’t wanna”. Now, you have to understand, Dutch was the toughest of us…never afraid to fight. Charlie was the polar opposite..our gentlest Hippie. Finally after being egged on for 5 minutes, Charlie says “Ok” and gives Dutch a quick shot to the solar plexus…Dutch dropped like an anvil, to the ground gasping for air.

(Below L to R) Dutch, Hammond, Charlie, Me

I remember the night we went to see Loggins and Messina at The Capitol Center in D.C.. CHarlie was fucked up on painkillers becasue he had just had 4 wisdom teeth pulled, that day. As we were leaving the concert Charlie slipped and rolled down a HUGE flight of marble stairs and landed on his feet at the bottom. THE CROWD CHEERED! He was loose and sedated, like the song says.

L to R Charlie, me, Mike Fitchett, Gail Hedlund, Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina

A bunch of  us moved to Baytown, TX for work and we hated it, except for starting my first real reggae band. Charlie and I had met these 2 heavy duty Rastafarians, Rabbi and Adufo.  We would play in the black part of Baytown, because that is where all the Trinidadians lived and these Rastas were Trinis. We became the band for Lord Brynner/Kade-I-Man. Brynner was star in Trinidad who had sung on Trinidad’s Independence Day. One afternoon Charlie and I sat laughing as these Rasta guys ran over to the neighbors yard and started pulling banana leaves off their plants, as the neighbors looked distressingly out of their window. They guys just needed the leaves to roll spliffs. Our lead singer was a powerful youth named Rabbi and our drummer and master steel pan player was named Steady (Stedman Joseph). We called the band “STEADY”, after him.

In the 70’s, on Baltimore Charlie, Julie Cooke and I were driving southward, down Falls Road, in a misty rain, in his VW Camper bus. His tires were pretty bald and as we came up to a light his wheels locked and we hit the median and rolled, TWICE. We landed on the wheels, facing the opposite direction facing north. All i remember was being in the back with a drum set, cymbals and stands flying by me in slow motion. When we stopped Charlie was under the steering wheel and Julie was still in the front seat spot but her seat had flown out the window. We got out and people ran up to us screaming “ARE YOU ALRIGHT?!!?” We said ” I don’t know, look at us. Are we bleeding?” We weren’t so we got back in the van (the windows had all popped out) and drove home. Weed..it makes you relax.

Baytown

In the mid 70’s Charlie, my girlfriend Gail Hedlund and I moved to Baytown, TX., and after a while, to Lamy, NM, outside of Santa Fe. We lived in what was, once, a General Store where “Billy the Kid” would shop. We went everywhere in his VW Beetle. I remember, that winter, doing about 100 donuts in the church parking lot, in the snow, in Galisteo. WHAT FUN! The place where we lived only had a wood stove for heat. I burned the violin shaped Greco bass (in the band instruments photo above) in that wood stove, not sure why, wish I still had it.Our neighbors had a dog named JIM SMITH and they always called him “JIM SMITH!…JIM SMITH!”..never just Jim.

Charlie reminded me of a time, in Santa Fe, when he, Gail and I walked out of a bar to get something out of her car, with our drinks in hand. 2 cops were right there and they were real jerks. They said we had stolen the glasses and were drinking in public. They made us WALK out of Santa Fe, to the city limit, following us in their patrol car all the way. After we waited a bit, one of us, probably Gail walked back and got her car. Poor girl, we didn’t always treat her well, but, it was her car.

We stayed out there for just one winter but couldn’t find jobs so we high-tailed it back to Baytown where we knew we could make decent money in oil refinery work.

We would often drive up through the Jemez mountains, the Valles Caldera. (a vast volcanic crater) It is a HUGE huge open valley with only one road running through it.

On one of our trips we stopped to smoke some weed and this genuine mountain man came riding up on his horse. He said he could smell our weed and would share his whiskey with us if we shared with him. He was a trapper and hunter who would ride from Taos to Albuquerque and sell his pelts. He said he was 2 days from home, on his way back. After a good while, visiting, a dog ran past us. He said “That’s my dog. He getting dinner. He’ll get one rabbit for me and one for himself.” The dog didn’t even stop to socialize. He was on a mission.

Later on, back in Baltimore, Charlie and I did our first real recording session with a legendary reggae artist, since deceased, named Keith Hudson (The Crown Prince of Reggae).  I had met Keith’s manager, Junia Walker, when me brought Keith’s LPs to the record store I was assistant managing, in Baltimore. I told Junia I played in a reggae band and owned several Keith Hudson records. Junia arranged for Charlie and I to drive up to Queens and meet Keith. We met him at his apartment and talked well into the night, making plans to record. Keith had nowhere to put us so Charlie and I slept in the display window of the shop on the first floor. (We should have sensed we were bound for greatness!) It was an odd ending to our short episode with Keith. He came to Baltimore, we had acquired studio time  and the session was fun. However, after the session Keith insisted we drive him back to Queens even though we had paid for his bus ticket, to and from, Baltimore. When we got to Brooklyn he ranted about not being treated like royalty and got out at a stop light with the tapes in hand. We  never heard from him again and never heard anything about the recording ever being released. The tracks came out later on a retrospective compilation called “Nuh Skin Up Dub”. Unbeknownst to us, Keith had christened us EARTHWORM and put the recording (that WE paid for!) out. 40 years later, you can hear it on YouTube…go figure.

Charlie had a badass ’80’s Punk band called THEE KATATONIX.

9:30 club in D.C. 1985      

Charlie LOVES his bikes!

Charlie and I have been friends almost all of our lives. I love him. He’s the brother I never had. Here’s to YOU, Charlie Gatewood!