Son, You're Gonna Need A Gun On This Tour

When The Strawberry Alarm Clock toured with the Beach Boys, we shared their private plane. One night a bus picked all of us up at the charter terminal. The bus had no interior lights. I remember it was noisy in there. I was sitting toward the rear of the bus. Mike Love had crawled up onto the luggage rack above the seats and crawled all the way to the back of the bus. Suddenly, he fell off the luggage rack and onto my lap...NAKED! Oh yeah...real funny. That was the same time Dennis Wilson got a hold of my new Kodak camera and shot a whole roll of film in 10 seconds. It's tough being 18 and on the road for the first time!

In April 1968, we departed L.A. in the Beach Boys private airplane (it was the Clock, the Buffalo Springfield on their final tour, and the B-Boys on board). Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed the day before in Memphis, TN. We were scheduled to land in Memphis but there were reports of snipers at the airport, so we were re-routed to Nashville where we checked into the Holiday Inn.

That night at the hotel there was a guy going from room-to-room with a huge flight case filled with hand guns. This was a scary time in the South. It seems almost everybody on the tour bought one, so I did too. I had never fired a gun before. But on every show we did anywhere in the South, everybody who'd bought a gun went on stage with it tucked in their pants. Idiots, eh? What was I thinking?!

When the tour ended, we had a gig in Wilkes-Barre, PA. In back of the hotel there was a vacant lot, so I thought it'd be good time to go out early in the morning and try out my new "piece". I fired my .38 revolver a few times. Man...it was LOUD! When I got back to the hotel, I realized that I was DEAF! I could hear...but everything was really muffled!! NOT GOOD for a working guitar player.