Becoming Keyzie: Tuning Out, Turning On, Dropping In...Permanently.

I had played in the Keys with a different band previously but for “The Photons” it was our first gig ever at Holiday Isle. We only got the gig because the band that was on the schedule quit!

The booking agency is a control freak entity that would love to carbon copy their idea of the ideal band. That's why the music business is dying. They expect all of their bands to fit into Top 40 Dance or Top 40 Country…"there’s no money in Rock and Roll, Jazz or Blues, boy...What's the matter with you?"

All bands had to include a female singer. We never gave it any consideration as the universe never introduced one to us...Road bands were comprised of whomever you could find at the time willing to go on the hotel/resort/motel circuit.

Needless to say we were the last band the booking agency wanted to send to a ”premium commission gig” that ALL the “non-talent” types were in heavy competition to monopolize. They were afraid we would ruin their already soiled reputation. The bitch of it is they never even bothered to show up to watch us play so they had no idea what our show was like but the Isle loved us.

Agents are some of the most insulting human beings on the planet to have to deal with, just like politicians and preachers. They see their fellow man as a commodity to be controlled and sold.

Two weeks in the Keys at the Tiki Bar, how could you fuck that up? We had just finished playing at Boston’s on the Beach in Delray Beach and were looking at an empty slot in our schedule so we were way excited to get a 6 night a week for two weeks gig and being in the Keys was icing on the cake, for me anyway.

"I can resist anything except temptation" (Lady Windermere's Fan) Most bands first time to the Tiki bar always has "hiccups" to be polite. There is so much to do during the day- fishing, snorkeling, drinking- a lot of guys can’t make it until 2AM…unless you're willing to take a sniff of what was all around in high quality and quantity, offered for free for band members back then.(She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie...J.J Cale)

Day drinking and getting invited out to the sandbar where the daytime action was (probably still is) is another stumbling block, it’s hard to recover from a daytime, sun beat hangover by the 9PM start time unless of course...”Ooo That Smell”(Ronnie Van Zant).

Behind the stage at the Tiki Bar was Bimini Row with shops on one side and docking slips on the other. The boats that docked behind the stage were PARTY PEOPLE like we had never seen. The band would go on a break and at the side door to the stage the owner(s) of the luxurious yachts were waiting, inviting us aboard to party with the type of people you see on wealthy lifestyle magazines- nude Adonis and Aphrodite physiques…snorting cocaine off of each other, sucking Patron tequila out of one another's belly buttons, enjoying life for all the poor souls trapped by sorry, inhumane conditions in places that SUCK!

It was the first time some of us had been exposed to the lifestyles of the rich and famous.. Yes, I did snort cocaine from a tan, buxom butt with skin softer than silk while gazing at the bountiful breasts of her impossibly beautiful friend…the kind of shit you only hear about other people doing for fun. Not bad for a back sliding Southern Baptist from TiteAssville, Fl that was told "music won't get you anywhere... Boy!

Doing the usual 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off set times didn’t work. At a resort as large as Holiday Isle it takes 30 minutes just to build a crowd and as soon as the band takes a break the people wander off. So we would play 1.5 - 2 hour sets to hold the crowd. The bartenders would tip us out for keeping the crowd and selling more booze thus generating more money for the resort and better than average tips for everyone.

JR the night manager and entertainment director was one of the few managers that was also an entertainer and he would give us bonuses for beating the previous sales for the date. Very rare meritocracy. The Saloon #10 in Deadwood, SD did the same thing when we beat the sales record for the dates we played. That doesn't happen at Holiday Inns or Hilton's.

After hours always found most band members at Hog Heaven getting post gig food and cocktails. The spot to be was out back on the ocean. They had a live hog in a pin and a rope barrel “hog” strung across the water from the docks which young drunk chicks were encouraged to “ride” with four testosterone and alcohol fueled guys pulling the ropes, making the riders breasts bounce joyfully for the cheering crowd, the young beauties trying to hang on for the 8 seconds (like bull riding), usually ending up topless in the water. And that was a Tuesday night.

The entrance had a long glass display case with t-shirts and other Hog Heaven paraphernalia for sale. Our first night in town and our drummer sits on the display case, the glass top shatters and somehow he avoided getting cut by the sharp shards of glass sticking between his legs and hands. A couple of friendly bouncers helped the drummer out of the case, managing to extract him without castrating him on the broken glass. He took off in his van before they could ask him to pay for the damage. Sorry about that, Larry.

Lucky for us these were the days before extensive surveillance cameras and being new in town they didn’t get a good look at him or for that matter figure out that I was with him as the Hog was THE late night place to be for younger party people and fun seekers in Islamorada. The people were friendly, the food was good and I didn’t want to get barred…

I didn’t know it at the time but I met a group of friends that night that the wife and I are still friends with to this day (shout out to Peter, Dave, Ryan, Chris, Max) though sadly cancer took one of them #fuckcancer. The older you get, the more dead people you know until you are one of them- that’s why it’s important to be good to each other now.

Holiday Isle had recently acquired the Harbor Lights Motel on the old road between the Isle and the Hog…it was a great place to put the band as the accommodations were away from the main resort and stood alone with only one other attached room for the band guys to annoy or be annoyed by. Resorts always stick the rowdy people by the band...

I really liked the fact that Harbor Lights had a boat ramp so very few guests were there to use the pool which for a sun sponge like myself it was like my own private pool with no one relieving themselves in it other than the seagulls. I practically lived at the pool.

You see, I had stayed in a lot of band rooms/accommodations that made me ill… band rooms are notoriously the least desirable and/or least maintained places on the planet (DO NOT go in a band room with a blacklight...) so to guard against coming down with an allergy, sore throat or other upper respiratory disease I would sleep outside on a chaise lounge in the ocean breeze. I still sleep outside quite a bit, especially during the cooler months. Air conditioning can be bad for you.

It's embarrassing because the crowd doesn't know/care that you are sick... they only know you SUCK. When you sound like shit you can't make good tips. In the Photons we had three singers so the band gets through the night minus the songs I sing, "Sorry, I can't sing that one tonight" is not what puts money in the bucket.

Being in a road band and needing an opiate based cough syrup is a tough proposition. Having asthma, I would cough and cough without ceasing until I had laryngitis so having access to opiates was critical but when a long haired musician, regardless of how sick, shows up at a doctors office, they end up getting the shit eye more often than not. It's not all the doctors fault because they didn't have access to my medical records and I couldn't carry them around... So staying vocally healthy is my top priority to this day. God Bless Dr. Deagle, RIP and thank you for treating me like a person.

I grew up in a house without air conditioning in Florida so I don’t mind the humidity. Sleeping is a misleading representation of what actually occurred though. I would party with people from the resort or where ever all night and would pass out after our “guests” left usually around 7AM or whenever the alcohol ran out.

If it didn’t rain hard I would usually come to about 4PM and go for food at the Townsite Grocery store because if the fellows that worked there liked your band they would hook you up. They were rockers. They hooked us up. God Bless you guys for feeding us real food.

The electrical grid was a far cry from the hardened system FKEC provides us now. The power at the Isle was exceptionally poor in those days. A ”brown down” is when the incoming voltage is insufficient to supply the power required to operate the equipment properly.

During one such incident my guitar amplifier blew up real good. I was screwed, my back up head had gone down a few weeks earlier and I was waiting on parts to be dropped shipped to the band house, all I had was a tiny 2 Watt practice amp, not really an option.

The maintenance guy at the Isle gave me the phone number for a guy in town that might have the type of amplifier that I needed. Normally I’m not one to borrow anything but I was desperate. I called the man up and explained who I was, where I was playing and if he’d be willing to rent me an amp for a few weeks. “No”, he said “but I’ll let you use it”. I offered to come pick it up but he brought it to the Isle that night and stayed to hear the band. I would end up playing with Jimmy Hawkins quite a bit over the next 25 years or so.

Life was different down here then, it was predictable and seasonal. People that worked here lived here for the most part. There were very few "corporate owned" businesses. It wasn't over developed to the point of grid lock. It was 24 hours a day until the anti-freedom types decided to close things at 4AM.

I realized that driving all over the USA and playing to small groups of people where it snows in the winter was backwards. Why not stay here where a lot of those people come for vacation and cut out all the expense and hassle of traveling and dealing with the cold weather? A light bulb moment. But my band mates couldn’t stand the heat and wanted to stay up north.

A few more trips back and forth between the Keys and the cold, grey, upper mid west and that was enough. My Canadian born and raised bass player/singer/keyboards and I left the drummer and rhythm guitar player in South Dakota where they chose to stay for the winter. My bass player had a beautiful new bride and a home in Florida so....

I had taken a real job in Orlando doing ride and show control for a company called ITEC. They built some of the rides for Universal theme parks. I have an ASET degree that I earned to get my old man off my back about playing music as a career. “It’s just a HOBBY dumb ass, you can’t make a living PLAYING.” Boy was he wrong! Too bad he died of Alzheimer’s 20 some years ago, I think he'd be amazed.

My parents approval never meant anything to me anyhow, nor did I ever ask for permission, preferring to beg for forgiveness after the fact, if necessary. I was the last of four, mom and dad were 42 when I came along so they were totally over the new baby thing. They dug my brothers' baby shit down from out of the attic and that was that. "Go play on the highway, boy!"

ITEC was the best employer ever. A friend from Titeassville hooked me up with the job and it was during this time I got married. We bought a brand new double wide on a half acre in Canaveral Groves, right next door to the Brevard County Jail.

The mobile home people installed the incoming electrical lines wrong and our first night in our new home started off with me turning on the main breaker, the fuse on the transformer outside on the pole blowing and sending a shower of sparks to the ground. It started a brush fire that took the fire department an hour and a half to contain. What a shit hole of a neighborhood that was, probably even worse now. The universe was giving me a hint.

I was told it would take 3 months for them to train me, 3 hours later I was trained. I was the guy the shop needed at that time and I needed the shop though I wasn’t aware of that yet. Synchronicity, man.

ITEC also provided a young drummer, Rob Guadalupe, and rehearsal space for the new incarnation of ”The Photons”. We would have rehearsal parties after work, with the office types driving over to check out the scene at the "shop". Beers were drank, weed was smoked, pizza was ordered and the "shop" band got tight with their new drummer.

The company had recently grown by leaps and bounds and shortly after I started, the company had its “annual gathering”, this time at Lake Buenavista on Disney property. They had probably 100 employees in a giant conference room with everyone sitting with the people they work with. The office types were up front like good Catholics and the shop types were in the back rows like hungover Southern Baptists at Sunday morning service.

The president of the company has everyone stand up and introduce themselves, where they’re from, schools and their job title. After 50 people or so all got up saying, “I’m so and so in the whatever dept. I went to whatever college. Go whatever team mascot! It was painfully boring. Most people don’t have public speaking voices and some people are agonizingly shy about talking in public and no one made any jokes.

By the time it was my turn the boredom had gotten the best of me so I stood up and with my well honed voice catching every ear in the room I said in my best "James Tiberius Kirk"(Star Trek) manner, “My name is... Luke Glenn... I work in the shop.... My ship...crash landed on this planet…” That’s as far as I got as the entire room erupted in a much needed laugh thus breaking the monotony and opening the door to more creative responses from the rest of the crew.

It’s amazing how a shitty task can turn out to be not too bad when you add a little party to it. I try to loosen uptight people because why not have FUN? There are plenty of opportunities for suffering... why not break it up with some pleasure? You’re going to get older and older, losing the enjoyment of youth along the way until you die…quit all the uptight shit and enjoy health while you have it because nothing lasts and nothing is guaranteed - it’s up to you to seize the freedom of being alive.

Time moves on and the universe had other plans. The ride and show control business had slowed down so without the overtime it was too hard to make ends meet in Central Florida. Most of the band gigs up there were pay to play meaning you had to sell tickets and if you didn’t sell "the minimum" then the band had to make up the difference to the venue. When you love doing something so much you’ll do it for free, like sex, it's easy to be taken advantage of.

I am a spur of the moment kind of guy so I called a real estate lady and told her I needed to sell my house in three days. She said, "Impossible". I assured her that she could do it. "It's a universe thing", I explained. The next afternoon she called and said, "The force is definitely with you. I've sold your house." My apprehensive wife and I put our stuff in storage and made the move with our blind cat, Pugsley. She was found in a bag of other kittens whose skulls had been crushed but she survived, some people...She loved laying inside the kick drum when the band played.

The band had a three week gig coming up at the Tiki Bar. We lived for the first three weeks in the band house, my wife got a job at Hog Heaven(Thanks Peter! RIP). After the gig was up at the Isle we lived in a tent for 3 months at Key Largo campground behind the K-Mart. It was fucking great! We had the best sex and were happier than ever.

We saved up a little money, our buddy Pasquale from Boston’s on the Beach sold us a little 30’ travel trailer at the Windley Key Campground and RV park. The lot rent was $450 a month plus utilities. We lived there through several small hurricanes until the real estate bubble shit happened in 2008 or whenever and we were offered to buy the lot our non movable, shit box trailer sat on for a mere $250,000, for a 14’ X 35’ space, what a steal.

Again the universe came to the rescue and my buddy Ian(who I met while working at the Isle) had a travel trailer in Key Largo for rent. We moved in just in time for (hurricane) Wilma. By this time Jimmy Hawkins had "retired" from the Caribbean Club and I was fortunate enough to land the house gig.

That's how Key Largo came to be the place where I hope to depart this incarnation, hopefully not too soon...just to run around and climb back up the ladder to the slide to do it again... I can't begin to name all the people the universe has sent my way in the times of need but I love and appreciate every second I got to spend with them... past, present and future. I can only hope I've enriched their existence on this planet also... as we all "Endeavor to persevere"(Outlaw Josey Wales).

The only thing that truly matters is how we treat one another. Peace and Love!

Pugsley the blind kitty.