Trying out a new cover page. These cover…

Trying out a new cover page. These cover pages are all experiments. Being visually stimulated, catching the vision of something, is an important help to me in the creative process. So having a cover, even one that is temporary helps me visualize the final product. Even though I have some ideas about it, this is another one of those places where you get outside help. When you’re doing a first book I can’t think of anything thing more important (except the book itself) than the impression the cover and the blurbs on it. As a big reader myself I’m going to have to be captured by the cover enough to turn it over and look at the excerpts on the back and to then take a look at the first few pages. If you have an opinion, please share it with me. My older cover is in the photo section. I’m afraid it’s just too busy.
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The Lemon Tree – Honolulu Hawaii

In spring of 1968 our band found itself in Honolulu, Hawaii, playing in a club at the very tail end of Waikiki. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget and not just because the girl I was going to meet here. It was the height of the Vietnam war and maybe 80% of the guys in our club were military, either stopping here before heading to the jungle, back for R&R and returning to the jungle, or finishing their tour here before heading home from the jungle. We were in a bubble, neither going or coming but a little piece of home to them. I nearly lost my life here, discovered how good but how sick Blue Hawaii’s can make you, how high gange from southeast Asia could get you, discovered how magical and exotic a tiny speck of land on the top of an undersea mountain can be and brushed across people in the International sex trade. Hawaii was the most beautiful and the most dangerous place I’d ever been in, and that includes Las Vegas. How much of this will make it into the book, that is already so jam-packed with our adventures I cannot say but the memories come flooding back as I write. The Lemon Tree, Honolulu, Hawaii, Kalakaua Ave at Liliuokalani Avenue

In researching the background for this section of A Naked Car Thief, I Google Earthed myself to the island to view again Sandy Beach and other places where we went to on the island. The last time I had been in Honolulu, I had looked for the site of the Lemon Tree, the club we played at, and the hotel that was just across a narrow alley from the club. I remembered the club as huge, directly across the street from this incredibly beautiful but usually deserted beach directly across Kalakaua Avenue. But I couldn’t find it. Yet with the magic of Google Earth I found the corner of Kalakaua and Liliuokalani Boulevard and there it was. Of course the building was smaller and cut up into smaller stores, the most prominent a McDonald’s. But behind it was that creepy, ramshackle hotel we stayed in, now some kind of a Korean barbecue restaurant. Even the curved columns from the old hotel showed up. It was great to look down nearly 45 years later on this fateful corner of the world and the feelings it brought back from the bones of these buildings. I’m sharing a screen capture of this corner for all my old band buddies.

Completely appreciate the way the Likes…

Completely appreciate the way the Likes have grown on this page. Especially since I still have about 25% of my first draft to go. I’m currently re-visiting Hawaii, which for a lot of reasons was an exceptional time and place for me. By the time we left about half of us had ‘rock’ fever and were anxious to get back to southern California. While I missed much about California I was getting the feeling that if I stayed there much longer I would have been just as happy with a little shack on the beach ….
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Naked Car Thief Imposter Caught By Dog On Video

Really? A naked car thief steals a Hummer limo? Really?

The moment a naked man was tackled to the ground by a German Shepard police dog after he allegedly stole a limo in Irvine, California was caught on video. Around 8 p.m. police and the California Highway Patrol used cars and a helicopter to track the giant 4×4 on a late night car chase through nearby Whittier through residential streets.

‘He came to a stop, he’s bailed,’ an officer is heard saying as he watches the man from the helicopter. Then, in shock, he adds: ‘He’s naked!’ Waving his arms, the alleged thief sprinted through a residential area but was promptly captured by a police dog, who tackled him to the ground until two officers restrained him and took him away.

Irvine police spokeswoman Lieutenant Julia Engen said, “We alerted nearby authorities and turned the pursuit over to the California Highway Patrol when the vehicle went into the area of Whittier. We cannot tell you why he was not wearing clothes. All we know is that he was wearing them at the scene of the original crime so he must have taken them off along the way.’ The chase ended at 9.45 p.m. when the driver was taken into custody near Valley View Avenue and Alondra Boulevard in Los Angeles County.

Lt. Engen added the man could still be in custody at Orange County jail. Hopefully he has been treated for scratches and dog bites in various unexposed areas on his body.

Just to set to rest any speculation, especially since it took place on December 13, of last year, no it was not me, nor any of my band mates, on one last rampage. To the best of my knowledge all of us were accounted for. This is obviously a stunt from one more, in a long line of imposters, trying to gain notoriety at our expense.

Larry Lamb of Las Vegas Died in 2006

[Note] This is mainly of interest to the guys who were in Stark Naked and the Car Thieves in 1968 through 1970, when Larry spent a lot of time following the band. He was certainly an interesting character in those years when the Lamb family was at the peak of its power in Las Vegas and Nevada. It’s sad to fine that another one of the colorful characters that illustrated our Las Vegas band days is gone.

Mar. 31, 2006
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Larry Lamb, who was 66, died at home in Las Vegas, two weeks after falling off a ladder in his garage, said Jan Smith, Larry Lamb’s longtime companion. The exact cause of his death was not known.

Larry Lamb was the youngest of 11 brothers in one of Nevada’s oldest families. The grandfather was one of five original settlers of the Pahranagat Valley, said his son, David Thompson.

Larry Lamb was the brother of Sheriff Ralph Lamb and two other brothers who were also in politics: the late Floyd Lamb, a former state senator, and Darwin Lamb, a former Clark County commissioner. Ralph Lamb was the first sheriff of the consolidated Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, from 1961 to 1978. The Lambs’ fame was mixed with notoriety. Floyd Lamb, a state senator who represented Las Vegas for 30 years, was convicted of accepting bribes in the FBI’s 1983 “Operation Yobo,” which netted another senator and two commissioners.

Larry Lamb was no stranger to trouble. In 1980, he shot and killed a man at a Christmas tree lot. Charges were dismissed, leading to criticism that Lamb was getting a pass because of his family’s connections.

The murder charge was reinstated, but Larry Lamb was acquitted by a jury. He said he acted in self-defense, claiming the dead man, Lee “Crowbar” McCambridge, was threatening him with a hand saw.

“Where the hell was I going to go?” Larry Lamb testified in the case. “I didn’t want to get hit with no saw.”

The large family of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members was close, said Thompson, a Las Vegas police officer. “It didn’t matter if you were running for president or getting out of jail; they’d stand behind you.”

Smith said Larry Lamb could be rowdy, but it was a character trait that was a piece of a self-styled cowboy of the old school.

“Easy? No. Fun? Yes. Loyal? Yes,” is how Smith summed up the man she’d known for nearly 50 years.

“He was colorful. He was never dull. He was a risk taker,” she said. “He was the old America that hadn’t gone all corporate.”

A prankster, Larry Lamb once filled the fountains in front of Caesars Palace with soap bubbles.

He was a bar owner and restaurateur who hosted his brothers’ political victory parties at his Las Vegas bar, the Cockatoo.

“He backed all his brothers, whether it was taking signs out, handing out literature or answering phones,” Smith said, saying he proudly pasted three stickers on a new car: “Ralph Lamb for Sheriff,” “Floyd Lamb for Senate” and “Darwin Lamb for County Commission.”

Larry Lamb is survived by Smith; sons Darwin and David Thompson; brothers Ralph and Darwin Lamb; sisters Wanda Lamb Peccole and Erma McIntosh; and three grandchildren.

Yvonne D’Angers – Off Broadway Topless Dancer – 1966

Off-Broadway-1966-Y'vonne-D.-AngersI just can’t help it. I am putting up another topless dancer picture. I have spent the last couple of days doing research for a final chapter on our experiences in the  incredible atmosphere of North Beach in San Francisco in 1966.

Originally the old Barbary Coast to the various and often scurrilous sea-farers of the 1800’s it became a major Italian neighborhood in the City, featuring outstanding Italian food and imposing Catholic churches. While known as the “Paris of the West”, in the forties and fifties it spawned the beat generation centered around the City Lights bookstore in North Beach.

As the Beatniks faded away two cultural revolutions began to rise in the cauldron that is San Francisco. One of them was, of course, the rise of the Hippies in the Haight brought on in part by the student population of nearby San Francisco State College. In roughly 1963-4, the mainly Russian neighborhood began to change to the “Drop out, drop in” culture that would reign for a few short years. It was the hotbed for musical expression of the philosophy of the young or as it’s motto states: “Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll”.

Meanwhile, over in North Beach in mid-1964, Carol Doda galvanized the world coming down in a bikini bottom on a piano at the Condor Club. This, of course, was the cultural stream we entered in late 1965 and it was without question a terrific time to be young and in music. Where the Hippie culture was re-defining music, we were reveling in the music of the era we loved. And we were surrounded by some of the best performers and musicians of our time.

But I was reminded in my Internet travels of this stunning lady, another iconic topless dancer of the era, Yvonne D’Angers, who performed at the Off Broadway. She was an Iranian-born blond bombshell who came to be known in the press as “The Persian Lamb”. She was a star witness in the 1965 trial over legality of topless waitresses but was much more famous for chaining herself to the Golden Gate bridge to protest her threatened deportation.

At least a part of the significance to North Beach to the City is trumpeted in a brazen newspaper ad: “Two of San Francisco’s three most famous landmarks … belong to Yvonne D’Angers, now appearing topless in North Beach at Off Broadway.” They fail to mention what that third one was.