From Transition from College to Bands

Shortly after officially taking a Leave from Stanford, I looked on the job board with a friend who was in the colorful crew centered around the card games in my freshman dorm, and who lived in at least one off-campus communal house I lived in after freshman year. He later became a very notorious anarchist philosopher-activist.

We got no-experience-necessary night shift jobs loading tanker trucks at the Shell Oil Refinery in  Martinez, California. I have very little recall of the job or the apartment we shared. The fact was no trucks ever loaded at night. I have a vague recollection of doing a lot of reading and struggling to connect a huge flexible pipe to one truck. I may have worked long enough to get one paycheck and been on my way.

I do remember weekend forays into the psychedelic shops in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood before it got famous. I was actively looking for a gig as a drummer with a San Francisco rock band, even though I had no drums.

There was a bulletin board in one shop with a card offering auditions for a drummer for a band called the Final Solution. I went. The audition felt as creepy as the name sounded. In a very large dark auditorium two very thin stereotypical hippies with long straight black hair held themselves as aloof from me as possible. The outcome was they said I couldn’t play loud enough to get the job. 

Next stop was Medway Forest.