From Interaction with other bands and Brian Rohan

I recently saw an in-depth history of the pioneer San Francisco psychedelic rock band The Charlatans, published July 19, 2017, the 50th anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival. On the weekend of that festival I got a phone call from the Charlatans, asking me to sit in on drums for a high school party they were playing, Saturday June 17, 1967. We ended up getting arrested in the band’s van in the parking lot during our break and taken to jail. I’ve never seen anything in print about that until just now. Here’s the excerpt from the article about that incident. My comments are in bold type.

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Of the San Francisco groups not invited to Monterey Pop, the Charlatans were the most glaring omission. They could have attended anyway, probably getting back stage to rub elbows with Ravi Shankar, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (/records/rolling-stones), and Otis Redding. Instead, the band found itself playing yet another crappy gig—and getting arrested for its trouble.

“George had booked us to do a high school dance in San Jose,” Wilhelm says. “It was somewhere down the Peninsula at a bowling alley,” Olsen recalls. The gig was such a yawn that the band’s piano player, Mike Ferguson, decided he had better things to do. “Mike had a jacket that I decided to wear that night.” Olsen continues. “He always carried 10 or 12 joints in its outside breast pocket.” What could possibly go wrong?

“So we’re out in the parking lot, taking a break between sets,” Wilhelm says, “smoking a joint in George’s Volkswagen van.” “The whole van is full of smoke,” Olsen says, “and these security guys come out and knock on the door.” The van door opens, smoke pours out, words are exchanged, and the security guy goes off to find a police officer. “Meanwhile,” Wilhelm continues, “we’ve eaten all of the joints we had, kind of rolled them up in little balls in our mouths, soaked them with spit, and swallowed them, so that when the cops finally arrive there won’t be any evidence. But when the cops show up, they say, ‘You guys are all under arrest.’ I say, ‘Well, you don’t have any evidence.’ And they say, ‘Oh, we’ll find some.’That was good and ominous.”

Upon being booked into a San Jose jail, the band members were forced to take off all their clothes, which the police vacuumed for evidence.

At this point in the story a lawyer from Brian Rohan’s office arrived and convinced the cops to check my clothes first. Since they were clean and I was not part of the group they released me before proceding further. There’s no mention in the article that I was sitting in for regular drummer Dan Hicks.

Now, anyone who has rolled a joint knows that they are not exactly hermetically sealed containers, which means there was probably about a joint’s worth of marijuana wedged into the seams of Ferguson’s jacket. “They found enough pot in the breast pocket alone to charge us all with felonies,” Olsen says. Wilhelm remembers one line of their spirited, if futile, defense: “We’re all, ‘Hey, man, we buy our clothes in thrift stores. Who knows what’s in them?’” Needless to say, that argument did not fly.

A year of court appearances in San Jose, with representation by noted rock attorney Michael Stepanian, came down to one question: Who was going to take the rap? “It was between George and Wilhelm and me,” Olsen says. “Somehow Dan had snuck out of the whole thing,

What Olsen didn’t remember was Dan wasn’t even there that night, I was.

while Mike already had a felony because of his arrest with Chandler Laughlin.” “The law for weed was the same as the law for heroin,” Wilhelm says. “A second conviction for me would have meant a mandatory two years in San Quentin.” Since Olsen had been wearing the jacket, and Hunter was apparently never an option, Olsen agreed to take the fall. It did not involve jail time, but expunging the felony from his record took years, as did paying off the legal bill.

In hindsight, the ill-fated weekend of Monterey Pop, combined with the decision by Kama Sutra not to release “Cod’ine,” was the one-two punch that would eventually put the Charlatans on the canvas. Mike Ferguson was the first to go, playing his last show with the band on October 30, 1967, at the Matrix. “When you’re just going and going, and you’re not making any money, and you know that if something good like a record happened you’d be at another level, it’s frustrating,” Olsen says.

From Hippies, Guns, and LSD: The San Francisco Rock Band That Was Too Wild For the Sixties (https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/hippies-guns-and-lsd/)