| A name I held on to for a long time that escapes me now was that of the man who, with his wife and co-composer, did the electronic music score for the film ‘Forbidden Planet’. Pretty common later, but that score was the first of that type as far as I know. He would visit the hill house and we tried to talk him into showing us his studio, which was on Melrose, but he put us off. Did anyone ever get to see it?
I don’t remember eating much at Fanny’s place, but I lived so I must have. It wasn’t the band’s responsibility to feed me. I would more or less invite myself because it was fun to be there. I do recall discovering that Baco-Bit sandwiches were tolerable.
One morning June said ‘We’re going down to the Tropicana Motor Inn for breakfast. Wanna come?’ Breakfast? Hell, yes! The plan was to meet up with the English band Ashton, Gardener, & Dyke. They were in town to play and somebody from Fanny had met them. After we finished eating, someone mentioned Disneyland and naturally the English wanted to see it. June, ever the perfect host, calls their manager, Roy Silver, and tells him she wants to take the Englishmen to Disneyland, as is their right. He says yes, so we go up to his house for money. If Fanny’s hill house represented opulence of the 20s and 30s, Roy Silver’s hilltop home was the current state of that level of existence. It seemed like there was a 360-degree view. Roy peeled off a bunch of bills and we were off for Disneyland. Pirates of the Caribbean was open that day and it was my most fun trip to the place. Certainly the cheapest.
Our band played pretty regularly. We didn’t need day jobs. Still, I wonder how I had so much time to spend at Fanny’s. Could be that 3 days of action were crammed into every single day. The Buffalo Nickel was scheduled to play for some benefit in Topanga Canyon on a Saturday afternoon. Most of Fanny decided to come to hear us. I’m not sure if Nicky was there. I know that June, Jeannie, Alice, and her sister Abby were there. Abby DeBuhr is someone I can’t do just to in print. I talked to her for a few minutes and I’ll never forget her.
Joel decided to stay in the canyon that night, so I took the van and went back to the hill house. Fanny was playing that night at a gay club in the hills above Azusa. It was a good place for stage experience without having what the management thought would be premature public exposure. They were musically ready, but the machine wasn’t in place.
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