One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

VII. Secret Mountain Laboratory

31 VII SecretMountainLaboratory Inthemid-’70smygirlfriendwasaDJnamed “Slowly Grail.” At the time I never knew just what that meant. In time I learned it didn’t matter. She did shows for a Pacifica station, KPFT, downtown on Prairie Street. We lived with Harriet Heaton, an early ownerofAndersonFair,andDJRichardBrooks,a.k.a.AcePaladino,different shift, same station, as well as being the lightman at Liberty Hall. So it was a somewhat communal and rockin’ two-story house with a huge sound system that would easily, and often did, play the neighborhood . Daily we disappeared into the Montrose on our own separate, consuming missions. Around dinnertime, a six pack of beer and a joint werelikeabuglight.Guaranteedtoattract.Nightlywesawoneanother at the clubs. Back then these pals, “Slow” and “Ace,” let us play live on KPFT at almost a moment’s notice. While we endured our respective art scenes tothenextpartytray,IperformedfortipsandfreelunchesatAnderson Fair. That always included plenty of day-old garlic bread and the other major food groups: spaghetti and beer. Then when you think it can’t get any better, a Deadhead from Phoenix with money to burn started up a radio station in Lake Tahoe, Cali- 32 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell fornia, just across the state line from Nevada, in Kings Beach. It was 12 miles from Truckee and practically on the north shore of Lake Tahoe itself. DJs from all over the U.S. and one from Radio Caroline off-shore of England came there to spin records and yuk it up in the Sierra. We were off to play radio at the Secret Mountain Laboratory, KSML, in a green 1960 VW camper with our two dogs: Osso, the black lab and Buffy, the Australian Heeler. With a five-gallon propane tank on the roof of the camper that ran by hose to a double burner on a counter behind the rider seat, I made Cuban coffee in an espresso pot while “Slow” drove. When we were trucking down the highway and it got really cold, I lit both burners. That car had no heater . . . and no fire extinguisher either. The radio station was on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, with the controlroomwindowlookingoutontothelake .Wemovedthreeblocksaway to a little wood cabin on Snake Street. It stood among the tall, orderly spruces in the shadow of the mountain peaks that surrounded the 30-mile long lake. I wrote and recorded new songs almost daily at the cabin on a cheap cassette machine. The gigs were few and far between . I spent more time in the casinos gambling with the 75 cents off the top of a weekly paycheck than I did gigging. Probably won more money on keno than I did playing music. At least at the casino the drinks were free if you were nice to the wait staff. Now and again we would go down to San Francisco. I played a few of my tunes with David Grisman at his house in Marin, and was part of a huge entourage backstage with the Grateful Dead at one of their last Winterland gigs. A marvel of controlled confusion, backstage was like a schoolyard the width and height of a basketball court with children bouncing about while Mom and Dad, and various other members of the band, stood in private huddles here and there smoking spliffs the size of their thumbs. Periodically they would exhale, laugh, and point at their children’s antics. This date further turned me on to Secret Mountain Laboratory � 33 live electric guitar. Jerry Garcia made it look off-the-cuff in front of thousands of fans, and I admired what those Californians could do with guitars that looked like surfboards. Back up in the Sierra, I played every chance I could get. Unfortunately for my wallet, I teed it up mostly in Tahoe City for tips at a vegan place called Nectar Madness. I played in a Truckee restaurant for cheap hippie jewelry. I even tuned it up in a dusty Silver City, Nevada, bar in the middle of the desert whenever the opportunity arose—mostly when the Harleys arrived from the Bay Area. For a couple of years, me and that soulful silhouette of a dark top kept the home fires burning. But that’s where my lover and I split the sheets. She kept the shift at the radio station. I took Buffy and the guitar back to that criminal territory, Texas...