Ira Ingber talks about his brother Elliot

When I put together the Radar Station tribute to Elliot Ingber I approached his brother, Ira, and asked him if he’d like to contribute something. Ira said he’d prefer to talk to me about Elliot. So over the course of three facetime sessions we spoke about Elliot’s career and a whole bunch of other related stuff. It’s taken me a while to collate it all as there was a hell of a lot to sort through, but, finally, here is a transcript of our chat about Elliot.

I also took the opportunity to ask Ira about his involvement with the Bluejeans and Moonbeams album. I have included that chat as a separate post.

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Steve Froy : Hi Ira, thanks for agreeing to chat with me. I’d really like to pick your brains a bit about Elliot and his influences and how he came to be what he was.

Ira Ingber : Music was in our house. Our Mother played piano and Father sang. And because, you know, we’re Jewish, music is a big factor. My Father had a big collection of cantorial music that he played all the time. And so I think that the atmosphere was, although not necessarily pro-music, like you’re going to have music, you’re going to have a piano or guitar lessons, but there was music all around and the phonograph was always going. I look back on it and it’s clear that we were influenced by all that stuff. Elliot and I were both influenced by the, let’s just call it, the background noise of the music.

Elliot began playing guitar when he was around 15. We were still living in Minneapolis, and I recall that he received some guitar lessons, but they didn’t last very long. He seemed to thrive when in the company of several of his friends. One was a drummer, another played piano, and another played sax. They encouraged each other.

He got the guitar lessons, I didn’t. This is a kind of funny anecdote I’ll share. So I started to express some interest in guitar. Well, first I wanted drums. My Mother said, uh-uh, that’s not going to happen. And she was probably smart to tell me that, but then guitar. And in their wisdom, they said, well we already have a guitar player so that’s not going to happen either. So on an early tour my brother was on he did, in ’62, I think it was, he comes back with a guitar for me. He bought me my first guitar, he got it in New Orleans and bought it from a fellow named Dale Hawkins! The guy wrote Suzy Q, and it was completely lost on me. What did I know? But it was a Gibson melody maker, a low entry level guitar. But it was Gibson guitar. And he bought me my first instrument. And I would discuss it with him years later, and I said, well you got it. You know, you gave me the starting. Well you were going to do it anyway. He was very almost exaggeratedly modest about his contribution.

His earliest influences were Glenn Miller, Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Richard Rogers’ score to the television show, “Victory At Sea”.

Late at night AM radio signals travel great distances, especially in the very flat American Midwest (we lived in Minneapolis back then). I remember Elliot found a radio station broadcasting from Little Rock, Arkansas that played Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and other black blues artists of the time who received little or no exposure on white-oriented radio. He was mesmerized by that music from the very beginning.

He did record a couple of singles. He did one, in particular, called. Moon Dawg (1960), which is legendary because the b-side of that song was called LSD 25. He didn’t write them. He was the rhythm guitar player. The personnel were interesting which I’ll tell you about in a second. Well he would tell people. Oh, it’s this new drug that’s coming out that’s gonna change things. I don’t think he took acid at that point, that would have been 1960, ’61. But the personnel on this single turned out to be quite amazing … Sandy Nelson on drums, who had some hits on his own, early proto-surf stuff … Bruce. Johnson was playing piano, who later joined the Beach Boys … Larry Taylor who was a lifelong friend, who played with Canned. Heat, John Mayall and Tom Waits. The producer was a guy named, Nick Venet [pronounced Vinay]. And this was really an amazing coincidence … when I got my first record deal on Capitol when I was 16, Nick Venet was my producer.

Oh, Gary Weaver, as the writer of the song. Great guitar player but not much ever came of him. He was also one of those … he was kind of a George Harrison, before George Harrison. Great riffs, you know, and great ideas for songs. He was a little older guy too. He’s the lead guitar player.

But Elliot was twenty, I don’t think he was even, twenty one, nineteen or so. We had just come out from Minneapolis and he ends up in this band called the Gamblers. And that was the first single. And it got radio play here. And it was really exciting to have heard it on the radio. Like wow. You know. He brought the record home. And we listened to it. And then turned the radio on. It’s on the radio. I mean that was as good as it got.

The cultural atmosphere in LA before he went into the army in 1963 or January 1964, was explosive. LA really was where things were absolutely on fire. We’d moved to LA in 1958 when I was eight years old. From the time we got here he made the acquaintance of Phil Spector and other people who went on to have major careers. Elliot was the hot guy coming up. He was really playing a lot, local club stuff, then got these little tours. He was in a cover band for the Wrecking Crew. And then he gets drafted.

So his ascent as this young hotshot musician is cut right off as he’s starting to come into his own. And really, on the basis of what his reputation was two years earlier, that’s how he gets hired by Zappa. Because they’d heard about this guy, Henry Vestine, who later played with Canned Heat was the guy Elliot replaced. But Elliot had been out of circulation for two years. But based on what he had done, prior to those two years, that was enough for Frank to want to hire him. So, I mean, you can only imagine what things would have been like for him had he not had that two year interruption. And the world, as you know, changed. Things were so changed here from 1964 to 1966 when he got out. It was a different universe. And he was very much like, as I look back on it, it was much like Rip Van Winkle. He woke up and the world was completely different. The Beatles had changed everything and the LA bands, The Byrds and all that stuff was happening. And he found himself in the middle of this cultural explosion and the fallout was still going on when he came out of the army. That’s how he got into Zappa and then subsequent to that the Fraternity of Man and then after that was Beefheart and so it all pretty much this momentum that had begun exactly when he got out of the army..

SF : Elliot seems to have been quite an unassuming type of guy.

II : Well, I think that for him, if he was a kid now, they would throw a bunch on Ritalin at him and say that he was somewhere on the spectrum, OCD and everything else. And fortunately he didn’t get the Ritalin thrown at him and he got to be a brilliant musician. For him it was about the music. It really was about the music and not the personality part of it or the persona part of it. And I think that his orientation was blues. It was all the luminaries that we all know well, B.B., Albert and Freddie King, Muddy Waters, the Wolf and Jimmy Reed . You know, his compass was rally that stuff and as things opened up more, and suddenly there’s India, there’s Ravi Shankar, and then we always had a love for Glenn Miller for example, and Les Paul, and the widening of his musical universe because of Frank too. But blues really was the anchor for him, the touchstone. And I think that with Don, that was a real point of commonality the two of them had.

SF : I heard Elliot had a large blues collection.

II : He did. We just sold it as a matter of fact, I’m happy to say. It’s funny, a guy cam in and bought it. I’m not interested in vinyl at all. I just don’t care much about it. But the guy said, well you know 90% of the collection is nothing but then there are the 10% gems.

Unfortunately it’s no longer the hidden cache of secrecy that only a few people had the keys to the kingdom for. Because everything is pretty much out in the world. But in the day your status was established by the amount of records you had, the obscurity of the great ones, and people like Alan Wilson from Canned Heat. All those guys from canned Heat were record collectors. And Larry Taylor, also a friend, I ended up producing Canned Heat because of my brother. Larry had a massive collection and they would refer to these things. These records were what informed them. And I think some of the covers that Fraternity of Man did, Blue Guitar, Earl Hooker, that was because of his record collection.

Elliot was friendly with all those guys, Al Wilson , Bob Hite, Henry Vestine, Larry Taylor and Fito [de la Parra]. He ended up recording with them. It was a small community here, relatively. Lowell George was part of that. And Lowell and I got close as a result. So the blues , the large universe of the blues, which was inclusive of Chicago and other stuff was the commonality with these people.

SF : Yeah, I see where this shows through all his stuff. Then he obviously went into the Fraternity of Man and they were beginning to experiment a bit more as well weren’t they? I suppose this is where the drugs started kicking in?

II : Right.

Well, the drugs, you know, a lot of people have said that really is what made him make some maybe not great turns or too many left turns. My answer to that is I worked with Brian Wilson extensively in the mid 90s and the drugs didn’t so it. The drugs were accelerants on a fire, yeah, they were all, everything was there. My brother, as I said would probably be diagnosed with some sort of autism, you know, and the drugs didn’t help. In some ways they were motivators, though, because in an odd way I think it gave some focus to things that were otherwise not in focus. But, it created more problems that it solved. I still work a lot with Van Dyke Parks, and Van Dyke is another example of that… the overindulgence, let’s call it that, specifically on psychedelics helped open doors of possibilities musically.

But then it also created other problems where it confounded thinking. And it was a balance that couldn’t be maintained.

And certainly in my brother’s case it was out of balance because he was immoderate in almost every aspect of his life. We saw that with him on so many things. His diet later in life, he became a very strict vegan. He stopped using drugs in the mid-1970s because he couldn’t just have a little of anything. It was either too much or none. His diet reflected that, his overall lifestyle reflected that. He struggled with moderation, you know., and a lot of people, a lot of musicians in that era shared that because society had no guardrails for moderation. It obviously still doesn’t.

SF : Eliot ended up in the film I Love You Alice B. Toklas. Have you any idea how that came about?

II : Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, there’s a when I was digging through stuff in Elliot’s apartment, there was a fellow named Hal Marshall who was he must have been a one-time vaudevillian back in the day. He was a lot older than everybody else, which means in the ’60s, he was probably in his 40s or 50s, which would have put him back as a someone from the 30s. He was a New Yorker, brash and had the ear of, I guess, some of the film producers or directors. And so when the time come to get the calls for the authenticity of the hippies, they went to Hal Marshall. I wouldn’t call him a casting director exactly, but he rounded up the hippies for movies. And somehow he Eliot made his acquaintance.

There was Alice B. Toklas. There was The Trip, of course, famously. Well, Easy Rider was a different story because of Eliot’s knowing Peter Fonda, and there was another one, too. [can anyone remember that other film that Elliot appears in? – sf]

And it was funny because back in the day, I would go to the movies and there would my brother in a movie. So he was the resident hippie.

SF : Okay. Very interesting. So can he be seen in The Trip movie? I’ll have to dig that out and I’ll see that for years and years

II : Oh, yeah. Same thing. He played the same guy in all those movies. They were about the same time. And I think there was another one, and I don’t recall which one it was, but all of a sudden he was in movies.

It was the same role he played every time. It wasn’t a character stretch.

SF : Do you know how he actually got to be in the Magic Band?

II : I don’t. I wish I did. I know that it was some connection with Frank. I think there was an introduction. This was weird thing I thought of the other day. I was in a band in 1966 I ended up on Capitol records. I was the last guy, these guys were together, they were called the New generation. And they managed by a friend of my brother’s. That’s how I got in. Because the guitar player, the second guitar player’s father wouldn’t let him sign a contract. They were all from a suburb of LA here and we were in Hollywood. So I got into this band. I remember before we got on Capitol records I use to visit this Karma Sutra label that Don was on. So I used to go over there, I can’t remember why. Bob Krasnow was the president. I think he was courting the band I was in but we ended up going to Capitol. But I remember hearing about Don then, this was the mid/late-1960s. I don’t know if Elliot was part of that. I think he knew Krasnow but I have a feeling it came through Frank rather than Krasnow.

SF : Elliot was considered a replacement for Ry Cooder but the band ended up going with Gerry McGee.

II : The first guy I ever saw playing a Telecaster was in my parent’s living room, and it was Gerry McGee. I thought it was the most fascinating thing. I wasn’t even playing guitar yet. And in my parent’s living room, these musicians came and went and would have these impromptu jams. Phil Spector was there. The first time I was ever in a Corvette was Phil’s ! He took me for a ride. My brother use dot cook dinner for Phil because he lived on the next block. Larry Taylor was there a lot, he was the first person I saw playing a fender bass. The first time I ever saw a Wurlitzer electric piano it was Bruce Johnston playing it. They were friends. So I was inundated with this stuff, I couldn’t escape it. Elliot brought all these people round, he was very social that way and entertained people at the house.

It had to have been Frank Zappa who got Elliot connected with Don.

SF : If Elliot was connected with Zappa he would have ended up at the log cabin and involved in the jams that went on there. [I later introduced Ira to the Alley Cat jam which included Elliot, Don and Frank].

II : Oh yeah, and I was there too. Frank was very generous to me. He lent me guitars, amplifiers. I was okay for some reason. Even after Elliot left the band he stayed in contact and was friendly with Frank. Yea, Frank learned a whole lot about blues from Elliot. Frank didn’t know the vocabulary. He didn’t have the encyclopedia that Elliot was able to give him. He knew, you know, broad strokes but Elliot really informed Frank with a lot of the details. Elliot played with the Mothers for a while, not long really. It was under six months I think, and, of course the Freak Out album was a landmark. But they remained friends and I remember in the 80s we went up to visit Frank and I hadn’t seen him in a while. He was very very warmly welcoming me. He handed me a guitar. It was a burned-out Stratocaster that belonged to Jimi Hendrix. Frank said, here play this. That was pretty thrilling. You could still smell the burn, it was amazing.

SF : You’re a shocking name dropper, you know that !

II : Well, I say it just because these were not celebrities to me/ I mean they were just regular guys who I was around. Don especially, because Don was so … he always had a twinkle in his eye, Don did. He was very … he was really encouraging to me, you know. He was one of those people who could help to bring out the best in people.

You know I think also the fact that my positioning in this whole thing was because I was Elliot’s brother. So I was already kind of okay. I didn’t have to prove anything.

SF : Elliot went on tour with the Magic Band in 1970. Do you recall anything from that time?

II : Well, I saw them play at a club called the Bitter End West, which was a very short lived venue. And they were amazing. They were really in great form and then shorty after that they started doing European tours (from 1972 to 1975 – sf). They were just an exciting band, no one really sounded like them, and no one could do what Don did on stage. And I was always struck by the amount of movement on stage, people were always walking back and forth, pacing nervously. And Rockette was dancing but Don was pacing, people weren’t just standing playing. They were like the shifting scene on stage, watching all this stuff go on which I thought I don’t recall any other band really doing that. Which I thought was really fun because your eye constantly following Rockette or Don, even Elliot moved around a bit too. It was exciting to to listen to, exciting to watch.

SF : Did Elliot ever tell you anything about what went on during the tours?

II : Not really. I remember he mentioned a particular concert in Helsinki with 60,000 people (probably 1975 – sf). Massive crowd. And I remember him saying that because English was barely spoken he felt a long way from home. But Germany, he liked, I remember. They were warmly received in Germany and the UK, obviously.

SF : Yeah, there was a big following for the band in the UK and Europe, more so than in the US.

II : Oh, by miles and miles. For whatever reasons the Europeans got it and the Americans didn’t. Americans just couldn’t embrace a lot of things that were slightly off the beaten track, maybe that’s what it was, I don’t know. It’s embarrassing to a degree. I know Frank was bigger in Europe that he was here. Other band too just just better away from home. You know, Hendrix had to leave the US to come back. In Europe there’s more an embrace of the Art part of it and less of the Commerce part of it.

Elliot had a very short time and a relatively small output but made the most of it. He really only had about 10 years. And with the solo album in the early 2000s. It was a relatively brief career but with these really monumental contributions within it, that they belie the fact that it was so short. Arguably you could say his career went form 1966 to 1975. After that he didn’t really produce much. And he did not embrace technology, I tried to get him into things. I saw how things were changing and the only way I could continue was by learning stuff and, of course, I built my own studio. But he couldn’t do that, I think he was just not interested. He like it when people did things for him.

I do now have his Les Paul Junior, which I’m thrilled to have. Playing and recording, it’s a magnificent instrument. It really is. I took it to my luthier to do some work. It needed some TLC and he just said, wow this is 1958! It’s just remarkable you know, and you can hear it on Alice in Blunderland of course. That was the big cameo for that instrument.

SF : There is one odd thing I wanted to ask you about, I don’t know if you’d be able to answer this or not.

In 1975, Elliot was in the touring band when they came over to UK, Europe. Then they did a few gigs in America as well. And whenever there was an official photograph taken of the band, Elliot would always have his back turned or he’s actually got a paper bag over his head.

And another one, he’s hiding behind a traffic sign, I think it was. I’m just wondering, why was he hiding his face? Was there a reason for that?

II : He had a real problem being photographed in general. He cited some Native American reference of when you have your picture taken, a piece of your soul gets into that. So I think that was kind of in play. He was painfully shy, that was the other thing.

He was very uncomfortable with a focus on him. Not one-on-one, but in a group setting, he would retreat. He probably, I’m guessing, he saw how Miles Davis did that, successfully played with his back to the audience.

Because Beefheart did it a lot of the time.

SF : Yes, that’s true, he did.

II : He would have his back to the audience, and I think it gave him some protection for his discomfort.

And maybe there was something stylistic about it, but I think that’s probably what it was.

SF : It just seemed odd, because in other instances he has been photographed and you can see his face and he’s just part of the band.

II : By ’75 he was starting to get very uncomfortable with being the object of photography to the point where years and years later at our wedding, he was just impossible. But my wife’s uncle got some great shots of him, where he didn’t know he was being shot. But he had a real problem with cameras on him.

SF : We’ve spoken about Eliot’s working with bands up to, what, about 1975, when he left Beefheart’s Magic Band for the last time. What was he doing after that? He didn’t record much, did he?

II : No, no. He recorded a little bit with Lowell. They did a song that they, I don’t think they ever finished it to their liking. It was called Roto-Tone. And it appeared on a compilation of outtakes.

It was called Outtakes and Hotcakes. A Little Feat compilation that came out in 2000, I think, something like that. He and Lowell always stayed very friendly. The cut never appeared on an album, but it was supposed to, it never did. But he recorded with them a bit.

He recorded with Peter Ivers a little bit. Peter Ivers, a very talented guy who’s no longer with us also, recruited my brother. I forgot if it was before or after I did it. [this was in 1974 – sf]

A fellow named Buell Neidlinger was playing bass. And they did an album, a Warner’s album, that actually we’re both on. Eliot and I are both on the album. We didn’t play together. And so that would have been about right around there, 74, 75, 76.

And then, you know, he started this little band with some local people that I don’t think they ever played anywhere. They recorded in a garage. And there’s, I don’t think I’ve got a box of cassettes. I’m going to have to go through that. I haven’t had a chance to go through. That may have some of those recordings and I hope they do show up on there. But it was hit or miss stuff.

Oh, there was the Grandmother’s stuff that we did together. That I largely put together for him. And there were submissions from all these ex-Mothers musicians, who created this thing called the Grandmothers, all disgruntled, former Frank members.

There were two albums made and they both came out on Rhino. One was called Ginger Wail and the other one, I think was called Flying Low. Both of those songs appeared on his solo album.

And really nothing happened organized-wise until his solo album came out. The, the, the, the.

SF : Yeah, what a title.

II : Yeah, that was one of his things. And which in many respects was a compilation also.

I think that for Elliot also, you know, you need to try to get a sense of why there was so little output. He was such a, a perfectionist that it prevented him from finishing things.

We know that well-worn cliché, perfection is the enemy of excellence. And it really is true in his case.

SF : I suppose that was an extension of his condition. When we spoke last time, you said he was probably on an autistic spectrum of some sort.

II : Oh, absolutely. That sort of not being able to finish something. It had to be right. Beyond right. It had to be perfect. Very rarely did things live up to what he thought his expectations could be.

For example, when he did his solo album. Which I. Was a big part of. I quit. I like to say I quit twice and I was fired twice because he was impossible to work with. You know, I was trying to be professional with it. Not, he’s my brother. I’m working, you know, this is a job. I was brought on to do. And he, he just made it so impossible.

After I left the making of that record. A few other people got recruited and, and I was told that there were, I believe the number was, 67 test CDs. We used to call them test pressings and they were CDs at this point. Yeah. Of the most minuscule of alterations from one version to the other. You know, no reasonable, in quotes, human, could hear the difference. Except he claimed he could. And so it went on and on and on.

It was a Japanese deal that Van Dyke [Parks] had gotten him. I kept saying you’ve got to get this thing out. I mean, you’re contracted. They paid for a record. And he just could not let it go.

He finally did. And I don’t think he was ever happy with the way it turned out. Because of what we’re saying. The, the, the, the perception on his part. That it had to be at some level of excellence. Well, again, I’ll use perfection, not excellence.

And I have to say to him. I can’t hear any difference, I really can’t. I can’t hear one eighth of a DB change of this to that. And I said, I don’t think you’re being well-served by driving yourself nuts. Trying to make something so exact. That really no one else will hear it. I said, I know you have to satisfy your own demand for what it should be, but you have been engaged by a third party here. The third party is a record company that wants you to turn a record in.

And that was the problem. And he did finally turn it in. The record came out and it made a little bit of noise, but he was so exhausted by the process. And I don’t think he enjoyed it. Because that wasn’t part of the equation.

That’s in part, why there was so little recorded.

We’re finally cleared out of his apartment. As of last weekend. Found all kinds of things that illustrate what I’m saying. There were bits and pieces of songs that were never finished. So.

I think it was a combination of the people who he held in very high esteem, like. Don, like Frank, especially those two guys, whose work he felt his didn’t measure up against. And so the way to do that is by just beating it into the ground. And he did it with. The Fraternity of Man.

Two of the members who I’ve spoken with over the years extensively. Said he was like a task master with them. And he learned it they claim from working with Frank. Well, Frank had a very different approach to the thing. Essentially, Frank had his approach which was it’s on the paper, play what’s on the paper and, and you’ll be okay. And that wasn’t an option for the Fraternity of Man in most instances. The other part of the other issue is that because Elliot did not speak music in an agreed upon convention for people. It was difficult, that was more like Don, and that’s why the two of them got along so well. They understood each other. And I think to the extent that Elliot was able to make Don happy.

Elliot then wanted to take that whole approach that Don communicated to Elliot with and he wanted to turn that to the musicians he would communicate with. And it didn’t work that way because he didn’t have that communication skill like Don did. That was really the problem, he couldn’t get his ideas across.

That must be very frustrating for him, because he had the ability but not being able to express that properly.

To compare him for the moment for conversation’s sake to Don and Frank … Frank was like. You know as predictable and solid as anybody could be. He was very ordered and very obviously disciplined, and very clear on what he wanted. Don less so. But Don could be made happy. He could be satisfied when something showed up for him. And this is just based on my work with him. And watching, as I did when I was very young. Watching them record. A few songs, Boogalorize. I was at that session. Santa Claus on the evening stage, I got to see that one. That was pretty exceptional stuff.

Elliot couldn’t do that. That was a big difference between Elliot and those two guys. And it was difficult for him because he could not express what he wanted in terms that other musicians could easily understand.

I could kind of do it. Just because I kind of knew where he was coming from on a lot of things. But, a lot of times it was guesswork for me also.

SF : How did Elliot pass his time then. He had a lot of time on his hands. What was he doing?

II : Well when are we talking about after most of the bands had finished. Well he got very involved. With bicycles. Very passionately involved with high end bicycles and bicycle technology. Now I rode a bike as a kid and he was totally disinterested. But he got into the, you know, the Lamborghinis. And also automobiles. Well, one car in particular, a Triumph TR3. But for whatever reason. The TR3 was it for him. That was the first car I learned how to drive on as well. It was a beast. I don’t know if you ever drove one.

SF : It was a hell of a car to learn to drive in.

II : Well it had no synchro first gear, for example. So if you’re driving at 10 miles an hour you couldn’t shift down into first. Because it would grind. So you had to get into second. And kind of balance out. But it was notoriously unreliable. No offence, but British cars were… they leaked oil and they wouldn’t start in the rain. Other than that they were great.

But anyway he got really involved with cars. With that car in particular. And bikes. And it kind of consumed him. But he was always, you know, music was always there.

I studied with a wonderful man. Joseph Valenti was his name. Teaching reading fundamentals and some theoretical things. And I got the books for Elliot also. So he kind of got into it. But he had a very difficult time. Learning and retaining things through books. He could do it by records. He was great at the repetition of just incessant playing of, you know, a Muddy Waters album, a song, and learning every intricate piece of it.

So his time was largely occupied from the mid 70s/80s. Occasional gigs. And then there was this little moment, a resurrection of The Fraternity of Man in the late 80s.

The man who put it on was a criminal. He’s no longer with us so I can speak his name and not speak ill of the dead. But Matthew Cates was this champion of Elliot’s and the Fraternity of Man. He was from San Francisco lineage. So he had some involvement with Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, and insinuated Fraternity of Man into this group. He paid for the recording, the re-recording of certain Fraternity of Man songs that I was drafted into playing on. And it was a really terrible experience because the guy had almost no talent and was fairly unscrupulous as well. Other than that he was great. But it took time. And it took a lot of time because it was now just about 20 years after the original recordings, and it was another opportunity for him (Elliot) to get things right. And again that same pursuit of what he thought perfection was. And of course, the bloom was off the rose at that point. There was only the original singer. For a time Stash Wagner came back. The other musicians … Richie Hayward, they didn’t talk much, Elliot and Richie. Richie was still with the second incarnation of Little Feat. And the bass player, Martin Kibbee was not playing anymore. The other guitar player [Warren Klein] wouldn’t want anything to do with it. So, it took a lot of energy from Elliot to put out this record. And it did come out on this independent label thing [San Francisco Sound – sf]. We played three shows, I think, two or three shows. Disastrous, really, I mean it was demoralizing for him because he didn’t really like the material that much. He didn’t like the idea that he was promoting drug use in 1987 as he did in 1968.

He didn’t like performing Don’t Bogart That Joint in 1987. But he had to because that’s the only reason the band was there.

SF : Did we talk about that song, how did it got in the movie ?

II : No. I don’t think so.

All right. So the Fraternity of Man album came out. The first one and it pretty much died, you know. It was on ABC Records, this awful label, part of the ABC. Entertainment thing. And they had no clue on how to promote music. I think they did have Three Dog Night., and they succeeded despite their ineptitude. And so the record comes out, Bogart is on there which. Elliot wrote with this fellow, Larry ‘Stash’ Wagner that was ’68. Peter Fonda was friendly with Elliot and was making the movie Easy Rider. They were assembling the soundtrack for the album, which was the first soundtrack of a major movie that had only songs in it, there was no composer, no underscore.

So Hendrix, was in there, The Byrds, Steppenwolf … and. Bogart shows up in that movie. And it was a platinum selling movie soundtrack. And so the song, which was dead, makes its way into the collective universal consciousness. And it’s been there ever since. And to this day, it’s meagre. but money still trickles in from that thing because it was such a huge hit.

It’s turned up. In a way it never leaves. And, you know, he wasn’t terribly proud of that song.

You ask anybody, and I love doing it, you know, oh yeah, my brother wrote Bogart. What? How? What? Yeah, and I have the guitar that he wrote it on here. I think it’s hilarious but it was very much an accidental success in that way.

So, I think that the best answer for you Steve, is, what happened was he never found a venue that equalled anything close to Frank or Don. Or even his own band after they were done. Elliot didn’t become interested in evolving recording technology that would have allowed him to record at his own pace in his own comfort level. Instead, he was wholly reliant upon other people to record him. Hence, the sum total of his recorded works is relatively small. His career was very short but meaningful. It had a lot of major moments to it. But very short, arguably under 10 or 15 years.

We’re having a celebration of life for Elliot and a number of people will speak, and it’s going to be a good event for everyone, for myself especially.

Matt Groening, Henry Kaiser, and Van Dyke Parks will speak. And this fellow named Del Kasher, you know who he is? He was around. I never met him. I’m going to meet him, I guess, at the celebration. He’s got to be, I think, in his mid-80s. He invented, among other things, the wah-wah pedal.

And he was in the Mothers before Elliot for a brief moment. And Van Dyke insisted that I invite him because he was around. Apparently, they knew each other, Elliot and Del.

So there’s going to be a number of people who span this time of Zappa, Fraternity of Man, Beefheart, speaking at this. It’ll be a lovely event. Sorry you’re not in town.

SF : Yeah, it sounds like it’s going to be interesting event. Are you going to have music as well?

II : Well, I created a playlist. There’s enough musicians to where it would be impossible. There’s 30 songs that we’re going to be playing through the day. Obviously, Beefheart, Zappa, Fraternity of Man, and then some of his favourites, you know, the blues things. And this fellow who put it together for me, there was a show in the 50s here called Victory at Sea. It was pure propaganda for the U.S. Navy during World War II. Very heroic, beautiful, stirring music by Richard Rogers, who wrote the theme.

Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Very big, bombastic.

Elliot loved that music. Being a child of World War II, you know, he was alive, born before the war. And so my friend said, why is that song part of this playlist? I said, he thought it was one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. So that’s part of the playlist.

SF : We’ve covered a lot of ground and I think we’ve talked over most things now. Thanks for taking the time, Ira, I really appreciate it.

II : My pleasure, Steve. I’ve enjoyed our time together. All the best

 

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Steve Froy
May/June 2025