Chapter 30: Did you ever take any great road trips?
Originally written July 13, 2021
Traveling always has been one of my greatest joys, going back to my childhood.
I remember wonderful family trips to California (San Diego, where my Uncle Jack, my grandmother’s brother, lived plus side trips to Disneyland), and to Yellowstone Park, and to my great-grandmother’s home near Paducah, Kentucky (right before I started second grade) and, when we lived in Oklahoma, countless road trips to Santa Fe.
(The hardest part of those trips was going back to Oklahoma City and trying to explain Santa Fe to my friends, little Okies who’d never experienced Fiestas or Zozobra or mountains.)
During my college years, as I’ve mentioned here before, I took two major hitchhiking trips.
The first was in 1973 when my travels took me through Texas and Oklahoma and the Midwest (furthest point, Green Bay, Wisconsin.) then back west via South Dakota and Yellowstone Park and eventually San Francisco, where I arrived with about $5 in my pocket and left for home a couple of days later with about 75 cents.
My second great hitchhiking adventure, which I wrote about in the first chapter here, after a quick jaunt to Kansas City, took me through the South, where I would meet my first wife.
During those ‘70s years, I also did several road trips with buddies to scenic Juarez as well as a couple of fun trips to — believe it to not — Amarillo, Texas, where my roommate “Amarillo” Mike lived.
And though I retired my thumb decades ago, I’ve taken who knows how many road trips.
When my kids were growing up, I’ve driven to Southern California, to Denver and to southern New Mexico. Even when I go to Austin to visit my kids and grandkids in recent years I usually drive, usually loving the trip there and hating the long drive back.
A few years ago I drove myself to Durango, Colo. so I could experience buying marijuana legally then -- illegally -- drive it back to New Mexico. (This state has since come to its senses and legalized weed.)
One road trip I’ll always remember fondly came about almost spontaneously in the spring of 1982, when I still was in my 20s.
My first wife Pam had gone to Alabama to see her folks with our daughter, who was just a year old then. My album, Picnic Time for Potatoheads, had just come out a few months before.
While Pam and Molly were gone, my long-time crony (and Potatoheads investor) Alec and I were talking about ways to promote the record. I’d mentioned that a cool radio station near San Jose, KFAT, had been playing the record, and I’d actually received orders for the album from KFAT listeners.
At that point we decided to talk to Alec’s friend Rich, who owned a decent van, and to go to the Golden State on a ragtag promotional tour. At the time most my income was from freelancing stories for The Santa Fe Reporter and substitute teaching. So, especially with the family out of town, there wasn’t anything holding me back.
Rich was up for it. He even decorated his van with Potatohead promotional material. I contacted KFAT and other radio stations and arranged interviews. The Potatohead California Tour was underway.
Even though she was on vacation herself, Pam was not happy about my sudden decision to go to California. She felt that her “vacation” was fulfilling a family obligation, while mine was I just having fun with the boys in California.
She was right.
On the way to LA we drove through Victorville, Calif. For some reason, we needed to stop at the Kmart there. In the parking lot we met a musician in a wheelchair who had hooks for hands. He played the bongos, singing along with popular radio hits. (The main one I remember was “Somebody’s Knockin’,” a pop country hit for a singer named Terri Gibbs. I later wrote a song about this guy called “Wild Bongo Donny.”
I don’t have access to any recording of my song, but here’s the one I heard Donny sing:
We spent our first few days in the Los Angeles area, where we did very little in way of promoting the album besides dropping the record off at a couple of record companies and KROQ radio in Pasadena.
We tracked down one DJ at his home in Venice Beach, who was friendly, though not at all interested. He suggested we go to Nashville and try to promote it as a country album. “They’d eat it up there,” he said, though I knew a Nashville road trip was not in the cards.
What I remember most about this trip to Los Angeles was how it expanded my culinary consciousness. During those days I had my first sushi in a Malibu restaurant called Something’s Fishy, where we encountered a gaggle of prostitutes in the parking lot: “You boys looking for a date?”
I also had Thai food for the very first time and ate my first falafels. There were few if any places in Santa Fe at the time the served this international cuisine.
Perhaps my first real rock ’n’ roll tourism occurred on this trip when we went to see The Waitresses in Pasadena. I’d never heard them before this trip, but KROQ was playing the hell out of their latest single “No Guilt,” as well as their signature song, “I Know What Boys Like.”
Here’s a live “No Guilt,” performed about a month before we saw them:
A night or two later, we camped out in the hills above Hollywood. The next morning a guy at a gas station told us there had been several recent murders up in those hills. But the only unpleasant thing we experience there was when, shortly after waking up, some jerk driving down the road, upon seeing the van, yelled “Fucking Potatoheads!” at us.
And yes, Alec, Rich and I went to Disneyland on this trip. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have fun there, but that fun was tempered by a feeling of guilt. The thought that I should be there with my daughter kept gnawing at me, even though Molly was way too young to appreciate Disneyland at that point. About three years later, I would take her there.
From Los Angeles we drove to Santa Barbara, where, at the UCSB campus radio station, KCSB I had an interview with a blind DJ named Greg Drust, who had been recommended to me by some folkie friends. We’d never met before, but Greg interviewed me for nearly an hour, taking a few breaks to play songs from the album.
From there we went to San Jose, where we stayed with a local journalist named Jack Sirica, who was a friend of one of my Santa Fe Reporter colleagues and the son of the famous Watergate judge John Sirica.
In San Jose we visited a local bookstore that was selling Potatoheads due to the record’s popularity on KFAT. I forget the owner’s name, but he was a great guy. We all got stoned in the store’s back room. I left some more copies of the album and he gave me a book of Tom Lehrer lyrics.
The next day we traveled to the nearby Gilroy, Calif., then known as “The Garlic Capital of the World” though I just knew it as the home of KFAT radio.
I was interviewed there by KFAT manager Dallas Dobro. The DJ on duty was Amy Airheart, who coincidentally, ended up in Santa Fe several years later and for a short time worked with Molly, then still in high school, at a local music promotion business.
After the interview when we were about to leave, the receptionist told me someone was there to see me. This strange guy, who looked a little like Andy Kaufman, introduced himself as an “investigator.” I asked if he was a private eye. He said he was an “investigator of the truth” and wanted to know exactly where I got my song ideas.
He’d been listening to my interview and he said he could tell that my music was coming from “somewhere deep.” I told him, honestly that often my songs came to me while listening to other peoples’ music, often with no obvious connection.
That seemed to amaze him and somehow verified to him that my music was cosmic or something. He mentioned he was a big fan of Jerry Jeff Walker and I told him I’d recently interviewed Jerry Jeff for the Reporter, and that the singer had told me that he’d given up drinking and was trying to live more healthy, and had taken up jogging.
Weeks later the “investigator of the truth” wrote me a letter, which included a poem he’d written about how Jerry Jeff was now living clean and sober and jogging.
I felt like an even bigger star the next day in Oakland.
We were downtown looking for this music magazine to drop off a copy of the album, when this guy stopped his car right after we’d parked. “Are you Steve Terrell?” he asked. I said yes, halfway thinking it was another “investigator of the truth.”
But this guy was just a normal fellow who said he’d been listening to my music on KFAT for weeks. “I saw the Potatoheads on your van so I had to stop and ask.” I gave him a copy of the record.
That probably was the last bit of promotion we did in the Bay Area. But we had a blast in San Francisco — much more fun than my previous trip there in 1973 as a broke hitchhiker. We stayed with a friend of Alec’s named Steve. We ate great food, including my first dim sum and something called Mongolian BBQ pizza — which didn’t taste much like Mongolian BBQ, but still was delicious.
I went to my first comedy club, just a couple of blocks from Steve’s place. One comic took the stage and pointed to Alec, with his long hair and beard, and said, “Jesus is here! It’s the son of God! Hello, Lord …” then he looked at me and said, “It’s Jesus and his pal Shemp!”
Another night we stumbled into this seedy bar in Chinatown. The sign outside said “Girls, Where Happy Friends Meet.” How could we not go in?
Almost immediately we were approached by one happy friend, a black drag queen who asked if we wanted to buy some coke. We didn’t. The atmosphere was tense. Maybe I was feeling self-conscious, being with a bunch of white tourists “slumming” in a sleazy bar.
But then this well-dressed, older Chinese man walked in and all eyes seemed to go toward him. I might have been just imagining this, but it seemed like he was some sort of authority figure, at least in this establishment. (At the time I said he looked like a Chinese Bruce King, the three-term “cowboy governor” of New Mexico.) All the hostile vibes seemed to subside. The guy in the suit didn’t want any trouble here. But we didn’t press our luck. After the next beer, we left.
Driving back to New Mexico, we stopped for gas in some tiny town in Nevada. This was in the days before nearly all gas stations were self-service. The attendant on duty was a very attractive blonde girl.
“Are you a band?” she asked. Sort of, I said and gave here an album, which I autographed, “To the prettiest gas station attendant in all of Nevada.”
We stopped for food up the road. When we were about to leave we were approached by a young guy in a cowboy hat. “Are you the guys in that van?” he asked.
Then he wanted to know if we were staying in town and mentioned we had a given an album to his girlfriend at the gas station. It was obvious that he was jealous and was checking out our intentions, perhaps worried that his gal was about to run off, leaving Bumfuck, Nevada for a romantic life of touring with a bunch of vagabond Potatoheads.
He seemed reassured that we were leaving town.
That promotional tour didn’t make me famous. And it didn’t stop Picnic Time for Potatoheads from losing lots of money. But still it was one of the most fun road trips I’ve ever taken.
Bonus: Sometimes while driving alone on a road trip, I’ll make a quickie iPhone video of me singing a snippet of a song. This one’s from a drive down to Austin, Texas in 2018.
Enjoy all 27 seconds of it:
I was living in San Francisco at the time. Yes, KFAT was one of the all-time great radio stations. I wish it was still around in its DJ-driven format.