Old Martinez Hall: Part II
(Another expurgated excerpt from Gringo Lessons: Rock’n Roll at Old Martinez Hall)
It was said Fats Domino in the mid sixties scored a full house at the Central Catholic School Gym in Taos. My partner Ken and I talked each other into thinking we could get rich by booking rock bands into Old Martinez Hall. Friends put us in touch with friends in the L.A. music business. Susie and I spent a few nights at the Hyatt on Sunset getting hustled by hungry rock’n roll promoters. Lewie and Hank Wickham, New Mexico favorites from Albuquerque, who frequently played La Cocina, headlined the lounge act at the hotel. We met Arlo Guthrie, a friend of Lewie’s. Based on guesswork, we hired Ricky Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band for three nights at a total cost of $7,000.00 plus rooms at The Taos Inn. Ricky’s hit “Garden Party” was soaring on the charts. The bar business at our joint, due to wedding dance income and pool tourneys, was lucrative.
At the Taos Inn, the Morris Brothers, Ken and Gary, whose folks had operated the Walgreen’s Drugstore on Taos Plaza, told us about a furniture maker in Juarez, Mexico. Local pilot Oren Olinger flew me and Susie to Juarez, where we dined on fresh shrimp, drank Dos Equis and visited the artisan in a nondescript back alley. We deposited half the amount, about $225 for the custom-made plywood cocktail tables at $6 each. He said he’d call when the 75 tables were ready for delivery. You had to wonder whether you’d ever see your money or your tables.
When the most honest man in Juarez called the Morris Brothers to say the tables were ready, my buddy John Koch and I headed off to Mexico. We stopped for fresh shrimp, drank more Dos Equis and bought a couple bottles of Metaxa brandy for the return. We found the alley, paid off the balance of $225 and piled up the tables in an asymmetrical pyramid on the back of the pick-up.
At customs, there was a long line of vehicles ahead of us. Impatient, I encouraged Koch to bypass the lot and pull up in front. Drunk as an Irishman, I proffered a bottle of brandy to customs, got our bills of lading stamped, and Koch drove on while I slept. In the early morning south of Albuquerque, I heard John talking to himself. So I took away the beer and started him on the brandy to sober him up. We arrived in Ranchos at Old Martinez Hall safely and unloaded. For years, after abandoning the Old Martinez Hall adventure, those plywood cocktail tables began to appear at various joints around town just to remind me of Ricky Nelson.
We spent $1,000 promoting Ricky Nelson on radio all across El Norte. None of the locals—except for a few hipsters like Manny Ocanas—bought tickets. The hippies stayed home in their communes. I paid Ricky $3500 in advance. Saturday night the balance of $3500 was due. After the Friday night opening, we only had about $1,000 in cash. (The show drew about 75 people per night at $5 a head.) In response to a call for emergency aid, the pool table guys drove up Saturday morning and gave me a bag with $2500 in it. We lost about $8,000. It took all summer to repay the advance against pool table revenue.
“Smile Bill,” said Dennis, “Don’t worry about it.” Dennis came to the concert and Ricky wanted to meet him. We arranged a meeting at The Taos Inn. They gave each other the Hollywood hug, and retired to a table.
Later that summer I visited Bo Diddley in Las Lunas, where he lived, just south of Albuquerque. (Prior to this, about fifteen of us, including Dennis, caught Bo and Cookie Vee, his singer, one night at the San G. during a film shoot.) “What do you think, Mr. Diddley?” Bo, who wore weird cowboy hats and thick spectacles said, “I ain’t doing much. I’ll take the door.” We agreed to spend $1,000 on publicity for the three nights. It was a terrific show, way more exciting than Ricky Nelson and we only lost a $1,000 on the weekend.
(Bo’s drummer didn’t show, so Dennis Long, a hippie and school teacher from Arroyo Hondo, played back-up. Under similar circumstances Dennis played with Earl “Fatha” Hines at the TCA due to a second emergency.)
Customarily, it was worth a hippie’s life or a violation of one’s privates–if he or she wandered by the Plaza or Ranchos de Taos on the wrong night. School buses filled up with women and children got shot up when they arrived in Taos circa the 1968 Woodstock diaspora. A female hitchhiker might get several kinds of rides on the way back to one of the communes–New Buffalo or Reality or Morning Star communes. Insiders whispered that troublesome hippies “disappeared” out there on the desert or in the mountains. Contrary to its reputation for love and peace, Taos retained its centuries old culture of violence, begun, maybe, 10,000 years ago.
At the end of the three-day Bo Diddley concert the hippies rebelled against the local cholos. A few flower children got in their pick-ups or picked up axe handles and some really big rocks. The engines roared, tires squealed, and they charged the locals, who were armed similarly with shovels and tire irons. The occasional rifle shot rang out—reminiscent of the famed gun battle at the Old Mountain View saloon in Arroyo Seco on the road to TSV when hippies and locals shot it out. The Ranchos riot continued for the couple of hours before the state cops arrived.
My first response was to try and stop the carnage but the El Cortez Tavern regulars said, “Not tonight, Bill. Better stay in here.” Considering my greater debt to the National Guard and you can understand why I owed my life to the kindness of strangers. Bartending, like football, skiing, and horse back riding was a contact sport. As a kid I got used to getting bucked off or scraped up against a tree by a disagreeable horse. You hit the ground hard, then got back up. The point of football was to get knocked down or knock somebody down–even if it was your opponent was a blocking dummy. Skiing included sudden encounters with trees, rocks, and hard-packed slopes. A bar fight just seemed like an extension of sport, as long as you had an equalizer ready at hand.
Once during a wedding dance I tried to stop a fight and a couple of guys came up behind threw a tablecloth over my head and hit me with one of the lightweight plywood tables from Juarez. Some regulars pulled me out of the melee. I went to the hospital and got stitches around an eye and in the back of my head.
I worked the wedding dance scene hard to pay off the losses incurred on the Ricky Nelson—Bo Diddley concert debacles, Though I brought Old Martinez Hall back from the brink, I couldn’t repay Harvey Mudd the original stake. The backbiters at the downtown Mudd combine bad-mouthed me and the rumor mill said I was out of my handshake deal on the Plaza Theatre.