CAVEMAN!

This is the story about the caveman.

As many of you know, I am ancient, I've been in seventeen thousand bands for over a million years, and I never exaggerate.

Experience has taught me that most musicians are idiots, but certainly no band I was ever in was more idiotic as the binge drinking Blue Fox Band.

In 1976 (yes, 1976) we were on the road playing at a place called Joe's Convention Lounge, on the American side of Niagara Falls. This was the Bi-Centennial year, so the aforementioned "Joe" painted everything in his Convention Lounge Red White and Blue to attract the American tourists who never showed up anyways.

Above the club was a slummy five room band house, complete with a roach infested kitchen, holes in the walls, and beds that made you feel like a hot dog in a moldy bun. We made communal meals usually involving Ragu and some sort of pasta. This way we had more money for beer and other idiot inducing substances.
After each night of playing, all nine of us went on a mission to entice females up the stairs to our swinging slum for some passionate road boinking. We were extremely particular about this selection.
In order to party with The Blue Fox Band, these girls MUST have arms and legs.

Since hardly anyone ever showed up to Joe's pathetic patriotic looking lounge, we began to consider girls with missing limbs and maybe sheep, but still we had no luck at all. The gig ended, and up the stairs we went to re-heat some Ragu ravioli and get blotto, 500 miles from home.
One night, Sitting around the kitchen table, the air filled with blue smoke, we began a fresh edition of "Burp-Olympics."
"Burp-Olympics" was an on-going beer drinking and belching competition involving nine guys, a thousand beers, and a small cassette recorder.
The idea was to suck down an entire beer as fast as possible, hit play and record on the cassette recorder, and then spork it back up as loudly as possible.

The burps would then be rated by "the judges" by their loudness, length, and originality. (I still have the tapes)
Somewhere around sunrise, I decided that because I was the leader of the band, I would set a good example and be the first one to go to bed.

I needed to go to the bathroom. Bolo had been in there for a long time, making ape-like noises and disgusting fart sounds. This was normal.
I knocked on the door. More gorilla sounds came from inside the bathroom.
When the door opened, I realized why Bolo had been in there so long.

He had been transforming into a cave man.

Wearing nothing but a shredded towel as a loin cloth, he had painted his face with some sort of war-paint, and frizzed his enormous afro straight out in all directions.

He also carried a baseball bat. (his club)
"ME CAVEMAN!" he yelled, and he proceeded to sit back down at the kitchen table to resume drinking.
I told him I was going to bed, and the soundman "Flathead," began interviewing the caveman, using the cassette recorder.

I staggered out of the bathroom towards my hotdog-bun bed. This did not meet with the caveman's approval.

"CAVEMAN SAY NO BED! CAVEMAN SAY STAY UP. DRINK! he slammed the bat against the table and everyone laughed.
I told him to cut the shit, and went to bed.
The door flew open, and the caveman entered my bedroom armed with a big pot of ravioli and a spatula, which had been on the stove. "CAVEMAN SAY NO BED!" he grunted.
Then he began using the spatula to catapult the ravioli at me as I tried to sleep.
I pulled the covers over my head and swore, as the caveman pelted me with more pasta. It's pretty hard to sleep while you're being pelted with ravioli.

The next thing I knew, there were other bandmates in the room, laughing, kicking the bed, telling me to get up and drink, all of this being tape recorded of course.

Someone took a plunger from the bathroom and fooped it onto the ceiling above my head.
My temper boiled over, and I jumped out of bed in my underwear, grabbed the plunger, and began killing people with it. They retreated back into the kitchen as I chased them swinging the plunger.

The caveman found this to be tremendously funny, so I focused my wrath on him.
He ran down the stairs, out the front door and onto the streets and sidewalks of Niagara Falls Boulevard, and I followed him, me in my underwear, wildly swinging the plunger, and the caveman in his shredded towel loincloth and warpaint, the rest of the band, hanging out the windows screaming with laughter.
The sun was coming up now, and people on their way to work couldn't believe what they were seeing ...me... (in my underwear) chasing the caveman around a car, when suddenly I heard the whoop of a siren.
"SHIT! THE COPS!" the caveman yelled, and I forgot about being mad and we both ran back into the slum.

The cops began pounding on the door. The band began hiding illegal things, and Bolo and I struggled to get into our clothes and clean up.

The cops kept pounding and we had to let them in.
They came in, looked around. Sniffed the air.
They were not happy with us.
One of them said something to the effect of this: "I don't know what the f*ck you guys think you were doing out there, but If I have to come back here again, you're all going to jail."

Then they asked whose van was parked on the sidewalk. It was mine. They gave me a ticket for parking on the sidewalk and left.
I still have the ticket in my scrap-book
(note the time)
I never did pay it.