Segarini: The Home Tour Part One

Well, I know it’s been awhile and I apologize for that, but the Holidays are a tough time for me. That 2 week stretch at the end of the year always makes me look over my shoulder at what took place in the previous 12 months, and what, if anything, I had accomplished. The stress comes when I try and determine whether or not I had made my life a little better…or worse. This year, with the exception of the wonderful experience of working with the absolutely stellar group who contribute to this blog, and their dedication, hard work, and well-crafted columns, I seemed to have treaded water, not going forward or backward, even though there were big changes in my life. I got depressed. I don’t like being depressed….

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If it weren’t for my daughter, son-in-law, adorable grandkids, and Xprime and their families and friends, I would have experienced a wallow in the deep end of the pool of self-analysis and self-pity, a useless exercise in wasting time and a thoroughly teenage thing to do. Instead, I had an old fashioned Christmas and New Year the likes of which I have not experienced in 3 decades. It was not only an uplifting and genuinely sweet reminder of what is really important in life, but I felt loved…and lucky to have so many people in my life to love back. Friends and family…and remembering what counts; the greatest gifts I received. At any rate, I came home with a smile on my face and determined to have a great year, this year. The Future lays in wait, and that is where I want to go.  Xprime and me (Photo by Heather Carson)

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Maybe I’m being foolish, but looking forward seems a hell of a lot better than sitting around pining for the past, when things were ‘better’, at least in our rose-coloured perception of what has gone before. My gift (or curse, as the case may be) is that I remember the past both good AND bad. Lessons have been learned, and I strive to continue to learn from my past mistakes and my current ones. I, like most of us, still make them. Life is a constant battle to achieve and create happiness and those are my goals…and to be honest, I have been rich 3 times in my life and poor 4 times. I need to add another ‘rich’ to that statistic.

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Before I delve into brand new columns (including the long-delayed next chapter of the latest Stockton California opus), I have decided to start off the New Year (a week late, as usual) by reintroducing myself to you. I think it only fair you know how I got here…and to remind myself that change is inevitable, lessons can always be learned, and money comes and goes like the weather. My dad always said that if you can’t have fun without money, you can’t have fun with it. As always…he was spot on. Thanks to you, Dear Readers, I have been having a LOT of fun while eating bologna sandwiches and wearing boxer shorts that should have become paint rags years ago. Ewww…

Sooo…the past is a wonderful place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. That said, let’s go for a visit to mine, shall we? Set the Wayback Machine….

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The Home Tour

 Stockton, California: Ellis Street From the time my adoptive parents, John and Mercedes Segarini brought me home from St. Joseph’s in San Francisco until the summer I turned 12, this is where I lived. There were no bars on the front door or chain link fence around the yard back then, Stockton hadn’t yet succumbed to foreclosures, gang related crime, or desperation. It was a Norman Rockwell childhood back before the world took a turn for the worse and common sense and neighborly intent took a punch to the face. Of course there was the war in Korea, the threat of polio, the fear that China would come over and do more than our math homework, and the creepy air raid drills just in case Mother Russia decided to drop The Big One and we’d have to “Duck and Cover”.

I dove off the garage roof with a tea towel cape around my neck to see if I could fly like Superman, I couldn’t. I accidentally dropped a 10 gallon can of paint on my kitten, “Snowball”, who instantly became ˜Flat ‘Red Ball’ and was no more, and bonded with my dad’s Water Spaniel, Spotty, who sat on the front porch with me for hours, my only friend in the world, after I tried to hit a home run in the living room and put a Louisville Slugger through the glass front door. I learned how to ride my first two wheeler by jumping on it from the porch and wobbling across the lawn to the sidewalk dozens, if not hundreds of times, before I made it to the street instead of winding up on my ass in my mother’s petunias. My bedroom was covered in Hopalong Cassidy wallpaper, linoleum, lamps, bedsheets and bed spreads. Next to the bed was the Emerson table radio my grandfather had given to me when I was barely a year old. It was always on. I had no idea then that I would pursue a career in music and its related fields, but the songs I heard late at night, laying there in the dark, have stayed with me my whole life.

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Stockton, California: Monterey Avenue We moved here the summer I turned 12. Susan Berry, my first major crush, who lived kitty-corner from our house, taught me how to french-kiss. Guy Waltz, the neighborhood’s coolest guy, turned me on to Elvis Presley by giving me a stack of 78’s when he joined the army and moved away.

My mother, who longed to have more children, fed every one of my friends who dropped by and encouraged us to hang out here to watch TV or just sit around the kitchen table while she served cookies or cake, or big plates of pasta. (Bob at 12) My friends continued to drop in to see my mom until she could no longer take care of herself and moved into a rest home, where they still made a point to drop in and say hello. I won my first fistfight here after John LaPape taught me how to box over the phone while I stood in front of the dresser mirror in my folk’s bedroom following his instructions. My dad referred to all of my friends as “Boy”. Pop was asleep in his Barcalounger one day when there was a horrific car accident and the wheel of one of the cars smashed into the house just below the big bay window next to my dad’s chair. He slept through it. My mom caught 4 of us cleaning a kilo of Panama Red on the kitchen table one day. Her only reaction? “Don’t let your father catch you.” Looking for the keys to my dad’s truck, I walked in on my parents making love. It was a shock to think that parents actually knew about sex. It was here in the breakfast nook that I watched the tragedy in Dallas play out on a warm November afternoon in 1963. I rehearsed my first band here (which my dad also slept through) and started writing the music that would lead to recording my first single with the Family Tree in a garage in Lake Tahoe on an early 3 track tape recorder the size of a refrigerator/freezer. I would return here in 1989 when my life was spinning out of control. (Family Tree era Bob 1967) 

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Stockton California: San Joaquin Street I rented this little house from my dad for 75 dollars a month in the old neighborhood we lived in before Monterey Avenue. The building on the right is the apartment building my dad’s family had lived in when they first came from Italy. It was here we sat in horror watching Robert Kennedy get gunned down on TV while waiting for a movie to start which never did. The woman I lived with here ran off with my dope dealer leaving behind half my record collection, my comics, and the cat. The window on the right looks into the little 10×10 room (or was it 8×8?) where I wrote Miss Butters.  Harry Nilsson also composed at least some of “One” in that little space as well when he came to visit for a weekend. We even managed to co-write a song for the Miss Butters album that Harry recorded a version of that I didn’t learn about until after he passed away.

The Family Tree broke up shortly after the release of Miss Butters, and I formed Roxy with one of the guitar players, Jim DeCoque, and we soon found ourselves with a record deal with uber-cool label Elektra Records in L.A. We had been living and rehearsing in a small house in a potato field on Highway 99 that we referred to as ˜Cold Red”. Fame and fortune suddenly beckoned.

It was time to leave Stockton.

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Los Angeles: Horseshoe Canyon Blvd: This house in Laurel Canyon was rented by our manager, John Frankenheimer, and was where Roxy lived for a year or so before finding our own places. On the same dead end gravel road that also housed Joni Mitchell, Chuck Barris, and Mickey Dolenz, we lived above the smog and noisy hurley-burley of Sunset Blvd. and Hollywood, separated from the hot, arrid San Fernando Valley by the mountains and canyons in this section of the San Gabriels. This is where birds chirped, cool breezes flowed, and the sky was perpetually blue and clear.

Team Roxy. From L to R: Jim Morris, John MacDonald, John Haeny, (producer/engineer) with one of his prize winning huskies, Jac Holzman, (President, Elektra Records), Bob Segarini, Randy Bishop, Jim DeCoq, and John The Frankenheimer, (manager).

We watched the moon landing here. We ordered late night pizza from Pizza Man, and watched car salesmen Cal Worthington and Chip and Storm introduce movies all night on local television stations. We rehearsed the Roxy Album, and we became part of the local musical community while Manson and family carved their way into the history books.

There had been one other house, a place where even the furniture and houseplants were rented, but we were very uncomfortable in the dank, dark residence that clung to the side of a hill under rows of the stilt houses crazy architects had built on the mountainous terrain. The Sword of Damocles complete with balconies and hot tubs, just waiting to tumble onto our heads during the next Big Shake. (Skip to 1:35 to see the actual houses above ours, and to 5:01 to see what we were afraid would happen.)

 

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Los Angeles: Crest Way: If you drive North on Vine past the Capitol building, Vine stops just as the street heads into the foothills and becomes Crest Way after a little jog in the road. Like the house further west in Laurel Canyon, here we were above the smog and backed onto Griffith Park. Moving in here led to the delightful discovery that deer would sometimes be in the back yard when we went out to the patio in the morning to have coffee and read the Times. The house came with a gardener, whom we never saw and never paid. A mother raccoon who had gotten into the habit of coming in through the kitty door in the laundry room to have dinner with the cats, Lloyd (who watched TV with me) and Ed (who didn’t) trotted her five newly born kits into the living room one afternoon to introduce us to them. They became part of the family while we lived here.

Randy Bishop, myself, and our wives moved here just as Roxy was unwinding and Rand and I were on the verge of forming the Wackers. It was a great house and the scene of some formidable parties.

We threw Rita Coolidge (Randy and I sang backups along with the Blackberries) a birthday party here, an all-nighter that saw some astounding music made in the living room played by guests who had played on dozens of hit records over the years.

My wife Cheryl and Rita ended up fully clothed in the dry bathtub eating chocolate cake and passing a bottle of Cuervo back and forth giggling like schoolgirls until the wastepaper basket had to be re-imagined as a barf bag once the tequila and cake met up in their stomachs. Rand and I wrote for the Dillards, Richard and Karen Carpenter, and the movie Vanishing Point here.

and after being introduced to Mike Stull by recording executive and wonderful person David Anderle, decided to move north to Mike’s hometown, Eureka, and put together The Wackers. We were having so much fun in Los Angeles, we had forgotten why we had moved here in the first place. Rock and Roll, Baby!

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Eureka California: Wackering Heights: I have recounted many stories that took place here and in Eureka in past blogs. It was an idyllic setting and a battery charger after the intense activity we had experienced in L.A.

Eureka is where The Wackers were formed. We wrote and demo’d the majority of Wackering Heights, Hot Wacks, and Shredder in this glorious house and other homes in town including the Stull’s, Mick Herndon’s, and once, Mike and I wrote a song, I Don’t Want My Love Refused, sitting in Mick’s neighbor’s living room waiting to take their underage daughter to one of our concerts.

She was like the band’s mascot and everybody’s little sister. (Pictured: Bob, Mike, and Randy 1971) The Heights was home to endless barbecues, pot testing parties, ridiculous drama and monumental laughs. From here we toured and recorded, always looking forward to coming home to this perfect place, not counting the rainstorms, the long drive to anywhere, and the growing desire to once again feel asphalt under our feet, the excitement only found in a big city, and the itch to move on to some distant and exotic place to explore and conquer.

After the trip described at length here in “The Wack and Roll Circus Hits the Road”, the decision was made. The Wackers would head for Montreal. And we did…without Mike, who decided that he would be better off pursuing his career back in Los Angeles.

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Montreal Quebec: Marcil Street: When the Wackers moved to Montreal, Cheryl and I first lived in a tiny 5^th floor walk-up on Victoria Street that had paper thin walls and little heat. Within six months we were able to afford the move to N.D.G and took up residence in a sweet 2^nd floor duplex with two balconies, large living room, dining room, kitchen and 2 bedrooms for the ungodly sum of 145 dollars a month. Our daughter Amy was born while we lived in this flat. Those are the doors to her room on the balcony.

Kootch lived across the street, Rand and Mel around the corner, and Ernie just a couple of blocks away. As diverse a neighborhood as any I have ever lived in, complete with mob guys, musicians, Dilallo Burgers, Chalet Chicken, and a 16 year old Jamaican bike riding hash dealer named “Hitler”. Seriously…his parents named him “Hitler”.

When the Wackers broke up after a 4 year run at fame and fortune I wrote a song that has still never been recorded, but I do have a badly worn cassette copy of the demo. It was one of the first introspective songs about my life that I had written and pretty much sums up my moves until then. Among the other songs written here was the feeble attempt at bilingualism recorded right after the Wackers broke up on which I played all the instruments and sang all the vocals myself, C’est Tout, and another track, by All the Young Dudes, who rehearsed in the living room here, that told the story of my love affair with a woman I had met at Andre Perry’s Le Studio years earlier.

After the Dudes album tanked, and Rene Levesque’s politics made it difficult for Anglos to play music in Montreal, it was time for another move.

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Toronto Ontario: Armadale Avenue: Buckminster Fuller called Toronto The Golden City. British actor Peter Ustinov called it “New York run by the Swiss”. I call it home.

Toronto is New York to Montreal’s Boston, L.A to Montreal’s San Francisco, and London, England to Montreal’s Paris, France. Toronto is a city of villages whose personality changes every few blocks and seems not aware of its own awesomeness on any level. We escaped to here from occupied Montreal in the summer of 1977. After 2 weeks of living at the Town and Country Suites on Church Street, Cheryl found the house on Armadale Avenue in the paper, and it was love at first sight. Our daughter grew up in this house. I didn’t.

The house was a single story when we lived here. The top floor was added after the owner presented his daughter with the house as a wedding present and we had to seek shelter elsewhere, but the years spent here were some of the best of my life. I finished writing and recording Gotta Have Pop while living in this house. Ditto Goodbye LA and VoxPopulii. The Segarini Band tours, does a television concert at the Palais Royale, and plays the Ontario Place Forum with Teenage Head that becomes a riot and results in rock shows being banned at the venue for a year. Andy Gibb bared his soul about

Victoria Principal in this house, Burton Cummings met his future wife in this house, and I was nominated for a Juno in this house. Cheryl and I were their Best Man and Maid of Honour. My mom and dad visited us here. My dad would walk the Bloor West Village community checking out the produce stores and European bakeries before we were out of bed in the mornings. I caught my mom jumping up and down on our new couch one afternoon laughing her ass off, and when I asked her what the hell she was doing, she told me I did it on her couch, now it was her turn to do it on mine. She cooked prime rib and Cioppino for my friends in this house and when Brian Stutz asked for ketchup to put on the perfect prime rib my mother had made, she moved his plate, wine, and cutlery outside onto the porch and then gave him the ketchup he simply and clearly did not need.

It was here that I built a career for myself in the music business, and here where I first entered the world of broadcasting working first at CHUM FM and then Q107. It was here that I wrote the theme song for the Edison Twins TV show, and here where I began to drift away from my family and friends and my common sense.

It was also here where I was introduced to free-basing cocaine by a friend who wasn’t a friend, a once a year occurrence that would later take over my life.

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Toronto: Dunedin Drive: I am working at Much Music as a producer, then at CITY TV writing and hosting the Late Great Movies three nights a week. My cocaine habit worsens. Amy throws herself a party on her 11^th birthday. She has refused an allowance preferring instead to earn her own money baby sitting and walking a neighbor’s Dalmatians. She buys her own soda, chips and dips and organizes her birthday party, which Cheryl and I spend in the basement watching a Jays game and drinking martinis until dust starts to drift down into our drinks from 20 kids pogo-ing in the living room above our heads.

Cheryl turns 40 in this house. I write a song for her called “Because of You”, which I play at her birthday party.

It is one of the first songs I have written in years, thanks to James Taylor’s “That’s Why I’m Here”, making me realize that music was something I just couldn’t walk away from. I find out Rand Bishop is flying into Toronto to produce a Kick Axe album.

I make some phone calls, cancel his hotel reservation, and have the limo that picks him up at the airport drop him off here on Dunedin Drive. We have a fine 2 week visit and catch up on the last several years. I get, and then lose, my old afternoon drive shift at Q107, and start to spend more and more time in the basement wrapped around a free base pipe. I am spiraling out of control while my family can only stand by and watch, unable to reach me. My friends start to drift away.

The phone rings.

My mother has had a stroke while driving a car in California. By this time we had lost the house on Dunedin and were preparing to move. Instead, we put everything in storage and head out to California to see my mom before we lose her. I’m told she won’t survive more than a few weeks.

They didn’t know my mother very well.

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Stockton California: Monterey Avenue: My mom slowly recovers while we live in the house I started writing music in. Nothing comes now, however. After 6 months in the Intensive Care Unit at Dameron Hospital, my mom comes home in a wheel chair, no longer able to care for herself. Years of physiotherapy begins.

We realize we are going to be here for awhile. Cheryl gets a job, Amy finishes middle school at Saint Luke, and I start hanging out with the wrong people, doing the wrong things just like in Toronto. There are some good times though.

I began reconnecting with some real friends from the old days. There were trips to Tahoe and Yosemite. Tracking down my Grampa Jim’s cabin in Pine Crest and peering through the windows to see myself a million years ago when I was single digits and listening to doo-wop down at the teen centre

and reading the Oz books on the living room floor of this cabin. The great Cioppino and crab feeds, Costanza’s enchiladas, and the amazingly consistent perfect weather. The best moment of the time spent in Stockton came at Cal Expo one perfect summer night listening to James Taylor at the outdoor theatre there. Cheryl and I stood up and danced to “You Can Close Your Eyes”. We were both crying, and deep down, we both knew why. She deserved so much more than what I had become, and I was helpless to turn myself around at that time. She stood by me as long as she could, and that was a long, long time.

One day in October the first year we were out there, while I was sitting in the same breakfast nook I had watched the JFK assassination in, waiting for a World Series game to start, the world started to shake. I felt queasy, then anxious as I watched the trees and signs outside bend right down to the ground while a roar rose steadily louder from all around. The television suddenly turned to snow, and everything started to slowly roll back and forth, including my mother, whose wheelchair was rolling back and forth in the living room from the fireplace to the television while her and her friend, Little Joe, laughed until they peed their pants. I had forgotten to set the brake on her chair. Amy and Cheryl were in the Chevy when the quake struck and Cheryl thought they had had a flat tire until she pulled the car over and saw everything moving like a palm tree in a high wind. It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake, and even though we were 140 miles from the epicenter, it rocked Stockton like a hurricane.

When the televisions came back on, I watched the Marina burn and the Bay Bridge collapse, and then the horror of the Oakland Freeway pancake-ing on all those hapless drivers on the lower deck. I oddly, and suddenly thought how lucky we were in Canada to have snow storms. The picture above of the side of the house on Monterey shows what used to be the garage. One day while I was sitting on the stairs leading to the kitchen from the garage, I had the crazy idea of building a screening room where the Chevy and the little yellow Fiat convertible now resided. Against everyone’s wishes that is exactly what I did. Amy started and finished high school in this house, going from Saint Luke’s to Saint Mary’s the second year we were in California. Cheryl and I drifted further apart, her dealing more and more with my mother’s care, while I spent more time locked in the screening room playing video games and watching movies and television on the big 10 foot wide Stuart motion picture screen, or digging the laserdisc of Bobby Brown’s latest album, a musical tour-de-force and turning point for great R&B, wrapped around a glass pipe.

We got Amy a half Doberman/half German Shepard puppy she named Muttley Crue. A cute animal with giant feet and a good disposition unless someone he didn’t know approached Amy. One day a neighbor couple tried to pet Muttley while Amy was walking him. She repeatedly told the couple not to come near her. They did. Someone got bit. Two days later an insurance adjuster came to visit and check out the dog. She decided that Muttley was harmless, then approached Amy while she held the dogs leash. Result: one bitten insurance adjuster and Muttleys one way ticket to a farm for wayward dogs. Mutt was replaced by Harley, a cute but tiny dog we had to give away because we kept accidentally stepping on him, and then a stray showed up on our doorstep, stayed until she gave birth to a litter of puppies, and then walked out like the bitch she was, leaving us with tiny puppies and the burden of feeding them from little bottles. We found all but one homes, and the little guy left behind fell to my care. I named him Bear. He lived in the screening room with me and gave me something to do besides drugs, and believe it or not, we bonded. He would fall asleep on my chest on the couch, and I would put him back in his box and cover him with a little blanket. When he was hungry, he would whimper more than bark, and I would haul him out and feed him with a doll’s baby bottle full of lukewarm milk and puppy vitamins. I came home one day and he was gone, having been given away to a friend of either Cheryl’s or Amy’s.

I went back to the pipe.

By now my mom was in a home and just came home on weekends. One day Cheryl came out to the screening room and sat me down. “Go home to Toronto”, she said. “Go home to Toronto or you are going to kill yourself here”. She was right. I borrowed money from my family and left for home. The marriage was over, but I was the only person who didn’t know it yet.

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Toronto Ontario: Lowther Avenue: I made it back to Toronto with a hundred dollars in my pocket. An old friend, Kim, had said I could stay with her and her daughter when I got back, but I quickly wore out my welcome and lost another friend because of the drugs. From there I stayed for a time with a friend of a friend who was a pot dealer, but an incredible control freak who, fine with the drugs, went postal because I used spices in my spaghetti sauce other than salt and pepper. Just before I moved out, I made him and his wife dinner, pasta with ketchup. He thought it was great. I still shudder at the thought.

Thanks to Dave Bailey, who has remained a good friend through thick and thin, and who had arranged my stay with the pot dealing, taste bud challenged headbanger, I was reintroduced to Wolfgang Spegg, the man who had launched my Toronto career by signing me to Bomb Records and opening every door in the city for me. He was in the Telex business now and just branching out into the relatively new enterprise of custom built home computers. He and his wife, Cathy lived in what can only be described as a mansion in the Annex section of Toronto, and they opened their home, and their hearts, and took me in. From here, Bailey reintroduced me to old friends and new ones. He started getting me out to a place called Westside Johnny’s, where I started singing again and flirted with the idea of putting a band together. Most of the time things were good at Wolf’s. A lot of dinner parties and even a visit from Cheryl at one point that gave me hope I could straighten out and patch things up. It was here that I learned how to use a computer, made new friends, and found a creative outlet by getting involved in a project of Wolfgang’s that was a decade ahead of its time. I would write a piece of music here that would become an ad and theme song for the project Wolfgang and I had started work on, Musicmusicmusic.com. A website where you could stream any piece of music you wanted, create playlists, and share them with others. Once again, there was hope, but I kept chasing the dragon. Eventually, the drugs overwhelmed even that friendship and I moved on. It was in the next house that I realized I had a one way ticket to Palookaville unless I changed my ways.

Part Two of The Home Tour can be found here

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Segarini’s column appears every Monday

Contact us at dbawis@rogers.com

Bob “The Iceman” Segarini was in the bands The Family Tree, Roxy, The Wackers, The Dudes, and The Segarini Band and nominated for a Juno for production in 1978. He also hosted “Late Great Movies” on CITY TV, was a producer of Much Music, and an on-air personality on CHUM FM, Q107, SIRIUS Sat/Rad’s Iceberg 95, (now 85), and now publishes, edits, and writes for DBAWIS, continues to write music, make music, and record.