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INSIDE THE FIRE
MY STRANGE DAYS WITH THE DOORSBy B. DOUGLAS CAMERON DAVID R. GREENLANDAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 B. Douglas Cameron
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-1275-5Contents
PRELUDE...............................................................................ix1. FROM ZYGOTE TO TROOPER (Or WHO IS THIS DOUG CAMERON ANYWAY?).....................32. NOVEMBER 3, 1968..................................................................103. LETTERS FROM VINCE................................................................164. JUNE 14, 1969.....................................................................255. THE SONIC ORGASM..................................................................286. DOUG CAMERON, ROAD WARRIOR........................................................317. LOS ANGELES: JUNE 16, 1969........................................................348. THE WORKSHOP......................................................................379. MEXICO............................................................................4210. MY SWIM WITH JIM..................................................................4911. ELIZABETH.........................................................................5412. THE END...........................................................................5613. "MAYBE FIND IT BACK IN L.A...."...................................................8914. THE COURSONS......................................................................9915. VINCE TREANOR REVISITED...........................................................10216. December 11, 1984.................................................................119ALMOST FAMOUS: THE DOUG CAMERON BANDS.................................................144EPILOGUE..............................................................................148POSTSCRIPT: THE SEARCH FOR MY ORIGINS.................................................151
Chapter One
FROM ZYGOTE TO TROOPER Or WHO IS THIS DOUG CAMERON ANYWAY?
Our grey stucco home was located in a beautiful older neighborhood on Harlem Boulevard in Rockford, Illinois. Across the street was a small Civil War monument, a large rock upon which had been bolted a bronze plaque commemorating Camp Fuller, a Union base located along the nearby Rock River in 1862. I saw that monument every time I went out front to retrieve the mail. The rock never changed, nor did the contents of our mailbox, which was usually stuffed mainly with correspondence for my father, a district sales representative for Continental Steel of Kokomo, Indiana.
There was no reason to expect the mail to be any different one day in November 1968, probably the seventeenth or eighteenth. I idly thumbed through a dozen or so letters, the last one addressed to me. I couldn't believe my eyes ... a legal size envelope, white in color, with parallel green lines on the left edge which included the logo: The Doors 8512 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles, California. I tore the envelope open and was stunned to discover that I was being offered the position of assistant road manager! (Over the years, this significant piece of correspondence mysteriously disappeared in the accumulated dust of time.)
It was a lengthy letter, the first of seven I would receive from Doors road manager Vincent Treanor III, informing me that the job paid the princely sum of $60 per week, plus room and board, for my efforts. The amount wasn't much, but so what? The primary condition of my employment was that I first finish high school. Unfortunately, life at West High by this time was quite a strain because I had a very strong case of senioritis.
Like most parents would, mine questioned the wisdom of allowing their teenage son to tour with a rock band, particularly the Doors, but Vince called and talked to Dad about the gig. The terms were agreed upon, but I still had to finish high school. UGH! What a trial. Especially geometry, which blew me out of the water. Bud Chamberlain, a math teacher at West as well as a great guy, agreed to tutor me. Even with his help I barely passed the final exam. Who said musicians are good with numbers? Oh, by the way, I needed that geometry class to graduate. I squeaked through by one point. Never give up!
So who is this Doug Cameron, fledgling Doors roadie, anyway? Where did he come from? How did he reach this enviable position in America, circa 1968?
I was born in a crossfire hurricane. Wish I could say that. It sounds good, doesn't it? But it's not true, at least not physically. Spiritually and emotionally, however, it is. A young woman named Margie Allison and her boyfriend, Ed Johnson, shared some backseat time in a 1947 Packard-or it might have been a DeSoto-somewhere in a frozen field south of Russiaville, Indiana. I started out as a zygote. Phonetically, zygote sounds a lot like the German words sei Gott, which means "be God." I keep trying not to Be.
I was born on October 4, 1951, in Terre Haute, Indiana. Terre Haute is French for "high ground", and that might be closer to Heaven than I'll be when I drop to room temperature at some date in the hopefully distant future.
None of Margie's family were around to help with my entrance into the world. Approximately 140 miles to the north in Kokomo, Indiana, her people weren't even close. They sent Margie to Terre Haute so no one in Kokomo would know she had "a bun in the oven," as the ancient adage goes. I learned later that Ed was somewhat angered by the news of my existence. He told Margie not to try pinning any responsibility on him, and that he would tell everyone she had slept with all of his friends if she named him as the biological father. With that he quickly departed to begin an academic career at Bradley in Illinois. He was reportedly about 6'2" tall and had blue eyes and reddish blonde hair. I figure he must have been a Valkyrie, in Norse mythology a chooser of the slain, because he decided my fate in very short order. At least he set the stage. Goodbye, Ed ...
Margie had a rough time the day I was born. In other words, mine was not an easy delivery. Years later I was told that there were a lot of screaming blue jays providing an accompanying chorus in the trees outside the hospital window. Pretty birds, but mean. By mistake, a nurse brought me to Margie, and when the blunder was discovered I was whisked away to a crib in another room. I was ON MY OWN. Not even a day old. Ain't dis a bitch? At least I wasn't a zygote anymore ... just an orphan. Or as the French would refer to me, a bastard. Is it any wonder I have never been crazy about the French?
Within two weeks-or three, tops-through the help of a doctor in Kokomo, I won the biggest jackpot of my whole life: I was adopted by Ray and Barbara Cameron, also of Kokomo. The size of the jackpot? Incalculable. If it had been $500,000,000 I wouldn't have traded. Not then, not now, not ever. Suffice it to say that I felt very loved as a child. Very safe, very secure.
Both Barbara Cooper Cameron and Raymond Lindley Cameron were erudite, educated, lovely people who fell in love with me at first sight. Mom came from an old Fremont, Ohio family, and her great grandfather, W.E. Haynes, fought for the North in the Civil War. My dad's family didn't have any money, so his was an uphill battle not only in his family but in life as well.
We moved to Rockford, Illinois, sometime in 1953. Back then, Rockford was one of the country's leading manufacturers of machine tools and the second largest city in the state, outranked only by Chicago, located some ninety miles to the southeast. Today, Rockford is Illinois' fourth most populous community, and due to a failure to diversify its products and services through the years, leads in virtually nothing.
I was raised an Episcopalian, and through that experience can corroborate the conventional line regarding Anglicans (another term for Episcopalians) being chilly. They are. Mom used to drop me off for Sunday school at Emmanuel Episcopal Church and drive away. There I was, walking through this massive, foreboding building, searching in near darkness for the right room. Well, I just split. I started walking home, stopping at some old woman's house to ask directions. I wasn't much more than four. It's a wonder some wicked witch didn't snatch me up for her cook pot.
When I was six-years-old, my mother asked, "How would you like to have a little sister?" I remember my first reaction being, "Oh, no!" Something was going to threaten my position as Golden Boy of the entire universe.
Nonetheless, my sister Martha, whom we later dubbed Mardi, arrived one day in a bright blue blanket. She had a beautiful smile, a dimple and blue eyes. I thought, "Well, the blanket is the wrong color." I felt just like the character in the Andrew Gold tune "Lonely Boy" from then on. Over the years I treated my sister like crap 80% of the time. Today I'm lucky she doesn't hate me completely. On one level, I think she does.
My early years were very similar to millions of other boys growing up at that time in the Midwest. Bicycles, ice cream cones, a fascination with the old guns and helmets our fathers had brought home from World War II and/or Korea. I once spotted a Nazi helmet on the sidewalk in our neighborhood. No one around ... Although tempted, I left it there. Had my conscience pulled me in the opposite direction, that helmet could have become the first piece in my current collection of military artifacts.
My friends and I spent many an hour at Sinnissippi Park, playing golf in the summer and sledding down a steep hill covered with deciduous trees in winter. Today no one sleds there because too many knuckleheads ran their sleds into trees. And with the ever growing abundance of lawyers and litigants, the city closed the hill. It was the city's fault a kid cracked his head open on a tree? The city did this on purpose? Kill all the lawyers?
As a youth, Jim Morrison was fond of pelting other kids with rocks, a sin of which I was guilty on at least one occasion. A friend and I were checking out a bridge being rebuilt on the Rock River when I decided that throwing some rocks at a couple of older guys was a great idea. The missiles didn't hit their targets, but the damage was done. With the angry kids in pursuit, we raced down a temporary wooden bridge only to discover that it had been partially dismantled. To escape we had to jump down from a height of over twenty feet. As I hit the ground, my right knee came up so hard that my jeans made a large scuff mark on my face. No broken bones, luckily, and my friend was unscathed. "Let's get the hell out of here!" I shouted. We did. Close call ...
When I was twelve Mom and Dad finally told me that I was adopted. I don't remember this sudden revelation having any immediate emotional impact, but it may explain why seventh grade was ghastly. Real Blackboard Jungle time. Multiple classrooms, lots of street smart hoodlums with slicked back hair and cigarettes, all collected in a huge three story brick building called Roosevelt Junior High. (Ironically, I later became a teacher in huge buildings with multiple classrooms. The students' slick backed hair was gone. But not the cigarettes.) Many mornings found me in a fetal position on a bed in the nurse's office. The pain in my stomach felt as if someone was stabbing me with a knife. Gastritis. I hated Roosevelt. My grades were poor, and I nearly caused my father to have a nervous breakdown. His job gave him enough pressure without having to worry about me.
John Kennedy was shot that year, 1963. A Catholic family across the street was torn up. Kathy Earp, the oldest of the then six kids, stayed in bed crying and crying for three days. The nation was in shock. As so many others have said, America lost its innocence the day JFK was assassinated. No one could trust the government anymore because there was so much suspicion that Kennedy's death had been an inside job. Lee Harvey Oswald did it, we were told. One man, one gun. Still don't know for certain, but for what it's worth, I firmly believe Oswald did it.
Sadness hung over the country like a monstrous fog until that early February evening in 1964 when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. All that screaming ... what a release! No more John Kennedy, but now there's a John Lennon. From a national tragedy to a national orgasm. The fog lifted. The music played. And in the summer of 1965, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, sitting on a beach in Southern California, began planning their assault on the history of popular culture. I truly don't remember much of what I was doing that summer, but a year later, as the year-old Doors (still unknown outside Los Angeles) were perfecting their initial repertoire in such clubs on the Sunset Strip as the London Fog, Gazzari's and the Whisky-A-Go-Go, I distinctly recall Doug Cameron, not yet fifteen, being BORED OUT OF HIS MIND!
Diversion came in the form of military school. Yes, military school. What would Jim Morrison, rebel son of a naval officer, have thought? Or Robby Krieger, who also had done time in military school as a youth? Needless to say, I never told either of them about my mandatory three summers at Culver Military Academy, for which tuition was Big Bucks.
It so happened that my maternal grandmother, whom we called Nana, had quite a few extra shekels and offered to send me to the summer version of Culver, located near Knox, Indiana, in the northern part of the state. Nana's sons-my Uncles Dick and Jack-also spent a trio of summers there, beginning in 1939. Considering how restless I was, this proved to be a particularly propitious opportunity, even though I wasn't much of a joiner. Good thing, then, that the summer term at the academy was not as strictly regimented as the winter.
To be honest, I was indifferent regarding Culver, but my dad was quite excited. He had known about the academy as a young man, but his economically challenged family could not help him realize his dream of going there. Now his son, through whom he vicariously lived a great deal of his life, could attend.
Fortunate sons from across the country-actually the Western Hemisphere-descended upon the time-worn, tradition-tested shores of Lake Maxincuckkee to become plebes, members of the military's freshman class. The youngest enrolled as Woodcrafters, or as we older plebes called them, Wood Tics. Otherwise, one could join either the Naval School as a midshipman, as my Uncle Jack had, or become a trooper in the Black Horse Troop, which was Uncle Dick's choice, and mine. The latter was the School of Horsemanship, which taught young knuckleheads the finer art of equitation and allowed an aspiring trooper to savor the admonitions of a retired Army officer, namely the unforgettable Colonel Robinette. Robinette was a portly, pasty faced, bespectacled soldier who was never seen without his campaign hat fitting so snugly on his head that the brim was only millimeters above his glasses. He rarely failed to remind us that, "You don't have to be a bonehead!" We certainly benefited from this type of instruction. Oh, yes ...
Troopers were quartered in very old wood-framed tents with canvas roofs and sides, screened windows and a screen door attached with a long spring that pulled the door shut with a loud slap anytime someone entered or exited. These tents were our homes for the next six weeks, so I heard that door slap a lot.
Again, Culver wasn't cheap, and I was never more impressed with that than when, on the first day of camp, I walked from the Quartermaster building to the troop area with a huge pile of brand new uniforms stacked high across my outstretched, straining arms. My campaign hat was a felt affair with a wide brim that made me look like Dudley Do Right. I was also issued khaki shirts and pants, blue blazers, blue chambray shirts, blue/grey riding breeches with a yellow stripe running down each leg and, as we were taught the English style equitation, a pair of impressive tall, black boots that came all the way to the knees. The plebes looked somewhat like Nazi officers-young ones-and were not in any way familiar with the system. They couldn't march, always complained, didn't like to stand at attention, and liked to shovel horse crap even less. With 150 horses stabled in the riding hall, there were plenty of road apples.
Every horse had a name, and the one I remember most was Clock, being ridden that first year by Jay Gillogly, Squadron Commander of both troops-A and B-for the "final make" of summer '66. Every week there was a new make, where various first and second classmen would receive lower or higher marks based on their new job for the next week. If one was a "dick off"-as a guy named Pete Schulz-wenk was fond of calling troopers who behaved like jerks-he would be made Stable Officer or Mess Officer, in charge of the chow hall detail. The latter was definitely preferable to the former.
Another bit of terminology that Schulz-wenk loved was "little birdies." "Where are my little birdies?" he would shout with a somewhat arrogant air when commanding a group of plebes who couldn't tell their asses from a hole in the bottom of the Zuider Zee.
Pete's brother, Axel, was a fellow trooper of mine in Troop B, but I remember the Schulz-wenk parents more than the boys. Herr and Frau Schulz-wenk were very cultured, internationally seasoned and obviously Germanic. They had blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. The father, an industrialist, was a CEO of Volkswagen Brazil. He had a Ph.D, as well as an especially penetrating gaze.
I once asked Herr Doktor Schulz-wenk, "How do you say `will' in German?"
"I can't understand you vith dat gum in your maus."
"Sorry ..."
Axel told me that not only had his father been the commander of a tank battalion on the Eastern Front in Russia, his grandfather was a major bigwig in the early Nazi party. Axel's father died in 1971, leaving behind much wealth. Evidently Pete came by his condescending attitude naturally.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from INSIDE THE FIREby B. DOUGLAS CAMERON DAVID R. GREENLAND Copyright © 2009 by B. Douglas Cameron. Excerpted by permission.
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