BG 086

14" x 21" 1967

Ahhhh....the Cow Palace!

This enormous venue was where we used to have the annual San Francisco Boy Scout Jamboree. I brought loads of gooey-but-nice Rice Krispie marshmallow squares my stepmother made for me to keep me and the gang going. James Garner appeared there one year (he was riding high as "Maverick" on TV), and I pulled rank and managed to get his autograph.

As to Donovan, he had a trippy song called "Sand and Foam" he wrote down in Puerta Vallarta, and I did a painting of what visions it conjured up in my head. Some so-called friends from Minnesota bought it and took it back with them from where they would send me the check. They never did, promising they would.

When I went to England to print the Funky Features line of posters over there for Lenny (see "BIO"), I swung a "driveaway" MGB (driving someone's car across the country for them) and drove to the Big Apple via Minneapolis. I stopped at a lumber yard and made a box to strap on the luggage rack that would hold the painting, then made for the house my "friends" lived in.

I banged on the door....there was no answer, so I broke a window alongside the door, opened the door from the inside, stepped in, saw my painting on the wall, took it off the wall, and walked back out to my car. I slipped the painting in its box and headed for New York.

I looked Donovan's Mum up in Hertfordshire and brought her the painting, which she said she would give to Donovan.

Nine years later I was living in LA, went to a party in Topanga and ran into Jeannie or Jeanette (I think that was her name), Donovan's ex wife. We started talking, and she told me she and Donovan loved that painting...and now she had met the artist!

Small world.

"The Loop" is filled with hundreds of stories like this...(well, maybe a hundred)

This time-capsule poster is in perfect condition.