Robert Galindo tells this tale: ........

The recent events in rhode island remind me of a stunt we (The Virgil Foxx Group) did once in comfort, texas. it's all true. it was probably fall of 1967, we were playing a dance at the comfort VFW for the local high school kids. we were totally into our Jimi Hendrix thing. so, we decided it would be kewl to execute some pyrotechnics schtick at the end of PURPLE HAZE.

i learned how to mix up some really sweet smoke bombs when i was 14. first, you save up all your lunch money for a week, then you go to the spice rack of the local neighborhood grocery store (i liked Rhin's Red and White at the corner of Cincinatti and Wilson), and then you buy up ALL the packages of Mc Cormick's SALT PETER. then you take it home and hide it under the bed with all of your SECRET STUFF (know wat i mean? nudge nudge). then, you go out and find a mess o' coke bottles and cash them in for the refundable deposit. THEN you go back to the grocery store and buy a big bag of sugar. that is all the raw chemical materials you are gonna need!

BUT you have to steal your mother's Folger's coffee can, cause you need a container where you can mix up this stuff. you take equal parts of salt peter and sugar, mix them up thoroughly with a skinny branch that fell of a mesquite tree, and then go do something pleasant (like watch "Captain Gus")......................when you return, VOILA (pronounced "voy-lah"), there you have it, a smoke bomb. VOILA!!!!

throw a match into it and it will produce beautiful luscious thick billowing clouds of pure white smoke and a sexy pink/orange flame that is really cool and sexy. if you were on drugs it looked FABULOUS. of course, i wasn't. i was a good kid and never got into ANY trouble like all my loser friends. it was a clean smoke too! no noxious odors. BUT one had to be careful to use an open can with a big opening. no compressed expanding gases allowed. that's a BOMB. we just wanted pretty white puffy smoke.

anyway, we made up two smoke pots cause we were gonna be really kewl. we worked it out with our stooges to ignite the mixture on cue. i know Bear(David Vallejo) was one of them, but i cannot remember if the other stooge was Al Catacalos or David King (actually Dah-veed was NOT a stooge. But that's another story). it was their role to place the Folger's Coffee cans, filled to the top with weapons of mass entertainment, next to each of the speaker columns located in front of the band. the aforementioned stooges were instructed to smoke cigarettes and exude tons of "we are better than you" attitude as they puffed, dragged, blew smoke rings, and posed like French Existentialists. when i entered into the final 320 bars of the guitar solo death throes, they were to flippantly toss their cigarettes into the coffee cans and walk away like they had better things to do than hang around some furshlugginer high school dance.

WHOOSH! SNAP! CRACKLE! POP!

it was a seven foot flame and an eight foot ceiling. i watched the whole thing as i played my gutz out hoping to impress pimply faced teenagers. i felt smug cause everything was in complete control. it was a close call, and nothing was on fire. you could hear and feel what everyone was thinking:

FUCKING "A" !!!!!!!!!
FAR OUT!!!!
GROOVY!!!!!!!!!

i wanted to turn to the band and say, "SEE! I TOLD YA SO!!!!" needless to say we were jazzed too.

since that was a hard act to follow, and we knew it, we took our scheduled break. we walked across the highway and leaned on Crow's car to take it all in, pat each other on the back, and revel in our glory. that is when we noticed the beautiful clouds of white puffy luscious nubile white puffy smoke billowing out of the building like a four alarm fire. it was beautiful! it was white! it was puffy! it was not like some ugly black smoke spewing from a desert oil field fire ignited by a vengeful ruthless fanatic who had just had his ass kicked by the the USA. kids were exiting the building coughing and waving the smoke out of their faces and hair and grinning from ear to ear. they LOVED it. it was BEAUTIFUL! it was WHITE! it was PUFFY!!!!! ....................now that's entertainment!

but the teachers and sponsors of the dance were infuriated. they chewed us out (it was worth it!), and they demanded that we sign a statement resolving them of all responsibility. it seem fair to us, but being from the north side and being much smarter than we looked, we knew that from the standpoint of liability, if a minor signed the statement it was rendered meaningless..................so we made Rob Meurer sign the confession (since he was only seventeen). Judge Sol Casseb would have been proud of us. after that, we always ribbed him that it "was the drummer's responsiblity" to take it on the chin for the band. after all, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.

anyway, we did not burn down the building and we did not kill anybody. WHEW! close call.

i felt really bad when i saw the news yesterday. i realized just how close we came to disaster. i am thankful that Jay Hoyer's cheap narcissistic theatrics and David King's latent homoerotic tomfoolery did not send us all to Hell that night. i'll NEVER do that again.

by the way, in 1980, we played a high school reunion at the lone star brewery for Antonian High. at the end of FOXY LADY, with community safety in mind, i shaved my guitar. but that's another story.

Robert Galindo, Feb,03