When he was14, his elder sister brought home two record
albums. The Simon & Garfunkel one made no great impression on him.
Listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Are You
Experienced?, though, Pete Castle heard his future. He drove up Sepulveda
Blvd. from his home in dreary El Segundo, on the southern edge of LAX, and in
Westchester Music, which had earlier spawned The Turtles, and became the star
pupil of WM guitar tutor Jim Morrison. (No, not
the one you’ve heard of.) Pete’s idea of a good time was playing a guitar lick
he admired a thousand times, at first very slowly, and then, after practicing
it a million times, no less fluently than the guy on the record.
By his early 20s, at a time when all anyone in Hollywood
rock circles could talk about was Eddie Van Halen, he’d become a legend on the
northern edge of Los Angeles’s South Bay, and I invited him to consider joining
my band, The Pits, though we had very divergent tastes. The first time I ever
heard him play, he came over with a scraggly-haired bass player to drummer Len
Campanaro’s place in the West Valley to run through some of my original songs.
Apparently speaking for Pete, the bass player scoffed, “Would Aerosmith play
any of these songs?” To which I replied, “God, I’d certainly hope not!” But Pete and I turned out to
share a love for the Bonzo Dog Band, and he joined my band, transforming it
instantly with a relentlessly in-your-face Ibanez-through-a-Marshall-amplifier sound like Cheap Trick’s.
I mistook Pete’s shyness for arrogance (though, there was
certainly some arrogance in the mix), and we didn’t bond. Len and I and bass
player Richard d’Andrea, earlier of The Motels, and TK, the bass player from my
earlier group Christopher Milk, hung out, but Pete was never
glimpsed away from rehearsal, though he assured me that if the band didn’t Make
It, it wouldn’t be because of him. I was flabbergasted and dismayed to hear him
describe The Pits to a third party as a novelty act, “kind of like The Bonzo
Dog Band”.
 |
| Pete is on the right. How apropos. 1977. |
We opened for Devo at one of Hollywood’s major clubs. During
out sound check Mark Mothersbaugh wandered in with a 24-string guitar and gently
mocked Pete’s guitar heroism, though Pete, very much less flashy than Van Halen
or Randy Rhoads, was never known to make pre-orgasmic guitar hero faces while
he played. Pete was a good sport about it. At the actual gig, at which Devo’s
fans seemed — not unreasonably — to see us as Everything They Hoped Devo Might
Eradicate — I surprised Pete by holding up a big cartoon balloon proclaiming,
“Wow, I’m really expressing myself!” during one of his solos. ‘Twas a Bonzos
homage, you see, and a shameless appropriation. He actually smiled.
And then quit the band to run off and play with a couple of
poodlehairs who would later star in various early iterations of Quiet Riot. His
departure meant that the demos I’d spent a lot of money on were obsolete, and I
was pissed off a-plenty, given his earlier assurance of fealty. I remembered
him snidely in my 1995 autobiography I,Caramba. He saw it, but conveyed his displeasure in a way that left the
door open to our becoming friends, though he’d remained in the environs of El
Segundo while I had moved to Sonoma County.
In 2013, I returned to Los Angeles after 28 years, and
formed a band with TK, from Christopher Milk. A succession of guitarists came
and went. Pete and I had never discussed politics during our original
association, but had come to sparring on Facebook about the issues of the day,
Pete always taking a position a few hundred yards to the right of Rush
Limbaugh’s. Not expecting for a millisecond that he’d say yes, I asked if he
might like to join the new band. He said yes.
The years had made the 23-year-old beanpole I’d
played with 38 years before portly, but he was a lot more cordial, and
fun to be in a band with. He never turned up on time. He was always a few
minutes early. I adore punctuality, which he disclosed that he regarded as the
courtesy of kings. There was no doubt he’d played with drummers thousands of
times better than I, but not once did he give me a look that said, “Is that
really the best you can do?” I loved him for that. He came up with some hilarious
ideas, such as incorporating the rhythm guitar riff from Archie Bell & The
Drells’ “Tighten Up” into our reworking of The Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man”. He turned out to be a
lot more versatile than I’d dared hope, pickin’ up a storm in our countrified version
of “The Kids Are Alright”, for instance. But what he seemed to enjoy most was
inducing his guitar to make lewd and comical sounds, sort of in the manner of Jeff
Beck, between songs. What a mischievous young scamp Pete Castle was at 60 years
old.
The band played one gig,
for which I’d had to coax, cajole, beg, borrow, and steal for weeks. Six people
attended, five because I’d personally enticed them, and one, a middle-aged
Russian lady, because she was looking for a prospective wife for her son, and
had heard that our singer was a reformed Russki. A combination of my disgust
with no one else in the band having lifted a finger, and my having come to be
unable to bear being in the same room with TK, inspired me to resign from the
band and move back to the UK.
From which we continued to have heated political arguments
on Facebook. He’d told me in midsummer 2015 that he couldn’t bear Donald Trump,
and was actually inclined to back Bernie Sanders, but after Trump was elected,
Pete became an indefatigable apologist for him. Like Rod Liddle in the UK, Pete
seemed to be defined much less by what he was for than by his hatred of the
alleged left, as exemplified by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At one point,
he posted a video showing a tent city that had come to line a road near his
home, and asserted, “This is what liberals want!” Even when he said something
as fervently inane as that, he always backed up his argument thoughtfully. No
typical MAGAt numbskull, Pete. He did a great deal of reading — a lot of it on unapologetically
right-wing Websites, I thought, but still — before opening his mouth. His and
his old friend Dave Stoltenberg’s lengthy exchanges made for some of Facebook’s
most interesting. I suspect that a very small minority of
those who came to regard him as the Ted Nugent of the West Coast realised that
Pete was married to an Indonesian Muslim, his beloved Lulu.
I unfriended him at the height of the family separation
horror, when it seemed he couldn’t muster a syllable of compassion for the
victims of Trump’s cruelty, and was content to observe that family separation
had actually begun under Obama — as though that precluded his repudiating Trump’s
cruelty! An old friend from El Segundo High School told me the Pete he’d
known as a teenager and young man would have been aghast at the one who refused
to spell Clinton without a K instead of a C, or to refer to the Democratic (and
not Democrat) party.
When I think of Pete, I’ll always think of the rehearsal at
which our 2015 band decided, just to be zany, to append Robby Krieger’s long
guitar solo from The Doors’ “Light My Fire” to the end of our version of The
Zombies’ “Tell Her No”. Pete played the whole thing flawlessly on his first
try, having never attempted it before.
That, dear reader,
is musicianship. I was blessed to share stages with Pete Castle, and blessed to
call him a friend.
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