Throwback Thursday – My days living under the stairs with Phil and Rosie
Throwback Thursday with a little help from my friend Rosie McGee. She writes about the time I lived with her and Phil in her book “Dancing with the Dead—A Photographic Memoir”
These were some of the most exciting days of my young life. I remember them well. The kid I chased turned out to be the head of President Clinton's secret service team. He said I never caught him. Read the story below.
“The night in September that New Yorker Mickey Hart was swept into the band as a second drummer, (after jamming with them at Haight Street’s converted vaudeville and film house, the Straight Theater), Phil and I invited him to sleep in the tiny space under the stairs that led to the landlord’s flat. It was no larger than the size of a single mattress, only a few feet high at its highest and certainly not great, but it’s all we could offer him.
He had only a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a radio, his rubber practice pad and his drumsticks. He also had candles, incense and matches, but I reasoned him out of using those in that tiny enclosed space. He’d pull the door nearly shut, turn on the tiny lamp I gave him to use, sit cross-legged on his mattress and practice on the rubber pad for hours.
"He had a hard time sleeping during the day, as the landlord’s adolescent son kept running up and down the stairs right above his face, never quietly. Mickey would occasionally bang on the underside of the stairs with a broom handle and yell at the boy. Once, exasperated, he crawled out of the closet, jumped to his feet and ran out the door to chase the boy down the street with the broom. He didn’t really want to catch him—he just wanted to make a point.”
For more information about Rosie visit her on FB. https://www.facebook.com/rosiemcgeephotographer/
In Rhythm,
Mickey