I was counting on Ronnie, and he eventually came through, though not exactly as we had hoped. He and his wife, Jille, along with baby Jesse, showed up at the camp one day. They had good and bad news. The bad—that he had been unable to find a suitable space in New Mexico. The good—that he was inviting us to his home on West Evans in Denver. He had equipment and a place to rehearse.
He came on Monday night, and he had gigs already booked for Friday and Saturday. I was ready to go, and the next day Steve and Clif and I, with Liz driving her car (named Rambi), set out for Denver. There was no problem with Steve and Ronnie playing together, as Steve had taught Ronnie to play the guitar a few years earlier in San Francisco, and Ronnie had already engaged a singer (Ralph Signorelli).
The gigs went fine, and May 23, 1969, marked the first official gig of the band named Daddy Longlegs. The following week we played a Wednesday—Friday—Saturday gig in Sterling, Colorado, and a Battle of the Bands on Thursday in Denver. During that week we left our booking agent over “artistic differences” and signed our equipment manager as our agent. The same day we received another letter from England, and the promises continued, bizarre as they seemed. The film was close to getting financed and Paula quit her day job to work on our project full time. There was, to date, no script.
Yet by early July, things weren’t going well. Conflicts came up time and again involving Ronnie and his family and the three of us. Many of the disputes involved our commercial viability. We were not cute, we had threadbare clothing, our equipment was shabby and didn’t match, and our songs were inaccessible. But that’s not what Steve and Clif and I thought about what Daddy Longlegs should be. It should be fun, loose and anarchic. To quote one of my own letters: “I have been cleaned up, dressed up and Top 40-ized twice in Connecticut, and it was awful.” There must be some kinda’ way outa’ here.
And there was. Paula and company called and said that the film project had been cancelled, but they had anted up and raised $1,700 for Daddy Longlegs to come to England for 6 weeks. They had already paid for the tickets, rented a bungalow in Hertfordshire where we could rehearse, leased equipment and made appointments with various record labels for auditions. We were shocked.
We had nothing. I hocked my clarinet for $50 to have some cash to show at Customs. Clif and Steve hustled up some dough, and off we went, with Liz at the wheel of “Rambi,” from Denver to O’Hare Airport in Chicago for a desperate grab at the ring. Ronnie would not join us, or perhaps could not join us. He did alright for himself later.
We arrived without incident at Heathrow on July 18, 1969 at 10:00 a.m. GMT. By November 29, 1969, we were on the cover of Rolling Stone.
