I scored a second film, a western. I only got a certain amount of money for that. I didn't get the full amount, but it all worked out very well. I was supposed to get $3,000 or $4,000 for it, and I maybe got $1,500. But I got the tapes. Because the guy owed me the rest of the money, and because at the time The Mothers were being formed, I needed a place to rehearse. He had a big studio, a very deluxe studio, which he let us rehearse in for six weeks before we recorded Freak Out! It was so ironic because we were all starving to death. We didn't have any money, and there was no way to eat. Most of the guys were driving 30 or 40 miles from a town outside of Hollywood. They would come into this place, and we were scraping nickles and dimes together.
You see, the studio we were talking about was the second studio. The first studio was a studio that I owned with the money that I got. This is how it works. The cowboy movie was written by my ex-high school English teacher. He's a really amazing guy. He stopped teaching school. He was just a few hours away from his Ph. D., and decided that he wasn't going to get his Ph. D.; that he was going to write films. He took a part time job as a mailman, and did his writing in his spare time. He wrote this script, and got some guys to produce it. He recommended me to score it, so they took me on to score it. They tried twice to shoot the film. The first time they tried, the leading lady had a miscarriage the third day of shooting, and the guy lost $30,000. Two years later, he paid all of his debt back, and started again on the film. He got Mercedes McCambridge to play the lead in it. It was her first job after she tried to commit suicide, and she was still a little on the alcoholic binge. So he started, and he got me again to do the music. With the $1,000 I earned to do the film, I bought the studio, in a little town called Cucamonga, from another guy. I took it all over. All the tape, all the equipment. I moved in there and just never came home. Shortly thereafter, I got a proper divorce from my wife. We just couldn't make it any more, and I moved into the studio. There was no bathtub, no shower. I had no food, no money, but I had a whole studio. I'd sit in there, and I'd make multiple recordings. I could plug the guitar directly into the board. I had a set of drums, a piano, electric bass: I could play all the instruments myself, and I recorded things . . . for 11 hours straight, just to do it. It would seem like nothing. There was no light in the studio, no daylight coming in. I didn't know what day it was, what time it was. I was just going out of my mind with all this equipment, which was really pretty basic stuff. At that time, Ray, who is the lead singer of the group, (I had known him for about four years), was working with a group at a local bar. I needed some money, and he had just had an argument with the guitarist in the group. So he called me up and asked me if I would come down and substitute. I liked the group very much. I thought this was our chance. The guys are groovy enough, and if we can stick together long enough, we can do something.
