Operation American Tornado
1965
Between 1965 and 1967, The Get Quick launched two chaotic attempts to conquer America—wedged between an impulsive, patchwork recording frenzy and a globe-spanning “world tour” stitched together with duct tape and divine madness.
Memories flip like mirrors. Documents grow deceptive. Timelines blur. Gigs vanish. Sessions bleed into séances.
Arrival in America:
The Get Quick’s First Assault on the New World
Excerpted from The Kevorkian Interdicts: The Secret History of the Get Quick, compiled by Serge L. Deighton (1991)
They came down into New York like longhaired moths looking for fire, four sharp silhouettes against the dull chrome of June rainclouds. The tarmac at JFK shimmered with heat and chemical sheen. It was the summer of 1965, and America, ever fickle in her obsessions, was stretching between the arrival of “the Pill” and the coming moon landing, split across the soft belly of the decade like a roast with too many carving knives.
The Get Quick, freshly arrived from Heathrow on a commercial Pan Am flight rerouted twice due to air traffic and engine panic, walked the jetbridge like a line of defendants—blinking behind mirrored glasses, trousers clinging in the humidity, their suitcases hand-painted with sigils, slogans, and ghost city emblems.
They weren’t famous. Not yet. But they looked like trouble, which in that season came with its own gravity.
Erik Evol, gaunt and sunless in black velvet, dragged behind him a chipped guitar case covered in gluey stars and curling letters that spelled out “SEER.” Mitch Joy wore a thrifted burgundy blazer over a red and orange striped shirt soaked through with the long flight and a smile so crooked it looked like the Titanic. Coco LeBree, rings on every finger and a scarf the color of chemical lime, moved like someone rehearsing for sainthood or seduction. Hait wasn’t with them—he’d flown in two days earlier, citing “sensitivity to arrival energies.”
They had no entourage—just a cardboard customs box full of demo acetates and a tour manager too hungover to speak. But their latest single, “Pop,” had cracked the American charts like a curse. Nobody in New York knew what to make of them yet. But the girls in the terminal were already whispering.
They smelled like chaos, but in a good way—like gasoline before the race starts.
They were picked up by a rented black Lincoln with faulty air-conditioning and a driver named Sal who kept humming “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” while glancing nervously into the rearview.
None of the boys spoke much. The sky over Queens was leaking. The radio crackled. Coco lit a cigarette and passed it to Mitch without a second thought.
From the backseat, Erik asked the driver: “What do you believe about thunder that comes without lightning?”
Sal said, “I believe it’s a bad sign.”
And none of them said anything for the rest of the ride.
That afternoon, they were ferried to a television soundstage downtown, some forgotten building off 11th where the grout sweated and the cameras ticked like heart monitors. The Clay Cole Show was meant to be a warm-up: a handshake to the American public. Instead, the studio lights flickered. One of the monitors blew out mid-rehearsal. The air itself felt charged—humid and metallic, like it might storm inside the walls.
Erik refused makeup. Mitch lit up under the “No Smoking” sign. Hait showed up with his guitar tuned to the traffic outside. Coco, swathed in acid-chartreuse silk, turned to the lens and said in a voice low and unnatural:
“We’re not here to promote.”
“We’re on commercial,” said a stagehand.
“Three and Two and...” the set director pointed at the host.
Clay Cole sprang into the camera and said “And now ladies and gentlemen, direct from London, hometown boys made good, the very HOT, the very NOW, the very QUICK... THE GET QUICK.”
The camera shifted to the band and Coco nodded sagely. “We’re not here to promote. We’re here to reveal.”
No one could say what that meant, least of all the host. A grip got shocked by a faulty wire. A small fire started and quickly ignited the curtains. A woman screamed. Mitch vaulted off of the drum riser over the flames and grappled onto the curtains like a proper swashbuckler. He twisted, threw his weight and tore the curtains from their rigging. They flopped down on the stage, a burning, hissing and crackling pool of fabric. Mitch rolled free and the rest of the band attacked the curtains with their boots, quickly stomping out the flames. The taping ended immediately afterwards. “Electrical instability,” they called it in the trades. A glitch. A fault line.
But by the next morning, the phone lines at KRLA were lit up like Christmas, and the record was moving again. Something had shifted.
The band hadn’t even played a note.
Academy of Music – New York City – 18 June
The old Academy of Music sat like a memory no one had quite let go of—a 1920s cinema palace too tired to be grand and too proud to fall in. The ceiling tiles flaked like ash, the velour seats smelled of mildew and concession syrup, and the ushers looked like boys hired to fight a war that never showed up on shore. But on that sweltering June evening, something unnatural buzzed in the air—static or prophecy, depending on who you asked. The marquee spelled it out:
TONIGT: THE SUPREMES – THE DAVE CLARK 5 – THE GET QUFCK.
Nobody enjoyed that moment.
The Get Quick arrived late, peeled from the back of a hired panel van that had no working windows. Mitch was shirtless, grinning like a lunatic out on bail. Coco adjusted a lace cuff and muttered something about “dying in the colonies.” Erik wore a silver-lamé suit that caught every hallway light and turned it sideways. Nobody knew how they had been added to the bill—Sid Bernstein said it was a mistake, the Supremes’ camp blamed it on “some new European manager with backwards ideas,” and the Dave Clark Five just looked typically English and confused.
Backstage, the amplifier Erik insisted on using—the one Mitch called “The Black Bell”—crackled even when unplugged. It buzzed in time with Coco’s bass pedal and gave off a smell like scorched honey. A tech muttered something about a wiring fault; Erik said they knew how to handle fire and explained that it was only “resonant with the building’s intention.” The tech shrugged and moved off toward the coffee station.
The show began in a murk of overlapping cues and missing spotlights. Dave Clark’s boys played tight and earnest, sweat darkening their pastel collars. The Supremes floated like angels through bad smoke and questionable sound levels. The Get Quick came on last.
There was a collective breath—in cinematic slo-mo—the kind that precedes a car crash or a miracle.
Then Joy hit the snare.
It was a shattering sort of rhythm, like something breaking on a boat deck. Erik bent a note until it felt like the drool of ill intention. Hait made the Hammond organ whine like a cat in heat in the middle of an air-raid. Coco, in white gloves and Spanish boots, walked to the edge of the stage and stared into the crowd, thunking on his bass without blinking. They opened with “Spinning Top,” a song that snowballed like a madcap séance in a burning building. By the time the second chorus hit, the kids in the front rows were standing on their seats, howling. Somebody threw a tennis shoe.
In the wings, a Supremes roadie crossed himself. “They’re not playing proper,” he whispered. “They’re pulling something out.”
When they finished—twenty-seven minutes of noise and shimmer and silence—they didn’t bow. Erik unplugged mid-reverb and walked off. Mitch tossed his sticks into the balcony. Hait was already long gone. Coco laid his bass on the stage like a sacrificial thing and walked backwards into the dark, leaving it throbbing a low ominous note.
Later, outside in the alley, a promoter tried to hand them a cut of the door. Coco hissed through his teeth and said, “Don’t ever book us in a cinema again unless it’s for our funeral.”
The promoter was speechless, profoundly confused. He actually looked somewhat adorable. Coco kissed the man’s cheek and vanished into a cab.
Midnight Window, St. Mark’s Place
(New York City, 19 June 1964)
There was a heat that year in Manhattan—not a blaze, but a boiling dampness, like the city had been sweating out its sins since ’63 and couldn’t quite cool down. Cars stalled at intersections and the lights stayed amber longer than they should’ve. People moved slower, thinner, like the sidewalks were syrup. That evening, The Get Quick had slipped the leash of the hotel PR man and wandered downtown—Mitch in a thrifted varsity jacket that read “Tigers 1958,” Coco in black sateen and plastic bangles, Erik in his perpetual suit, sleeves cuffed, hair storm-tossed even in still air.
They ended up on St. Mark’s by accident or fate. Some psychic’s card left in a deli, a map folded the wrong way. They stood beneath a streetlight with no bulb, watching a girl in a silver miniskirt smoke a pale cigarette while a boy recited Shelley beside her, trying hard not to care.
Erik peeled off alone. Always did.
He ducked into a used bookstore where the air was cooler, and the walls were tall with paper. The man behind the register—long hair, acid-wash stare—nodded and said nothing. Erik wandered toward the metaphysics section, fingers drifting over the cracked spines: Be Here Now, Autobiography of a Yogi, The Secret Doctrine. His hands stopped at The Morning of the Magicians, opened it, found a sentence underlined in red: “We are what we imagine.”
He smiled. Quietly, like a secret returned.
Elsewhere, Coco sat on the hood of a Thunderbird outside the Electric Circus, absently strumming a borrowed guitar, half-reciting lines from Cocteau. A child walked by holding her mother’s hand and asked if he was a prince. Mitch, three blocks up, was drinking Rolling Rock with a crew-cut poet from Queens who said he’d once been in a folk band called The Exploding Banana Para-Republic.
Somewhere around two a.m., the band reconvened under a flickering marquee that read TONIGHT: THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION. They didn’t go in. But a moment later Christian Hait walked out.
“Hello lads,” he said.
They stood a while in the humming dark, half-lit by neon and myth. A girl passed and recognized Coco, asked for a kiss, and got one on the forehead. “For luck,” he said, and didn’t elaborate.
Erik looked up toward the Bowery sky, where no stars could be seen, and whispered, “This city’s a mirror, but it cracks like ice.”
Then they walked, the four of them, toward the river—lean and laughing, like something holy and used.
Philadelphia – 19 June 1964
Trouble Finds Snide
The Get Quick rolled into Philadelphia under a sky like brushed tin, dulled by heat and burnt ozone. The bus smelled of hot vinyl and tobacco spit; the drummer’s window wouldn’t open, and Mitch tapped a bugle funeral solo on the glass and cursed it quietly, like a priest gnawing through communion. They were all tired. Their minds buzzed with the coil of too many dreams in too few nights.
S. True Smith had stayed behind in London, something about kidney stones and a private clinic off Harley Street. In his place came a man no one had chosen: Sydney Sneyd, nephew to Professor Cromicon and recent graduate of a correspondence law program in the Hebrides. He wore tropical-weight suits in clammy weather and smoked Parliament menthols with the flourish of a man who’d once been almost-famous in a boarding school play.
He met them in the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. His shoes were patent leather and slightly damp. “Philadelphia, gentlemen,” he said, adjusting his tie. “And gentlewoman,” nodding at Coco with a wink that made something in the air recoil.
Coco made no response, just pulled out a compact and stared at herself.
The venue was a reconfigured vaudeville house near Rittenhouse Square, the kind of place that still believed in chandeliers. The staff looked like they’d been raised by ushers. It was half-booked, badly promoted, and already running late.
Sneyd spent the afternoon arguing with a local union rep who insisted the band pay a “performance tax levy” unique to Philadelphia—Article X, subsection B, governing traveling musical acts from foreign jurisdictions. Sneyd laughed, then argued, then tried to flirt. The rep, a retired Marine with a clipboard, cited the code again and told him to pay it or scram and try his luck in the next city.
Sydney refused. He was arrested just after lunch.
Mitch tried to bail him out but was told the holding office closed at four. Coco found this hysterical. “He’s gone native,” she said. “Let him stew.”
No one told the crowd. They went onstage at 8:23 p.m., half-lit and wholly electric.
They opened with “Thunderbolt Scaffold,” and Erik’s guitar snapped through the air like a wire across bare skin. Mitch was thunder on the kit—tight, punishing, possessed. Hait’s Hammond sounded like a haunted carousel in a basement full of floodwater. Coco, in suede and mirrored epaulettes, was the axis of the room—swinging between starving shaman and angry animal, smearing lipstick across her bass pickguard during the chorus of “Mourning Static.”
Some said the crowd didn’t know what to make of it, but they stayed. A girl in the third row wept. A boy in a military jacket collapsed, speaking in tongues. A bulb in the mezzanine exploded during the last note of “Black Gospel Fire.”
Backstage, Erik sat on an amp, shirtless, drinking Yoo-hoo and staring at his reflection in a cracked dressing mirror. “Where is the profit in all this?” he asked, not to anyone, and maybe not about money.
The promoter offered them the full take in cash, sweating through his undershirt. “We don’t want to deal with your man Snide again,” he said.
“Neither do we,” said Coco, stuffing the loot into her Channel clutch.
By dawn, Sydney Sneyd had been released. He returned to the band’s hotel room with a necktie stained by vending machine coffee and a citation he framed in the bathroom later that year. The band left town without saying goodbye.
On the road to Baltimore, a storm rolled in and Coco transmuted again. He watched the lightning over the New Jersey Pine Barrens and murmured something about “cleansing frequencies.” Mitch was asleep with a cigarette in his fingers. Erik was sketching a symbol in the condensation on the back window, humming something that sounded suspiciously like a responsorial chant run through an Echoplex.
Philadelphia would be remembered only as a night of ruptures—where the band played through fury and friction, and something invisible followed them out of the city.
Iowa Corridor – 20 June 1964
Sydney Sneyd, Or the Modern Prometheus
They drove through the Iowa dark with the curtains drawn and the television tuned to static. Outside, the wheat fields ran black and endless. Inside, the tour coach smelled of engine grease and a perfume Erik claimed was “distilled from a pope’s last confession.”
Sydney Sneyd sat upright in a bucket seat by the kitchenette, leafing through a folder marked U.S. Compliance: Touring Acts – Type C (Alien). His tie had a new pattern courtesy of the Philadelphia jail, and his eyes twitched in time with the road bumps. Around him, the band slept or pretended to: Coco snoring faintly beneath a sequined shawl, Mitch curled in a ball with headphones tuned to white noise, and Erik somewhere in the back, whispering to a Dictaphone like it was a wounded bird.
Sydney was preparing a Memo of Asserted Authority. It contained four typed pages: revised stage protocols, stricter curfews, a clause prohibiting unsanctioned interviews, and something he called “Emotional Uniformity Expectations.” He planned to distribute it with breakfast in Des Moines. There was also a hastily typed rider addendum labeled QUICK ACTION DIRECTIVE (QAD). It required the band to submit setlists for pre-approval, banned the use of talcum powder onstage (“per fire code”), and—perhaps most quixotically—forbade “the conjuration of foreign deities.”
He underlined that last part in red.
At a truck stop outside Davenport, Sydney slipped into a phone booth and rang the Cromicon offices. “They’re fragmenting,” he whispered. “Like ice shelves in the sun.” He asked for a courier to deliver a fresh wardrobe—not for the band, but for himself. “If I’m to reassert dominance,” he said, “I require a stronger silhouette.”
No one answered his second call.
Back on the bus, he found a hand-drawn sigil pinned to his pillow. It had been scrawled in gold eyeliner on an old receipt from a diner in Camden.
Written in Coco’s looping hand, it read: “You suck eggs, Syd.”
Sydney burned it in the sink, but not before copying the symbol into his notebook under the heading Possible Cult Formation – Internal?
At the motel in Des Moines, he held a mandatory “alignment breakfast” at 6:30 a.m. in the parking lot beside the soda machine. Coco arrived in sunglasses and a bathrobe. Mitch never showed. Erik stood barefoot on the curb, staring into the middle distance like a man about to receive an interstellar signal.
Sydney read the entire memo aloud.
There was silence.
Then Erik said, very gently: “You’re managing the surface tension of a dream, Sydney. That’s like trying to leash a memory. Like trying to catch the smoke from Coco’s fag in your mittens.”
Coco blew a plume at a crow circling overhead. “I’ll sign it,” he said, “if I can bleed on it first.”
Sydney folded the memo and slipped it into his breast pocket. “Not necessary,” he murmured.
He spent the rest of the day holed up in a La Quinta conference room, attempting to draw up a legally binding “Mystical Containment Clause.” That evening, he faxed a packet to the Office of Foreign Musical Licensing in Bethesda, seeking emergency reclassification of The Get Quick under a new bureaucratic subheading: “Cultural Entities – Semi-Volatile.”
He received no reply.
Somewhere near Sioux City, the band discovered he’d packed their luggage with business cards reading Sydney Sneyd, Spirit Liaison & Executive Logician. Coco used them for rolling papers. Mitch taped one into the bottom of his hi-hat and said it gave the cymbals a “sneydier” tone.
By the time they reached Chicago, Sydney had developed a tic in his left cheek and started quoting Pythagoras in arguments. “Harmony,” he muttered to no one, “is just a matter of acceptable ratios.”
But the band had stopped listening.
Chicago, Springfield, and the Wall of Girls – 21–24 June
As word of the chaos spread, the crowds grew more rabid. They rolled into Chicago in a haze of Midwestern heat and memory. At the first gig hundreds stormed the exits before the encore, trampling velvet ropes and throwing lilacs and shoes at the stage. A girl reportedly tried to climb inside a backstage drum case to follow the band to their next destination.
The security guards wore steel-toe boots and black gloves at the Springfield gig two nights later, where The Get Quick were encased behind a cordon of Springfield PD officers and stagehands with stun batons.
“The Get Quick, who gyrate on stage as if they were all flea-bitten, had to be protected by a human barrier,” wrote The State Journal-Register, somewhat missing the point.
The Cult Forms
Back at the hotel, the band couldn’t enter for two hours due to crowds shrieking for Erik and Mitch, and occasionally mistaking Hait for a young priest. Teen girls, housewives, and a few Vietnam vets trailed the group across state lines, sometimes just for the chance to witness them dine at a Dairy Queen. A Pontiac Bonneville was totaled when three fans tried to leap onto the band’s moving limousine on a rain-slicked night in Lansing.
Back in London a bouquet of black dahlias arrived at S. True Smith’s office with a note that read only: “We are watching the arc.”
Coco LeBree later described those nights as “operatic, insectile, and necessary.”
Chicago, 21 June – Tunnels of Sound and Smoke
Summer was full-throated already, cicadas shrieking in the medians, sweat pooling in the necks of collarless teens. The Get Quick’s bus pulled into downtown with the weariness of a soldier returning to a place he’d only dreamed of bombing. This was Christian Hait’s birthplace, the city of his youth, and he looked out the window with the solemnity of a man watching his own funeral in reverse.
The venue was the Aragon Ballroom—built to look like a Spanish courtyard, now crumbling slightly at the edges, like an aging drag queen who hadn’t updated her mascara. Dust hung in the chandeliers. Pigeons roosted in the arches. Beneath the cracked paint, the magic was still there, like dried blood in the grout.
Sydney Sneyd, trying to be helpful for once, had arranged a daytime radio interview with WLS, but Hait refused. “Chicago already knows me,” he said, lighting a Lucky Strike with a match struck on his boot. “What’s to explain?”
The band checked into the Edgewater Beach Hotel, all pink towers and ghostly grandeur, its glory days already behind it. The lobby smelled of carpet shampoo and Chesterfields. Coco ordered a filthy martini and disappeared into a lobby armchair, legs crossed like an Egyptian carving. Hait was nowhere to be found—rumors that he’d taken up temporary residence in the hotel’s boiler room, “listening to the language of pipes.”
That night, the show began with no warning. A local DJ introduced them as “The Get Lost,” and the stage lights misfired on cue, catching Erik Evol in a sulfuric glow that made him look like the devil himself at a masquerade. He didn’t blink. Just hit the first note, a low golden drone that rattled molars.
What followed was less a concert than a fever dream. Mitch beat his drums like they owed him money. Coco stalked the stage in wide silver trousers, hurling cherry blossoms into the audience (where he got them, no one knows). Hait eventually emerged from the wings, barefoot and glowering, tossing handfuls of chalk dust into the air during the instrumental break of “Mercy Engine.”
When they played “Panther’s Gait,” a dozen girls stormed the velvet rope at the foot of the stage, some in tears, one with blood on her lip, all screaming as if possessed. A boy in a Cubs jacket tried to leap the monitors and was caught mid-air by two security guards who looked more scared than he did.
Backstage, a girl in checkered hot pants handed Mitch a crumpled envelope. Inside was a hotel room key and a note that read: “Remember Maxwell Street. The apple pie and the brass ring. Let’s finish what we started.” He folded it slowly, like scripture.
Later that night, the fire alarm was pulled at 3:17 a.m. Guests streamed onto the street in nightgowns and bathrobes. Coco swore the smoke was more than real, it was demonic. Mitch claimed it was an illusion, but an omen. Sydney accused the lighting tech of sabotage. And Erik... well, he just stared up at the blinking red light and murmured, “Good. Let it burn.”
Chicago, 22 June – The Ashtray Morning
The next morning arrived in yesterday’s clothes, like a thief at a masquerade party.
Chicago, never a subtle city, seemed momentarily subdued. The sky hung low and wet, a lidless eye blinking through soot-colored clouds. Somewhere below, on the north edge of the city, the lake slapped the shore like a tired dog. Inside the Edgewater Beach Hotel, Sydney Sneyd nursed his silence over hard boiled eggs and toast with tea that tasted faintly of tin.
Mitch Joy sat alone in the café downstairs, back to the windows. He still wore the suit from the gig before—no tie, shirt collar wilted open, a scratch on his knuckle he hadn’t noticed until a waitress brought it to his attention. “You in a fight?” she’d asked. He only nodded, though the answer was more complicated.
On the street outside, a knot of teenagers hovered under the awning, waiting for someone—anyone—to appear. One girl had a Sharpie tucked behind her ear like a cigarette. Another clutched a copy of Tiger Beat with someone else on the cover. They didn’t look disappointed. They looked hungry.
Coco had disappeared before dawn. A maid reported seeing him in the ballroom alone, dancing shoeless to no music under the faded stars of the domed ceiling. When asked about it later, Coco said only: “Some spaces are haunted in the present tense.”
Erik emerged just past noon, shaven and showered, wrapped in a corduroy jacket two sizes too big. He found Mitch in the café and said, “We’re in the wrong key,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Mitch lit a cigarette, passed the matchbook over. On the front it read: “Ask For Gloria. She Charts.”
Hait wandered down around two, draped in a wool scarf and holding a book of Rilke in one hand and a large grapefruit in the other. “There’s a priest outside who wants a word,” he said to no one in particular. “He has a cassette tape. He says it proves a point.”
By mid-afternoon, Sydney Sneyd reappeared, fresh from the courthouse in a new shirt that still had the creases. He carried a briefcase full of petty cash and two subpoenas folded like fast food napkins. “The promoter skipped town,” he said, with a sort of detached cheer. “But we’re booked clean through Reno and there’s a journalist from Esquire waiting in the bar.”
No one moved.
Instead, they let the day slide over them. Mitch wandered out around four and walked the length of Division Street, past shuttered barbershops and pawn windows still advertising color TVs. He saw a boy playing stoopball in a TGQ shirt that hadn’t been printed yet. When the ball rolled toward him, Mitch picked it up and said: “You should play guitar.” The boy looked confused. Mitch smiled, tossed the ball back, and kept walking.
Back at the hotel, Coco returned near sundown with a yellow silk scarf and a blister on his heel. “Chicago’s a mirror,” he told Erjk. “But it only shows you what you were.”
That night they didn’t rehearse. Didn’t write. Didn’t even bicker. They just watched the lights come on one by one across the water, and for once, no one said anything worth recording.
The next morning, they’d head south again—toward Springfield, toward the Wall of Girls, toward whatever havoc was waiting.
But for now, they lingered.
Like a song you’ve played too slow.
Like a postcard that never got sent.
Springfield, Illinois – 23 June 1964
The Wall of Girls
There was a myth about the Midwest—something whispered in smoky Greenwich bars or mumbled by the backline crew while unloading gear near the docks at Tilbury. That the American interior, particularly in states like Illinois or Ohio, was quiet, flat, and unimpressed. That it wouldn’t notice you unless you stepped on its Sunday grass. That the gaggles of young lovely screaming girls were all in California.
The myth died that night in Springfield.
They came in waves, with signs and slogans and felt-tip drawings, all variations on a fever. Erik, Take Me With You and COCO = GOD and Joy Is My Religion. Teenage girls in white sunglasses and army jackets, housewives with flower pins and shopping mall curls, and greaser boys with eyeliner and cuban heels who mouthed every lyric like a mantra. They waited all day outside the Prairie Capital Convention Center—a modernist wedge of poured concrete and optimism—just to be near the band. Or maybe to be near whatever it was the band was becoming.
Sydney Sneyd, running three days without real sleep and newly banned from the mini-bar, stood at the edge of the barricade wearing a seersucker suit and a plastic shade clipped-on his glasses. “I think they’re multiplying,” he told the security chief, a retired sheriff’s deputy named Vaughn. “Like spores.”
Vaughn spat into a styrofoam cup and said, “We’re bringing in extra bodies tonight. Got one guy used to do riot control at Joliet.”
Inside, Coco paced the green room with bare feet and a champagne flute filled with ginger ale and amphetamines. He looked every bit the pagan princeling of tabloid myth—bare chest under a marabou vest, gold crescents painted under his eyes, a cigarette filter tucked behind each ear like horns.
When asked what he planned to wear onstage, he simply said, “The room.”
Mitch Joy was warming up on a practice pad in a side hall, lost in the slow building storm of his own rhythm. Hait and Erik sat side-by-side in silence, tuning nothing, eyes closed. They hadn’t spoken since Chicago except in stage cues and stares. The whole room smelled faintly of clove oil and roasted peanuts. Erik had bled from the ear in soundcheck and hadn’t told anyone. He liked the way the lights dimmed when the pain pulsed.
By curtain time, the crowd was pressing against the barricades like pilgrims at a miracle site. It was the kind of heat you couldn’t explain—emotion packed tight in flesh and corduroy and cheap mascara, screaming to be seen, to be opened.
The set began with “Cinematic Death Scene,” rolled without pause into “Rust On The Crown.” Mitch led with a thunder roll, Coco counterpointed with something halfway between jazz and warfare. Hait’s organ hummed like hospital machinery. And Erik... Erik played with a calm so complete it was violent.
By the time they hit “The Thousandfold Name,” the security team had already come to accept complete failure.
The first breach came from the left wing. A girl in silver go-go boots climbed over the crush barrier like it was nothing more than a waist-high fence between fates. She made it to the monitors before Vaughn’s men tackled her in a wave of polyester limbs and talcum. Then two more. Then five. Then a full dozen.
Sydney tried to intervene—his exact phrase, later reported, was “You can’t punch poetry!”—but a fan pulled his backstage badge off and kissed him full on the mouth. He screamed and vanished into the wings.
Backstage, a table collapsed. An amplifier howled and refused to quiet down. The band played on. Mitch leaned into “Palomino Panic” like he meant to break the floorboards. Blood ran down Coco’s chin from a bitten lip. Erik never moved.
Eventually the house lights flared, and the PA begged the crowd to disperse. It was no use. The stomping and chanting had started by then:
“GET QUICK / GET QUICK / GET QUICK.”
And, all at once—for the first time in The States—the band looked at one another and didn’t feel like frauds.
Afterward, the dressing room was half-destroyed. Rabid fans had decorated Mitch’s towering hardware case with corsets, nylons and brassieres. There were lipstick kisses on Hait’s tour journal. Someone had written BLACK AMBER in eyeliner on the green room mirror.
Coco sipped someone else’s brandy and said, “This is how revolutions start. With pop songs and poor lighting.”
It took the others a moment to snap out of their stunned silence—then they all peeled in laughter.
Later, in the van, Erik leaned forward and whispered to no one in particular: “You all feel it too, right? Something followed us from Chicago.”
And no one disagreed.
From “The Kevorkian Interdicts” by Serge L. Deighton (Doppelgänger Press, 1991)
Brooding Mutants in the American Grain
There was blood in the butter. That’s how Sydney Sneyd reportedly described the mood of The Get Quick tour after the midpoint swing through the American interior. It wasn’t literal blood—not yet—but it was a sense, a smear in the atmosphere. The machinery of the American Dream hadn’t taken to these London-bred dervishes as anticipated. By late June, the bloom had shriveled.
Since the Cardiff Incident—an incident no one explained but everyone felt—Coco LeBree and Christian Hait hadn’t exchanged more than a few frosted syllables. They moved like stars in opposing orbits: Coco trailing a cloud of dry ice and cologne, Hait a static hum of disdain. At hotels, Sydney staggered their check-ins. In buses, he assigned separate seats. At rehearsals, he occasionally inserted himself between them like a human fire blanket.
Mitch Joy, always the gentleman pugilist, did his best to keep the peace. He rarely chose sides, preferring instead to pass out beers, toss out jokes, or vanish for a swim. But it was Erik Evol who emerged as the unpredictable axis around which the group’s strange gravity revolved.
Erik, mood-ring mercurial, spent most of his downtime alone in hotel rooms writing letters he didn’t send to La Maga, his partner back in London. He’d decorate the margins with inked sigils. “They are not ready for us,” he scrawled in one note I glimpsed before he burned it in a coffee saucer.
When he wasn’t conjuring melancholy, he and Coco needled Sydney endlessly. One day, Erik demanded a bowl of blue M&Ms before a matinee gig in Kansas City. Another, Coco insisted their rider include exactly one garment from each bandmate’s mother. Sydney, whose patience was already stretched thin by double-booked venues and unpaying promoters, threatened to go “full Ronnie Kray” on them more than once.
The press weren’t helping. The New York Herald Tribune called them “mood poisoners.” Billboard barely mentioned them. Seventeen asked if Coco was “a boy or girl,” to which Coco replied, “I am a letter from the future that hasn’t been decoded yet.” Most papers ignored them entirely—rock and roll, to many American editors, was still delinquent noise for hormone-frenzied teenagers. And The Get Quick made no effort to court sympathy. They confounded journalists, offering cryptic answers or speaking in foreign tongues. More than once, they asked the interviewers questions. (“Do you believe in false memory?” Erjk once whispered into a CBS boom mic.)
Jon Savage would later write, “Compared to the British Invasion’s packaged pop confections, The Get Quick were brooding, androgynous mutants who slinked across America like a fever dream.”
He wasn’t wrong.
On the Road Between Springfield and Reno — Late June, 1964
The highways stretched like drying veins across the land—Illinois into Iowa, Iowa into Nebraska, Nebraska into a numbed nowhere that only truckers and ghosts called home. The Get Quick’s tour caravan crawled westward beneath a sky bleached of intent, heat shimmering on the tar, cornfields leaning in close like spectators aching to overhear.
By this point, something was giving way inside the band. Not breaking, not yet—but a slow buckling at the base. Like the frame of a touring van after too many jumps across state lines. The boys were still playing, still drawing blood with their songs, still whipping teenage crowds into gothic delirium. But in the small hours—those dust-colored moments between gas stations and truck stops—it was a different picture altogether.
Coco LeBree had taken to speaking in riddles again. He wore dark glasses at breakfast and carried an antique locket full of what he claimed was powdered bone. “American bone,” he whispered to the driver at one fuel stop outside Council Bluffs. “Revolutionary War or post–Civil Rights, I’m not sure which. Either way it sings an ancient blues.”
Christian Hait, whose devotion to sonic purity had once bordered on religious, now sat silent on the bus with headphones on—plugged not into music, but into the static between stations. His journal, when glimpsed, was filled with equations and phrases like aural decay vectors and the inhuman root of rhythm. Mitch Joy tried to draw him out, but was met only with a slow blink and a quote from the Book of Job.
Mitch was the only one who still made eye contact. He shaved every morning, ironed his shirts on hotel nightstands, handed out cigarettes like talismans. His jokes had a studied lightness, like someone whistling in a warzone. He’d taken to sleeping with the windows cracked and one boot on. “In case we have to go in a hurry,” he told Penny Packer, who now handled logistics with the calm desperation of someone trained in forest fires and press embargoes.
And Erik—well, Erik Evol had moved entirely sideways.
He no longer spoke unless spoken to, and even then he answered as if from inside a glass box. He’d begun copying passages from a battered copy of The Book of the Law onto motel wallpaper with a fountain pen. He mailed postcards to La Maga, even though he didn’t know where she was. One said, simply, “We are moving through myth but the myth is moving faster.” Another, scrawled across the back of a Shell Oil receipt, read: “Mitch is the only one still fully present. Hait has gone far. Coco burns from within. I am trying not to fracture.”
Sydney Sneyd, their beleaguered tour manager, had by this point given up on schedules and sanity. He took long calls with Cromicon’s legal counsel, pacing like a tethered hawk in Holiday Inn lobbies, shouting about force majeure and spiritual liability clauses. He was convinced—perhaps not incorrectly—that the band had conjured something. Or been conjured.
“They’re not falling apart,” he told his micro-cassette recorder one sleepless night outside Lincoln. “They’re molting. What’s coming out, I don’t think we want to see.”
In the bus on the long haul toward Reno, they passed a burning hay truck outside Rawlins, Wyoming. Coco muttered a blessing in a language no one recognized. Mitch tapped a rhythm on the seatback. Hait’s burgeoning mustache hummed a frequency no one else could hear.
Erik scribbled something in his sketchbook, tore out the page, and slipped it under the bus driver’s seat.
When Penny found it hours later, it was a highly detailed depiction of an indescribable scenario with a caption that simply read:
“The dream is starting to remember us.”
The Interior Turns Cold
As the tour pressed deeper into the Midwest, the welcome soured. In Iowa, they were refused service at a roadside diner—“No Servants of Satan”—was what someone etched into the road dirt caked on the van’s back window. Sydney later said that in Missouri, a man in a Stetson offered to shoot Erik “for free.”
They were also hemorrhaging money. Promoters wriggled out of guarantees with byzantine local tax clauses or shady “venue ordinances.” In Illinois, one show had been so badly advertised it drew fewer people than the carny freak show operating two fields over. Coco refused to perform. The rest played a 15-minute improv called “Local Ghosts, Global Circuits.” No one clapped.
La Maga: A Dispatch from Chalk Farm
Excerpted from “The Kevorkian Interdicts: The Secret History of The Get Quick” compiled by Serge L. Deighton (1991)
July 1964. The Get Quick were somewhere in Nevada, or maybe Utah, chasing storms and shadows and monies owed across the American void. But in London—back in the crumbling townhouse near Chalk Farm Road, third window cracked with a paper fan wedged against the pane—La Maga lit a candle and began writing.
Outside, the heat was rare and mean. The city shimmered with stifled breath. Camden girls in watermelon lipstick sweltered on curbs, and boys in acetate shirts smoked Pakistani kef under viaducts, waiting for night to bring some kind of relief. But La Maga had shut herself in for days.
Inside: blackout curtains. A record spinning endlessly (side B of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.). A half-drunk bottle of Cinzano. And a stack of unsent letters to Erik, folded into quarters, then again, then again, until the creases felt like sigils. She didn’t mail them. She left them under the bed like offerings to some low altar.
The chalk circle on the floor was her doing. And the smell? Lavender and menthol. That, and the stale sweat of late-summer grief.
She hadn’t meant to stay behind. There had been talk—wild talk, ecstatic plans scrawled in lipstick on the backs of menus at Gerry’s, torn napkin maps of California, lists of radio stations they’d overtake like pirate ships. But then the miscarriage happened. Quietly, almost cosmically—on a Tuesday morning, during a solar eclipse that nobody noticed because it was overcast in Hampstead. Erik hadn’t known. He still didn’t. And when they’d left for America, she’d simply not gone.
Instead, she began to tune London like an instrument. Each night she walked—sometimes barefoot, sometimes in a veil—through Notting Hill, Primrose Hill, over to the drowned pulse of Soho. She said nothing to anyone. She touched street lamps. She whispered the names of forgotten saints and radio transmitters. She believed, quite seriously, that The Get Quick had ruptured something that June. That their crossing into America had broken the very skin of the age.
And that she was meant to repair it from here.
One night, on Parkway near Regent’s Park, she ran into S. True Smith in a three-piece summer suit, drunk and full of clairvoyant bile. He looked at her once and said, “They’re waking up over there, aren’t they? Can’t you hear it?”
She did. But she didn’t know what to say. He just smiled and nodded, stumbled into a minicab and vanished.
Back home, she arranged twelve objects on a tray: a silver spoon, a dented thimble, a tuft of Coco’s scarf, a pressed violet, two dead flies, a scrap of Erik’s torn setlist, a faded photograph of Mitch as a boy, a tiny cassette with no label, three teeth (not her own), and a matchbook from The Scotch. She placed the tray beneath her bed and did not speak for three days.
When she finally called Christian Hait, reversing the charges from a pub payphone, she said only: “Tell Erik I’m starting the ritual. And tell Mitch to stop dreaming about the girl in green—she isn’t from this world.” Then she hung up before he could reply.
Somewhere above Primrose Hill that night, a dog howled like a phonograph needle dragging through a cracked record.
La Maga lit the last candle and waited... Something was coming through.
Reno Rodeo Massacre
In Reno, the band’s 25th June gig coincided with the first night of the town’s legendary rodeo. The venue was half-full, if that. Outside, you could hear the bulls snorting. Inside, Coco wore a red sequined robe and declared himself “Queen of the Desert.” Betty Kaye, the promoter, tried to pay them half their fee upfront, promising the rest in Sacramento. Sydney—already chain-smoking Virginia Slims and seething pure venom—threatened litigation before soundcheck.
The Get Quick had arrived in Reno in a haze of bad air and worsening omens. They’d come through the Sierras at dusk, a grey centipede of vans and gear trucks crawling down from Donner Pass into a flat bowl of sodium-lit nothing. Nobody spoke much. Mitch was reading a tattered paperback of The Wild Palms. Erik had taken to drawing crude maps of imaginary cities on hotel stationery. Coco, silent since Springfield, was fixated on an AM signal out of Fresno that played only hymns and static, often overlapping to the point of indistinguishableness.
The venue was a makeshift fairground pavilion on the outskirts of town—half-dismantled carnival rides, plywood signage, the distant stink of livestock and vendor grease. That night marked the opening of the Reno Rodeo, which meant dust and rhinestones and crowds in high cowboy drag. It also meant the band’s set time was bumped three times to accommodate a championship calf roping.
Their “dressing room” was a converted trailer with a door that wouldn't latch. Inside: two folding chairs, a bucket of orange Gatorade, and an ice chest filled with off-brand beer. Hait refused to enter. Mitch stripped off his shirt and took a nap on the floor. Coco submitted a written request a mirrored dresser and velour settee. Erik never looked up from his notebook. “This is the place,” he mumbled. “The hinge. The fulcrum. The red carnival in the mirror.”
It was just after 9 p.m. when Lena Kaye, the promoter, appeared. All heavy eyeliner and turquoise jewelry, she was already rattled. She offered the band half their agreed-upon payment in cash, promising the rest in Sacramento. “I’ve got receipts,” she said. “They’ll make good.”
“No one in Nevada makes good,” said Coco, who hadn’t spoken all day.
They took the cash and took the stage. The crowd was a strange composite: rodeo-goers looking for spectacle, Vegas runaways, a few dozen zapped out teenagers in fringe and beads who’d hitched in from Berkeley. The air was warm and whipped by dust. A single spotlight trembled overhead like it might go out.
What followed was not a concert. Not in the traditional sense.
They opened with “Carnaby Gargoyle,” but something in the tempo bent—Mitch played it too slow, or Erik played it too fast, or time itself forgot the measure. “Murky Disaster” became an endless drone of broken harmonic overtones. Hait’s organ pulsed like a malfunctioning lighthouse. Coco spoke rather than sang, unspooling a stream of verses that hadn’t appeared in any previous version:
“There’s no sun in the desert, only mirrors / Only teeth in the gravel / And a man named Vetch with a fistful of eyes.”
Three songs in, the audience was divided—some shouting for “Mercy Engine,” others hurling plastic beer cups at the stage. One woman near the front fell to her knees and began praying in Spanish.
The band played on.
During the final number, “Bloodless Brass,” Erik turned away from the mic and began shouting into his amplifier. Coco struck a tambourine against his own forehead until it dented. Hait held a single note on the Farfisa until it warbled like an emergency broadcast test tone. The song ended—or collapsed—and the band walked off.
No bows. No encore. Just the sound of the wind picking up in the rafters.
Backstage, Lena Kaye was gone. The trailer was locked. The Gatorade bucket tipped and rolled into the dirt. A rodeo clown, half in costume, wandered past and said, “Hey Brits, y’all just exorcised a damned horse out there.”
That night, they slept at a half-finished motel off Highway 395. The rooms smelled like old powdered milk. Mitch refused to take off his boots. Coco lay in the bathtub smoking and humming “Ave Maria.” Erik walked out sometime after 3 a.m. and didn’t return until sunrise. He left a note on the minibar that read: “Check the tape for reversals.”
The soundboard tape, of course, never turned up.
And somewhere on the other side of town, in a buckled row of aluminum bleachers, an old cowboy in a white hat told a local reporter: “I don’t know what that was. But I sure as hell didn’t clap.”
Sacramento – 26 June
Kaye’s Revenge
Excerpted from The Kevorkian Interdicts: The Secret History of The Get Quick *Compiled by Serge L. Deighton (1991)
The Get Quick rolled into Sacramento like an apology no one intended to give. The air was dry and electric with midsummer static. Heat lay on the city like wet wool, and the sidewalks shimmered with distant mirages—children on bicycles, ghost dogs, melting pop bottles. Erik said the trees looked like they were plotting something. Coco LeBree confided to a waitress that he could hear the color green. Mitch Joy stopped speaking sometime before noon.
They arrived at the Crest Theatre in an unmarked Dodge van, still dust-sick from Reno and riding the kind of silence that sounds louder than speech. The theatre marquee said:
TONITE ONLY — THE GET QUACK
Besides the obvious, the letters had been spaced unevenly and someone had scrawled a question mark on the box office glass in soap.
Lena Kaye was already inside, red-eyed and righteous, a bandage across her left knuckle and a typed legal threat clutched in one hand. She had not forgiven Reno. She had not forgotten the walking-off, the half-set, the absence of receipts. And she had not, under any circumstance, planned to give them the rest of their fee.
“I’ve invited local press,” she said through a clenched-toothed smile. “Don’t embarrass yourselves.”
No one answered her.
The venue was full—an odd, buzzing crowd that included mod kids, art students, off-duty cops, and a delegation from a local mystic order who claimed to have communed with Coco in the dream realm. The curtain rose ten minutes late. The lights flickered. The crowd murmured and shifted, anticipation turning slowly to doubt.
Then: feedback.
Then: silence.
Then: “You Can’t Take Her Place,” unrecognizable.
The Get Quick performed it not as a song, but as an act of resistance. For forty-two minutes they played a version so slow, so unmoored, so utterly unmarketable that it became something like a séance or an industrial accident. Mitch’s drums thudded like iron in wet clay. Coco plucked at his bass like he was nursing a dying animal. Hait played a single sustained tone on the Farfisa for nearly six minutes, then cut it off and whispered the Lord’s Prayer into a contact mic. Erik, meanwhile, stood at the center of the stage, not moving, not playing, staring at Lena Kaye in the wings with his arms crossed over his chest like a man awaiting trial. Unprompted, his guitar was issuing tremendously terrifying shrieks and wails of feedback.
At minute thirty-two, the first audience member vomited and promptly fainted. Another three followed in quick succession.
By the end, the room was mostly quiet. A few slow claps. One person off in a corner sobbing. A glass bottle rolled down the center aisle with no clear origin. It shattered against a stage barrier.
The band walked off without a word.
Backstage, Lena Kaye waited. She said nothing. She handed Sydney Sneyd an envelope marked PAID IN BLOOD, and walked away into the hot Sacramento night.
The review in the Sacramento Bee the next morning called the show “a prolonged act of public punishment” and described Erik as “looking like a colonial ghost come to collect.”
The sound engineer’s tape of the performance—later referred to in collector circles as “The Sacramento Drone”—was seized as evidence during a zoning dispute and misplaced in a county storage facility. Some say it still exists, filed under Agricultural Development: 1968–70.
Back at the motel, Coco sat in front of the tv glued to cartoons, refusing to acknowledge anything else. Mitch took a pair of scissors to his stage shirt. Hait said he’d dreamed of a staircase made entirely of heavy water, each step collapsing under its own memory.
Erik sat outside, legs crossed on the curb, cigarette dangling, watching the sun set over the Sacramento River.
“There’s something about America,” he said to no one in particular. “It lets you show your worst self and then asks for an encore.”
Sacramento, California – 26 June 1964 – “Kaye’s Revenge”
The valley sun beat down like a curse that afternoon, flat and white as a sheet of hospital linen. You could see the heat rippling up off the blacktop behind the old Memorial Auditorium, where Lena Kaye paced and fumed in a cheap rayon dress the color of boiled ketchup. She’d promised Sacramento something transcendent. The Get Quick. British sorcery in tight pants and continental shoes. And all she’d gotten, so far, was a phone call from Reno full of ominous silence and the smell of singed money.
Inside, the air was thin and twitchy. Erik stood beneath a mural of noble Pilgrims and looked like a man waiting for the noose. Mitch and Hait played a quiet hand of poker with the road crew, using old food stamps as currency. Coco was in the dressing room, combing out his hair in a cracked mirror and humming a bastardized version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
They went on late. The lighting was wrong—two spots refused to power up, so half the stage looked like it was receding into the void. Coco emerged like a vengeance doll in crushed pink velvet, gave a brief half-curtsey to the confused Sacramento crowd, and launched into the intro riff of “You Can’t Take Her Place.” It sounded like a chain being dragged through a ballroom.
By the end of the song, they were still playing it. Thirty-six minutes in. Forty-two. It wasn’t noise—it was siege music. Coco howled, Hait played every key like a trapdoor, and Mitch pounded the toms with a funeral energy. Erik didn’t face the audience once.
Backstage, Lena Kaye howled at a sound tech: “They’re killing the song, they’re gutting it on stage!” The sound tech nodded like he’d heard this all before. “Yeah,” he said. “A real public hanging.”
It ended with silence. No encore. No announcement. Just four shadows vanishing behind the curtains.
Outside, teenagers stood blinking in the low dusk, unsure if what they’d seen was music or an exorcism. Kaye tried to withhold payment. Sydney Sneyd, who’d spent the entire show in a stalled Cadillac out front re-reading The Book of the Damned, simply handed her a postmarked envelope. She opened it later, in tears: inside was a single playing card, the Queen of Spades, and a note in Erik’s handwriting that read:
“You got your revenge. We got ours. Balance is beauty.”
Fabian in the Fog – London, 27 June 1964
The air above Paddington shimmered with brake dust and dry heat. It was nearly July, but London hadn’t noticed. The city still wore its spring gloom like a damp scarf, and Fabian Kevorkian—shirt unbuttoned one too far, tie knotted in his trouser pocket—moved through it like a man stalking the ghost of a deadline.
He’d just come from an unsanctioned playback of Ring the Bells at the Trident Studios cutting room—a single lacquer dub wrapped in tissue and passed hand to hand like contraband. The track was imperfect, warped in places, the ending clipped. Still, it left him pale and murmuring. He smoked three Turkish cigarettes in silence, then walked to Soho without looking up.
In his flat above an abandoned chemist on Rathbone Place, he poured three fingers of advocaat into a teacup and called S. True Smith. No answer. No tone, even. The line crackled with what sounded like a tide pulling back.
Kevorkian stood at the window, looking down onto the alley where a teenager in football boots was trying to coax a fox from behind a skip. The whole city felt like a page that hadn’t turned.
The American tour was unraveling—he felt it in his left ear, the one that always rang faintly before a breach. A kind of auditory prophecy. He’d taken to jotting down the names of songs he heard inside the ringing. So far this week: – “False Thunder” – “A Map of Salt” – “Mercy Engine” (again) – “Even Mannequins Are Ashamed”
He opened a file folder, a heavy one marked UNDELIVERABLE MATERIALS, and slipped the Ring the Bells dub inside. Beside it: a faded telegram from Peggy Lee’s people; two Polaroids from the San Francisco Chronicle marked “Not to Be Printed”; and a scrawled note in Coco LeBree’s handwriting that read simply:
Do you remember the dream we had about the birds made of glass? I know what it manes now. It’s happening.
Kevorkian sat at his harmonium and played one long, broken chord. It sounded like a ship slipping beneath ice.
He didn’t say a word. But across the city, in a pub called The Wych Elm, a girl collapsed in the middle of a jug band set. She claimed later she’d heard a note no one played—“the color of sand,” she said, “but it tasted like smoke.”
Fabian poured another drink. He’d been summoned to a listening room at Decca in the morning. They wanted an explanation for the Gold Star session. They wanted to know what Erik had done, what Sydney had signed, what Coco had said to that girl in Santa Clara who now couldn’t stop speaking in tongues.
He had no answers. Only more notes. And the ringing.
Palm Trees and Legal Threats:
Hollywood Interlude, June ’64
If the American interior was a gauntlet, Los Angeles was the mirage oasis. The Get Quick disembarked from the tour coach on 27 June and stepped into the stage-set unreality of Hollywood with its golden haze and disembodied smiles. For six precious days, they did not perform live. Instead, they mimed.
KRLA Beat caught them outside a stucco bungalow near the Sunset Strip, squinting beneath borrowed sunglasses. In the photo, Erik is shirtless, Coco is swaddled in a feathered shawl, Mitch flashes a thumbs-up in front of a Denny’s, and Hait—despite the heat—wears long sleeves and gloves. Their silence in that frame is deafening. They are rock and roll ghosts in the land of make-believe.
Between 27 June and 2 July, the Get Quick made four televised appearances, all of them awkward and alluring: Shivaree, The Lloyd Thaxton Show, Shindig!, and Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is. Coco later said the whole week felt like “an open-casket wedding.” The band, notorious for live volatility, was visibly bored lip-syncing. On Shindig!, Erik mouthed the words to “Plague Motel” while burning a napkin just offscreen.
Meanwhile, Fabian Kevorkian had flown in and, acting as agent and silent warlock, he worked the city with Erik’s demos in a briefcase lined with crushed red velvet. Los Angeles, ever a sucker for melancholy wrapped in gold, quickly bit. By week’s end, he had deals with four artists, including a spectral ballad arrangement of “Crazy Names Of Love” by none other than Peggy Lee. But it was Cher’s version—recorded that same week at Gold Star Studios—that sent tremors through the camp.
Sydney Sneyd, always attuned to cosmic signs and celebrity alchemy, was present at the tail end of Cher’s session. By some accounts, he lit a bundle of sage and declared the studio “a temple of voices.” On a whim—or in an act of willful sabotage against Kevorkian’s authority—he booked Gold Star for the band on 30 June.
It was the Get Quick’s first time recording in an American studio. Kevorkian, who had up until then had been the only producer the band had ever worked with, had engagements that forced him to return to England—but his presence was felt like a hex. Months earlier, sensing a fracture in the power balance, he had filed a preemptive injunction in both Britain and California: the band was not to record outside of his supervision.
They did it anyway.
Hollywood Interlude – Late June 1964
Velvet Sunlight and Legal Smoke
They crested the Hollywood Hills like survivors crawling out of some paleolithic trench war, dry-eyed and overexposed. On 27 June 1964, The Get Quick arrived in Los Angeles under a waning moon and the manic hiss of pressurized optimism. They’d left behind Sacramento’s ghost hum, a trail of broken contracts and semi-conscious teenagers, and now the sky was palm-blurred and syrup-colored.
They checked into a rented Spanish Revival villa above Laurel Canyon, a place with stained-glass windows and the smell of bergamot and mildew. Wordlessly, they divided the rooms: Mitch took the one closest to the kitchen. Coco hung bedsheets like curtains and declared his room an “asylum of starglam decay.” Hait took the den and filled it with beeswax candles and pages from the Zohar. Erik moved into the attic, brought a floor mirror, and stopped eating for two days.
Sydney Sneyd, meanwhile, spiraled.
The LA press were eager. KRLA Beat sent a reporter with a tape recorder and a bottle of Midori. Tiger Beat sniffed around for a snapshot of a shirtless Mitch in the garden. Fabian Kevorkian had already landed in Los Angeles two days earlier and was working angles at Gold Star and Sunset Sound, wielding Erik’s demo reels like ciphers from a foreign empire.
“We’re going to sell weird to the straight world,” he told the local Warner rep, over eggs Benedict and amphetamines at Musso & Frank. “Not as sound—no, not as music—but as rituals disguised as product. Think Bergman by way of be-bop. Think teen apocalypse with eyeliner.”
By 28 June, the band had filmed mimed segments for Shivaree and Where the Action Is, all lacquered smiles and surreal staging. On Shindig! Erik refused to lip-sync and instead shouted an obscene passage from Lautréamont’s Maldoror while Mitch drummed on a mannequin torso. The producers aired it anyway, claiming it was “avant-garde rock and roll ballet.” The ratings were high.
Back in the Canyon, the nights took on a slow molasses surrealism. Parties bled into séances. Sylvia Plath quotes were recited poolside. A woman claiming to be the secret heir of Ambrose Bierce lived in the garage. Erik stayed mostly in his attic. One afternoon, he called Mitch up to show him a smudge on the mirror and said, “I think that’s where my voice has been escaping.”
Mitch said, “I forgive you.”
Kevorkian, suspicious of the creative drift, tried to regain control.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we record.”
“The Open-Casket Wedding”
Hollywood, 28 June 1964
The Get Quick rolled into Los Angeles like they were gliding in on steam—exhaust trailing behind the tour bus, sun turning the windows the color of warm champagne. The city smelled like coconut oil, car polish, and a thousand promises someone else had broken. It shimmered with deceit and narcotic optimism.
They were booked into the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, two blocks off the boulevard, a faux-tropical outpost for traveling musicians and divorcees, its pool perpetually cloudy with sunscreen and gin. The clerk didn’t ask for signatures—he just slid keys across the counter and offered a nod, like he’d seen it all before, in this half-dream world.
Hait kept his sunglasses on. He was already working on a tan but had only managed the sallow hue of a boy kept too long in a museum. Coco, barefoot in a linen shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, wore an orchid behind one ear and carried a Japanese fan. Mitch Joy hoisted the band’s gear into the elevator himself. Erik trailed behind in a full-length cape, despite the 92-degree heat, humming something from memory that no one recognized.
The Days Melted
They did the rounds, as scheduled—Shindig! on Tuesday, Where the Action Is on Wednesday, and a television interview that felt more like a low-grade court martial. On set, the hosts smiled like taxidermy. When asked about “The Get Quick sound,” Coco replied, “It’s what happens when a city sleeps too deeply and slips into the wrong dream.”
The producer nodded, unsure, then asked Mitch how it felt to be back in America. “I don’t think I was ever really here,” he said, lighting a cigarette from a cracked footlight. The show went to commercial a full minute early.
Hauntings on the Sunset Strip
At night, they wandered.
Tower Records. The Chateau Marmont. A secret party in the hills with Dennis Hopper, who offered them a bonbon tin of peyote and a courtesy snapshot from his new Polaroid camera. Erik ignored him. Coco stole both.
Jerome Bowles, 41, part-time bookie and full-time liar, reported missing after a poker game in the café basement. Last seen talking with a “sweaty man with a clipboard” about “something called Cromicon.”
Witnesses identified the clipboard man as Sydney Sneyd, coordinator with The Get Quick’s tour logistics. Sneyd denied any knowledge of Bowles or the reported five-hundred dollar outstanding debt owed to by one Coco LeBree.
Mitch met a waitress at Barney’s Beanery who could roll a cigarette with one hand. Hait was found, once, in the produce aisle of Gelson’s, gently whispering to a crate of eggplants. “They remember,” he said to no one.
At that hour, the Strip looked like a stage after the play had ended—just lights and trash and forgotten props.
A traffic officer flagged a group of pedestrians dancing silently on the roof of the Whisky a Go-Go. There was no music. Just movement. One of them was later identified as Coco LeBree, though at the time he gave his name as “Lilith”—no last name.
When asked what they were doing, he replied: “Waiting for the moon to change key. There—” He pointed and dissolved.
The others were removed from the rooftop without incident. No arrests made.
La Maga arrived halfway through the week, trailing incense and two cracked Samsonite suitcases. Her presence grounded them, like a ghost returning to haunt her own séance. She refused to stay at the hotel, renting instead a room above a tarot shop in Silver Lake where she said the ceiling “spoke better truths.”
Silver Lake afternoon. The clouds were low, drifting slow as thoughts across a morning hangover. A call came in from a landlord on Effie Street. Said one of his tenants had been sitting on the front stairs, rocking back and forth and humming for the past three days.
Officers found a man named Jerome Bledsoe in a rented garage studio. Said he was trying to tune his voice to match the “strange guitar tone” he’d heard coming from a van parked across the street Thursday night.
He couldn’t describe the van. Just the sound. Said it smelled like clean crystal resin. Claimed it “flattened the air.”
One of the neighbors remembered seeing a man in rose colored glasses and a velvet jacket dialing in an amplifier in the alley.
No further contact. No record of any nearby performance scheduled—musical or otherwise. Possible unlicensed show. Code left open.
Strange Interludes from the Strip, U.S. Tour 1964
Los Angeles, California. It was warm and windless. The smog sat low and heavy over the basin like an uninvited guest who’d overstayed dinner.
A woman named Marnie Falk called in a noise complaint from a second-floor walkup above a wig boutique on Melrose. She said the stereo across the hall had been playing one song on repeat for six hours—some new British band she didn’t recognize.
By the time officers arrived, the apartment was empty. A reel-to-reel deck was still spinning. The song was titled “Airships in Bloom.” The vocals were reversed, the drums overlaid with bursts of distorted laughter.
The name on the lease was Penny Packer, traveling with a band from London. She’d left a note in the mailbox: “Gone west with the van. Feed the cat.”
Peppermint Dust
The band drifted west from the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the pool still glowed faintly from old film deals, toward the din of the Strip. Mitch Joy led, coat over one shoulder, fingers ink-stained from the liner notes he refused to surrender to the American typesetters. They entered the Peppermint West club in pairs—Mitch and Penny first, then Coco and Erik, followed by sideman Christian Hait in his missionary black, and sound guy Nigel Strangeways close behind with a reel-to-reel slung like a satchel bomb.
The floor shook faintly from Johnny Rivers’ house band doing their customary twist routine. Girls spun in man-size birdcages. Coco leaned close to one, mirrored her motions, and the crowd took photos like he was an imported novelty from London’s private clubs.
Penny Packer, the band’s tour manager, was overheard telling promoter contacts from Capitol that Mitch was “not interested in radio edits” and “very much not interested in any request to smile.” Mox and Joss, the roadies, drank well vodka near the emergency exit and argued over whether The Standells or The Seeds were stealing The Get Quick’s sound.
By 2:30 a.m., Erik was gone. Witnesses placed him talking to a bartender with an eye patch about something “buried under the Strip,” but this lead was never confirmed.
3 a.m., station attendant called in a report of a teenage male monopolizing the payphone for over four hours. Officer arrived on scene. Found one Chester Klein, 17, barefoot, talking into the phone receiver with no coins in the slot.
When questioned, Klein said:
“I’m waiting for Coco to call me back. He said she would.”
“Who? Which is it,” the officer inquired, “He or She?”
“Both,” he said.
Witnesses confirm Coco LeBree had passed through the Mobil station earlier that day to purchase rolling papers. No known further contact. Klein’s parents contacted. Subject returned to Van Nuys voluntarily. No charges filed. Case closed.
The Basement at Café La Bohème
The group was spotted entering Café La Bohème near Sunset Plaza. Upstairs: French chanson and what passed for coq au vin under heat lamps. Downstairs: roulette wheels, card tables, and, reportedly, a room with no clocks and a slow-turning fan where one might “feel twenty minutes stretch into hours.”
Christian Hait refused to go down. Said he “dreamed this place already, twice, once with fire and once with snakes.” Coco went anyway and didn’t come back up until morning.
Sydney Sneyd of Cromicon was waiting at the café’s front table with an ashtray full of licorice stub cigarettes. He’d allegedly set up a recording session for the band in the basement—off the books, off the grid, off everything. Mitch called it “an inquisition with a rack and a reverb plate.”
Later audio reels reportedly captured a female voice—unaccounted for—singing a lullaby in a language no one present spoke. The tape later warped in storage and was declared “compromised” by Cromicon archives.
Ben Frank’s at Dawn
Just after five, Nigel Strangeways was seen sitting alone at Ben Frank’s Diner, nursing a tomato juice and scratching diagrams into a napkin. He claimed it was a feedback loop schematic, but a busboy recalled it looked more like a transit map of dead stars.
Ragged Jack, stage manager, joined him briefly. Said nothing. Took three sugars in his coffee and stared at the jukebox while “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” played twice in a row. Jack asked Nigel if anyone else could hear the dog in the left channel.
They left without paying. The waitress didn’t stop them. Said they looked “like ghosts already running late for something terrible.”
West Hollywood. Bats seen flitting across the moon and low glowing clouds. Most of the crowd at Ben Frank’s was coming down, sobering up, or switching gears.
A waitress named Joylene reported a man in a black suit handing out fake foreign currency to teenagers in the booth near the jukebox. Said he had a voice like a priest and eyes like a broken lightbulb.
One of the kids identified the man as “Christian Something”—claimed he was in a cult or a rock band or a cult.
The man in the suit was gone when police arrived. In his place was a napkin scrawled with the phrase: “The first song was about you. The second is not.”
The Trip (That Wasn’t)
Coco, in a silver lamé jumpsuit, was refused entry to The Trip on account of “looking too much like a hallucination in progress.” He laughed and vanished around the corner with a strange man holding a suitcase made of clear vinyl and containing an electric hair dryer and fifteen pairs of rolled socks.
Mitch and Erik showed up late, entered without resistance, and watched part of a Warhol-sponsored act involving mirrors, gasoline, and a woman reciting passages from Finnegans Wake. Erik left before the second act. Mitch stayed. He was later found asleep in the alley behind the club, a strip of 35mm film looped around one boot.
Police responded to a noise complaint behind The Trip. Witnesses described loud arguing followed by a crash. Found one Raymond Delmundo, 32, unemployed jazz musician, in visible distress. Claimed his baritone saxophone had been deliberately broken.
“Shades. Long hair, might’ve been English. Said I was playing in the wrong key for this city. Grabbed my horn and twisted it in his hands like it was a paper cup.”
He was referring, authorities believe, to Mitchell Joy of The Get Quick. No charges filed. Subject refused medical assistance and later attempted to pawn the broken saxophone at a shop on Fairfax. Case closed. Saxophone unsalvageable.
The Sunset Strip was quiet in the early morning hours except for the neon buzz of the marquees and the flatulent groan of buses climbing into Laurel Canyon.
A security guard at The Trip called in a report of a man asleep in the orchestra pit. Said he was in a silver lamé jumpsuit and refused to leave. Claimed to be part of “the stage team.”
The man gave the name Baggy Mack. No ID. Gave the impression of dense intoxication but smelled pleasantly of lemon polish and melted wax. Said he was “guarding the bass response.”
They escorted him out without incident. He left behind a pair of black gloves and a roll of blueprints labeled “CROMICON HQ: ZONE B.”
Ciro’s, Drenched in Light
They all met again at Ciro’s late in the evening, invited by a group of “radio people” who wanted to understand the “English Invasion” at close range.
The room was full of red light and slow laughter. Girls danced without music. Christian Hait stood outside the whole time, praying softly in Aramaic—as a goof, he later admitted. Nigel’s tape recorder had vanished, replaced by a silver bowl full of cigarette ash and yellow and greenish teeth.
Penny Packer claimed she’d secured a deal with a local sponsor. “A whiskey ad,” she muttered, “but for a brand that doesn’t technically exist.”
Mitch looked redundantly unimpressed.
Erik stood in the middle of the dance floor, unmoving, while a jazz trio played behind him. When asked later what he’d been doing, he said only:
“I was listening for the signal beneath the piano. It’s a heavy sound. Heavier than heavy water. And I think the tide is creeping in.”
Note: All times approximate. Recollections may have been affected by light, sound, and atmosphere. The Get Quick left Los Angeles two days later for San Francisco. Their hotel room at the Roosevelt was reportedly found with the mirrors turned to face the walls and a single Polaroid nailed to the floor. It showed no one standing where someone was clearly meant to be. Scrawled in the margin:
Heavy Water.
Gold Star Sessions
The lost “Ring The Bells” session happened in this heat—air thick with flypaper sweetness and something like fate gone sideways. Inside Gold Star, amid velvet walls and coil echo, they laid down the track in near silence. Erik’s guitar tone turned liquid. Coco sang into a microphone wrapped in tin foil. Mitch, unshaven and radiant with fatigue, drummed like a paddleboat keeping time in an underwater dream.
The engineer, Bobby Todman, swore later he could hear the studio breathe. “I don’t mean it metaphorically,” he said. “I mean it was alive.”
They left with nothing—no contract, no master copy, no handshake. Just a reel-to-reel that vanished by morning and a lingering pressure behind the eyes, like they’d looked directly at something too real to recall.
The Parade of Mirrors
On their final day in L.A., the band was invited to a rooftop party above The A&M lot. Cher was rumored to attend. She didn’t. Someone played “White Rabbit” on loop. Syd Sneyd got drunk and tried to toast “to the American Empire and all its haunted youth.” Coco pushed him gently into the pool.
Afterwards, Erik took La Maga’s hand and wandered into the dusk of Griffith Park. They weren’t seen again until dawn. When they returned, she wore his shirt and he was barefoot, carrying an empty birdcage.
“Where did you find that birdcage?” someone asked.
Erik looked confused. “It’s a lizard cage,” he said.
“Where’s the lizard?” no one asked.
That night, they flew to San Francisco, leaving behind a city that had offered them nothing except heat, hallucination, and a song no one would hear.
Erik slept the entire flight with a silk napkin over his face. Coco stared out the window at the curve of the California coast, whispering, “You can’t arrest a mirage.” Mitch hummed the outro to “So Blue It’s Silver.” Hait, for reasons unknown, had a bundle of sage burning softly in a bronze oil lamp in his lap.
30 June – Gold Star Studios
The Bell That Broke the Contract
Gold Star was a sonic temple, thick with ghosts of Phil Spector’s reverb and mid-century hits. That morning, The Get Quick arrived in boots, perfumed, and oddly docile. Coco wore a leather trench over bare skin. Erik carried a tattered paperback of Steppenwolf. Hait had painted sigils on his cheeks. Mitch carried only a stack of handwritten lyrics and a bruised lemon.
The track was “Ring The Bells.”
Kevorkian had explicitly forbidden any recording in the U.S. without him. Contracts were clear. And yet, Sydney Sneyd, drunk on a mixture of champagne and righteous theater, had booked them into Gold Star under a false name—The Everliving Gospel.
What they recorded that day remains disputed. Some say it was a seven-minute dirge in 3/4 time, full of modulated feedback and reversed organ lines. Others claim it was mostly silence punctuated by sobbing and someone eating a pack of very brittle crackers. But most believe it was a complex and intricately planned multi-song composition. What’s certain is that something happened in the playback room—a low rumble, like someone breathing under the tape.
The band listened once.
Then Erik stood, walked to the console, and erased the master track himself.
Todman watched him do it, and said nothing.
Was it the studio? The atmosphere? The energy (or lack thereof) of the players? What made Erik instantaneously abort the recording?
That night, Kevorkian got word. By sunrise, telegrams were arriving from London. Cease-and-desist orders. Threats of suit. Syndication halts. Distribution freezes.
“Ring The Bells” was never again attempted.
Its memory spread anyway, like mildew on a prayer book.
By 2 July, Sydney Sneyd was chain-smoking from two hands and muttering about “cosmic reprisals.” The band packed their things. Coco left behind a note in lipstick: WE UNMADE A SOUND.
On 3 July, The Get Quick left Hollywood behind and headed for San Francisco. But they left a crater in their wake—part velvet, part legal, all myth.
Next stop: the Cow Palace and the coup no one saw coming.
Gold Star, 30 June – The Lost Session
According to engineer Bobby Todman, the band arrived with incense, Turkish coffee, and a single finished song: Erik’s spectral “Ring The Bells.” The mood was electric, if fractured. Mitch laid down drums in a single take. Coco overdubbed a wordless harmony. Hait insisted the song needed “less Earth, more ether.” Erjk sang through a modified telephone receiver.
They left that night giddy. Sydney wanted the track rushed to acetate and couriered to London for radio play. He had already begun whispering of it as the next single. “It’s a chant for the end of summer,” he told Melody Maker days later, though the track remained unheard.
Kevorkian moved fast. By 2 July, legal documents were in the band’s hands, citing breach of contract and threatening to suspend UK distribution. Sydney threatened counter-suits. Warner Brothers, who’d flirted with The Get Quick sessions just the day before, quietly stepped back. “Ring The Bells” was shelved. The tapes sat in a locked cabinet at Gold Star until the studio changed ownership in 1982. By then, the acetate had oxidized.
The Song Remains Disputed
To this day, no official copy of “Ring The Bells” has surfaced. Bootlegs claim to contain fragments—a chiming guitar loop, Coco’s echoed laughter, a heartbeat rhythm on floor tom—but none have been authenticated. Kevorkian never mentioned the track in interviews, though his biographer notes he once referred to it privately as “the severing point.”
As the band departed Los Angeles on 3 July to resume the tour, a strange mood hung over them. A song had been born and buried in the same city. Legal skirmishes turned psychic. Trust, already fragile, was now wrapped in parchment and litigious smoke.
The Get Quick were no longer just musicians lost on tour. They were moving violations in a battle over ownership—of songs, of selves, of myth.
The Get Quick Hit Hollywood
By the week of 1 July, Shindig! had crowned The Get Quick its featured act—a coveted gig, even for a band who considered American television a sort of psychedelic punishment. The show’s producers asked the group to close with “Rock & Roll,” a track from their UK debut, but AFM union rules meant they couldn’t simply mime the old recording. A new instrumental version had to be made, and the job fell to The Shindogs, the house band, who booked Gold Star Studios for the night of 30 June.
The Get Quick were present, bleary-eyed from their own ill-fated Gold Star session earlier that day. Erik sat mostly in the control booth, chain-smoking and muttering about “duplication theft.” Mitch never took his sunglasses off. Hait, reportedly in the midst of a self-imposed vow of silence (“due to vibrational contamination”), stood barefoot in the iso booth with his back to the glass. Only Coco participated musically, laying down a rhythm guitar track using a battered Harmony Rocket borrowed from a studio intern.
The Shindogs, though, were pros. Guitarist James Burton, whose clean, knife-sharp licks had once propelled Ricky Nelson and Dale Hawkins into the charts, shook Erik’s hand in the hallway. “He looked like he’d walked out of a dream of Sun Records,” Erik recalled. “It was the only good thing that happened that week.” The respect was mutual. Burton, interviewed years later, said, “That little band was a wrecking crew of its own. You could tell something wild was going on under the surface.”
Their actual Shindig! performance, aired 1 July, is strangely subdued. The camera lingers on Coco, half-shadowed and grinning through the verses, while Erik barely feigns playing, instead staring directly into the lens as if trying to will himself out of the dimension. The final chorus builds into a fury of tambourines and sneers, then cuts to Dick Dodd’s frozen smile. Then the credits abruptly roll like everything is completely normal.
Shindog Days and Union Nights
Los Angeles, 1–2 July 1969
The first time the house band played “My Kind Of Disease,” they got the tempo wrong and the bass fell out of key halfway through. Coco stopped them cold with a flick of the wrist. He wasn’t angry, not visibly. Just disappointed in the bones of the thing.
“Don’t think of the rhythm as a rhythm, think of it as a relapse,” he told the studio bassist. “Think contagious contagions.”
The bassist, who’d cut records with Nancy Sinatra and played golf with Dean Martin, nodded a nailed the next take.
* * *
Hollywood had taken them in the way Hollywood takes everything in—with high beams and a low ceiling of smog. Shindig! had requested the band for a special “British Invasion Flyover” week—booking The Move, The Herd, and The Get Quick back to back with retreads of The Beau Brummels.
The set reeked of lacquered wood, cuban heels and twisted ambition.
The showrunner, a man named Rayda Bloom, greeted them with a clipboard and a smile he’d learned in real estate. “Thrilled to have you here,” he said. “The kids are wild for your look.”
Mitch Joy, sunglasses on indoors again, whispered, “We’re not here to be gawked at. We’re here to be lived through.”
They mimed “Carnaby Gargoyle” under a bank of sweating kliegs while union gaffers barked about cords and cables and someone in a headset shouted, “Where the hell is... who? Coco! Where the hell is Coco!?!”
He was in the rafters, apparently, watching the rehearsal from above with a peach in one hand and a stolen prop sword in the other. La Maga called it “a reconnaissance of the invisible stage.”
* * *
The Shindogs, the house band, were absolute aces. You could hear it in the way their drummer ghosted a snare fill, the ease in their voiceless harmonies. They liked Mitch, who rolled his sleeves and passed out cigarettes between takes. They weren’t so sure about Hait, who refused to shake hands on the basis that his body “was already compromised.”
Erik, however, fell into a quiet rhythm with guitarist James Burton, who had known Memphis back in the day and once watched Elvis cry. “He plays like he’s hiding from the police, with a keg of napalm,” Burton said, admiringly.
Coco, in a white scarf and boots with no soles, at first refused to perform entirely, claiming the Shindig! stage was “dimensionally imbalanced.” A studio tech found him seated beneath a floor lamp in the dressing room reading The Kybalion aloud to a bowl of Jell-O and managed to woo him to the stage with a platter of pickled eels.
* * *
The performance proper, aired 1 July, went off with minimal disaster. Coco snarled through “Mercy Engine” with a serpentine smile. Erik played with one eye on the camera and one eye on the past. Mitch beat the drum set like it had poisoned his horse. Hait stood in the shadows holding a tambourine as if it might explode.
The audience—a pre-loaded crew of teen screamers—shrieked on cue. One girl fainted. Two others claimed to see angels. The network, seeing ratings potential, asked if the band would consider a holiday special.
“We don’t do Christmas,” said Erik. “We do revelations.”
* * *
But the trouble came the next day.
Union Paperwork.
Where the Action Is was filming on location at the Cinnamon Cinder, a teen nightclub with surfboards on the walls and white noise in the carpet. To appear, the band had to sign waivers with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The stack of contracts looked like something from the Treaty of Versailles.
Coco refused immediately. “This is paper fascism,” he said. “I won’t sign a document that smells like deep pocket lint and bleached crime scenes.”
A union rep—a retired radio man named Harold P. Glick—took offense. He called the band “ungrateful,” “British degenerates,” and, weirdly, “non-union spiritualists.”
Erik asked Glick if he had ever truly heard his own voice. “Does it echo when you sleep?” he asked.
Glick threatened to blacklist them.
Erik swung first. It wasn’t a punch so much as a gesture—backhanded, elegant—but sharp, and with rings. Glick immediately went down. Someone screamed. Hait clapped once and sang, “Balance is restored.”
The band was escorted from the premises by armed security. The tapes of the incident were said to be “accidentally lost.” The producer of Where the Action Is called it “a minor misunderstanding.”
* * *
That night, The Get Quick played no shows. They returned to the Hollywood Hawaiian, ordered a dozen shrimp cocktails, and watched My Three Sons with the sound off. Mitch played harmonica into a glass of gin. Coco didn’t speak, but at least he was smiling. Hait stared at the ceiling and murmured nonsensical coordinates.
Erik surveyed his mates, lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly, and said, “I think we’re beginning to make an impression.”
Cinnamon and Conflict:
The Where the Action Is Incident
The next day, 2 July, the band traveled to The Cinnamon Cinder, a suburban North Hollywood teen club turned TV set, to film their spot for Where the Action Is. The morning was already tense. A handler brought in a thick sheaf of AFTRA paperwork—union waivers, performance releases, and emergency arbitration clauses. “It read like a lease on your soul,” said Mitchell Joy.
Coco refused to sign. “I said no because it wasn’t written in a language I recognized,” Coco told Cream Soda Underground in 1972. “And it smelled of vinegar douche and veiled threats.”
The refusal drew in a union rep—described by multiple witnesses as “red-faced, middle-aged, and visibly thrilled to have an enemy.” Words were exchanged. The official called the band “Commie scum,” “limey bastards,” and “fairies.” He threatened a U.S. blacklist, saying they’d never work stateside again.
Erik, who had already spent several days dodging studio lawyers and industry handlers, finally snapped.
“He was ranting about how we’d be begging to come here when the Soviets took England,” Erik later said. “I’d been living in London, yeah, but I’m a Philadelphian. So I just turned and clocked him. Broke his nose. He was rolling around on the floor when I noticed his badge—he was a union official.”
Accounts differ on what happened next. The footage from Where the Action Is that day was never aired. The band left the Cinnamon Cinder under police escort, though no formal charges were filed. Sydney allegedly made several calls to “contacts at AFTRA,” but the details are lost to history or sealed in legal archives.
Back in London, the incident made tabloid headlines:
“Rock Singer Attacks American Official – Band Faces US Ban!” (Evening Standard, 3 July 1969)
“Get Quick Thugged Up in Union Brawl!” (Melody Maker, 5 July)
Whether true or apocryphal, the incident marked the beginning of the end for their smooth infiltration of American media. By the time the tour resumed on 4 July in San Francisco, The Get Quick had begun to wear the haunted, hunted look of people trapped in their own legend.
Final Week: The Hollywood Bowl Ultimatum
Excerpted from Drive Me Widdershins: The Get Quick in America (Doppelgänger Press, 1991)
By 3 July, The Get Quick had reached what should have been the crowning moment of their American campaign: a headlining slot at the Beach Boys’ Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl. The show was a showcase of the era’s elite—ten acts in all, with The Get Quick positioned just above the marquee in thick Helvetica: “From London—The Get Quick!” Syd Sneyd called it “the chance to present them as the better Beatles… but stranger. More dangerous. A band from the future.”
Yet the day began with a crisis.
The night before, Erik Evol had punched a union official in North Hollywood and walked off the set of Where the Action Is. By the next morning, the mood had turned inward. “He was gone,” said Mitch in a later interview. “There was this look he got when he wanted to disappear, like the air around him was curdling.”
That afternoon, after a loose and moody soundcheck at the Bowl, Coco cornered Syd Sneyd in the amphitheatre’s empty green room and declared he wouldn’t perform. “He said he felt like a stolen relic on display,” Syd recalled. “He said, ‘I’m not here without Fanastasia. I’ll burn it down before I pretend.’”
Fanastasia—Coco’s parrot, partner, muse, and sometimes co-conspirator—had remained in England, nursing a spiritual illness Hait once described as “melancholic clairvoyance.” Mitch Joy’s current girlfriend Nadja, equally enigmatic, had stayed behind as well. Coco demanded both be flown to L.A. or threatened he’d vanish into Griffith Park with a flintlock.
Syd, exhausted and desperate, relented. He phoned Cromicon in London and arranged emergency first-class flights for a couple of birds. “It was,” he said later, “the most degrading moment of my life. I’d survived EMI press junkets, underground film festivals in Algeria, even a weekend with Salvador Dalí. But this—this broke me.”
Yet Coco agreed to perform.
And so, as the summer dusk settled over the Hollywood Hills and 15,000 Southern Californian teenagers screamed for anything that looked British, The Get Quick took the stage. There is surviving footage, grainy and flickering: Coco, in velvet slacks and pointed boots; Mitch, scowling beneath his ray-bans like thunder; Hait with tambourines spinning on each hand; and Erik, striped-suited and glowing like a man returned from his own funeral. They played “So Blue It’s Silver,” “Carnaby Gargoyle,” and “Mercy Engine,” before closing with “Panther’s Gait” in a blaze of crimson lights.
The audience roared. Critics called it “phantasmagoric.”
Fanastasia and Nadja arrived later that night at LAX, met by La Maga, and ferried directly to the band’s rented house in Laurel Canyon. “They flew in like three witches at midnight,” said Ragged Jack. “Everything changed after that.”
A Sudden Departure
But for Syd Sneyd, it was over. He left for London the following morning without speaking to Coco again. In his place, he appointed two handlers: the reliable tour assistant Penny Packer, and Bernard Surbeck—an affable Los Angeles entrepreneur who ran a successful laundromat chain and later tried (in vain) to manage Blue Cheer.
Syd’s announced his departure to Mitch, Erik and Hait in a quiet, tearful meeting over breakfast. “He said he loved us, but he couldn’t survive another day of the madness,” Joy shrugged. “We knew he meant Coco.”
Coco, however, was not informed. He only discovered Syd was gone when he arrived at the venue in San Francisco on 4 July and found Penny Packer handing out per diems. “I thought we were being robbed,” he later joked. But beneath the sarcasm, he was livid.
To Coco, it wasn’t just abandonment—it was betrayal. That night, seated around a tiny backstage dressing room lit by a single blue bulb, the band made a quiet but definitive decision: when they returned to England, they would sever ties with Cromicon for good.
“None of us said it out loud,” Joy recalled. “We just sat there and nodded. It was time to take back the band.”
And so ended The Get Quick’s American summer—not with a bang, but with a quiet coup.
Refusal at the Cow Palace
On 4 July, with the ash still settling from Syd Sneyd’s abrupt departure, The Get Quick rolled into Daly City for what was to be their penultimate major appearance: a slot at The Beach Boys’ Firecracker event at the Cow Palace, a cavernous, echo-prone arena just south of San Francisco. It was a far cry from the glamour of the Hollywood Bowl. Only 3,500 tickets had sold in a venue that could hold four times that number. The promoter—Lena Kaye, once again—was visibly panicked.
The band had arrived late, disheveled from the drive up the coast, and Lena Kaye, sleepless and chain-smoking Newports—was pacing the corridor in a sequined blouse and orthopedic heels, trying to smooth chaos with clipped pleasantries.
She handed Sydney Sneyd a check and a hug; he returned both with silence.
“Don’t think they’ll like you in Daly City,” she muttered. “Not your crowd. Too Catholic.”
Sydney just said, “My boys don’t have a crowd. They create convergence. And whip the devil with his own tail.”
The band, having endured payment disputes with Kaye already in Reno and Sacramento, had reached the end of their tolerance. Erik insisted on full payment before soundcheck. In cash. Kaye, red-eyed and trembling behind a clipboard, began muttering about the cheque.
“Not paper,” said Coco. “We’ve had enough paper on this tour. Paper promises, paper flowers, paper faces. No more.”
* * *
The Cow Palace crouched in the saltlight fog like a half-drowned cathedral—too big, too cold, too full of echoes that didn’t belong to anybody anymore. Once it had housed rodeos, Republican conventions, dog shows. Tonight it was dressed up like a great American promise: a star-spangled blowout with pyrotechnics and pop music, the Beach Boys mid-poster, The Get Quick in tiny print beneath the fold.
Erik Evol was the first to notice it: something wrong in the voltage, a pressure behind the sockets. He said the amplifiers “hummed in the key of dread.” Coco called the backstage corridors “hollowed-out penitentiaries with better signage.” Mitch Joy, more practical, kept to the dressing room and tuned his snare like it mattered.
Soundcheck was a joke. Hait refused to play until the mirrors in the lighting rig were covered with cloth. Coco left halfway through and spent twenty minutes in the men’s room staring at a urinal as if it might sing to him. Mitch and Erik tried to run through “Panther’s Gait” but the house monitors cut out mid-chorus, and when the tech apologized, Erik simply unplugged his guitar and sat cross-legged on the stage.
“I’ve seen this place in a dream,” he said, “but it was a cathedral, and we were saints being burned for our silence.”
Kaye returned with two union reps and a clipboard full of missing payments. She said something about ticket sales, something about percentages. Coco asked for the balance in cash. “Not promises,” he said. “Not confetti. Just weight.”
The envelope she produced was thin.
* * *
By 7:45 PM, The Get Quick had made a decision.
They weren’t going on.
No statement, no tantrum. Just quiet refusal. Coco sprawled on the floor of the green room sketching sigils in eyeliner pencil. Mitch pulled out a portable reel-to-reel and played an unlabeled tape. Hait lay on the couch with a warm washcloth over his eyes. Erik smoked beside a floor fan and listened to the whine.
Outside, the crowd was confused, then restless. The Box Tops played longer than scheduled. The Beach Boys brought out extra brass. Fireworks were shot an hour early. Still, the absence on the bill left a hole that couldn’t be patched.
Backstage, Lena Kaye cried. Sydney Sneyd watched the whole thing from the loading dock and murmured, “They’ve graduated from performance to refusal. That’s their final act.”
* * *
Later, someone swore the band had been spotted walking barefoot through the parking lot, humming in unison, following La Maga toward a waiting van.
Others claimed they’d never arrived at all.
Either way, by midnight, The Get Quick were gone from Daly City.
No refunds were issued.
Downriver and Dispossessed:
Fabian Kevorkian, London, July 4, 1964
Excerpted from The Kevorkian Interdicts: The Secret History of the Get Quick, compiled by Serge L. Deighton (1991)
In the London dusk—air thick with soot and soft tobacco smoke—Fabian Kevorkian sat slouched in the back corner of the Chelsea Arts Club, half-listening to the wet hiss of ice melting in his third glass of Fernet and half-watching a fox patrol the garden wall outside. It was July 4th, a date he marked with habitual disdain. Americans and their pageantry. Their boot-cut trousers and television dentistry. Their habit of treating the future like a foregone conclusion.
At his feet lay a briefcase lined with crimson felt and thick with unsigned papers—session recalls, contract revisions, a few delicate letters from EMI’s legal team, and a dog-eared manila folder marked in his own severe ink: CALIFORNIA: INTERVENTION NOTES
A courier had arrived earlier that morning—pallid boy, wet hair, the smell of machine shops on his breath—bearing a cable in triplicate. The message read:
SYDNEY GONE. COCO THREATENS EXODUS. ERIK SILENT. JOY UNDECIDED. RING THE BELLS SESSION VERIFIED. AFTRA SCANDAL CONFIRMED. PROJECTION: SPIRAL.
Kevorkian folded the paper carefully, placed it on the seat beside him, and did not speak for twenty minutes.
Instead, he replayed a sound in his mind: not a song, not even a melody—just the flicker of static from an untuned reel captured by mistake in Studio 3 during a February session. A high, twitching pulse embedded in silence. Hait had said it was interference from the valves. But Kevorkian had always believed it was something else. Something that came through.
He smiled and finished his drink.
* * *
He was not a man prone to despair. Fabian Kevorkian was not, in any practical sense, soft. In the 1950s he’d ghosted jazz radio in Tangier, pinched tape loops for Burroughs, and spent three hours locked in a crypt with Lennox Berkeley “to test acoustic isolation,” as he once said, smiling without his eyes. He had assembled The Get Quick from the tailings of a dozen London club nights, stitched them into something volatile, and coaxed into life their first record by speaking in tongues behind the glass.
But tonight he felt the shape of loss enter the room like a draught through a gap in the brickwork.
* * *
The phone rang—his private line, the one listed only in Kaleidoscope, Index Audio, and with a small pentagram in the EMI directory.
“Kevorkian.”
The voice on the other end was clipped, transatlantic. He knew it without needing the name. “Fabian. It’s Jack Leach.”
Leach—head of Warner’s experimental acquisitions team—had sniffed around “Ring The Bells” before the injunction.
“They’re out. I’ve been told they walked off the Cow Palace stage before even plugging in. Refused payment. We’ve had two stations pull the simulcast, and Lena Kaye’s threatening to sue.”
Fabian exhaled. He counted to five.
“They’re not out,” he said. “They’re molting. There’s a difference.”
“Not in this town, there isn’t.”
* * *
After the call, Kevorkian took the long way home, walking the length of the Embankment like a man leaving something behind. He passed the site of the old Savoy chapel, where he’d once recorded Erik Evol reciting Blake in an unbroken whisper. The Thames smelled of iron and algae. A few policemen on bicycles nodded politely, not recognizing him as the man who once convinced an MI6 liaison to greenlight a vinyl pressing of white noise for deep-state acclimatization purposes.
When he reached his townhouse in Pimlico, there were candles in the windows. La Maga had left them lit. A stack of test pressings sat by the door, balanced like offerings. Inside, a reel-to-reel tape hissed.
Kevorkian lit a cigarette, picked up the top record—RING THE BELLS (UNMASTERED)—and stared at it for a long time.
In the margins of his own label copy, he scribbled:
“If they go, they go as ghosts. But they will return. No one gets out clean.”
He didn’t sleep that night. Instead, he walked the house barefoot, listening for phantom chords that never quite resolved.
The Northern Refrain:
The Get Quick in Washington State, July 1964
Excerpted from Drive Me Widdershins: The Get Quick in America (Doppelgänger Press, 1991)
By the time they rolled into Washington, the tour had shed its glamour like old snakeskin. What remained was bone and ache and the strange music still coiled inside them. The Get Quick were no longer interested in making an impression. They were listening for a signal. And somewhere between Tacoma and Seattle, they began to hear it.
Spokane – 8 July – The Hollow Auditorium
The Spokane Civic Theatre was a mid-century shell with pastel carpets and drafty ducts. It had once hosted ballet, symposia, a police dog exhibition. That night it hosted The Get Quick—who played as if they had already left their bodies behind.
There were maybe 300 in the crowd. Farmers’ daughters in crinoline. College boys with Beatles hair. A few bewildered housewives. One local journalist, Hal Benjamin, described the set as “a funeral with feedback.”
Erik opened with a solo of broken loops and reversed reverb, while Hait recited what may have been fragments of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Mitch padded out an ominous jazz brush pattern. Coco wore a mirrored shawl and refused to face the audience.
They ended the set with an unreleased track—a dirge that bled into silence.
Afterward, the dressing room was lit by a single floor lamp with a red bulb. Someone had drawn a sigil in ash across the vanity mirror. Sydney Sneyd was gone, of course, but the bad vibes were not. It was said Penny Packer had taken up lighting candles in each venue to “keep the frequencies clean.”
Tacoma – 9 July – One Night in the Tunnel
Tacoma was a cement curve tucked beside the sea. The venue—a defunct shipping warehouse turned impromptu music hall—had been booked at the last minute after the original site double-booked a gospel revue. There were no proper risers, only pallets and scaffolding. Sound check consisted of Hait whispering to a lamp and Coco asking the floor, “Do we want to be heard, or remembered?”
Apparently he got his answer. The performance was pure voltage.
They played only four songs, but stretched them into fifty minutes of overlapping rhythm and incantatory cycles. Erik’s guitar sounded like a glacier cracking. Mitch took over lead vocals on “Off the Map,” turning it into a topical lament for everything they’d lost along the way.
The Tacoma Tribune called it “eerie, incomprehensible, and impossibly important.”
Seattle – 10 July – The Last Light
The Paramount Theatre in Seattle was their final continental stop, though no one mentioned it out loud. The marquee still read “British Invasion Festival,” though all the other acts had dropped off, scared off by bad reviews, worse juju, union spats and sudden gastrointestinal flus.
The Get Quick were alone on the bill.
They arrived in silence and soundchecked in sideways glances. Mitch stood alone on the vast stage for nearly twenty minutes, brushing the snare with a feather, listening to the way the space responded. Coco wandered the balcony, reciting smatterings of French. Hait claimed to have astrally projected himself into the projection booth, though no one could confirm if he was serious or bored or both.
They played to a half-full house of devotees, drifters, and a few Capitol Records scouts who didn’t know what they were witnessing. The setlist was improvised, based loosely on a new song cycle Erik called The Evening Ladder. It ended with “To See the Air That Carries You,” a song with no words and only a single repeating chord that gradually detuned itself over ten minutes.
At the end, they didn’t bow. They walked off, one by one. Coco last. He appeared lost.
Departure – Sea-Tac Airport – 11 July
They left in silence.
At 6:04 a.m., a rented white Dodge van pulled into a restricted lane outside Seattle-Tacoma International. The band emerged with little more than a few softcases and paperbacks. Coco wore gigantic dark glasses and a silk scarf knotted like a priest’s stole. Mitch carried a book titled The American Ephemeris, 1931–1970. Erjk held only a postcard, blank, addressed to no one. Hait could only be seen in the fourth shadow cast across the tarmac.
Penny Packer saw them off. She cried, quietly, as the plane taxied.
The boarding agent later said they vanished down the jet bridge without a word.
Postscript – The Tape in the Envelope
Six months later, a battered manila envelope arrived at Fabian Kevorkian’s Pimlico flat. No return address, just a rubber-stamped glyph: ☍
Inside was a reel marked PARAMOUNT – 10 JULY – DO NOT ERASE.
There were no liner notes, no track names. Just sixty-three minutes of strange music, unrepeatable and unclaimed.
He played it once, then stored it in a lacquer box beside his fireplace.
When asked, years later, what it contained, he only said:
“It was the sound of four ghosts saying goodbye to a country that never quite believed they were real.”
Oasis and Exit
Remarkably, the final leg of the tour unfolded with a kind of weary calm. The band flew to Honolulu on 11 July, and for one surreal week, they were at peace. They played two shows—one at the Honolulu International Center, and another at Schofield Barracks for U.S. Army troops. The latter show, played barefoot on a sweltering runway stage, was one of the few on the tour not photographed or filmed.
“It was like we dropped out of time,” Coco said. “Like no one could find us.”
Erik, who had expected the islands to be a tourist-trap cliché, was moved by their quietude. He and La Maga spent their downtime on deserted beaches and in oceanfront diners. “She swam in nothing but a hat. He splashed and sang in the water,” said a fan who spotted them in Waikiki. “It looked like a strange service in a church of seashells and beautiful ghosts.”
Years later, Erik would name it his “favorite dream,” and La Maga (referring to the band and their entourage) called it “our spiritual honeymoon.”
“It ended the only way it could,” said Mitch Joy. “No goodbyes. Just gone.”
Honolulu Interlude: July 11–18, 1964
Excerpted from Drive Me Widdershins: The Get Quick in America (Doppelgänger Press, 1991)
They landed in Honolulu like castaways washing up from some lost arc of history. The air met them like warm breath, smelled of salt and pineapple rinds and something faintly medicinal. For one week, The Get Quick moved without purpose and for the first time in recent memory—without escort. No handlers, no Penny Packer. Just the ocean and the sun and the quiet, thin-skinned awe of survival.
They stayed at a low-slung beach hotel on the edge of Waikīkī, favored by Japanese jazz combos and ex-aviators. Coco said it felt like “a forgotten embassy,” and took to drinking guava gin at 9 a.m. Mitch disappeared into the surf for hours at a time. Hait borrowed a library card from the concierge and spent both days reading Myths and Legends of Polynesia poolside, wrapped in a terry robe and dark glasses.
Erjk wrote postcards he never mailed. One of them, found later in a guitar case during the Mercy Engine sessions, read simply:
“Something is happening here. Not in us—around us. Or underneath. The tide is saying hurry.”
Honolulu International Center – 5 July – The Quiet Rapture
They played to a restless crowd of 1,100 locals, tourists, and servicemen. The opener—a Hawaiian surf band called The Tropicorde—left the stage with a whisper and an apology. The Get Quick stepped out barefoot. No introduction. Just the slow, mournful pulse of “Death of a Carnaby Kid,” reimagined as a steel-drenched lullaby.
There was no stage banter, no theatrics. Erik played seated. Coco stood in a loose linen tunic and stared into the crowd like a lost god waiting to be remembered. Hait, half-shadow, half-glimmer, conjured high harmonics and radio static. Mitch sang the final chorus of “Ashtrays at Dawn” in falsetto, his voice nearly breaking.
People wept. The extended applause was solemn and sincere. It was the only show of the tour where no one screamed.
Schofield Barracks – 6 July – Sunstroke Mass
The second show, on the tarmac of the U.S. Army base at Schofield, was hotter, wilder, stranger. Organized as a goodwill performance for troops (who had no idea that within a month’s time the Gulf of Tonkin incident would ignite the countdown fuse to the U.S.’s official entry to the Vietnam war) it took place in the sweltering hush of late afternoon. Coco introduced the band as “temporary citizens of a temporary nation.” Mitch wore a pith helmet. Erik tuned to the sound of a passing Chinook.
The band played one long, evolving piece—never named, never repeated—built on a drone in D minor and the soft clack of wooden spoons Mitch found in a field kit. It was part lullaby, part benediction, part warning.
No recordings exist. Hait reportedly erased the field tape afterward, reasoning in his tour journal, “It—like the flesh which clings upon the bones of context—was not meant to last.”
Departure – 18 July – The Long Flight Home
At dawn the next day, the band stood on the tarmac at Honolulu International, watching the ground crew load their battered gear into the underbelly of a Pan Am 707. La Maga wore a white lace veil and stood apart from the others, smoking clove cigarettes and reading The White Goddess.
No interviews. No statements. Just a grainy photograph of the band taken by a Danish tourist—four exhausted figures, silhouetted against the slanting Hawaiian light, caught mid-step toward the long aluminum tube that would carry them east, over the curve of the Pacific, back to England.
Somewhere Over the Ocean – 30,000 feet
Coco dreamed of a palace made entirely of mirrored ice crystals. Hait traced new constellations in the condensation on the cabin window. Mitch folded his boarding card into a crane and left it tucked inside a barf bag.
Erik didn’t sleep. He watched the wings tremble and hummed something new—something no one had heard yet. Something he considered and determined they’d all hear soon enough.
What Awaits
Back in London, there were rumors.
That their Abbey Road sessions had been sabotaged by a rival producer. That the BBC was preparing to ban their latest track. That Fabian Kevorkian had invoked the Interdict Clause and summoned the band to a private tribunal at the Royal Society of Sound.
La Maga’s Soho flat had been ransacked. S. True Smith was spotted meeting with EMI execs in a parked Bentley, looking like a man who’d made a deal and didn’t know the price. And somewhere in a damp studio basement, a new reel clicked into place—marked only with a hand-drawn eye and the presumptive title—
Project: Grotesque Prismatic Godhead
The band didn’t know it yet, but America was just the dress rehearsal. The next act would begin on a fog-choked London street, with a telegram, a locked door, and a whisper through the wire that said:
It has begun again.