Behind the Redwood Curtain

This fabled Lake County outfit’s sole 45 was written on a literal dark and stormy October night in Lakeport’s Hartley Cemetery.

The morbid B-side “the Marble Orchard” retells a night when writers Louie Shriner and Steve Kuppinger were hanging out in the graveyard, nursing a bottle of Thunderbird. The startling sound of footsteps by the headstones interrupted their festivities. The guys heard a “wolf-type howl” and lost it. You can practically see Shriner’s trembling hands reach for a cigarette.

Hartley Cemetary — *Hartley Cemetery, Lakeport*

The Graveyard V was comprised of Louis Shriner (lead guitar, vocals), Steve Kuppinger (bass guitar, vocals), Dave Tempelton (drums), and Dennis Roller (rhythm guitar).

At live shows they brought a coffin up with them on stage, the outfit’s fifth “member”. A face-painted friend, or even live bats, would burst out mid-set, and a band member would jump in, finishing a song screaming with the lid closed.

The band was formed by local songwriters Shriner and Kuppinger, who met on a summer job picking apricots. “[Louie] was sleeping in the trunk of his brother’s car,” Kuppinger recalls. “I ran into him in the restroom one day. He was trying to comb his hair and used almost a whole can of hair spray. We started talking and one thing led to another. We both played six-string so we made a deal to get together when we got back to Lake County. The band started that night at my house. He came over, and we played Beatles and Ventures songs, and a lot of oldies.”

The Graveyard V was part of a small scene of bands from towns surrounding Clear Lake, a Northern California vacation destination. The Raising Young, a Native American band from Lakeport, and March Hare from Kelseyville also played in the area, along with rural north coast bands like the Dream Merchants from Fort Bragg. The band played miniature golf courses & a local bar called the Monkey Cage, as well as “a lot of redneck bars where they just were not ready for us. We had fights on the stage and had beer bottles thrown at us while we played. It was some really hard work for very little pay.” says Kuppinger.

They also had a sizable following in Redding, CA, where they headlined a show for 1,000 people. After shutting down local Kelseyville rivals March Hare at a battle of the bands — and winning a recording contract with Stan Sweeney’s Roseville label Stanco — the crowd lost it: “There was almost a riot that night when we won. Everyone from Kelseyville just went to pieces, and there was a big fight. But we got the recording contract!”

A Ouija board gave the band its name. “Louis and I sat down and we asked the board to prove itself. We turned off all the lights. Our hands got icy cold and we heard someone walking outside the window in the gravel. There was no one there.”

The A side of the single, “The Graveyard Theme”, a blown-out 60s garage instrumental, was played using a Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal lifted from the Jefferson Airplane by “light fingered” Louie Shriner at their show together on Cobb Mountain.

“In the early part of the band we made our own light show. We took a tire rim, and welded a leg on an electric motor. We then welded it three feet out from the motor to hold three colored lights. We cut out a round piece of plywood with an arching slot in it. As the plywood spun it was like a three colored strobe; the faster it went the better it looked.”

Lake County is a weird place. I went to Konocti a few times as a kid in the 90s. The vibe was Bud Light, chaw, and speedboats. 38 Special was playing. The parking lot was a sea of cowboy hats and warm beer.

The area also has a darkness to it. From the earliest days of white colonization, with the 1850s Bloody Island Massacre of native Pomo women and children by the US Army Corps of Engineers, into more recent years, with the largest fire in California history, a meth pandemic, and extreme poverty that define the area.

Clear Lake is also steeped in the supernatural — Clear Lake Oaks locals tell stories about seeing a “pig man” running around the hills of High Valley Ranch above the school in the 80s. The Pomo have legends of a “donkey man” appearing on the reservation, and the “little people” who inhabit Mount Konocti — shadow-like creatures scampering through their homes like mice.

Likewise, the Graveyard V was also no stranger to the otherworldly.

“I remember every time the band went into the recording studio the engineer used to curse us because he couldn’t get the place warm. He told us once that 30 minutes before we came in the place was nice and warm, but the minute we got there and set up the temperature went down. I remember being able to see my breath while I was singing back up. Then there was that growl on Marble Orchard. I think that whatever it was must have followed us when we left the cemetery, and I think it stayed with us everywhere we went. It seemed that no matter where we were it was always cold; all the girls that went with us wore coats all the time.”

Shriner’s increasingly erratic behavior, accelerated by large amounts of LSD, led to the band’s dissolution. After pulling a gun on his bandmates, Louie decamped to Florida with his then wife, Kuppinger’s sister. It was there that he tossed the master tapes of the Graveyard V’s followup album, including the legendary sophomore single “Stay Away From My Grave,” into an alligator infested canal. “He then threw his big extension speaker in, got on top of it and paddled around with his guitar.”

“There was something very strange that followed that band, and I think took its toll on Louis,” Kuppinger says. “I think it has hit all of us: Dave is in prison and, hell, Louis might even be dead by now. The last time I talked to him he was very bad off. And I haven’t gotten away clean. Thirty years ago Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy hit me, and the doctors have been trying to control the pain ever since. There is no cure. The only one I do not know about is Dennis Roller, but he did get burned very bad — on both arms, his chest and his back. Almost all of his little finger was burned off. So I think all of us has been hit by whatever it was that followed us around. Sometimes when it is really late and stormy I can still feel it, almost like it is waiting out in the dark for me to start another band.”

Sources:

“Up From The Grave” (Frantic Records, 2009) liner notes written by Alex Palao
Interview with Steve Kuppinger via Beyond the Beat Generation, by Mike Dugo, originally for the now defunct 60sgaragebands.com

The beautiful self-titled 1967 LP from Afterglow belongs in the pantheon of Northern California underground music. Full stop.

Originally dubbed “The Medallions,” Afterglow was formed by five high school friends in 1964 in isolated Fort Jones, CA, located in beautiful Siskiyou County.

“I was raised in a very rural country setting, with very little exposure to the music scene. The nearest music store was over 100 miles away, ” Afterglow drummer Larry Alexander recalls. “We’d be on roads up there where you wouldn’t see a car for an hour.”

At the heart of Afterglow was songwriter Tony Tecumseh, considered one of the first Native American composers in rock music. Tony’s heritage was Klamath and Modoc. He was a descendant of Winema, famous for her role in the Modoc Wars of the 1870s.

“We’d be on roads up there where you wouldn’t see a car for an hour.”

Afterglow2 — *Larry Alexander, Gene Resler, Ron George, and Tony Tecumseh*

“Afternoon” was the opening track on the first BTRC compilation I made for friends in 2010. Tony’s opening guitar chords emulate the afternoon chime of Big Ben, jolting the listener awake before descending into a dreamy, melancholic verse. Larry’s breezy, rolling drums fuse with Ron George’s bass to carry a solemn vocal melody from Tony and Gene Resler, punctuated by Roger Swanson’s insistent, pulsing Farfisa organ.

Beyond the excellent quality of the music, Afterglow as a band is fascinating to me. Fort Jones has a population of 500– how could a band like this exist in such a remote part of the state? Growing up in rural Northern California myself, it was always pretty clear – music was happening south of us (San Francisco, Santa Rosa) but almost never to the north. As a kid in the 90’s my family vacationed in the Shasta area– a truly special, beautiful & isolated place. Imagining a band making such outstanding music in such a remote place blows me away.

Mount Shasta — *“Did anything cool ever happen here?”* 🤔

After high school, the Medallions took a break, with members relocating to College of the Siskiyous in Weed, Chico State University & Yuba College. Reforming in 1966, they started playing pizza parlors, county fairs, school proms, local hangouts, battles of the bands, and Armory dances in Northern California & Southern Oregon, opening for the Turtles and the Beau Brummels.

The Medallions gained local traction, and landed a publishing deal with Leo Gar De Kulka‘s Golden State Recorders in San Francisco. In the summer of 1967, Larry Alexander’s parents moved all the furniture out of their living room, letting the band rehearse in Fort Jones for three months before heading into the studio in the fall. Their album was recorded by Gar De Kulka in San Francisco, an 8 hour drive, and the closest recording studio available to them at that time. For most of the band, it was their first time in a city.

The band’s experience with Golden State was not great. Almost every song was tracked in one take, under the premise that the band was recording a demo. Promises to “touch up” these recordings were never fulfilled. To the band’s surprise, their demos were compiled into an album released by MTA records. At the label’s direction, the band changed their name to Afterglow. The iconic album cover, whose psychedelic style was a complete surprise to the band, was also a label decision with no input from the band. The band saw the cover for the first time upon receiving their first box of LPs.

Afterglow’s songs did well on local radio. “Riding Home Again” held the #1 spot for 21 weeks on KSYC in Yreka, and #1 for several weeks at another local station in Redding.

“I love this song because I can just see all of us riding through the beautiful countryside and forests in the mountain territory that we lived in,” Gene Resler would later say of the track. “We were so lucky to have the opportunity to live in such a beautiful part of California.”

“Tony drove a lot to get to our gigs and practice. I imagine he wrote this on one of his many trips back home to Klamath Falls, Oregon,” Ron George recalls.”We thought this would be the song that defined the album.”

The album contains easy riders like “Dream Away” and “Chasing Rainbows“, along with the rocker “Morning“, a relatively aggressive track about the uncertainty of the Vietnam war era, and the off-the-deep-end “Susie’s Gone” – probably my cat’s least favorite song ever. “The one song we didn’t write.” Ron George said in an interview with the Slovenian webzine It’s Psychedelic, Baby, “[It was] written by a California Highway Patrolman based in Chico, CA. Byron Boots was also a jazz musician and wrote several songs for us to record. He said this was the next direction for rock music. Our friends didn’t like it but the world did. We tried to find him when we heard about the 1995 release but could not get personal info from CA State, and were generally told he probably passed away years ago. Would love to talk to him or his family so his ultimate success could be celebrated.”

Although they did well locally, Afterglow found it difficult to succeed. Following the release of the album, Golden State Recorders and MTA had a falling out, and MTA barely distributed the album. It was nearly impossible to find for the band’s growing local fan base, and never stood a chance at commercial success. Feeling burned by a bad deal, the band called it quits and went their separate ways.

Gene Resler at the Woods in Guerneville, CA — Gene Resler continued performing music, moving down to Santa Rosa, playing shows on the Russian River and the surrounding area, and also doing a residency in Tiburon. He released one 45 in 1979 on Papillon Records.

Over the years, the album became a collector favorite, and was reissued by Sundazed in 1995. The band gradually learned of their cult following. Sundazed, at the time of the documentary below, never compensated the band for their share of profits for the reissue.

Afterglow re-formed in 2007 (without Tony Tecumseh, due to his poor health), and released a second album in 2012. In 2011, Tony received a lifetime achievement award from the Native American Music Awards one, year before his passing in 2012, recognized for his historic contributions to rock music.