Happy Rosh Hashanah-- Story Of A Jacket

You know what’s funny about this picture of me and Craig Chaquico? Well, actually I’m going to tell you in a minute. But I just realized something else. That photo was taken at a Jefferson Starship session at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco, probably in the late ‘70s. I’m 73 now and Craig is celebrating his 67th birthday tomorrow (Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, the day the shofar gets blown and people eat apples dipped in honey). But see that belt on me? I’m still wearing it today! But you know what I’m not wearing anymore? That shiny jacket. And that’s what this story is about-- the jacket, not the belt.

10 minutes before that photo was snapped, that was Craig’s shiny jacket. Every member of the Starship got one and they weren’t "merch" for sale. Beautiful, don’t you think? That style was very fashionable back in the day. The only reason I was allowed to come listen to the recording session was because of Paul Kantner. We were pals from when I booked the Jefferson Airplane on their first trip to the East Coast, in 1966, I believe. Right after the show I took my first full-blown acid trip with Paul and Marty Balin, Bill Graham and Sandy Pearlman, except I was the only one on acid. Paul and Graham got off on the psychedelic vibes and we bonded forever. Anyway, Paul invited me to the session. I was a rock writer at the time and I interviewed some of the band members, including Craig, by far the youngest member of the band.

He said some things about his adventures with groupies that he immediately regretted, fearful, if I recall correctly, that his serious girlfriend would flip out if she heard what he said. He wanted the cassette. I wanted the jacket. As you see from the photo, we each got what we wanted.

So where’s the jacket now? I mean I still have the belt (and and I just looked in my closet and I still have that plaid shirt as well), so why not the jacket? I love Istanbul. The first time I was there was 1969 and I absolutely fell in love with the city-- the sights, the sounds, the smells, the food, the people, the history, the shopping, the vibe... I’ve been back at least a dozen times since, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. This one time I'm about to tell you about, I was there alone— and wearing the jacket. It was early in the morning and I was visiting one of my favorite sites, the Hagia Sophia, which started out as a Byzantine church, was converted into an Ottoman mosque and then, in the 1900s was turned into a non-sectarian museum. (In 2020 Erdoğan had it turned into a mosque again, but I haven’t visited since then.)

It was a museum every time I was there and this particular time I met a guy who said he was visiting from Adana, in the heart of ancient Cilicia near Syria. He looked more like a Syrian than a Turk and we sort of bonded and, without saying so, decided to visit the rest of Hagia Sophia together. It was no longer a church or a mosque at the time and one thing led to another and it was pretty empty and we both were up for some outlaw risk-taking on a dark, empty staircase, perhaps more than lust itself. It was fun and we left together and headed over to the Galata Tower, the Genoese medieval one, the old Byzantine one on the site having been destroyed during one of the Crusades. He was wearing Craig’s jacket. And he disappeared. I never saw him or the jacket again, although over the years I’ve seen lots of guys who look just like him. And when I worked at Warner Bros, I also wound up with a dozen shiny jackets of my own.

UPDATE:

I just found an old notebook with transcriptions of interviews from the late '70s and-- don't ask me how-- but one of the transcriptions was the Craig tape! I can see why he didn't want his girlfriend-- or his mother-- to read it! I wonder if I should publish it. I enjoyed reading it and I think other people would too. I think I'll save it for the book. Here's a photo of a kind of table of contents of the notebook that the transcripts are in: