Rednecks, Revolvers and Rock & Roll“We still didn’t know if he had just been trying to scare us or if he had really intended to kill us.
The next morning, we went back out to the barn, where we made a chilling discovery.”In the spring of 1978 I moved to Phoenix, Arizona to hit the big time with the rock band Jepetus. I had played drums with the band since its inception about two years earlier, and we enjoyed a good following in Southern Oregon. Because of that success, we had gotten too big for our britches on our home turf, and we wanted to share our awesomeness with a larger audience. Phoenix was in for a real treat!
I had moved to Oregon from Ventura, California in 1972, and my first job in Medford was at a factory where I became acquainted with a couple other budding young musicians, Marty and Tom. Marty played guitar and Tom played bass guitar. We soon discovered our mutual musical interests and in the next couple years we played together occasionally at jam sessions and parties.
By 1975, I had moved on to a different job where I met Steve. He and his brother had just moved out west from Chicago. They had somewhat randomly picked Klamath Falls as a destination, but when they got there, they decided to keep going. When I found out Steve played guitar, we got together with Marty and Tom to jam.
We all hit it off very well musically and personally. It was not long before we were playing gigs together, and Jepetus was born.
We were young—all in our early to mid-20s—and full of ourselves, enjoying our quick rise to local rock and roll renown. We thought we were pretty hot, and we wanted to expand our horizons by playing in a bigger city.
But of all the big cities in the country, why we picked one in Arizona is still a mystery to me. Perhaps we were hedging our bet. Los Angeles would have offered much more opportunity, but would have presented much more competition. We were good, but maybe not LA good.
Steve had a sister who was going to school in Arizona, and perhaps that is the reason we picked Phoenix. I don’t think his sister offered any particular benefit to us as far as getting into the local music scene, but she was certainly a friendly face in a strange land. So we could have gone anywhere in the world and had the same head start.
There was no head start. We simply threw ourselves into the gaping jaws of a big, alien city with no research, no planning and no survival strategy. As it turned out, it might just as well have been Los Angeles.
To be honest, I really didn’t want to move. We could easily have traveled to gigs in bigger cities that were closer to Medford, and still come home to our families and, more importantly, steady jobs. That made a lot more sense to me. Sacramento, Portland, and even Seattle and San Francisco were all within reach for weekend gigs. I’ve never really been a risk-taker, but I have always been a team player, so there we were.
Another mystery was why we decided to look for a house in Scottsdale rather than Phoenix. The cost of living would have been lower in Phoenix, and that’s where we had intended to look for gigs anyway. Scottsdale was on its way becoming an expensive, upscale city in 1978. In 2019 it’s the place to be.
But, again, there we were.
The day we arrived in Scottsdale we located and rented a big 4-bedroom house, which allowed each of us to have our own bedroom. The family room was large enough to set up the band for rehearsals, and we even had a swimming pool, which as I recall, was a prerequisite. In that neighborhood, we would have been hard-pressed to find a house that didn’t have a pool.
It was a very nice house—much nicer than we could afford—and I really don’t know how we managed to get it.
I think we might just have been in the right place at the right time when we found the house. The owner was out of town, so we met with the owner’s friend instead, who was just doing him a favor by finding tenants. Some friend. We didn’t look at all reliable. I wouldn’t have rented to us, but I think he just wanted the deal done so he could get on with his life.
There was only one thing in our favor: we had cash to pay the rent on the spot!
Well, I had cash. I think I was the only one in the band who had any money to speak of. I paid all the rent and utilities while we were there, with the understanding that the other members were to repay me after we got rich playing music. We didn’t get rich, so…
I had been working steadily for a few years. I made extra money playing gigs with the band nearly every weekend, and I had a pretty good income from a side venture, with considerable cash tied up in operating funds for that venture.
Normally, I would have spent the money as soon as I got it, but I knew I was going to need a lot of money for the move so I squirreled away as much as I could in the weeks leading up to the move. Just before we moved, I cashed out for a big pile of money. It was about $1,200 as I recall. That would be almost $5000 today!
That big pile of cash would not last long. Rent, utilities, food, beer, not to mention a trip back to Oregon two weeks after we got to Arizona, for a weekend gig at Brownsboro Tavern. Why didn’t we just wait two weeks before we moved? I foolishly assumed the other guys had saved too. I don’t know how they thought they were going to survive. They were all pushing for a big expensive house in the ritziest community in the state, and none of them seemed to have much money!
The house we rented was on Mountainview Road, which formed the southern boundary of a large residential area in Scottsdale. There were no neighbors across the street from us. It was a just big, beautiful, open desert, and it stretched as far as you could see.
The desert became my respite. Every day, while everyone else slept in until at least noon, I got up with the sun and hiked through the desert. There were thousands of square miles of lizards and snakes. I love the desert. I was in heaven.
And out in the desert, I was alone.
Besides my love for the desert, part of the appeal for rising early was simply getting some time to be by myself. I was 26 years old, and I had never lived with roommates, let alone 11 others in what amounted to a commune. I was uncomfortable, to say the least.
Besides the four of us in the band, two of our girlfriends came along. Eventually, Tom’s wife moved down with their two kids, and at some point, Steve’s sister and her young child moved in. Steve’s other sister who I think was on summer break from school was there for a while, too.
We had also invited along a friend to help us out with vocals for our first couple weeks in Arizona. She would audition with us, but ultimately not be there for the gigs. It hardly seemed ethical. And it really didn’t make any sense.
That big house was not nearly big enough for that many people. I had to get away from the crowd—and not just for me. My roommates’ safety depended upon my daily desert therapy.
Everyone else in the house was just getting up and around by the time I returned from my morning walks. I tried to get back to the house by about noon, and rehearsals usually didn’t begin until late in the afternoon. For the first couple weeks we had those rehearsals every day, but they became increasingly less frequent. And shorter.
Scottsdale is in the middle of the desert, and no surprise, it was hot. The day we arrived in Scottsdale it was 107°. And it wasn’t even summer yet. By mid-summer it was 115°. Even though the house had air conditioning, we used the oppressive heat to justify hanging out by the pool and partying.
But we hadn’t traveled all the way to Arizona just to party. We came to play music, and we did manage to get a few gigs, although we struggled to find them. None of us cared too much, because we were having fun. We had no band leader, no manager, no agent, no business plan, and we made no earnest effort to succeed. We had a swimming pool and, for the time being, enough money to buy beer.
A big blow to our collective psyche was dealt the first weekend after we arrived when we went to some of the fancy nightclubs to check out the competition. We were in awe at the talent displayed by the local bands. It quickly became apparent that we were out of our element, and we were not going to get into the bigger clubs we came to play.
One visit to a nice nightclub still stands out in my memory. It was a bar in Scottsdale called Scenes West, and we had gone there one afternoon to see about getting a gig. It sounded like the radio was on very loud, playing Boston’s Foreplay/Long Time. It turned out to be not the radio, but the current band rehearsing. They sounded just like Boston.
They were better musicians, better singers, and they had much better equipment.
It was devastating. We knew we were nowhere near that level. They were just a local band, and there were many more bands that were just as good. We left without even talking to the manager. An audition would have been humiliating.
We had all assumed it would be so simple. However, when faced with the reality of our considerable shortcomings, I don’t remember anyone saying, “Well, we certainly have our work cut out for us. Let’s do it.” It was more like, “What’s the use?” We lost the will to survive.
Back home in Medford we were the big fish. In Phoenix, we were fish food. We were not prepared for that rude awakening. But then again, we hadn’t really prepared for anything.To his credit, Marty struck out by himself and landed us a gig for one night at a small country-western bar in Scottsdale called the Crystal Pistol. He had fibbed about our style of music, and we were all a bit nervous going in because of that. Did they think we were a country band? I, for one, didn’t know any country music.
As expected, our rock and roll didn’t go over too well there. They were tolerant though, even respectful, and we made it through the evening.
It was our first gig in Arizona, and our last gig at the Crystal Pistol. Still, we had a pretty good attendance that night, we kept the crowd, they danced, and we did get paid. That was good. We needed some encouragement. And cash.
Not ready to totally give up, and needing some income, we went in search of gigs at some of the less-than-stellar music venues. We eventually managed to book a few weekends at The Zoo, a seedy strip club in a shadowy part of downtown Phoenix.
Marty had an old king-cab International pickup truck that we had used for the move to Arizona. We had built a plywood canopy on the back to hold all our music gear and other belongings for the trip. It was just a big plywood box, and it wasn’t pretty. But it was our only transportation for the band.
When we arrived at The Zoo in that truck for our first gig, the bouncer came out to show us where to load in. He took one look at our rig and said, “I don’t believe it. It’s the Beverly Hillbillies!” He wasn’t wrong, and it reinforced, at least to me, how out of place we were.
During the week, The Zoo featured strippers dancing to recorded music. But on Friday and Saturday nights when the bar had live music, it featured topless go-go dancing rather than the strippers. The dancers and band were on opposite sides of a partition, so we weren’t distracted while they performed. They took their breaks when we did, so we never really got to see the show.
There was a good crowd on our side of the wall. They danced, cheered, and really seemed to enjoy the music.
We enjoyed our gig at The Zoo, but we didn’t make any more money than we would have made back home in Medford. And back home, that money would have been extra income, supplementing my paycheck from a regular job. In Arizona, it was the only income, not even close to a living wage.
I think it was about that time that we decided we needed an edge to get us into better clubs. We needed a keyboard player. I made a few calls to numbers we had found on bulletin boards and the newspaper classified ads. One call was to Randy Ruff. His wife answered, and she said Randy was not available. He had been playing with The Grass Roots for a few months. The Grass Roots had been one of my favorite bands since junior high school. My thinking was: We need a keyboard player, and we were beat out by my favorite band! I was now officially in the same league. I had made it!
I had made it, but it did not rub off on my band’s fortunes. Toward the end of the summer that year, we were disillusioned, unemployed and broke. We played a few auditions, but gigs were scarce. We had barely been getting by on small unemployment checks. My savings were depleted. We could no longer pay the rent.
Defeated, we loaded up the truck and moved back to Medford.
Looking back, we probably could have made it work in Phoenix. If we had more ambition, we could have played steadily at the lower-echelon bars and perhaps worked our way up the food chain. We simply were not ready for the big time. Honestly, we just weren’t nearly as good as we thought. But we could have gotten day jobs, continued rehearsing, and at least tried to get better gigs.
Safely back in Medford, we resumed playing the regular gigs in Southern Oregon. We got right back in the rotation, and we didn’t seem to have lost our following. It felt good. Comfortable. Familiar.
Marty soon rented a house out in the boonies near Eagle Point, and there was a barn on the property. It was just a large shed with a dirt floor, but one Saturday morning we all got together and put in a wood floor. It became our practice hall. It was a very comfortable space, with plenty of room.
For the next several months, we spent a couple nights a week rehearsing in the barn, as well as playing our weekend gigs around the Rogue Valley. Our experience in Arizona had left an impression on us, and we were really trying to improve our skills.
One evening in the late summer of 1979, we were in the barn practicing My Sharona, a new song on the radio, and the first big hit for The Knack. That may have been the only song we worked on that night, playing it over and over for a couple hours, trying to perfect it.
And it was nearly perfect that night. We were in the middle of our last run-through of the night when some small chunks of wood came flying off the wall above our heads, interrupting our rehearsal.
We stopped playing, and Tom said someone was shooting at us. Although I did see the wood chips flying, I hadn’t heard anything except a beautiful rendition of My Sharona. I told them it was just the knots in the cedar paneling drying out and popping loose. It was all quiet for a while—no popping, no shooting—so we started playing again.
We were only a few seconds into the song when the band stopped playing again. This time they all ran over and huddled behind me and my drums at the back of the barn.
“Somebody’s shooting at us,” they screamed. Tom said, “We heard gun shots.” His words had barely cleared his lips when another shot rang out and more chunks of wood flew off the wall. We were being shot at.
As we all cowered there, several minutes passed with no more shots. We were concerned about Marty’s girlfriend and her young daughter who were in the house just a few yards away from the barn. We had no idea why we were being shot at, or what the shooter’s motives were.
Marty finally bolted out of the barn into the darkness and ran to his house to check on the girls and call the police. The rest of us stayed put, still huddled behind the drums.
Marty soon returned to the barn to let us know his girlfriend was OK, and the police were on their way.
An Eagle Point police officer responded quickly to Marty’s emergency call, followed by a Jackson County Sheriff’s deputy and his police dog, Deputy Hard.Deputy Hard was a large, fierce-looking German Shepherd. He was given his orders and he immediately went to work. I wasn’t happy about being a victim, but when I saw the dog, I was sure glad I wasn’t the perpetrator.
A suspect was soon located, apprehended and restrained in the deputy’s powerful jaws. The man was found hiding in the brush across the driveway, about 50 feet from the barn, and even closer to the house. When arrested, he had a gun in one hand and a beer in the other. His gun was already reloaded; he had intended to keep shooting until he killed us.
The beer he carried suggested it was going to be a recreational killing.
He told police that we were playing way too loud and he was just trying to scare us. He lived about a mile down the road. A mile away! I really doubt we could have been that loud, but we were obnoxiously repetitive. That may have been a contributing factor.
Volume and repetition aside, I wondered why he hadn’t just knocked on the door. We were capable of being reasonable. It’s very common for a band to be asked to turn the music down. It’s normally more cordial than this was.
In fact, we had been playing there a couple times a week for a few months with no complaints. He had succeeded in scaring us, but how could we possibly have known we were being shot at because we were too loud? It could have been a poacher and we were simply in the line of fire. It could have been an angry husband. It could have been anything.
He was just an ignorant redneck. Even worse: a drunk and armed ignorant redneck. That’s one of the most dangerous combinations on the planet. I’d rather waltz with a rabid wolverine.
Once the shooter was safely locked in a patrol car, we showed the police where several shots had entered the wall high above our heads. At least one bullet was retrieved from an overhead wooden beam. They took our statements, finished their investigation and hauled the gunman off to jail.
We locked up the barn for the night and went into the house to have a beer and try to calm down from the ordeal. We still didn’t know if he had just been trying to scare us or if he had really intended to kill us.
The next morning, we went back out to the barn where we made a chilling discovery.
While unlocking the barn doors, we found two bullet holes that were much lower than the ones we had known about the night before.
We were able to trace the path of one of the bullets. It entered about waist-high through the front barn door, penetrated two sides of a wooden speaker cabinet, and exited the barn through a side wall. Steve had been sitting on a stool against that wall. He turned pale when we discovered that the bullet hole was two inches from where his head had been.
Once outside, the bullet continued its journey through a chest of drawers that was sitting outside the barn. After that, it went through a fence rail, and finally came to rest in the trunk of an old oak tree.
That bullet had traveled 40 feet after entering the barn, blew through seven pieces of wood totaling over 4 inches in thickness, and it still had enough power to bury itself deep inside a tree.
We had calmed down a bit from the night before, but the discovery of bullet holes in a trajectory low enough to kill us had us trembling again. By the time we discovered that new evidence, the attempted murderer was already out of jail, having been charged only with menacing. He was more than a menace. He had tried to kill us.
That was the beginning of the end for rehearsals at the barn. It was not necessarily because of the shooting. Sometimes it’s just time for people to move on.
Not too long after Steve’s brush with death, he moved away to begin a successful career in computer programming. I think he and his girlfriend just decided they wanted more out of life.
Steve’s departure signaled the official end of Jepetus. It had always been Steve, Marty, Tom and Scott. Without any one of us, Jepetus did not exist.
The name Jepetus deserves a bit of an explanation. It was Tom who had suggested it. In the third grade, he had read a book about Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons. At that young age, he mistook the stylized, cursive ‘I’ on the cover for a ‘J.’ Over the years, the ‘A” became an ‘E.’ Basically, it’s gibberish. Fitting.
Regardless of our dismal failure in Arizona, Jepetus had been successful in the Rogue Valley. We loved playing, and we were all good friends who just liked hanging out together even when we weren’t playing music. We had a good run, and I think we all have fond memories of that band.
It would only be a few months after the Eagle Point shooting that I found myself in the crosshairs of another shooter. Again, it was in the outskirts of Eagle Point. And again, I was sitting at my drums playing music. The band was not specifically the target this time, but it was no less terrifying.
With Steve gone, the rest of us from the newly disbanded Jepetus moved on to other music projects. I joined another band. The lead singer in that band had occasionally played with Jepetus, and she was the vocalist who had accompanied us to Phoenix for our first two weeks there.
It was nice to be reunited with her, and her husband was playing bass. One weekend we had a gig at the Brownsboro Tavern, at the junction of Brownsboro Road and Highway 140. It was really a fun bar for playing music, and Jepetus had played there many times. It had a pretty large dance floor for such a small tavern, and we kept that floor packed with enthusiastic dancers.
During our performance that Saturday night, I again found myself playing solo in a strangely familiar scenario.
This time, the song was Dreams, by Fleetwood Mac. The other band members, as well as everyone on the dance floor had suddenly stopped and dropped to the floor. A new dance craze? I had no clue what was going on, even though it should have seemed very familiar based on my recent experience as a target. I stopped playing just in time to hear the final gunshot.
It’s a small consolation that the band was not the target this time. We found out later that some guy had a fight with his girlfriend. It got ugly, and he was forced to leave the bar. He went home, but only for long enough to get his gun. He returned and fired several shots into the bar as he drove by.Another drunk, armed, ignorant redneck.
Thankfully no one was hurt this time either. But any one of us in that bar could have been killed.
All the shots entered the building near the bar where the shooter had argued with his girlfriend. Fortunately, that area was largely empty at the time, as most of the people were some distance away enjoying our music on the dance floor. Our band’s music saved many lives that night. It may have been a very different story if we had been on a break.
The shooter was arrested and charged with reckless endangering. Another attempted murder, and another ridiculously minor charge. Apparently, the cops were ignorant rednecks, too. If someone shoots into a building he knows is occupied, that’s attempted murder. There is no other way to look at it.
Except, in that neck of the woods, they’re all just good ol’ boys.
These incidents happened 40 years ago. To my knowledge, I have not been shot at since, although I have been asked to turn down the volume many times. A polite request, and an accommodating reduction in volume. No guns required.
Over the last 50 years, I have played countless gigs in hundreds of bars, and entertained thousands of people. In that time I have witnessed such a small number of bar fights that I can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. That’s very likely fewer than my fair share, although it’s possible I just haven’t noticed all of them.
Regardless, I’m certain that I have survived more than my share of shootings.
Music is a wonderful thing, but its charms do not soothe everyone’s savage breast.
Scott Wright © 2019
These events transpired over 40 years before this writing. Some details may be cloudy, and there may be discrepancies from the actual events. Note that I mentioned only the names of the band members. All the other people involved with us (wives, girlfriends, kids) were just as important to this tale, but the band members volunteered to be in the band. The others were simply dragged down with us. And I’m sad to say that many are no longer with us. Deputy Hard and Randy Ruff earned honorable mentions.