THE MUSIC & THE MONSTERS

Former teenager Al Astrella (aka White Feather in the annals of the Rainbow Family) was a typical 60’s music casualty. He started listening (just listening, not playing; but one thing leads to another) to bluegrass and blues, Jim Queskin Jug Band and Missippi John Hurt, but soon hit the harder stuff. A Hard Days Night was particularly hard on him. Premonitions of Mojo Navigation began to take hold of his mind.

In 1968, at the age of 15, he received his first lessons in guitar playing from “Uncle William”, local night beat cop in his home town of Boston. An easy night’s beat from the heat, as it were, and it was.

From there, it was but a short day’s journey into Mojo, but one must not make light of this, and our lad most assuredly did not. Two steps forward, and one step into the Garage. Al was blind to all but the music, which he saw with his inner ear. While this was no guarantee of illumination, he claims to have seen the light at Spidergate Cemetary, in Worcester, Massachusetts, which prepared him for the next stage, that being the stage where he saw his first Grateful Dead show at the age of 16.

In 1970, at the age of 17, Al saved up his lunch money, and ran away from home, hitch hiking to the West Coast to be closer to the San Francisco Sound. He spent the next seven years following the Grateful Dead, and travelling around the South East, learning how to flat pick at various bluegrass festivals. In 1977 he moved permanently to Santa Cruz, where he took his place among the street musicians on Pacific Avenue; he continued to follow the Grateful Dead, and became a familiar figure among the parking lot pickers, strumming himself and the surrounding cosmos into a state of beatific numbness. To this day, the smell of brown rice and incense will send him into samadhi, or stupor, whichever strikes first.

In addition to music, Al also fell prey to the 60’s Monster Craze. A renowned collector of Monster Movie memorabilia, and protege of Forrest Ackerman, our Monster Master of the San Lorenzo Valley won First Prize for his Bela Lugosi impersonation at the 2000 Hollywood Cult Movies Convention.

Al lives in Ben Lomond with his wife, two daughters, and numerous other monsters.