Our guitarist's audition

Here's how we learned that Jeff was the perfect "heavy" guitarist for The Zoo:
Back in the very earliest days of the band, Jeff, Don and I shared a tiny three-bedroom townhouse-style apartment in Boise's old "Sergeant City" neighborhood, built back in the late '40s or early '50s. The apartment was small enough that during a year in the same house we learned things about each other that we didn't really want to know. There was only one bathroom. The insulation in the walls was thin, and the heat vents carried more sound from one bedroom to another than any of us felt comfortable with. We felt like we were in our roommates' rooms almost all the time. Stereos were essential to block-out the occasional noise from the room next door....
But this wasn't one of those occasions....
One night, Don and I were coming home from the grocery or the record store or SOMEWHERE, not knowing Jeff had a surprise waiting for us. Jeff was always a real spontaneous guy, unpredictable at almost all times. You never knew what he'd say or do next, but you could always count on it being funny.
While we were out, Jeff had attached a long lead to his electric guitar and sat his amplifier at the top of the flight of stairs that led up to the second floor of the apartment.
As soon as he heard us come in the front door and step into the front hall, he hit a huge, crashing chord on his guitar and leaped ALL THE WAY DOWN the flight of stairs, landing on the carpeted hall floor right in front of Don and I, missing us by inches, and windmilling his arm through the end of his guitar chord just as he landed -- and just before crashing into the wall across the hall from the foot of the stairs.
He left a huge dent in the wall -- which we yelled at him about ... much later. Right then we were too busy trying to take in the Pete Townshend-like entrance he'd just made. And I was wondering if he'd broken anything, if there'd be blood or a trip to the hospital. I'd seen Jeff do some amazingly silly things before -- seen him put his skinny, cartoon-like body through activities that would cause anyone else immediate trauma -- so I knew he thought that he was pretty-much indestructible, but....
His amp must've been turned-up somewhere beyond "MAX," because I never heard the sound of Jeff crashing to the floor in front of us, or the thud as he slammed into the wall, or his scream as his right forearm and elbow were crushed into the wall by the weight of his body.
All I heard was the huge crash of that guitar chord, reverberating down the stairs and through the hall. It was still humming in the air as Jeff moaned at our feet. It was deafening, and I swear to God that the walls shook, that Jeff rearranged the building's foundation.
But it faded away, and then all I could hear was the laughter from Don and I as Jeff lay before us in a heap, moaning. We'd dropped the groceries in our shock and hilarity at his sheer balls and nerve -- we probably broke a few eggs, but we didn't care about that. We were too busy laughing and checking to make sure Jeff was still alive, that he was breathing and had a pulse -- and assuring him that he'd won the job.
It was a stunning entrance, never to be topped. We all laughed about it for years afterward....

...Later on, Jeff was probably a little disappointed by the way it all turned out.
There really wasn't all that much room for heavy guitar in The Zoo. We never really drifted that much toward the heavy, raunchy, bluesy stuff that Jeff preferred back then. So we kept him handy mainly when we needed outrage or anger expressed -- which Jim could also do, but only if we got him really angry. You needed to sort of warm him up. A little later, when they were living together, we usually let Melissa take care of that.
So Jeff's recorded work for The Zoo was actually fairly minimal. But Don and I will never forget his audition....