A few classics drawn from the deep well of stories about Encinitas millionaire Ed Seykota: He’s walking down the street with a friend when he glimpses some butterflies fluttering nearby. Immediately he hurries off to a phone booth to call one of his investment brokers to buy certain commodities they had been studying. Then, a short time later, Seykota makes another rushed call. Sell those commodities! A bee circling around his head had tipped him off that the market was about to fall.

Seykota meets with a “priest” who had come to him to ask for a donation to a children’s charity. Before their scheduled discussion, Seykota hastily constructs a wooden “confessional” and when the priest arrives, Seykota sits down inside it, behind a screen, and asks the priest to divulge his sins. The bewildered priest leaves after several minutes, empty-handed.

Seykota builds an elevated platform in his office at Seacoast magazine, the short-lived North County publication he owned two years ago. Whenever anyone comes to him with an investment proposal, he moves up to the platform and, if the request is granted, he theoretically waves a magic wand to sanctify the solemn occasion.

Just one more: Seykota and a couple of his friends are eating dinner at Moonlight Gardens, a restaurant in the La Paloma Theater complex, which he owns. He tastes the clam chowder, finds it wanting, storms into the kitchen, and shouts at the cook, “If you can’t do it right, I’ll do it myself!” Whereupon he grabs canisters of paprika and other spices and dumps them into the large crock of soup until it turns pink and has to be discarded. The entire staff of the restaurant walks out. Within two months, Seykota closes the restaurant.

Now, if you were Ed Seykota, widely known and respected as a brilliant investment analyst, as the creator of a sophisticated computer model of the volatile commodities market, and if you had earned millions of dollars using your ample brainpower, would you just roll over and play dead while these insulting stories (and many more) stomped on your good name?

“The priest was the Reverend Kevin of the Encinitas Church of Religious Science,” Seykota says, answering the question. “We were talking about forms of communication. He had asked me what I thought was the best way to ask somebody for money. So I said, ‘Let’s try to communicate about it without any of the classical signs.’ I got an office partition and we were on either side of the partition – which did, in a way, look like a confessional – talking about donations. Eventually, I did give him a donation, though I’d rather not say how much because then every church around is going to come to me for money. But that was an exercise that we both had agreed to participate in.

“Regarding the second story, at one point a lady named Maxine gave me a little white porcelain star on an eighteen-inch-long stick, and on each point there were ribbons with little affirmations on them, like ‘Keep holding good thoughts and you’ll get your wish.’ For a couple of weeks I kept it and waved it around at people. But that’s not a good way to make investment decisions.

“The incident in the restaurant – no, that never happened. I was losing about $1000 a month and it was time to stop feeding it. But there was no paprika.”

And the butterfly story? “Well,” Seykota says, “I made an observation once, a while ago, that usually around the time I’m buying things, or usually around the time things are going up, sometimes I see butterflies. And sometimes around the tops of markets, I see bees. Now why this is, I don’t know. I’ve thought for a long time that it’s just my imagination. But I kept a diary for a while and sure enough, there’s a correlation. I don’t act on it very much but I do notice it. I don’t run off and buy every time I see a butterfly, although maybe I should, maybe I’ll do better.”

Seykota’s affinity for butterflies, however, strains the conventional understanding of mere symbolism. The man is a butterfly nut. A quick tour of his new home reveals butterfly glasses, mugs, dish towels, coasters, serving trays, and cereal jars in the kitchen; butterfly ashtrays, bath and hand towels and wash rags in the bathrooms; butterfly sheets, pillow cases, and throw rugs in the master bedroom; a butterfly mobile in the dining room; butterfly pictures – embroidered, woven, etched into gold foil – on virtually every wall in the house; butterfly books in the spare bedroom that doubles as an office and library; and actual butterflies, dried and pressed, inside a box of treasured mementos. A chrome butterfly anoints the grill of his cherry-red “super-stretch” limousine, a custom-made Cadillac originally buit for singer Isaac Hayes.

There is, of course, considerably more to Ed Seykota’s life that apocryphal stories, money, and butterflies. For one thing, there is his self-willed destiny to become a musician and to record his own album. As destiny would have it, this required purchasing instruments and equipment, learning about songwriting, structure and arranging, and, well… manufacturing his own record album. Total cost: about one year of work and $65,000 I cash. You can say you hear destiny’s knock but you just don’t have the bucks to pay C.O.D. when you open the door? Seykota would say that obviously you don’t want it bad enough, because if you did, you would somehow find a way to come up with all the money and time you need. Seykota himself came up with plenty of money – a million dollars before he turned thirty – and he’s just humble enough to believe that if he did it, anybody could do it. Problem is, most people really don’t want to. “Once you save about $500,000, you really don’t have to work anymore,” he explains. “You can live off of the interest; even if you just put it in the bank, you’ll have enough money to do anything you want to do. And that scares a lot of people – the prospect of never having to work again, the prospect of finally having the freedom to do what they really want to do. It’s too easy.”

Broker George Cubberly, who is affiliated with the nationwide brokerage firm of Drexel, Burnham, Lambert in New York, has worked with Seykota in commodities futures investments for nearly seven years. “Most people in this business lose money,” he says, “so when you find somebody like Ed Seykota, who’s just been able to make money, that’s generally considered successful. And if you find a person who’s had a lot of success in making money, he tends to stand out as being almost unique. We use the system that Ed designed years ago, and frankly, I think he’s a genius – a multitalented, extremely intelligent individual with a proven talent for making money, and lots of it.”

For geniuses, lots of things are easy. And for Seykota, there’s been life as a restaurateur, as a theater owner, a publisher and a journalist, a skyscraper proprietor, and even a church leader. “Ever since I met Ed, anything he’s gone after, as far as financial gain, he’s been able to attain,” says Jim Moreno, who became acquainted with Seykota three years ago. Moreno was producing and directing pop preacher Terry Cole-Whettaker’s television program and Seykota was serving on the church’s board of directors. “How does he do it? Good question. If I knew how he did it, I’d probably do it myself. Who wouldn’t want to be financially independent? And that seems to be just like rolling off a log for him.”

Scott Chatfield, who produced Seykota’s first album and administers La Paloma Theater for him, recalls his first impression of Seykota. “I first talked to him right after he bought the theater in 1977. I was a skinny twenty-one-year old projectionist, and all I wanted to do was preserve my job. We were walking along the beach and I was wearing bright-green-day-glo socks, telling him wat an asset I would be to the theater if he kept me on. All of a sudden he said, ‘I like the color of your socks. You’re the manager.’ As I got to know him, I realized he was quite unorthodox in his methods. He wouldn’t think anything about changing his entire pan on a moment’s notice. For instance, I had the theater booked a couple of weeks in advance and he came in one day with a Rasputin-like gaze and said, ‘I want to turn the theater into a church.’ Naturally, my eyes got real wide and I said, ‘I can’t do that, Ed.’ I pretty much ran the theater the way I wanted to, although maybe I bent a little in his direction.

“The one thing about knowing Ed Seykota is that it teaches me a lot,” Chatfield continues. “And the main thing I’ve learned is that having a lot of money doesn’t mean instant orgasmic happiness. I find that ninety percent of the Americans I know are searching for money, and most of them are involved in empty quests. Is Ed happy? He has higher highs and lower lows than the rest of us. You have to understand, a guy like Seykota, with all his wealth, is one of the most discriminating minorities there is. It’s very difficult for him to get a good deal when he buys something, an appliance, some recording equipment – people use the analogy, ‘Oh, five grand to him is just like a nickel to me.’ But what they fail to realize is that he has an emotional investment in his money. If he gets gypped out of five dollars, he feels just as bad as you would if you got gypped out of five dollars.

“There was one time when he said to me ‘Boy, I see some of my friends who aren’t doing that well and have mortgages on their houses and stuff like that. There’s nothing I’d like better than to give them the money, but I’ve tried that and found out when you give people something, it generally changes their relationship with you and they always end up finding a way to resent you.’ Part of the reason our relationship works is that I don’t need him, I don’t depend on him for my income. I get a lot of experience and I have a real good time when we work together, but I don’t really get a lot of money.”

Edward Arthur Seykota was born in Seattle, thirty-seven years ago this August 7, son of Harold and Hilda Seykota, who now live in La Jolla. Seykota’s father was a chemical engineer whose job it was to start up new plants ll over the world, so the boy’s childhood was marked by almost yearly moves to such places as Redondo Beach and Kansas City as well as more exotic locales like Rio de Janeiro, Colombia and Holland. While in school, Seykota recalls he was always very studious, more concerned with getting good grades than anything else – although he did maintain such hobbies as playing guitar and ukulele and rebuilding old radios salvaged from neighborhood garbage cans.

By 1964, when he graduated from high school – the American School of the International Schools of The Hague in Holland – Seykota had made up his mind that he wanted to become an electrical engineer. On the basis of his excellent grades, he received scholarship offers from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accepting the latter because he felt it was better suited for his career goals. Within three years, his interest had expanded from electronics to the more intangible field of economics, and while he was still an undergraduate he was supporting himself entirely by teaching. One of the courses he taught (to graduate students) was called “Dynamic Feedback Laboratory,” which had been devised by Seykota through his independent studies. “The idea behind the course was that social systems and economic systems and management systems all behave as closed systems based on the relationship between cause and effect” Seykota explains. “In other words, they can be seen as self-contained feedback systems. Everything is circular; things regulate themselves, and if you interfere in some way, then that will have an effect. And that effect will come back and alter the information you get.”

Around the same time, Seykota began observing the investment markets very closely, keeping graphs of stock and commodities action and reading the financial sections of newspapers and biographies of famous investors. “I was very current on what was going on,” Seykota recalls. “I knew I was going to be a good investor. There was only one thing I didn’t have: money to start with.”

In 1969 Seykota graduated from MIT with bachelor of science degrees in electrical engineering and industrial management. And he promptly opened his own business, an investment consulting firm he called Mirronics, which was based on his feedback method of analyzing the market. To his chagrin, however, his business foundered; in the year he kept it open, he had only two clients, who paid him just barely enough to cover his basic operating expenses. “The problem was, my idea wasn’t marketable,” Seykota says. “People weren’t interested in knowing what’s really going on, because they’re interested in it going on the way they think it should be going on in their minds. That’s the main reason why there is so much instability in the economic system the way it still is today – people are so heavily invested in it turning out a certain way that their actions are all based on their own preconceptions. So nobody really wants to know. The profit motive isn’t really the only motive businessmen have – they have a lot of other motives, like the ego motive. For instance, in the investment community on Wall Street, it is not as important to make money as it is to not lose more than the other guys. So this thing I had, with all its insights into the market, wasn’t salable. And at that point I said to myself, ‘I’m no longer going to work for other people as a consultant, I’m going to become an investor and make money for myself.’”

Seykota began applying for work at various Wall Street brokerage houses, and was eventually hired by Merrill Lynch, where he was paid $200 a week to write the company’s newsletter. Just two weeks later, however, Seykota received another job offer from a different brokerage house, Hayden-Stone. The salary was the same, but the firm let him work in the accounting department with the IBM 360-65 computer – at the time, the most advanced of its kind. Attracted more by the opportunity than the pay, Seykota eagerly accepted the job offer, working his normal forty-hour week and then coming in every Saturday and every Sunday from eight in the morning until midnight to obtain market data and test and retest his various market strategies. Within six months he had formulated the investment system upon which he still bases all his monetary decisions today.

He arranged a meeting with his superiors at Hayden-Stone and immediately persuaded them to let him adopt his system for company-wide use. Within another six months, Seykota’s system had been formally set up and actively marketed by the firm. But almost from the start, problems set in between Seykota and his bosses. “They told me I would get ten percent of the commissions if I set this thing up, but when the money started coming in, I never saw any of it. But I didn’t have a contract, so there was nothing I could do. Another thing I didn’t like was that the firm was asking me how much money my system made for the customer and how much money it made in commissions. I told them it pays really well for the customer but really low in commissions, so they asked me to change it to make less money for the customer and more for the firm and its brokers. I said that’s immoral, that’s stealing, but they pretty much forced me to do it, because they had, after all, paid for all the research. So I showed them how to change it. But after I had done that, I told them that I wanted no part of it, so I quit my job and came back to the same firm as a broker.”

Using his original, unadulterated system, Seykota began attracting a number of clients and started to experience some astonishing success. “The typical guy gave me $5000 and I made about eight million for him over the next seven years,” he says. “How? Just by following my system.”

In 1973, he abruptly moved to Del Mar on the suggestion of a friend and affiliated himself with Hayden-Stone’s Orange County office. “By that time, I wasn’t really working,” Seykota recalls. “The money I was managing was trading so infrequently that I didn’t have to be there in the brokerage house. A lot of brokers are on the phone all the time, but the deal I made with my clients is, ‘You give me the money, don’t ask questions. I’m not going to guarantee I’m going to make anything. If you lose half, you get your money back, but aside from that, I don’t want to talk with you. If you’re willing to do it my way, okay, then play with me; if you’re not, then don’t sign up.’ So whenever I wanted to put in an order, I would just call up the secretary in the Orange County office and have her do it for me. They called me the Phantom at my office there, because I’d make more money that anyone else for my customers and I had the largest accounts, but I never showed up in the office.”

Is own income rose accordingly in the ensuing years. Until his move to Del Mar, he was only drawing a salary of about $1000 to $1200 a month, and not really earning too much more than that. “I was more interested in validating my work, my system, than I was in making money for myself,” Seykota says. Still, as the money continued to flow into his clients’ pockets, it flowed into his as well, and while he is reluctant to discuss his exact earnings, he does admit that he was a millionaire by the time he was thirty. “When I was in college, I read an article that if you’re going to make any money, if you’re going to be wealthy, you’ll know it because you will have made a million dollars by the time you’re thirty. So I said to myself, ‘Well, I’d better make a million dollars by the time I’m thirty,’ and I did. Right down to the wire, in fact – it was within a week. I came up to almost a million the week before and then I lost some of it, and then I made it back – it got real exciting toward the end.”

After he made his first million, Seykota says, he left Hayden-Stone and affiliated himself with various brokerages and as an independent broker, investing both his clients and his own money in whatever commodities his computer system decreed would prove profitable. And with no more than an hour of actual work to be done every week, he “played.” He bought houses and apartments and commercial buildings all over San Diego County, including a three-story, bluff-top mansion in Encinitas (just north of the Self-Realization Fellowship compound); the La Paloma Theater complex, also in Encinitas; and the Jeweler’s Exchange Building in downtown San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. Which he purchased for $1.5 million in cash and a note payable for $500,000. He became immersed in various “positive thinking” organizations, completing est training and even serving as chairman of the board of directors for Terry Cole-Whittaker’s Church of Religious Science in La Jolla. He amused himself by buying fancy cars, traveling around the world, and once making a million-dollars in twenty-four hours. (“I don’t even remember what commodity that was,” he says glibly. “I just remember my broker calling me up and saying, ‘Hey, you’re up a million dollars today.’”) And he fulfilled a number of long-standing dreams and fantasies, among them his desire to be a publisher and a writer. To that end, he bought two magazines, Seacoast and Desert.

Michael Johnson founded Seacoast as a biweekly newsprint advertiser in September of 1978 and shortly thereafter approached Seykota for money on the recommendation of a friend. Seykota turned him down. After that initial meeting, however, the two became close friends and for a while were virtually inseparable, Seykota even serving as best man at Johnson’s wedding in May of 1980. Several months later Johnson – who by then had acquired Desert and turned Seacoast into a slick, full-color monthly – was once again in need of another investor, and this time it was Seykota who offered his help. Seykota subsequently bought out two previous investors for more than $200,000 and signed on as executive publisher in October of 1980, with the understanding that he would not have any artistic, creative, or editorial control over the magazines. But from that point on, Johnson says the relationship between the two deteriorated until Johnson was forced from his position as publisher in the early spring of 1981. (Johnson’s ten-million-dollar lawsuit against Seykota is set for trial in federal court here July 11. The suit charges Seykota with illegal conversion of corporate assets to personal use.)

“Within two or three days after he joined Seacoast,” Johnson recalls, “Ed was down at the offices, interviewing people about how they liked their work. He also started to attend staff meetings, uninvited, and demand certain things in my presence, such as taking all the headlines off the cover, things like that. Then several weeks later he wanted us to print an interview with Terry Cole-Whittaker he had written himself. It was nothing but fawning praise and inane questions – everyone on the staff was just appalled at the thing, but Ed launched a campaign of harassment and intimidation to get the article published. He played on our friendship and on the fact that he had investe3d so much money, and I finally published the damn thing just to get him out of my hair. Afterward I told him that what he had done was unfair and counter to all of our agreements, and he said, ‘Well, I guess I just break my agreements.’ Then he told me he wanted me to give him all my objections (to the Cole-Whittaker article). So I did. I told him the story’s been done before, it’s pop religion and not in our editorial format, and the interview consists of straw men he set up for her to knock down and it appeared that he and she were in collusion to get the ting together. He broke down and started to cry, saying, ‘I put my money up and now I can’t have any fun.’

Then there were his constant mood changes. One minute he’d come into the office and be glowingly enthusiastic about the publication – to the point of wrapping his arms around me in a bear hug and saying, ‘You’re my man; I’m so happy I became associated with you.’ The next, he’d be cold, wild, fucked up, screaming and walking out the door shaking his fists. One day he called me in a howling rage bout how he went in to use the bathroom and found a copy of San Diego Magazine on the toilet seat. ‘Ed,’ I told him, ‘I’m trying to run the magazine and I don’t have time to police the johns. And I don’t understand why a copy of San Diego Magazine…’ ‘Well,’ he broke in, ‘if you don’t understand why a copy of San Diego Magazine shouldn’t be in our bathroom, then you shouldn’t be publisher. It lowers the consciousness of those around here.’ Another time I had a circulation consultant fly in from New York, and when I introduced him to Ed, all Ed wanted to do was talk about how to raise money for Terry Cole-Whittaker’s TV ministry. The guy was totally nonplussed. Ed was just a continual embarrassment down there.

“It reached the point where finally I went to New York on a recruiting mission and when I got back, he was physically occupying my office and had taken me off the signature card for the magazine. He said, and this is a direct quote, ‘Unless you submit a job fantasy, you can’t work here anymore. A job fantasy is describe your job as you would like it to be in a fantasy.’ I refused, and he said, ‘I want you to buy me out, and until we can resolve that, I don’t want you around here anymore.’ I told him, ‘You can take your money and you can shove it up your ass. If you try to run this magazine, it will be down the tubes in six to eight months. I don’t give a fuck about your millions – you can’t manage people, and this magazine will overwhelm you.’ And that’s precisely what happened.” Seykota abruptly folded both magazines in the fall of 1981.

Somewhat surprisingly – but not altogether uncharacteristically – Seykota does not dispute many of Johnson’s allegations, instead shrugging them off. “I was two-thirds owner of the magazine, so basically it was my magazine,” he says. “So I could do anything I wanted with it, and don’t really need to justify anything.” He does, however, challenge Johnson’s charge that he continually meddled in the magazine’s day-to-day operations after he’d given his word he wouldn’t. “That [not meddling] was my original intention, and it would have been nice had it worked out that way,” Seykota says. “But the other side of the deal was that he was going to provide some financial discipline, and he didn’t. Well over a million dollars were spent on things that didn’t work, and I had to come in there and unwind the whole operation and try to make it work. I fired him because I wanted a budget and I wanted a plan, but he didn’t like the idea of reporting to anyone – he wanted to retain the freedom to say what he wanted to say and make policy as he went along. And I wouldn’t so much have minded his management style except that his management style lost a lot of money.”

That controversial interview with Terry Cole-Whittaker grew out of Seykota’s attraction to the Church of Religious Science and to Cole-Whittaker personally. Three years ago Seykota began working with her in various fund-raising and financial-planning programs. For a time the two were close friends, riding around in Seykota’s big red limousine and attending parties and seminars together. Seykota became her biggest promoter, and was even made chairman of her church’s board of directors. Then, less than two years later, he was asked to resign, and since then he’s been disassociated from Whittaker, both on a business and personal basis. Church spokesman Stan Leopard insists the parting was amicable (Whittaker herself refuses to discuss Seykota), but Seykota provides this account of what led up to the rift: “After I had pretty much served out my usefulness with the computer model (on which he developed financial strategies), I was looking for some other areas to be of service, and one of them was that because there had been a tremendous turnover of people in her operation, she should maybe leave the operational control of the church to other people. She’s so ‘on’ all the time that she often has a difficult time trying to manage people directly. I told her we were there to worship the Lord, not Terry, and that she’s making a wonderful contribution, but to some extent her ego is getting in the way. She has since taken it to heart, and from what I hear things are3 a lot better now, but at the time, she didn’t like what I had to say. So I asked her if she wanted me to resign and she said she did.”

A million dollars at an early age, a fling with publishing, a bit of religious politics – well, all of that was yesterday. So what’s happening today in Ed Seykota’s life? “If I meet someone new and they ask me what I do,” Seykota replies, “I tell them I’m a musician. I don’t even bring up the commodities or the market – that’s all behind me.” His new career as a recording artist began two years ago, when he was teaching an adult-education course in commodities trading through the San Diego Community College District. One night he lectured about positive attitude and his belief that whatever you really want, you’ll get. “I had everybody write down something they had always wanted to do but hadn’t done,” Seykota says. “And what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for me, too, so I told them that one thing I thought would be fun to do was make an album. That would be a real kick. And the people in my course said, ‘If that stuff you’re teaching really works, if you can really do anything you really want, then why don’t you do this album?’ I thought it over for a second and said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do this album.’ And I gave them my word I would do it.”

Seykota enlisted the aid of Scott Chatfield, who by then had become program director at radio station KAVO in Fallbrook. Chatfield had managed new-wave trio Fluke and several other rock groups since he had last worked with Seykota at La Paloma Theater, and, Seykota says, he “felt right” for the job of producer. Within five weeks of the adult-education course’s end, the two had completed a demo tape of songs that Seykota had written, recorded in Chatfield’s home eight-track recording studio. But Seykota still considered his musical career more an experiment than anything else.

That soon changed, however. “Right before I was supposed to start working on the actual album, somebody broke into my house and stole a lot of my instruments,” Seykota says. “I took that as a sign to tell myself, ‘you’re either serious about music or you’re not.’ You know the old saying, ‘Use it or lose it.’ So I resolved right then that I would buy new equipment and spend a lot more time on my music, and from that point on I really got into it.”

With Chatfield as producer, Seykota entered Western Audio Recording Studios in Kearny Mesa toward the end of 1981 to start recording his album, titles Seykota! And slated for release in San Diego on Obvious Moose Records, label owned by Chatfield but financed by Seykota. During the week, Seykota says, he would work on songs and ideas at home. Then on weekends he and Chatfield would spend four or five hours in the studio, finalizing arrangements and recording the songs with the help of local musicians hired by Chatfield. And within twelve weeks the album of thirteen songs – all written by Seykota – was completed. For the most part, Seykota’s songs are novelty tunes of the type written by Randy Newman (“Short People”) and Harry Nilsson, and they’re sung in Seykota’s husky monotone that is equal parts sincerity and sarcasm. But there are also some love songs and even three instrumentals which Seykota himself is featured on acoustic guitar.

Simple chords, simple chord progressions, simple melodies and simple structures – that is the music. But Seykota says the simplicity is intentional. “If I had been waiting around to do some more sophisticated stuff on the first album, I might still be waiting around to do some more sophisticated stuff for the first album,” he says. “And I may never get around to doing more sophisticated stuff, because, interestingly enough, the most popular songs of all time are the very simplest ones.”

The song lyrics, too, are almost childishly simple. “Tuna Fish,” one of his favorites on the album, reads in part: “Just gimmie tuna fish or nothin’ at all/ Gimmie tuna fish or nothin’ at all/ Hmmm. Tuna fish. That’s what I want/ Hmmm. Tuna fish. That’s what I want.” Seykota explains how that one came about. “I already had the riff – which is basically an A to a G back to A, a simple rock ‘n’ roll riff – and one day, I was taking Terry Cole-Whittaker, her then-boyfriend Mike Doyle, the surfing champion, and Jim Moreno, who worked with Terry, up to Los Angeles in the limousine. So we were all riding along and I had my guitar and was just messing with the riff. We were driving along up in Hollywood and had the sunroof open, and this guy in a tow truck pulls up next to us at a stoplight and he just freaks out – he had never seen a car like that before. So he called up his boss on the CB radio – we could hear him because we were right next to him – and he told him about it. His boss said, ‘What are you doing?’ and the driver said, ‘Well I’m eating a tuna fish sandwich,’ and his boss said, ‘Throw the sandwich in the car.’ So in comes this tuna fish sandwich – almost like you toss flowers at a coronation. It wasn’t a rude gesture bat all; it was almost an acknowledgement – you know, ‘Oh here’s some tuna fish for you.’ So all of a sudden it just clicked – ‘Give me tuna fish or give me nothing at all.’ We ate part of it and then offered it to another car driving by beside us to try to keep the flow going. Then we gave some oranges and apples away to other people who were driving by to keep alive the spirit of sharing. But that song literally fell into me – it just happened.”

Once the album was recorded, Seykota let Chatfield take control of the remaining work, including the pressing to vinyl of 1000 copies and their distribution in February to most San Diego record stores. The release to retail stores was accompanied by a media campaign – a part of the total $15,000 production budget – which was directed by Chatfield and included interviews on radio stations KGB, KFMB, KAVO, and KCBQ, a television appearance with Channel 8’s Marty Levin, and newspaper interviews in the Tribune, the Encinitas Coast-Dispatch, Tuned In, the San Dieguito Citizen, and the Oceanside Blade-Tribune.

In the first month after the record’s distribution, only about fifty copies had sold, but Seykota isn’t discouraged. “The purpose behind the first album was not to be a star, but to find out how to do an album. And this was the fastest, easiest way to get myself and Scott and everyone else educated about the music business. I’ve read a lot about it and always been interested in it, but it’s different once you actually do it.” It’s the second album that will make him a star (he hopes), though if that shouldn’t, he’ll still not be discouraged, for stardom is a certainty. “But the goal is not to be a star, although being a star is a symptom of what I’m going to do. The goal is to be happy doing my music. If I just wanted to be a star, I’d be a star in a week. I could spend a million dollars on a media campaign and put my picture in newspapers everywhere. That, in itself, would be an interesting story that the press would undoubtedly pick up – ‘Who is this guy? What is he doing? He’s spent a million dollars to put his picture everywhere!’ That would be easy. But I’m really motivated by doing my music. I like music, I want to do music, and I know the stardom is going to happen. It’s just a question of when I get it together enough that I can piece together what I hear in my mind. I’ve already made it, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be on the charts one day; I don’t even worry about that. If you set your mind to anything, and allow other people to guide you, it’s got to happen.”

A few months ago Seykota set his mind on the Nevada desert. As usual with him, something came of it. For about four years he had kept a small one-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas, which he used for periodic stays, though not for gambling – he doesn’t gamble, at least not in Las Vegas casinos. Something told him he belonged not in Encinitas but in southern Nevada. (Following a similar intuition led him to Del Mar ten years earlier.) So he bought himself a $285,000 home in the new Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, and he defends against charges or irrationality by saying, “Take a walk out there and you’ll see why. Feel the sunshine, and look at the open prairie, all the open space. I don’t know why – I just like it here.” Of the madness in downtown Las Vegas, he says, “All the glitter and showiness, I like having it around just to look at. It’s a Disneyland for grownups. I just feel like I’m supposed to be here.”

Seykota invited thirty-six year old Sharon Feil to join him in Henderson and to bring along her two young daughters, Michelle and Nikki – all three of whom Seykota had known for about one month. In late January of this year they moved out to the desert and shortly thereafter Feil and Seykota were engaged. Together they’ve set up a home, with kids enrolled in school, lots of trips to the grocery store, a bustling kitchen manned by Feil, and a recording studio manned by Seykota.

The studio is actually the dining room, though the $50,000 Seykota has invested in music equipment has gone far to lend the room the appearance of a professional Hollywood record plant. Scattered about are amplifiers, monitors, cassette decks, microphones, an Apple computer (for composing lyrics), a synthesizer, “drum machine,” mixing board, sundry other electronic gadgets, and numerous musical instruments. It is in this buzzing, humming room that Seykota spends most of his days.

Those days begin promptly at 6:00 a.m., when hot water begins to pour into his oversize bathtub – the one with the brass Jacuzzi fixtures. From amidst the steamy bubbles, Seykota begins his morning with phone calls to a half dozen brokers in the East, sometimes in London, too. Ten minutes on the line at most, just long enough for him to make a quick check on his investments. (He hasn’t invested other people’s money since 1979, when he decided to stick with his own. He taught his computer system to a string of brokers and has let them manage his money, as well as enjoy for themselves the benefits of the system.)

The rest of the day is reserved for “play.” Seykota retreats to his dining room studio to write songs and work on arrangements. Frequently, he’ll play the same riff over and over again for several hours, sitting in front of his synthesizer with his eyes half closed and his head bobbing up and down to the music.

On a recent Tuesday morning, Seykota connected the synthesizer to something called a sequencer and programmed it to repeat a simple fifteen-second riff he’s titled “Big Wave” and which he’d composed just the day before. “It’s got a few problems I still have to iron out, but I’ve already started work on a new one,” he says as he peers out the picture window behind his synthesizer at the backyard patio and pool. “Often it’s best to let a problem piece sit for a while and then get back to it later; it will usually end up working itself out.” He turns his attention back to the synthesizer and quickly pounds out another orchestrated riff; this one comes along much faster. He feeds it electronically to the sequencer, then moves to his Apple computer. Gazing intently at the display screen, he squints his eyes and starts to type and sing at the same time. “Everybody needs a relationship… Everybody needs a relationship. Let’s see…”

He’s stuck, temporarily. But it’ll work itself out. Seykota leaves the computer and walks over to the fireplace, which he tries to keep blazing all day long. The bright sun outside looks hot, but the Nevada winter is cool and the fire helps to heat the house; it also provides an excuse for occasionally leaving the music room when the creative work there is stalled. Only a few embers remain from the morning fire, and Seykota pokes around in them with a stick. Of course, he could simply pile on more wood, turn on the gas, and ignite the pile in a flash, quickly. But he doesn’t. “To me, it’s an embarrassment to start a fire with paper if you can see an ember,” he says with unexpected intensity. “It’s mandatory to use that ember to start the fire, not paper, and especially not a match.”

He walks outside to the front porch and returns with an armload of firewood, which he meticulously arranges in the shape of a teepee, smaller pieces near the center, larger ones on the outside. Using a long brass tube, he then begins blowing on the embers beneath the wood, softly at first, until they spread their glow to the new wood. He is completely absorbed by the process. A few minutes of this and all the logs are ablaze. Seykota turns from the fireplace with a triumphant grin on his face. Another success.