This next little ‘chapter’ touches on a possible cloud or two and I hesitate to go down this road but I’ve lately come to the conclusion that a reader needs to understand who the writer is and without revealing a bit of myself  and my imperfections such as they are, how are you expected to do that? The sequence of events below are merely a stepping stone path across a far larger field of events but serve to highlight what went through my mind during a crucial period of my career.  Now, the others may have seen things differently but the stories here are my perspective, sometimes clear, sometimes grossly immature and naïve.  So, if the following offends someone’s version of reality, please remember, this was mine.

 

     I’ve often wondered what my life would be like if I had never been a New Christy Minstrel and those idle wonderings take me back to the day Randy Sparks and I met on the sidewalk in front of the Troubadour to make our deal.  I had just spent some very brief and pleasant time with Jackie, Randy’s ex-wife.  It was a truly innocent and fun little affair, and since I had no relationship with Randy at the time, it was completely innocent. I had watched The Randy Sparks Three perform and thought them polished and enjoyable.  There was Randy, Jackie and Nick Woods.  I hardly knew Randy at all. Nick was an enigma. He was congenial, quiet, slightly intimidating. His talent was awesome. A voice that was as flexible and rangy as a graceful charcoal line drawing.  Later, long after the Minstrel star had waned, Nick and I became close friends - more on that in another chapter.   Jackie was cute as heck, the smartest dumb blonde I’ve ever met and fun to be with.  She’s one of my best friends to this day.  Art and Paul had established a strong reputation in the L.A. area but we had broken up the year before and I had become a promising song writer. My writing partner Walter Schorr and I were getting songs recorded by groups like Joe and Eddie, The Smothers Brothers, Glen Yarbrough and others. We had signed a publishing contract with one of Henry Mancini’s companies and we were on a bit of a roll. It was a time of opportunity for lots of us, so when Jackie called one afternoon and invited me to join a new recording project headed up by Randy and already in rehearsal for Columbia Records - “It’ll be lots of fun…” – I figured, why not?  It was just for a recording anyway and maybe I could get one or two of mine and Walter’s songs included.  Nick Woods had already taken to one of them, “You’ve Heard My Voice and You Know My Name.”

 

     I met Randy to discuss the matter at the appointed place – the sidewalk in front of the Troubadour before a show.  I remember the ‘meeting’  - me facing east, him facing west. I have no idea why these things stick in my mind but the scene has never left my memory and I still smell the odor of late afternoon traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard that day.  Until then, I had had very little direct contact with Randy Sparks and oddly, this was the first time he and I actually faced each other in direct conversation. He seemed uncomfortable – I could tell from his breathing and slightly red face, but I chalked that up to the fact that – well, Jackie being his ex and all, I figured it was only natural to be that way. He was talking to me about boundaries and understandings and I didn’t have a clue where he was headed.  I swear right now, the only thing I remember him saying to me was “as long as you don’t cross the line”.  I can still hear them.  I went numb trying to figure out if I was being threatened or if there was some innocent meaning.  I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people and boy oh boy, has that gotten me into trouble. A short story from my childhood follows. Bear with me.
 

     When I was around thirteen years old, standing on the sidewalk in Brooklyn listening to Wally Custerbach tease my friend Ronnie and thinking that he must be kidding and two seconds later watching Ronnie get whopped good by Wally and by the time I figured it all out, Wally had split down the street and Ronnie was picking himself up off the sidewalk and rubbing his jaw. I consider it a character flaw in me and if you understand or if you’ve been there, you can fill in the blanks. I’m not in the business here of making myself look good if you haven’t figured that out yet.  

 

     Anyway, the deal with Randy offered a chance to make a few bucks which I sorely needed.  For the life of me I can’t remember how I was paying the rent and getting food to eat, let alone put gas in the car. Suffice it to say I had no idea at all of what he meant by “crossing the line” but when his hand reached out to shake mine, I looked down and my hand was shaking his despite the perceptible tightening of my throat. No contract discussed, no deal outlined, just an offer to come on board and bring what I had to offer to the party.  All that was handed over on a handshake!  I had a lot to learn. 

 

     I’ll probably detail the months following my conversation with Randy later on – there’s lots – reconfiguring the group, new members, auditions, but let’s just say that we all worked hard rehearsing, bonding, recording, performing, and soon enough it became obvious just how good and different we were. I had brought McGuire, Kane, and Ramos in. Between Nick and I we were handling most of the arrangements, I did get a couple of Walt and my songs into the mix, and more and more, I was pouring everything I had accumulated over the past several years into the work – my style, my little riffs, my experience with Paul in making things sound different and interesting. Nick was too.  Between us we helped to make this makeshift chorus of great talent take on a personality that I don’t think it could have had without us.

 

     It started to become pretty obvious to everyone including Randy about how important Nick, Jackie and I were to the group, so I started delicately opening the subject of participation up to Randy and I was greeted with subtle assurances from him that when the time came to formalize things and not to worry because I was ‘covered’.  By the time we were rolling along I had a comfortable feeling that I was part of something really big and different.  We even signed a piece of paper that kind of sort of (that’s a folksinger’s description of a legal agreement – a stupid folksinger’s description) rewarded me with ‘a piece of the action’.

 

     That piece of paper mysteriously disappeared at a recording session shortly afterward and never has been found.  I’m sure Nick got one too.  I don’t know about Jackie but no proof, no deal, right? Fuggetaboutit!  We finished the album for Columbia and we were on our way at last.  The stage was set and all the time spent writing with Walter, learning from my Greenwich Village mentors like Rosmini and Seeger was about to pay off. 

 

     Do I have to publicly admit here that I am stupid? Well there it is.  I am.  I hardly noticed when we were greeted with two ‘managers’ – Sid and George. These two guys were sharp dressers, talked like they knew everything about show biz, and promised us that soon enough we’d be the folk version of Stan Kenton’s band. Huh? Stan Kenton’s band? Wait a minute. How the heck can you compare a bunch of guys reading charts with a gang of highly unique one of-a-kind artists like us? But they persisted in their ignorance and delusion that each of us was just a character playing a part that could be replaced. If you know anything about folk music and folk singers you know how stupid that is. They didn’t.

 

     Which leads me to another one of my pearls of historical miscalculation:  we went along with them figuring they’d learn sooner or later.  After all, they were going to take us to the top. The other thing about them was the old ‘frog in the kettle’ analogy. They were slowly taking more control of events and between the two of these guys and Randy, the rest of us were slowly becoming less and less part of the private talks… but, a bunch of star struck kids including the idiot writing this at the moment, went along.

 

     Anyway, back to the story.  People started to notice us.  In short order we had developed some serious momentum and by the time we were rolling down the track to stardom, the momentum was unstoppable.

It all came to a head-on collision with reality and all the dreams and illusions I had been secretly wishing were true and the bright light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the headlights of the truck that hit us.

 

     Randy, Sid, and George had waited until they had made the deal for us with NBC for the Andy Williams Show which would feature us weekly on national television and had planned out a pretty impressive schedule. 

 

     The big meeting was scheduled one night at The Troubadour during one of our sold out runs there. We were called to upstairs near the dressing rooms and told that there was good news waiting for us. Thank goodness no one handed us a bar of soap on the way upstairs. But it was at this final crowning culmination of all of our work and all the combined efforts of our brilliant management leadership that we were to be presented with the dazzling opportunities that lay before us.

 

     With stars in my eyes I trudged up the stairs with my fellow team mates expecting to receive the news that my life was about to change, my dreams about to be realized, my appetite fortune to be satisfied beyond my wildest dreams.

 

     It was all waiting and it could be mine….

 

     But first, we had to sign employment contracts. Employees?  Wait a minute. The warning sirens that had only been faint echoes in the previous months were finally was playing a tune. The dreams of independence and equity dissolved in one sudden stomach punch drugged by the visions of cheering audiences and national fame that snappy suited agent types were painting for us, and of course the prospect of an endless supply of women – did I mention I was in my early twenties?  

 

     What followed were the details of the wonderful world we were entering and how we’d be paid so much per week, then if we recorded, we’d be paid this for this and that for that, but if we left the group we’d only be paid if this was sold and that wasn’t.  And the stomach sickening deep knowledge that we had better be good little boys and girls or else. I did not feel like a good little boy.

 

     I left the meeting without signing anything and spent the next few days in shock. I knew that I had been had like a freshly decapitated chicken’s body knows that …. Well… I tried to talk to Jackie, Nick, Dolan, Barry about forming our own group but the blade had made a clean slice and there was no putting the pieces back together.  It was a done deal. I even talked to Mancini’s people about sponsoring any refugees from the group who saw things my way. Nothing made sense.  It was their way or the highway and it looked like I was the only one who didn’t see the reality of it.

 

     It took a few days, but I eventually saw the situation for what it was. I think that everyone signed their agreements except for me.  I think Nick held out too. I could see that he was devastated. When Nick Woods gets the way he gets – silent as a stone statue – there’s no penetrating the wall. To this day, I’m not sure Nick ever signed. Heck, he’d been a part of the Randy Sparks Three forever and was as important an element in the style of this new group as Randy was in my opinion. His vocal harmonies were not only colors, they were movement, they were commentary on the music and lyric.
 

     Non-duplicatable.  You could tell he’d suffered the same disappointment as I.

 

     So, numbed by what my heart saw clearly but my logic fought to reject, and only partly aware of what I was about to step into, I trudged up to the managers’ office, to be greeted by a table laid out with a row of signed contracts and a smiling lawyer guy named Ed in a brown suit holding a ball point pen in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. 

Now here’s the part I play over and over again in my head like a movie. It’s the scene where once again I watch my hand reach out like the day on the sidewalk outside the Troubadour. I reach out, take the ball point pen …and sign the paper without even reading it.  Everyone was smiling so broadly, no one noticed my trembling fingers.  It took a week for me to calm down and numb my brain to the fact that I was a chicken after all. I let Wally beat the crap out of Ronnie on the sidewalk in Brooklyn.

 

     So began a bitter-sweet journey of being part of something truly great –carrying all the illusions of stardom, a journey to the stratosphere of musical popularity and years of avoiding the reality that someone forgot to pack a parachute. When the plane ran out of gas in the late sixties, well, you can figure out the rest.

     

     So, I wonder - had I not shaken that hand there on the sidewalk that late afternoon and had just said: “No thanks”. Where would I be now? 

Somewhere, I guess. After all, everyone’s got to be somewhere. Right?