The truth be known, I’m an ‘also-ran’... lots of people are. Most of us in fact. Lots of us brushed against it, touched it but never got close enough to grab it and shove it into our pockets. Some got real close. I sure did. Maybe that’s why my story might be easier to understand than the inflated 'confessions' of real superstars.  I was part of the sixties folk music thing just like it was happening to me.  But it wasn’t.  It was happening to a young kid who didn’t know shite from shinola while he had a front row seat to history. Funny thing about history. You don’t know it’s history when it’s happening.  You’re just there.  To tell the truth, there were moments. Yep, that was yours truly singing Puff The Magic Dragon to a concert audience of 300 people a full two years before Peter, Paul and the blonde I introduced them to in the Village recorded it.  That was also me, third from the left in that line of New Christy Minstrels – week after week on national TV, at the White House and Carnegie Hall.  And that was me - one half of the best kept secret duets on Columbia Records. ‘Cult heroes’ we’ve been dubbed. Shit.

 

     From Greenwich Village in the late nineteen fifties, to the narrow streets up Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, then on to what some might call fame. What does an adolescent know? I hung out with people you only read about now, had things happen that don’t happen every day, saw places that belong in magazines – experienced events that still make me burst out laughing in the middle of the night, and haunting cues that bring a lump to my throat and make me incapable of finishing a sentence. Bobby, Nick, Gayle, Barry, I miss you terribly. You died too young.

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Anyway, here goes…