You know, the music business is like the Lotto. Just put your numbers down and sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don’t. There’s just no rhyme or reason.
So gradually, and then I had an Italian roadster that I built, it took me five years to build it, it was stolen from me and stripped. I said, well maybe we should have another where we shouldn’t steal from each other.
The big turning point, really, was the Beatles’ influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came the Lovin’ Spoonful and everybody else.
I remember we woke up one morning at Denny’s house and John Phillips called. He said, you guys okay? We said, yeah, what’s wrong, what’s going on? He said, well, everybody’s dead over at Sharon’s house at Terry Melcher’s place.
That’s why I had to leave Hair on Broadway, because I did it for about a year, and one night I was doing the show, and I realized, well, this is not real. I told the director. He says, man, it was a killer show tonight.
To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true… I’ve never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.
But times changed, and I changed, and I didn’t feel that way anymore. The Beatles were happening. I think that was probably the main thing. The Beatles just changed the whole world of music.
There’s only one drummer. We all travel to his beat. Well, I couldn’t sing his song. Because for me, it wasn’t a truthful statement. Well, Linda sang it, and it was a monster for her.
And there was a real shedding of the old dogma, like boundaries of morality were being broken down and everybody was into the new party mode of just loving on each other. Which destroyed thousands of us. I lost 16 of my personal friends through that lifestyle.
And a friend of mine in the Christys, we used to sit up at night and talk and read and wonder if reincarnation, and if it wasn’t reality, what would happen to the human spirit when the body dies? Is there an afterlife? Just questions like that.
It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn’t play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.
I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions.
