While in college, I had been working as an engineer for a sound reinforcement company named Megaphone, located at 39 Crosby Street in the now very toney section of Manhattan called SoHo. At the time, it should have been called NoGo. There were more junkies on the streets than cars.

I wasn’t a Manhattan native, even though I would always introduce myself as a New Yorker. I was from Queens, and though not quite as bad as Jersey, I was always ashamed that my “Bayside” might be showing.

Manhattan was a mysterious place to me. Having been born in the South Bronx and raised in Queens by two blue collar parents who could barely “rub two nickels together”, I was always fascinated by the pace and the diversity of Manhattan. Every time I needed a job, and I always needed one, I would hope that I could work in “the City”.

My first was for a bike messenger service located on 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. I was immediately attracted to them because they were called Quicksilver Messenger Service, named after the great acid rock band from San Francisco.

I would pick up a package from somewhere and then deliver it to someone… on bike. Pretty simple. During the summer of ’68, I noticed a trend, I was delivering a lot of packages between pharmacies and Ad Agencies. I couldn’t help myself, but I started to investigate these drug store runs and peak into the little white bags that had to be delivered to specific people at specific times to specific places.

All the packages contained the same item, a pill jar filled with about 50 “Black Beauties”, methamphetamine sulfate, speed. Well, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. No one would miss one pill from each of these deliveries. The summer of ’68 flew by rather quickly.

In late August of that year, I rode my bike up to the brand new GM building on 59th and 5th to make a final delivery of the summer. I was pretty thin at this point, maybe about 120 pounds, a large portion of which was my hair, but still amped up on my daily regimen of Vitamin S. It was hot, humid and stinky in NY. I grabbed my little white bag, locked up my Schwinn and stepped into the freezing airconditioning of the lobby. My tinted John Lennon granny glasses steamed up as I half floated and stumbled my way to the bank of elevators. I got on. Pushed 36.

summer in the city

On the elevator I could sense that there was someone else standing next to me. In a few seconds my glasses cleared and there was George Harrison. A Beatle. I said nothing. I got off at 36, delivered my package and picked up another one to be sent to yet another Ad Agency on Madison. I was still shaking. Maybe it was the speed, but I think it was George. This new package looked a little different. It was in a brown paper bag and the contents were wrapped in aluminum foil. I had to open it. I knew it was weed. But, it wasn’t… it was a bunch of dried stringy plant like things that looked like mushrooms.

I had heard about this! Magic Mushrooms. I ate a few. I puked a bit.

I saw God.

As I jumped back on my bike, the streets began to undulate, the hot dog vendors looked like clowns and the strains of Steve Miller’s song rang through my head… ” doo doo de doo doo doo, living in the USA… someone gimme a cheese burger”.

Livin in the USA

During my senior year in high school, my friend, Stanley Bassell and I used to get around to most of the great music venues of the time. We practically lived at the Fillmore East. Over time, we got to meet lots of folks that were, “connected”. Stan went on to NY State College at New Paltz, where he minored in rolling joints and majored in co-eds. I believe he belonged to the fraternity Lambda Sigma Delta 25. I would often head upstate from Long Island, where I went to Hofstra University, to hang with Stan and partake in some extracurricular activities. Oftentimes we wound up playing music… Stan was a drummer and I was, well, Mick Jaggerstein. Sometimes there were long jams with some really great musicians. Two guys that really knew how to play the blues, were these two albino brothers from Beaumont Texas. They had just signed a record deal with Columbia after being showcased at Steve Paul’s Scene in NYC. They had taken a place up in Stattsburg NY and asked Stan and I to tour with them as their sound guys.

As exciting as that sounded, there was this little pesky issue called the Draft. I had a “2S” student deferment, and had I not gone to college, would have been shipped off to Saigon ( or just as bad, Toronto). So, while I couldn’t tour with them, Stan and I did get away from time to time, weekends and vacations, to tour with Johnny and Edgar Winter.

Christmas of 1969 took us on an incredible journey. We were booked to play the Miami International Pop Festival with acts like Mother Lode, Sweetwater, Canned Heat, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Vanilla Fudge and the Amboy Dukes. The promoters four walled a motel, the Miami Airport Inn, and everyone that played, stayed there for four days. I recall one jam in Bob “the Bear” Hites’ room. The Bear was the lead singer in Canned Heat and they were doing a version of “Goin Up To The Country” with Johnny Winter and Jerry Garcia on guitars, Phil Lesh on bass, Janis singing and Butterfield playing harp.

Canned Heat

Later that day, I was holding the elevator for the Winter Brothers, when a very diminutive fellow and a Giant entered the Otis. The little dude was ornery, demanding I let the lift go up. I explained that my musicians had some trouble seeing, as they were albino. The little guy took a swipe at me, and me being from NYC, punched back. A scuffle ensued until the Giant easily separated us. Later I was to find out that the tough was non other than Augustus Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s chemist and brilliant and eclectic crafts-person who eventually became best-known under the name of ‘Owsley’- the paradigmatic LSD “cook”, a magician-like figure.

And the Giant…. Ken Kesey, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Later that day, I found myself hanging out in the lounge and got into a conversation with a strange dude, a guitar player and leader of the band The Amboy Dukes, Ted Nugent. Ted tried to convince me to leave school and come on the road with him and the Dukes. The “Motor City Madman” truly was, and I was having none of it.

Now, firmly ensconced in academia, “2S” deferment in hand, living on campus in Hempstead Long Island and having started the Hofstra Concert Committee, I was ready to venture back into the mystery and adventures that could only lie in the cavernous streets of “the city”. In other words, I needed a job. Given my “resume” ( bike messenger, drug runner, sound mixer, bad lead singer), I found gainful employ at Megaphone Company, a sound reinforcement firm that toured with rock bands. I started as a “roadie” but quickly moved up the ranks to monitor mixer and then to mixer. I worked for bands like Tony Williams Lifetime ( w John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce), Spirit, Dreams, Black Sabbath, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, The Allman Brothers Band, The Grateful Dead, Poco.

But there was one tour that confounded me. I considered myself musically adept and well versed. But when this band went on stage, I had no idea what they were going to play. Oftentimes the show would consist of one tune, an hour of, what sounded to me, like cacophony. We traveled in a Greyhound like bus throughout the Northeast and as far south as Washington DC. The bus carried six musicians, lots of gear and two sound mixers. We played small clubs as well as Auditoriums.

One such date was in DC at the DAR Constitution Hall ( the DAR stands for the Daughters of the American Revolution, a lineage-based membership organization for women who are descended from a person involved in United States’ independence). The DAR was considered by many to be the kinder, gentler, female version of the KKK. There was the famous incident where the DAR refused to allow the famous African American contralto, Marion Anderson to perform. Needless to say, in 1971, the situation was rather tense.

We pulled into our hotel. Out of the bus stepped Gary Bartz (alto), Jack DeJohnette (drums), Michael Henderson (bass), Airto Moreira (percussion), Keith Jarret (piano), Whitey Davis (sound), me and the Prince of Darkness, Miles Davis (trumpet/wah wah). Miles was dressed in leather pants, leather jacket and a pair of purple bug eyed sunglasses. On his feet, he wore a pair of yellow leather platform boots with lucite heels.

He and Whitey strolled up to the hotel desk and in Miles low, throaty, raspy cackle ( he had supposedly argued with someone after having a polyps removed and his voice was never quite the same) said. ” The shitty room is for Whitey Davis and the Presidential Suite is for Blacky Davis”.

I had the pleasure of being the guardian of Miles’ two trumpets, one green lacquer and one orange. That eve, just before we were set to play, several DAR board members wanted to meet “this Miles Davis”. I wondered, given the DAR’s reputation, if they knew anything about Miles. I followed Miles to a room in Constitution Hall and there were these three blue haired WASPy septuagenarians with faces that looked like Mt. Rushmore. And there was Miles in all his peacock glory, sleek, beautiful and black. The meeting was brief. One woman made a remark that pissed Miles off. We left.

During the show that night, Miles kept calling me on to the stage to “talk” to me. It was hard enough to hear a normal voice over the din of the band, but with Miles rasp, almost impossible. Finally, I got what he was saying, “My Wah Wah is busted”. I finally replaced the pedal and assumed all was cool. I settled into my, “What the hell are they playing” mode. But within a few minutes, Miles was signaling me once again.

I snuck out onto the stage, and Miles grabbed my head and put his lips to my ear and said ” I’m hungry”.

“What ?”, I screamed back.

“I’m hungry”, he croaked.

This went on for a bit. Finally, I figured out what he was saying.

“What do you want ?”, I yelled.

” Spaghetti….. no meat”, Davis rasped.

And then, he grabbed my head again. Yet this time, I could hear him perfectly as he softly whispered into my ear…. ” but mushrooms is cool”.

I had to agree.