Cover photo taken at the Bema, Sunday, April 19, 1970

In September of 1968, after our Class graduated in June and upon failing my draft physical back in Minneapolis in August, I returned to Hanover.  And began, in the words of a friend of mine who is a famous Southern artist, “living the dream of every red-blooded American male”— singing lead in a rock band.

I’d had a taste of the lifestyle in the latter half of our senior year, when I joined a campus band called Ham Sandwich. That band broke up shortly after our graduation, when guitarist Dan Morgenroth and I walked across the stage. But beginning in September of 1968, with the band Tracks, I started living the life of full-time hippie musician. The joy of making music with friends and for throngs of fans; the hardships of starving artistry (I “fed” myself for one full week in early 1969 on $2.13); living on the road for weeks at a time; the dangers of being a long-hair back in the day; the whole nine yards. Highlights included:

• Multiple recording sessions that resulted in a triple album box set that made history and sells today for $600 in pristine shape. History because it was the only triple album by a rock band that was the band’s debut and sole record.
• A pair of shows in Webster Hall in January 1971 as the lead act at 7:00 and 9:00 for Joe Walsh and the James Gang. People who were there will tell you today that Tracks outplayed the James Gang at both shows and the audience reaction showed it. That evening was also a “one-degree of separation” for me. At the end of our encore and a “standing O” from 900 people at the second show, as I was going down the back stairs to the dressing rooms Joe Walsh was coming up. As we passed in the narrow stairway he said to me, “Nice set, man” in that classic stoner voice of his.
• Playing for 5,000 people at the Beaux Arts Ball at U. Penn in June of 1971.
• Believe it or not, I’ll include in the highlights two drunken suits literally try to kill us by running us down in their Cadillac at 3:00 a.m. one night in Boston, February 1970, simply because of how we looked. Scary. A lesson in prejudice that has stayed with me and informed my years of civil rights work. Yep, highlight because of the long-term good that resulted.
• Having a fanatical group of high school kids from Bradford, VT, follow Tracks everywhere within a two-hour radius of their hometown to every club and location that didn’t serve alcohol. It was like we were the Dead or Phish.
• Best of all, just getting “onstage” (whatever that meant on any given night) and making music that people loved for 3 or 4 hours a night.  Rinse and repeat several hundred times!

Though I was with Tracks as its lead singer for just the first three years of the band’s six-year run (and so missed the pleasure of declining three “sell your soul” recording contracts), the experience has stayed with me. And here’s why, a slice of my philosophy of life, which I believe to my core. As I wrote on page 346 of my book: “Once music has cast its spell over you, it remains forever an essential part of who you are, of how you exist. It touches your soul, and your life is never the same."

While my “real job” career as an educational administrator lasted for 38 years, I always tell people that my best preparation for being a high school assistant principal (you’re a slacker, McFly) was being in a rock band. I used to strategically post the photo of our band that is on the front cover of my book in my office on a bulletin board facing the door. In the 90s, when kids would come into the office with orange hair on the left side of their head, green hair on the right side, metal piercings everywhere (until schools outlawed same) and a mountainous chip on their shoulder about their “alt” look, the first thing they saw was this damn hippie band. In the AP’s office! They couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s that band.” My first answer always was, “That’s Led Zeppelin early in their career.” They’d walk up to the photo for a close look and then I’d say, “No, not really. That’s the band I was in before I got into education, I’m on the far right in the photo.” Slow turn toward the desk. WTF, I knew they were thinking, the suit was a hippie. What a great opening for the suit. Then I’d say, “Okay, so you can figure out I don’t give a rat’s behind what you look like. Alright? Now let’s talk about why you’re here.” Tremendous icebreaker.

For almost four decades my life was spent far removed from music. But music was never far from me. And at the end of my education career, I began to get a jonesing to write something about my years in rock and roll. Turned out, a lot of people in northern New England had been waiting decades for the story to make it into print. Old Times, Good Times: a rock and roll story, published in August of 2011, focuses on the decade from the mid-60s to the mid-70s in northern New England, and even though I only lived three of those years in the music biz I felt I had earned my props and could be an advocate and historian. In fact, I consider the book a history of an amazing time and place in an era that will never be replicated, plus a history of more than a few incredibly talented bands. The publishing company? Not so much. They put “MEMOIR” on the back cover. So, it was both a memoir and history. The chapter from the book that unsurprisingly gets the most attention is the chapter on Aerosmith, who shared an agent with us and were playing the same circuit Tracks played about the time I was leaving the band. A friend of mine who was a great front man in our music scene back then, and still is in touch with Steven Tallarico, said about that chapter: “The national media would love to read this. You have information here that none of them have ever read or heard about.”

One of the great spin-offs of making the commitment to write a book about the music of the classic rock era was getting Tracks (and other bands) back together for the decade of the 2010s. Tracks played its first geezer gig in 2010, and its final geezer gig in 2019. I continued to do short cameos with our 1968 reunion bands for our 50th (The Party Crashers, Hi-Heel Sneakers) and a three-spot with The Better Days Band in 2023 for our 55th (Born Under a Bad Sign by Cream, Live with Me by the Stones, and Mustang Sally). Am I finally done exercising the “golden throat” – the band’s nickname for yours truly? Perhaps we’ll see at our 60th!