FOREWORD - TO THE PAST

The 1960s and 1970s were the most intense decades of my life. I was studying for a career in science, but music and film simply grabbed my heart and wouldn’t let go. I willingly submitted, throwing myself (against advice) into the entertainment fray with whatever rag-tag stock of talent, energy and luck I could muster.

I started a rock band after seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Two months later we signed a management deal with a hometown music pro who sang Wildroot Cream Oil jingles, network TV themes, and knew everybody who was anybody in the New York scene. Bill Szymczyk (later producer of Grand Funk RR and the Eagles) cut our first demos, and Phil Ramone our first singles for United Artists. On Murray the K’s weekly WINS poll, we beat out the Dave Clark Five and other hitmakers. Within three years our group, the Fifth Estate, graced four labels, and finally landed a Top-11 hit with “Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead,” our rock version - with Renaissance solo - of the Oz anthem. We earned a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean we got paid. All this while continuing full time at college, largely to avoid Vietnam.

Along the way our manager brought in some high-end jingle-writing and producing gigs. I even sang on the theme that for five years opened each episode of Candid Camera. The Fifth Estate played the clubs where the Blues Project, Jimi Hendrix and other greats played, sometimes sharing the same bill, walked the halls of the Brill Building and 1650 Broadway, selling songs to and playing or singing on other writers’ demos , recording at the same studios and chatting between sessions with the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Rascals, and so on.

We even hung at Manny’s Music, instrument-shopping Mecca of the world, where on an average afternoon you might see Dylan, a Stone, the Shangri-Las, the Turtles or a luminary from the Atlantic or Motown stable haggling over prices or trying out the latest gadgets and gee-gaws. Prices were always good, but got even better if you let a certain salesman reach over the counter and tweek your cheek. Lots of cheeks got tweeked.

Later we toured with Gene Pitney, the Buckinghams, Music Explosion, shared the stage with Paul Revere & the Raiders et al., or the TV cameras (on Hullabaloo &...) with Dionne Warwick, Cannibal, Sam the Sham. We were even courted by the Beatles’ U.S. manager, Nat Weiss, but finally broke up in 1969 when royalties and bookings stopped and wedding bells started.

And so my career took a sharp left for two decades, during which (co-founding a film production company to make up for much non-payment in music ventures) I had the honor of being Orson Welles’ cameraman for a day, producing or directing shoots with Charles Bronson, Hume Cronyn & Jessica Tandy, recording & mixing features for director John Sayles, and filming Abby Hoffman and the Pope.

Enough name dropping. My only point is to say that I was there in various nooks of the entertainment business and in the thick, redolent atmosphere of the times. I still smell the Brill Building hallways, remember the crackling energy that pervaded society and the entertainment world, the first day of issue of “Sgt. Pepper,” the awful days of the assassinations, the war, the protests, the moon walks, Woodstock (we got stuck in traffic on the way), Kent State, the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, John Lennon, Live Aid, Farm Aid... the whole era is burned into my neurons.

Through it all I soaked up popular music for enjoyment, for its true reflection of the times, for its vivid portraiture of the writers and artists making it. In 1983 I was invited to design a department and curriculum (for a then-new field of college study, Music Production & Engineering) at Berklee College of Music. Teaching there since then has given me a chance to make sense - artistically and sociologically - of what I experienced first-hand, and, for the first time, to discover the factors that had made some of my own and my generation’s favorite music so important - in fact, central - to our collective lives. We were just too close to see it all clearly .

This book is the result of my ruminations. I trust that avid music listeners (and Rolling Stone readers) know enough about recording to be able to understand common studio equipment and techniques. I trust you know how to sing a do-re-mi... scale and can count beats. And I am sure you go to movies and read books, go to a museum once in a while and are familiar with the ‘big names’ from Rembrandt to Picasso. More than all, I know you read newspapers, watch TV, and are fully aware of current events and the important moments of the century - the media beat it all into us every day.

Well, surprise!... So did Paul and John, Keith and Mick, Stills and Crosby, the Eagles, Tina Turner and Tracy Chapman. In the right hands, life becomes art. Thus, we are all artists, as our lives express our views of life itself. At a gallery showing of new paintings by a friend, one browser asked the artist how long it had taken him to do a certain piece. He responded, “About forty years, madame.” In a very real sense, each of his paintings brings the sensibility of a whole lifetime through the brush and to the canvas. This is no less true of popular music-makers’ works. The best of them render life exactly, or exactly as we would like it to be, and we salute their products with our hard-earned dollars.

Ergo, here is my take on the the times that created the music that created the times during three of the most exciting decades of this century. It is a wide-ranging memoir and analysis of music and its makers, of the music industry, of society and politics at large, and ALL the factors that have made some of the great records stick like glue to our hearts.