Here I will relate my adventures in the fabled hills of Hollywood, back in 1969...before things got Manson-oid...the short of it right now, is that a friend I met in Tucson, in the spring of 1968, auditioned and was cast in the L.A. production of Hair! the Rock musical, by the winter of 68/69...When I flew from NYC to Los Angeles on New Year's Eve 1968, I had a taxi take me directly to the Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard...I knocked on the stage door, the guard summoned my friend, Alan Braunstein - who played WOOF - and in five minutes, I was in the men's dressing room...when the house lights went down for the show...Alan simply pointed out a doorway to the "house" where I found an empty seat...

After the show, I went up to the stage as people were invited to do, to retrieve my luggage and guitar, which Alan had stashed in the dressing room. He then said I could be a guest at the place he lived. It was an old hippy compound in a two story commercial building that had been converted to a head-shop living quarters by a man known as Emperor Vito (mentioned on the back of the Mothers of Invention "FREAK OUT" album sleeve). Vito had left the area in the previous six months. But first, the cast of HAIR! were invited guests at the New Year's party at Papa John Phillips' house in Bel Air. Alan told me to simply act as if I was part of the show...funny thing is, New Year's parties tend to dwindle quickly after midnight. It was nearly one am by the time our car load got there, and we didn't stay long. One thing for sure, I got a an eye full of how life "at the top" is filled with "that ole l'ennui", as the French and Cole Porter put it...

The previous summer, Alan had joined a garage band that called itself the Die-Hard Trippers, which including Chris Mancini, the son of Henry Mancini on guitar. So, it came as no surprise when Alan drove up to Mancini's mansion, and we proceeded to the heated outdoor pool...the weather was warm enough that night. I got my first close up gaze at a Gold Record plaque, or two which Mancini senior had been awarded for Moon River and The Peter Gunn Theme. In fact, it was warm enough to go to the Mancini beach house in Malibu, fort a 8am morning swim in the Pacific, January 1, 1969...All this was before the Tate-La Bianca murders 8 months later...a tragic end to naivete for many people in my generation
All in all, those 24 hours of time were quite dramatic for me - from a tenement flat in NYC's Lower East Side, where I lived for 2 months, to the sands of Malibu, all in a day...