I started playing a ukulele when I was about 12 years old.  I remember when I bought my first one, my grandmother made fun of me telling me I would never learn how to play that thing, and I had just wasted my money, but I loved playing it, and when I discovered the guitar was tuned just like the ukulele, but had two more bass strings on it, I slid right into playing the guitar.  I’ve never been a really great guitar player, I don’t even know the names of some of the chords I play, even after fifty-five years of playing one, I still don’t know the names of each string, but I know how to tune it and I love playing my chords.

I was working a club in Hollywood and Randy Sparks came in one night and caught my show.  A few days later Artie Podell, who was working with Randy putting the Minstrels together, asked me if I’d like to become part of the group.  He said they were going to make a lot of money and have a lot of fun, and I thought, wow, sounds good to me, where do I sign?

During my three and a half years with the Minstrels, Randy and I wrote a song titled “Green Green.”  It was a song that very accurately described my philosophical mindset at the time, but as the years went by I changed the way I felt about a lot of things.  I wanted to sing songs that were more relevant to the social injustices I perceived taking place around the world.  But the Minstrels were set in stone, and wanted to continue singing the sunshiny, happy tunes that had made them famous.  So, I reached a point where I was just impersonating the person I used to be and I hated it.  I couldn’t do it anymore, so I had to leave the group to pursue my own path.

The first time I heard Phil Sloan sing “The Eve of Destruction” to me, it struck a chord deep within my heart.  I thought, “this song is based on reality,” at least reality the way I perceived it.  As I recall, our producer, Lou Adler was not that hot on the song, but in my first three-hour recording session with Dunhill, Lou said, the third song we were doing sounded like the first song, “Let’s do something else.”  So, I whipped the handwritten lyrics out of my back pocket, smoothed out the wrinkles, and said, “Let’s do this Eve of Destruction tune.”  I think someone in the booth said, “Well, maybe we can put it on the B-side of a record.”  So the song got recorded in one take.  If you want to read the whole story, it’s on my blog page under “Eve of Destruction.”

The song “Eve of Destruction” was immediately labelled by the media as a protest song.  I never thought of it as such, to me it was nothing more than a diagnosis of the human condition.  I always thought of it as a societal mirror reflecting back on the world-wide community the inconsistencies of our culture.

I met Cass Elliott at Fordham University when she was singing with “The Big Three.”  We became close friends, and I met Denny and John through her.  So, when they came to California looking for someone to produce their new music, I happened to be riding a number one tune, so they asked me if I knew a producer and I said, “I sure do, his name is Lou Adler.”  So I told Lou about them, he said to bring them to my next recording session and he’d give them a listen.  They sang three songs, that’s all it took.  Lou was mesmerized, actually we all were.  So, in order for them to make some bridge money, Lou suggested they do the background vocals on my album “Child of Our Times.”

Well, Eve of Destruction had no answers in it.  It was just a song filled with what I thought were very valid questions.  I realized that if everyone in the world was like me, the world would be in the same shape it was in, so I couldn’t point my finger at anybody else and say it was their fault.  So, my search began.  I went out looking for the answer to my own personal eve of destruction, never dreaming I would find it where I did.

These days I’m doing whatever presents itself to be done.  When the phone rings I answer it, when somebody emails me, I email them back, when somebody invites me to come and sing, if all the bits fall into place, I go and sing.  I spend hours, days and weeks just hanging out with my wife.  32 years married and she’s my best friend.  We laugh and talk and read and play with our grandchildren.  Life has become a wondrous thing for me.

I tell people that very few artists can actually pay the rent through with their gift.  Whether they be a musician, an author, a painter, an actor, whatever their gift might be.  Out of the many tens of thousands of gifted artists, so few ever pay the bills with the money they generate from their art.  So, I tell people who ask me, just work your art, if you love it, do it with no concern about what others think of it or have to say about it, it’s your art, it’s your expression of your feelings.

Randy Sparks told me one time that a young man came into his office and asked him to critique his music, his gift, his talent.  After playing a few songs, Randy looked at him with that twinkling gleam he always has in his eye, and told him, “Personally, I don’t think you have a chance to make it in the music business, and if you believe what I’ve just said, I’ll be right.”  Even as I recall these words, I just sit here and laugh at the truth of what Randy said.

Oh my, there have been so many.  The list would probably start with my younger days listening to rhythm and blues artists that no-one’s ever heard of these days, then moving into early rock, and then all the different artists I worked with, Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Bobby Darrin, Bob Gibson, Nick Woods, Art Podell, Dolan Ellis, Clarence Treat, Larry Ramos, Paul Potash, Barry Kane, Randy Sparks,  so many names I can’t remember.  I think I’ve probably been influenced by every artist I’ve ever seen perform, or performed with, because that’s what we do, we influence one another, we encourage one another.  I see somebody do something that looks like it would be fun to do, whether it’s singing a song or skiing down a mountain, and I think, “Wow, I’d love to try that.”  So, I do, and if it works and It’s fun, I keep on doing it.  If it doesn’t work, and it’s not fun, I don’t do it anymore.  Pretty simple, huh!