forgottenhitsblogspot.com

Web've been telling you for a while now about the new Harvey Kubernik book spotlighting The Summer of Love. Well, you may now order your copy online(see links below)

1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love April 18, 2017 by Harvey Kubernik (author) 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love $29.95 FREE SHIPPING. (Available on Amazon.com)

Meanwhile, Harvey has sent along an interview he did with Travis Pike that did not make the final cut of his new book . . . and has suggested that we run it here in Forgotten Hits as part of our very special 1967 Series.

He explains . . . I think the Travis piece is really unique and we both like to expose some of the forgotten and rarely chronicled veterans. As an author and a music historian, I think it is important to bring forward other 1967 voices like Travis as a balancing act to the other more well-known recording artists like Jerry Garcia, Paul Kantner, Carlos Santana, David Ruffin, Ray Manzarek, Justin Hayward, Andrew Loog Oldham, Keith Richards, the Seeds, Albert King, Marshall Chess, Johnny Cash, and so many interview subjects I've talked to over the last 40 years that inform my book. I've enclosed a new interview I did with Travis Pike that is not a part of the book, which I thought might be perfect to run on your site. Travis kept so many of his photos, reviews and articles from fifty years ago. He really offers some Boston-birthed unique reflections on the magical Summer of Love never reported ~ HK

Harvey Kubernik and Travis Pike Interview On the 1967 SUMMER OF LOVE By Harvey Kubernik B) 2017

Harvey Kubernik: Take me back to 1963. Travis Pike: In 1993, home on leave on my way to report for duty with the US Navy in Germany, I wrote a title song for my father's 28-minute action featurette Demo Derby. I was still overseas in the summer of 1964 when Demo Derby opened in Boston with the Frank Sinatra film Robin and the Seven Hoods, and in Hartford, New Haven, and Worcester with Elvis in Viva Las Vegas. Within ten days it had been booked into 61 New England theaters, and later, paired with the Beatles, Hard Day's Night, played on some 6,000 screens across the country, and continued to be booked into theaters and drive-ins for ten more years. Apart from singing with a garage band when I was 14, my real beginning probably dates from 1962, when I graduated from high school and purchased a pristine 1955 Studebaker Commander with a blown engine. Rebuilding that Bearcat motor was a costly proposition and I didn't know where to begin. Fortunately, I had older friends, speed shop mechanics, who did. I earned the money to buy parts and pay them for their labor by driving a delivery truck during the day, and at night, going to bars with them (since they had an abiding interest in making sure I had enough money to pay for their efforts), where I was allowed to earn tips for singing special requests, played live, by the bar bands. Arguably, my professional debut came in Germany, when a German mechanic friend learned I used to make money singing rock and roll, and began taking me around to clubs, and getting me up on stage to sing American hit songs with the local German rock bands. Those German audiences took to me, and although tips were non-existent (gratuities usually came in the form of drinks, and I wasn't much of a drinker), the club owners began offering to pay me to come in and sing with their house bands. That brought me to the attention of Werner Hingst, a rock promoter who assembled "The Five Beats" for me, began booking me as The Teddy, die Twistsensation aus USA, and in a matter of weeks, brought me to the attention of the A&R people at Polydor and Phillips Records. Stationed in Northern Germany, I soon had Danish fans driving down from Jutland and German fans driving up from Hamburg, but before we ever got around to seriously discussing a recording contract, I was in an auto accident that ended my reign as a "Twistsensation" and, I thought, any hope of a musical career. Returned to the States, I was admitted to Chelsea Naval Hospital, where a bone graft was scheduled to reconstruct my ankle, which had not knitted properly. The large orthopedic ward was regularly visited by Red Cross volunteers, some of the sweetest elderly women I have ever met, who did what they could to make our ordeals bearable. I requested German language magazines, and the next time they came, they brought Der Spiegel, Bildzeitung, and Stern, (similar to our Time, Look, and Life magazines). I wanted to try to keep my information and language skills current. One old dear asked why I wanted German magazines, and I told her about my short-lived European stardom, and the next time I saw her she brought me a guitar. I had been an athletic dancer and rock singer, not a musician, but with nothing better to do I taught myself to play guitar and even began writing songs. One of the first was "End of Summer", written in English, but with verses in German, too. If I ever did get back to Germany, I wanted something to show I had been thinking of my fans. With a large repertoire of pop tunes, I was soon playing and singing requests for the patients on my ward, and by the summer of 1965 the Red Cross was wheeling me around to the other wards to entertain the sick and wounded. My audiences were young servicemen, and they liked my parodies of popular songs. For example, Herman's Hermits Mrs Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter, quickly became Mrs Brown, About Your Pregnant Daughter. But it wasn't all fun and games. Orthopedic surgery is extraordinarily painful. Performing gave me something else to think about, and without my realizing it, laid the groundwork for my future in Boston's coffeehouse scene.

HK: How did the film come about? TP: One liberty weekend, when I was still a patient at Chelsea Naval Hospital, I sang a few songs with a high school garage band in Natick, Massachusetts, made up of the younger siblings of the first rock band I ever sang with. I wasn't able to drive, so my father drove me over and was there when I began and the roar of that high school audience threatened to bring the auditorium down. That's what inspired him to make a rock music movie, if I could come up with some new songs for it. HK: You and I have talked about your other 1966 movie Feelin' Good. You told me your dad wanted to make a film that was the antithesis of the beach party flicks done on the West Coast, and that concept was carried right over into the music, too. He wanted songs that were more R&B and traditional Rock n' Roll, not West Coast Surf Music, or British Invasion. TP: Yes. From the beginning, his concept was to contrast what kids in the Northeast did for the summer with what Southern California kids did. While there are some pretty beaches along the coast from Massachusetts to Maine, the water temps are generally cold, as is the night air when the sun goes down. Cape Cod is a major tourist attraction, but it has more to do with nautical museums, seafood restaurants, and antique stores than playing in the cold water. New England doesn't have the surf that Southern California has, and those hardy souls who are determined to surf its shores are usually clothed head to foot in insulated wetsuits, not bikinis. Apart from drive-in theaters, coffeehouses, dance clubs, art and music festivals (generally nowhere near the cold ocean winds), stadium and indoor concert venues are popular with the young Yankees, and that contrast was what he hoped to capture and present to the rest of the country. HK: Then, you were in the middle of a new psychedelic audio world in 1967, and were a 23-year-old Navy veteran, not a teenage hippie, but you performed at some pretty trippy psychedelic-themed venues. TP: We did. Apart from college gigs, they were among the largest and best-paying venues for rock bands, and we were Travis Pike's Tea Party. We took our name from the pre-revolution Boston Tea Party, and our Very Merry Unbirthday break song from the tea party sequence in Disney's 1951 production of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,. Tea is a popular euphemism for marijuana, and by definition, psychedelic connotes a relationship to LSD and other hallucinogens, with the expectation of expanded consciousness, but as far as suggesting the existence of alternative realities, program music had been doing that for at least two centuries without the drugs. Travis Pike's Tea Party was still very much a rock group, but the Side B of If I Didn't Love You Girl" was "The Likes of You", a lyrical love song to a goddess, for which we required musicians from the Boston Pops to play the strings and woodwinds. "The Likes of You" has now been incorporated into Morningstone, the evolved 1987 version of my mid-70s rock opera, Changeling. HK: What do you remember about the initial record release in 1968? Did you garner regional airplay? Did you have a working band at the time just before you moved to Southern California? TP: It was terribly disappointing. We were the house band for a new WBZ-TV show, and WBZ Radio, with DJ Bruce Bradley (8pm-11:30pm), and DJ Dick Sommer (11:30pm-6am) was one of the hottest contemporary rock stations in New England at the time we recorded it, but by the time the pressings were in hand, the TV show had been cancelled, WBZ had changed its format, and WRKO was the new Boston rock powerhouse. WRKO had even hired Arnie Ginsberg away from WMEX, which meant they were suddenly the biggest game in town. Worse, the previous year (when we were still calling ourselves Travis Pike & the Boston Massacre), we had been featured in a big promotion for thenemerging WRKO, and their programming director decided our TV show stint on WBZ was a betrayal and refused to play our record. We sold a few copies at gigs, and it showed up in jukeboxes, but that was about it. As for having a working band, we were still together, but since this all happened at the beginning of the summer, when the TV show cancelled, all the summer venues had been booked. We were suddenly out of work, and frankly hadn't any prospects until the fall semester, when the college crowds come back to town.

HK: And that's when you packed up and moved to Los Angeles. So what was your West Coast reception like? Were you well-received or was it like starting over? TP: A little of both. A visiting Boston biker fan who had recently relocated to West Covina, California, visited me in hopes of getting in to a Travis Pike's Tea Party concert. When I told him we had nothing going, and wouldn't until the colleges fall semester, he offered to take us back to California with him, and show us around. I jumped at the chance. Armed with our 33 1/3 demo album and a fistful of "If I Didn't Love You Girl" 45s the bass player and I went west. We spent a day or two recovering from the trip, then took a driving tour through Hollywood. I never felt more like a tourist, cruising the famous Sunset Strip and then I saw it. The Whiskey a Go Go looked like just my cup of tea. I had an excellent meeting with the proprietor. I couldn't swear to it, but I think he'd heard of us, which wouldn't be a complete surprise. We'd played the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston with San Francisco's Moby Grape, L.A.'s Spirit, and were frequently featured in articles about the Boston Sound, but after I gave him an "If I Didn't Love You Girl" 45 and played him our album demo, he agreed to book us. Unfortunately, he was booked ahead, too, but if I could get the band here by a certain date, he'd bump one of the scheduled bands and put us on. HK: You are a contributing "voice" and incorporated in my upcoming book due in April, 1967 A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love, along with a flier from a 1967 Boston area show. I've noted before that most journalists even music historians, have failed to acknowledge recording artists like yourself from the 1966-1967 era, who DIDN'T fit the visual stereotype, let alone the omnipresent "free love and drugs" mentality and participation, in their books and fanzines. Looking back at this 1967 world, do you think that you, and many others, were overlooked, at least partially owing to not fitting into the media stereotypes we have so often seen in coverage and documentation the last half century? TP: Probably. Despite our 1967 introduction to the public as Travis Pike and the Boston Massacre, a band name that subsequently evolved into Travis Pike's Tea Party, we weren't notorious anarchists, didn't maliciously destroy property or foment insurrection. We were a rock band, organized and based in Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated to performing only original material, 95% or more written by me. Speaking for myself, inspiration and creativity do not require drugs, and I believed that popularity should not be based on who smashed the most hotel toilets, showed up late (or not at all), for gigs, or passed out on stage. Perhaps I overrated music, lyrics and performance as the most significant measures of talent, but I still believe success can and should be earned. I don't seek inspiration in a bottle or tablet. I need to be alert, and clear-headed, to write the way I do. HK: As you look back at 1966 and 1967, and even early 1968, how would you characterize the philosophy, music, and legacy of the Summer of Love? TP: I've thought about it quite a bit since you asked me to contribute a sidebar for your book. For me, I'd say it all started with the 1967 release of Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow LP. Their "White Rabbit" song took fans on a psychedelic trip through Alice's Wonderland. Later that same year, the Beatles released their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP. In "A Day in the Life" they sang they'd "love to turn you on", then played with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and Ringo sang he got high with a little help from my friends. "White Rabbit" is brilliant, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is still one of my favorite LPs, but if psychedelic drugs inspired those tracks, they also inspired their fans to experiment with hallucinogens. Drug use, supposed to expand one's consciousness, became an acceptable topic for discussion and experimentation, and in the long haul, may even have led to the current widespread heroin and opioid epidemic.

I speak from experience. During the two years I spent in and out of military hospitals, pain killing drugs were regularly prescribed. They reduced the pain, but I wasn't able to stay focused. If I had a sudden creative impulse or even something I wanted to discuss with my doctors, by the time I got pen and paper together, I'd forget why. When I realized what was happening, I decided I'd rather live with the pain and stopped taking pain pills, so obviously, the deliberate, self-inflicted oblivion inherent in recreational drug use is anathema to me. That many youthful idealists enthusiastically embraced the Summer of Love counterculture is not surprising. Rebellion is just another step in maturation, but even when the death toll resulting from overdoses began to rise, they were slow to accept that their own lives were in danger. Having gone so far down the rabbit hole, they blamed not the drugs, but the abuse of those drugs, abuse from which they believed they were immune, never considering that when under the influence of drugs, one cannot always remember just what one took or when. HK: You stayed outside the free love, anti-war movement that informed most of the books, movies and available documentation of the era, didn't you? TP: Yes, but I was exposed to it. 1964-1974 was a turbulent decade, marked by Civil Rights marches, legislation that shook the nation and a draft that was shipping more and more of America's young men to an escalating war in Vietnam. When I made my coffeehouse debut, the times had been a-changing for a year or more, the Rolling Stones were enjoying High Tides and Green Grass, and Timothy Leary's anti-establishment philosophy was calling on American youth to "turn on, tune in, drop out" and, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, in 1966, the Mamas and the Papas were already "California Dreaming". Widespread use of The Pill, a contraceptive approved by the FDA in the early sixties, may have prevented unwanted pregnancies, but by the time The Pill made the April 1967 cover of Time Magazine, it had created a fertile field for sexual experimentation. Abortion was still an illegal and dangerous procedure in the USA, and The Pill freed young women to explore their sexuality and still pursue both their educational and career goals before starting a family. If The Pill was the wonder drug that set women free, what other wonders might designer drugs achieve? HK: I think it's important that a guy who served in the military, had a performance career in New England and Germany, and was rockin' in 1967, is around to discuss his journey 50 years on. You're in my book on the Summer of Love. The Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Doors are viewed as the epicenter of 1967 music, but I wanted you, a regionally successful musician, singer, and songwriter from Boston, to comment on its regional impact. TP: You've brought up my military service, and I think that requires clarification. I was a citizen sailor. In those days, at 18, all young men had to register for the draft. I joined the Navy in 1963, expecting to be rejected for poor eyesight, thinking to rid myself forever of that particular Sword of Damocles. Apparently, my eyesight was not poor enough. Stationed in Germany in 1964, I was in a car accident that sent me Stateside for bone-graft surgery. I spent most of the rest of my enlistment in physical therapy, until I was honorably discharged in 1966, a partially disabled Naval vet who never went to sea, never saw combat, and was happy to be a civilian again. As for commenting on the impact of the Summer of Love in Boston, Massachusetts, I was busy that year. When I wasn't writing songs or rehearsing my new group, all of us were listening to the radio, still mostly AM (few car radios had FM in those days), and in Boston, we heard a lot of Wilson Pickett, James Brown, The Supremes and Aretha Franklin. R.E.S.P.E.C.T. was then, and still is, one of my favorites. But being a band leader, living in an apartment building full of college students, we were also regularly exposed to underground music through the other tenants, who would invite us in to hear their latest album aquisitions. Outstanding among them were Jefferson Airplane, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Who, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Beach Boys, and of course, the Beatles.

When I heard "For What It's Worth on the Buffalo Springfield LP, I thought it was an anti-war, anti-establishment song. Since then, I've learned that it was actually written in support of their fans outside Pandora's Box on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood against a curfew imposed on Sunset Strip in Hollywood, because of all the hippies and sightseers blocking traffic on the streets and sidewalks. I also thought Scott McKenzie's San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), was a timely and clever exploitation of the counterculture hippie movement. Now, it sounds more to me like a recruiting tool for future bag ladies and perpetually doped up, unemployables. As for that song's impact on Boston, it probably inspired our most affluent hippies to emigrate to San Francisco. HK: But you were Travis Pike's Tea Party. Weren't you part of that counterculture? TP: I was, but the counterculture wasn't all sex, drugs, and rock n roll. It was reflected in fashion, too. Carnaby Street fashion had arrived with the British Music Invasion, but it came with a hefty price tag. By the summer of 1967, Boston's enormous student population gravitated toward what I would characterize as hippie garb -- colorful shirts, bell-bottom jeans, and mini-skirts, which became nationally popular with the advent, in January, 1968, of Rowen and Martin's Laugh-In. When we were still Travis Pike and the Boston Massacre, we wore buccaneer shirts with large collars and puffy sleeves, bell-bottom trousers and "Beatle Boots". That's how we were dressed for a photo shoot aboard "Old Ironsides", the oldest commissioned vessel in the U.S. Navy. We were slightly more affluent when we changed our name to Travis Pike's Tea Party. Bass player Mikey Joe and I experimented with the Carnaby Street look. His flowered tuxedo jacket looked great on him, but clashed with my heavy Nehru jacket that looked like it was made from sofa material. I frequently wore a Lord Jim double-breasted sports coat. Less frequently, I'd wear my high-collared, satiny brocade or semi-iridescent silk Edwardian dinner jacket. "Teddy Boys" were a sub-group of British delinquents that favored Edwardian dress. I had been booked as "The Teddy" in Germany, but I didn't get into Edwardian fashion until 1967, when I wore clothes imported from England that I bought in downtown Boston's Freaque Boutique. I wish I had more photos, but they were stolen about the time the group broke up. HK: Travis Pike's Tea Party sounds like a psychedelic rock group, but you weren't into drugs, so how would you describe the music you composed and performed in 1967? TP: I'm old enough to have roots in fifties music, but I was also influenced by my European experience and what I heard on the radio. An article about my father's film, Feelin' Good, in the October 26, 1966 Boston Traveler, reports, Mr. Pike [my father], took some of the 30 or 40 songs Travis had written, down to New York to the "tunesmiths", and they said they were good. That's when we decided to make Feelin' Good. Ten of those songs ended up in the movie. So when I began assembling Travis Pike and the Boston Massacre in 1967, I must have had at least forty songs in my original repertoire.

Early in 1967, Nashville recording engineer Ray Fornier came to Lightfoot Recording Studios, the recording studio I managed in Jamaica Plain (a neighborhood of Boston), to test our new APEX 4-track sound-on-sound recorders. He recorded me playing "Till the End", "Don't Let Me Change Your Mind", "Gray Day Lady" and "Love Me Again", then called Roy Acuff of Acuff-Rose Music, who invited me to Nashville. I didn't go to Nashville, because that test recording convinced classical guitarist Karl Garrett to join my group as my lead guitarist. On 19 July 1967, Travis Pike and the Boston Massacre recorded its first demo album which included "I Thought You Knew" (with a clever little fugue Karl created), Okay, "One Ten Blues", "Bad Week" (recently evolved into "Cold, Cold Morning"), "The Likes of You", "End of Summer", and "The Red-backed, Scaly, Black-bellied, Tusked, Bat-winged Dragon". HK: What became of that demo? TP: It reached New York City music publisher George Pincus, who called me at the club on Cape Cod where we were performing. He wasn't interested in the band, but made me a generous offer for "End of Summer". I turned him down, figuring that if the song was good enough to interest George Pincus, it should be good enough to land us a recording contract. HK: Getting back to my original question, how would you describe your sixties music? TP: William Phillips described my music in his column reviewing our performance at the First Annual Boston Pop Festival at the Psychedelic Supermarket on Friday, May 17th, 1968, in which he wrote "Travis Pike's Tea Party performed in about every conceivable pop musical style, from straight rock to psychedelic to folk to rinky-dinky ragtime". I use my wife's newspaper clippings to rediscover my history. For instance, Ernie Santosuosso's column in the Boston Sunday Globe of September 24, 1967, reported, "Travis Pike and the Boston Massacre have changed their name to Travis Pike's Tea Party", so now I know when that happened. I know how many original songs were in our performing repertoire by the end of 1967, because in the HUB-HUB column of the Boston Herald Traveler of January 26, 1968, about the "Boston Sound", Jim Morse prophesized, "The next combo to be snapped up by big label will be Travis Pike's Tea Party. It took eight months to put this outfit together, and six months of rehearsals to learn the 80 original songs the group performs". I find that number of songs intriguing. I regularly adapted song lyrics and altered melodies. By the time that article was written, I'd discarded several original songs and parodies of pop tunes not suited to our 1967 audiences. I have been credited with writing as many as 300 songs during my career, but when I recorded my back catalog, I only came up with about 80 songs. Maybe there's some upper limit to how many of my original pieces I can appreciate at one time. HK: What do you suppose makes the entire sixties decade the center of social, spiritual, artistic and music research all across the country? TP: Much of the period was covered by the media in forms that allow us to witness the events, hear the sounds and see the images like never before. To be sure, images of the World Wars were captured on film, but their presentation was confined to newsreels shown in theaters, or stock footage that appeared in movies. Television brought both news and entertainment into our homes, and with it, the sound and fury of the Vietnam War. Radio dramas had become the province of television, but music continued to thrive in our automobiles, workplaces, and with the advent of battery operated transistor radios, even accompanied us on walks to the beach, playgrounds, or in my case, out into the middle of a lake in a rowboat. Pop music dominated the AM dial, but FM provided access to the underground, and voices were heard that had never been heard before. Granting that much of the FM musical renaissance of the sixties was inspired by drugs, whether taken in hope of enhancing performance or merely as a popular theme for exploitation in music and verse, its popularity crossed over into the mainstream during that decade.

HK: What did San Francisco and Hollywood mean to you in 65, 66, and 67 prior to your relocation to Southern California to further pursue your music career? TP: As a native Bostonian with my particular interests, I thought of Hollywood as the land of opportunity, home to the thriving movie industry, and fast becoming the new home to the recording industry, then in the process of relocating from New York City. As for San Francisco, it was the site of the terrible earthquake and fire of 1906, and its rise from those ashes, embodied in its Golden Gate bridge a triumphant synthesis of art and engineering, celebrating the city as the port of entry for prospectors during the gold rush of 1849. However, in the period under discussion, both mainstream and underground media were covering the psychedelic music that became known as the San Francisco Sound, and in Haight-Ashbury, the communal, free-love, flower-in-your-hair hippie counterculture, whether deliberately or inadvertently, was popularizing recreational drug use. HK: To many you are a new voice. Others are really digging the film clips from your 1966 performances in Feeling Good that are on the internet. TP: In reference to my performance of "Watch Out Woman" in that movie, the online Perlich Post, Monday, November 7, 2016, ran the fabulous headline, "The best music video of 2016 was actually shot in 1966". Now I'm negotiating with a record company about releasing a vinyl 45 of that performance. I've also been contacted for more interviews, had inquiries from bands considering acquiring mechanical rights to record some of my songs, and I now have new fans on three continents. HK: 2017 also brings a new compilation album with one of your 1967 tracks included. What is it like to have created something 50 years ago and see it re-discovered and re-issued, for a third time? TP: I think it's great. Maybe third times the charm. In 1994, "If I Didn't Love You Girl" was released on vinyl and cd in a German compilation by Way Back Records titled Sixties Rebellion Vol. 7 The Backyard Patio. In 1995, it was released on a UK vinyl compilation LP Tougher Than Stains by London Fog, and it will be released this April in the New Untouchables Le Beat Bespoke volume 7 compilation LP featuring rare underground sixties dancefloor favourites from Dr Robert DJ sets. Incidentally, "If I Didn't Love You Girl" was also covered on The Syrups album, produced and engineered by Geoff Emerick, widely celebrated for his work with the Beatles on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Abbey Road. HK: Your brother, Adam, was one of the Syrups. TP: Yes. The cast included Adam on bass guitar, piano and vocals, Tommy Montes on drums, percussion and vocals, Pat Walton on guitar and vocals, and his brother Orion Walton on lead vocals. Adam wrote many of their songs, and the Walton brothers thought it would be cool if another Pike brother was represented on the album. When they played it for Geoff Emerick, he said they should record it, so they did. HK: What else do you have on your plate for 2017? TP: I'll be releasing a 20th anniversary DVD edition of the Blenheim Palace, Save the Children Benefit Performance of my epic narrative rhyme, Grumpuss and if I can make the time, I'd like to finish and publish the novelization of my musical, Morningstone. I'll be on a two-hour radio show on www.LuxuriaMusic.com in March, and in April, I'll be selling and signing copies of my book, Travis Edward Pike's Odd Tales and Wonders 1964-1974 A Decade of Performance at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Contrary to rumor, I have no intention of starting up another band. What I will consider, if my music becomes popular, will be to appear as a guest of an existing band that knows my material. As you know, I started out singing with bands in bars, dance halls and auditoriums, so that would be like old times, except that now I'm 72-years-old and the songs I'd be singing would be my own compositions. HK: You stay busy. TP: I do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Harvey Kubernik, a lifelong resident of Southern California, is a veteran music journalist whose work has been published nationally in Melody Maker, the Los Angeles Free Press, Variety, Goldmine, the Los Angeles Times, and MOJO, among others. He is a record producer and noted documentary film and radio interview subject, and a former West Coast director of A&R for MCA Records. Kubernik is the author of several books, including Canyon of Dreams (Sterling), Neil Young: Hear of Gold, and Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows (Both Backbeat Books). He lives in Los Angeles. Harvey Kubernik has been a music journalist for over 42 years and is the author of 8 books, including This Is Rebel Music (2002) and Hollywood Shack Job: Rock Music in Film and on Your Screen (2004), published by the University of New Mexico Press. In 2009 Kubernik wrote the critically acclaimed Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon, published by Sterling, a division of Barnes & Noble. In summer 2012, the title was published in a paperback edition. With his brother Kenneth, Harvey co-authored the highly regarded A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival, published in 2011 by Santa Monica Press. During April 2014, Harvey's Kubernik's Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956 & 1972 was published by Santa Monica Press. Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik wrote the text for photographer Guy Webster's first book for Insight Editions published in November 2014. Big Shots: Rock Legends & Hollywood Icons: Through the Lens of Guy Webster. Introduction by Brian Wilson). In autumn of 2015, BackBeat Books in the U.S. and Omnibus published Harvey Kubernik's book on Neil Young, Heart of Gold. In 2017, Sterling will publish Kubernik's 1967 Complete Rock Music History on the Summer of Love). Thanks, Harvey . . . and Travis, who is now the newest member of The Forgotten Hits Family. Hopefully, he will continue to share his memories and perspective with our readers from time to time. (kk)

BACK TO PREVIOUS