HERE ARE THE STORIES…
Not long before he died, we were talking with Jimi Hendrix on MacDougal St in Greenwich Village, New York City. (You can see exactly where we were if you view the movie "Next Stop Greenwich Village" a Paul Mazursky film. We were standing just outside the Cafe Reggio, the coffeeshop in the movie where many scenes were shot with the actors trying to figure out what to do with their lives.) Hendrix, tall and skinny, would bend over closely and speak in a soft voice. He was a very polite and self effacing guy, quite gentlemanly. At the time, he was deeply into jazz and jazzrock. This was the period when he wasn't taking drugs. He truly loved creating jazz and hoped his fans would appreciate his new style. Sadly, most didn't. Instead, the fans put tremendous pressure on him to return to his old life and old style of music, which finally he yielded to. The word on the street was that, essentially, that was what killed him.

As we said goodbye to Jimi Hendrix and rounded the corner from MacDougal on to 3rd, we went past the Night Owl, a little club where Jimi had played years earlier as Jimi James and the Blue Flames. The Night Owl was known as the starting place of The Lovin' Spoonful. Also having played there was The Ragamuffins with Jon Hall, (who later formed the band Orleans "Dance With Me"), Tom Pacheco and Sharon Alexander. When Sharon and Tom saw us playing at the Cafe Wha! they asked us to form a group together and we became partners in a band called "EUPHORIA" (summer of love west coast harmony pop), reissued in 2007. As a coincidence, performing with us at the Cafe Wha? (yes, the question mark was a part of the name. Very beatnik don't you think???) was Jon Hall and his inbetween band KANGAROO.

The Cafe Wha? was a downstairs Greenwich Village club where years before Roger had first seen Bob Dylan play one Sunday afternoon. It was then a "basket house" which meant that after each set the performer gets up and passes around with a straw basket for tips. Dylan was still playing mostly Woody Guthrie songs. Yes, Rog put in his quarter for Bob. Actually the Wha? was an upscale basket house. That is, the waitress passed the basket for the performer.
The following evening at the Gerde's Folk City hootenanny (open mic), Roger and Bob met and Dylan was going to hitch a ride with him and a couple friends to New England. Dylan later changed his mind and decided to go west instead. "Later that night we gave Screamin' Jay Hawkins "I Put A Spell On You" a ride home. We waited to make sure he got inside his building before leaving. To put it politely, one of us was somewhat inebriated".

Some of the clubs like Gerde's Folk City had a liquor license and others like The Freudian Slip did not. Their specialty was Rum And Cola, but the only rum was from food extract. Once in a while a "Knowledgeable" customer would complain that there wasn't any rum in his cola, so the waitress would take the drink to the kitchen and give it a triple dose of extract. That always satisfied the customer.

Greenwich Village is an area in lower Manhattan(NYC) about 15 blocks high and wide, but the "Village" that every musician refers to was a zigzag strip of just 5 short blocks. I counted 22 venues where there was full time live music, some running from 7PM to 4AM, plus a couple of off-Broadway theatres.Opening a club not on the strip meant almost certain death. Our at-the-time manager was a partner in a venture that was 4 blocks away, The Generation Club. The club had 4 acts for one week each. 1.Jimi Hendrix, 2.Ian And Sylvia, 3.(can't remember), 4.Chuck Berry. Like the others, they told Chuck he'd be paid at the end of the week. He started to pack up and said he wanted his dough up front in cash or he'd walk. So he got paid…the only one who did get his money. All the rest were stiffed. The club folded after 4 weeks even with great stars in the lineup. Hendrix took over the lease to turn it into his own Electric Lady studio.
Speaking of studios, when we were in the group "EUPHORIA" we had a rehearsal studio in an historic old hotel, The Broadway Central. The hotel boasted that Abraham Lincoln had stayed there, and I believe it. It collapsed shortly after EUPHORIA broke up, well, part of it collapsed and several people were killed. Then they tore down the rest. Was it Wendy's bass playing that loosened the foundation?

At the time we were living in the East Village. On the floor below lived the trumpeter for BLOOD SWEAT AND TEARS, and 2 floors below a motorcycle gang had taken up residence. It was never quiet but one night, very late, we were awakened by what sounded like a violent rainstorm, and there were people yelling in the hallway (not uncommon). The gang war had erupted with a rival motorcycle gang and they had set our building on fire. It seems that the gang from third street had tried to fricassee our gang. After the fire was put out we moved back into our building, the only ones who did. There was a one foot diameter hole in our floor to the apartment below that the firemen had chopped, so I put a board there and life went on. Until…a couple weeks later during the middle of the night OUR gang brought one of THEIR gang to our building for a little barbecue, right across the hall from us. At that point, the detectives investigating the murder suggested that it might be time to move, and we were 'on the street'. And all of this was going on while we were doing the EUPHORIA album. A good friend Joan Egan took us in for a couple months.
Joanie was the press agent for most of the big acts in this country, including the Rolling Stones, The Doors, Led Zeppelin etc. Joanie told us that when The Rolling Stones first came to this country they came with a reputation for being "bad boys". She was a tough lesbian and confronted them with "I'm not going to have any trouble from you, am I". Their response was a Very Very Polite "no ma'am, certainly not". Not at all what their image would have you believe. When Jim Morrison of The Doors exposed himself on stage in Florida, she was the one who went there and secretly got him out of the state to avoid jail time. I remember sitting on her desk at the agency she worked for and looking at a 62 page press kit that she had just gotten for Led Zeppelin.

Going back a year or two earlier, one of the coffeehouses we played at was the Four Winds on 3rd st, open til 4 AM every night. A cold NYC winter night would find a bunch of musicians there keeping warm and dry, along with a couple of narcs (undercover detectives) doing the same. Often people would just take out their instruments and play along as we were doing our set. Not from stage, from their seats. There was barely enough room for us on stage. Among those who did were David Bromberg, and a guy we knew as "Billy the Flute". He was Neil Diamonds' flute player and keyboardist. He invited us one time to watch them rehearse before a show at the Bitter End. Others who were playing at the Four Winds at that same time were Steve Goodman'City of New Orleans', and Emmylou Harris. Emmy had just come up from Texas where she had learned Mr. Bojangles from Jerry Jeff Walker, and we learned it from her, and eventually put it on our ROGER AND WENDY "Love Rog and Wem" album. Sometime later, with her guitar on-top her belly, a very pregnant Emmy shared the bill with us for a week or two at Gerde's Folk City across the street. A few years later, we played a couple of concerts with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who had the 'hit' with Bojangles.

Skipping ahead to the late 80's, I just read an interview with someone we met at the Speakeasy Cafe (formerly Rienzi's), Michelle Shocked. She was playing at the open mic night and living in a squat on the East Side. We went there with her and there were a half dozen or more? people living in the abandoned building, very reminiscent of our 1st street apartment after the first fire.We became good friends and when we had a college gig in New Jersey we asked her to come with us and be our opener. The show went really well, so when we had an upcoming tour we asked her to join us. So the three of us set out in our van to the midwest. One of the gigs was at Eureka College, the then President Reagan's alma mater. About a month after getting back, she came over to tell us that someone who had recorded her live (informally) at Kerrville Folk Festival had released the tape (bootlegged) and it was on the charts in Britain. The Texas Campfire Tapes. Coincidentally, before going on tour, she had recorded some songs in our basement rehearsal room on the same type of tape recorder as the Campfire Tapes, my Sony Walkman "Pro". A fantastic little tape recorder. When we talked recently, she said she probably still has the cassette somewhere because she never throws things away.