I started writing seriously after high school. Serious stuff it was, too. I wrote songs, poems, novels and short stories. Those days of literary bliss now seem one of the great highlights of my life. I was good, and I knew it. No one could tell me any different. I could shade a sentence with the goo...I started writing seriously after high school. Serious stuff it was, too. I wrote songs, poems, novels and short stories. Those days of literary bliss now seem one of the great highlights of my life. I was good, and I knew it. No one could tell me any different. I could shade a sentence with the good Darke County earth and wash a song clean through with muddy rivers. I wrote some radical songs. I wound by way of Millbrook to watch while Tim Leary set the second Chicago fire. It burned clear through to China. I met a pretty young lady whom I had met in Chicago. I was singing nights and working during the day as a researcher and librarian for Compton’s Encyclopedia. She was a Chicago groupie who developed into a Baltic intellectual, an artsy lady, and a very good friend and companion. I fell in love. Two years was an eternity in those days. After we tired of Chicago, I took my bag of songs to New York City where I was hired as a staff writer for a music publishing company affiliated with Roulette Records. That led to record production for RCA and Atlantic. I married Zita because I felt my parents would like that, and possibly she might as well. We had a couple dreamy, smoky years that haze over in my memory. We had a weekend cabin in the Berkshire hills, yet I was not as happy as I thought I should be. My creativity was directed toward the success of other people. I wanted to follow my own visions. I think I was crazy then. I wanted to strike out on my own and let the fate that would be mine happen. After three auto wrecks in as many months, I presaged the need to get away from the city. I was tired of the race, both the human and the rat, weary with the world, ready for Armageddon. I was frightened for the future. We retired to a rented farmhouse near Greenville, Ohio. Unable to make a living producing records in the small rural community, I turned to carpentry. It wasn’t long before I was bidding my own jobs, hiring my own labor, and contracting small jobs. When my father died, my childhood ended on the spot. Suddenly, I was truly and irrevocably responsible for myself. I went back to Chicago, where my wife’s family was living. We lived on the near north side for three years, then began to drift apart. Zita got radical with women’s liberation, and though I tried to be a liberated male, we just couldn't make it anymore. We split up. She left and joined a commune. I took it hard. A couple of years after Dad’s death, my mother left Ohio and moved to a house owned by her sister in Denver. I struggled on for a while remodeling homes in Chicago, but my heart was no longer in my work. My ex-wife got a job as a carpenter. My mouth dropped open with surprise. I had as much I could handle and made my way west. I began to write again, got back into singing and improved vocally. I got my own place in Denver and struggled through a lonely and emotional hell. I found a girlfriend now and then, but it did not last. Finally, a girl I knew from Chicago invited me to California, where her Dad was producing movies, so I went swishing on into LA, feeling handsome, spirited, and full of stardom. I met the girl’s sister, Chaya, who is still with me. Chaya had two young children from a previous marriage, Bobby and Tasha, so life was laid out with responsibility. Just before I met her, I almost died when an artery broke in my intestinal tract. I had a complicated operation and lost half my small bowel. It took several years of recovery and made some big changes in my life.
In 1963, I was a young entertainer desperate to break out of the self-imposed monotony of small-town life. I wanted to flee from the factory life that threatened to enslave me. I was a young wri...
