![]() It was Bold Archer, whom they’d set free. They rode till they came to their fa-milyĪnd there they dismoun-ted bold and free.Īnd th-ere they ordered the music to play They mounted their horses, away they did ride Now Dickie broke locks and Dickie broke bars The chain and the bars will have to be broke He was doing both for a while, but he finally committed himself to us.Just as the flowers grew under the arch, So Chris was happy to get out of that, although he didn’t want to lose the security of a hundred a week, which we weren’t making at the time. There was the Westwood UCLA beer drinking audience. Was there an audience to support all that? Ledbetter’s was where folksingers went when they needed a gig and about $100 a week. Everyone else just kind of fell in naturally, but Chris was working at Ledbetter’s as a mandolin player with a bluegrass group called the Greengrass Group - a Randy Sparks special. Chris was the only one inducted into the group by Jim Dickson. Actually, that’s cheating, because we’d met him before in San Francisco up in a North Beach folk club that’s since folded. Well, Michael Clarke was walking down Santa Monica Boulevard and he looked right for the part and we said, “Hey, you wanna be our drummer?” and he said “Sure.” And so he learned how to play the drums–well, he’d played conga drums before. ![]() So we were at the point where you had just about all the Byrds… You think it’s bad here–well, sure it is–but Philadelphia is really it’s blacker smog and heavier. I mean, Detroit is not a cool place to live. Well, I’ve never been a chauvinist about a city, you know, and I’m not nationalistic, and if you got me to another planet I don’t even think I’d be spheristic, because I’m a universalist, and I believe that anywhere in space is just as good as anywhere else as far as its basic essential value. The Byrds are so rooted in L.A., what with friends and recording sessions, but we’re considering it really heavily. You have to be within an hour of both the city and the airport, so he was saying that you don’t move north into Marin Country, you move south of the city. Like I was saying before, I was over to David’s house yesterday and he was discussing where to live in San Francisco. So I said, “Hi, David, wanna sing high harmony?” And I knew his reputation from back in 1960 when I’d come out with the Limelighters and he was, like, “Can I play with you guys, can I play with guys, huh, huh?” So I didn’t know how far to trust him, but we took him anyway, and he sure could sing. Why don’t you ask David?” And David just happened to be standing right next to him. Paul Potash, who was a friend of ours, said, “I think you need a high harmony part. Anyway, we did that and the very same night David Crosby came in. But Gene Clark heard it and he dug it and he came over to me and said, “Do you want to start a duet, like Peter and Gordon or something?” That was before Simon and Garfunkel stopped being Tom and Jerry. If you heard it today it would be cool, but then it was foreign and unacceptable. I was doing Beatle songs with a twelve-string acoustic guitar, doing folk-Beatle music, you know, and of course nobody was going for it. Then I was hanging around here for about a year without any visible means of support. A friend of mine named Bob Hippard got me a job at the Troubador - Hippard’s also the guy I co-authored a couple of space songs with, “Space Odyssey” and “CTA–102” - for about $175 a week, and I took it for about two weeks. Well, Chad punched me in the mouth once in South America for saying “Fuck you” or something, but of course I wasn’t into violence so I didn’t punch him back … Nothing personal against any of the guys in the group - they’re all nice guys. Oh, I left them long before they went and did that. Shit, they were even on ‘Hootenanny,’ on television. The Chad Mitchell Trio was about as low as you could go in those days. ![]() He couldn’t believe I was the same cat when he saw me with the Byrds at the rehearsal session. I saw him a lot in the Village, but didn’t really know him. It wasn’t till the Byrds started and Jim Dickson got him over to one of our rehearsal sessions that I really met him. He looked all funky in his levis and funny hair. ![]() I had a crewcut, but later I got into longer hair, but combed nicely. He had a big following of about 20 or 30 little chicks and I didn’t, because here I was with a suit on. I knew him to say hi to him in the street, and I saw him at Gerde’s when he was singing hootenannies down there and I was with the Chad Mitchell Trio. It was painful sometimes, but it was good experience. So I started going to hootenannies as much as possible, any place I could play in front of people. I did ask him the secret of his success before I walked out, though, and he told me to get in front of audiences as much as possible.
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