It was around Christmastime of 1967 when I was invited to a party by my former art teacher, Stuart Allingham. This is where I met Tom Marshall. At this point, I had only played bass once in my life, and that was as a joke for my High School Senior Dinner. Somehow Tom overheard me say that I play bass, and he asked me to jam with a band he was putting together.

So, we went to some hall to rehearse. That same night, Al Walten showed up to sing. Here's where the Bluesberry Jam confusion comes in. Neither Tom nor I were ever in Bluesberry Jam. Al Walten left us to join Bluesberry Jam, which featured legendary guitarist Ted Greene. Besides myself, Al and Tom, there were 2 other guitar players and a drummer. I can't recall their names right now. People came and went, including more guitar players and a keyboard player. I remember a couple of guys showing up. They played current rock and roll covers, but we were pretty serious about playing blues. They didn't last long.

Eventually, the band was myself, Tom and another guitar player. One night I show up for rehersal at Tom's mother's house, and Charlie Allen was playing drums and singing. At about the same time, Glenn's friends from Cleveland were convincing him he had too much talent to stay in Ohio. "Said Californie is the place you aught to be... so he loaded up his Gibson.." well, he moved to the west coast. Charlie had seen him play at a club, and invited him to meet the rest of us. We were all pretty blown away by his talent. That's when we really started playing a lot of the local clubs.


It's also false that Fito De La Para was with us. He was actually in Bluesberry Jam. When Frank Cook left Canned Heat, Fito took his spot. Charlie was still our drummer. We invited Frank Cook to play with us, but Frank was more interested in managing. He came and saw us at some fashion show (I think it was, I remember it being outdoors and we were playing under a canopy), liked what he saw, and agreed to manage us. Frank got us some good gigs, places like the Ash Grove and the Whiskey A Go-Go. Eventually he realized that Charlie needed to be out front, and he took over as our drummer. That's how the original five came to be.

We went on the road in the fall of 1968. It was supposed to be three jobs. One in Cleveland, at a club Glenn used to play at (it was a big thing for him), one in Detroit, and we played at a Blues Festival in New York at the Cafe a Go-Go in Greenwich Village. That's where we got a lot of notice. Those three gigs turned into several weeks on the road. We were also booked for the Miami Pop Festival around Christmas of 1968.

Modern Music had both a recording contract and a music publishing contract with us, but they let us out of the recording deal to sign with Columbia. David Geffen was the middleman who put the deal together. We recorded our first Columbia album in 1969. What we didn't know is that Modern had kept the publishing contract. We were sued, and it costs us somewhere around $16,000.

We were popular enough to have been recruited to be in the movie "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon". We were in the background, playing on a marina in San Diego, while the main scene was actually in a resturaunt. We were then asked to contribute to the soundtrack album. We showed up and saw some of the greatest studio musicicins on earth there and I said to myself "what are WE doing here?"

Changes in the band started to occur during the recording of the "Are You Ready?" album. We were playing a club called The Golden Bear in Huntington Beach when Glenn announced that he could no longer live the sinful life of a rock musician, and left the band. In the mean time, Tom Marshall had become way too egotistical and difficult to be around, so he was let go. Frank Cook was in a bad auto accident, hit by a drunk driver head-on while driving on Sunset Blvd. He lost about 3/4 of his right kneecap, and Ron Woods replaced him on drums.

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