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<font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>Back in 1969, I was on
an exchange program from my small WASPy <a href="http://www.bowdoin.edu">men's
college in Maine</a>, where the beer guzzling jocks of Beta Theta Pi Fraternity
ruled supreme, and we anti-war music loving 'hippies' were called Freaks,
(even by our own kind!).</font></font>
<br><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font> <font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>Anyway, here I was at NYU in Greenwich
Village, frittering away my parents' remaining fortunes by reading Byron
and Shelley (my favorite poets, especially Shelley - the ultimate cool
dude) and watching the Philosophy Professors score big points by swinging
their Existentialist Chains in front of all the gullible impossibly foxy
coeds, so easily impressed were they (but not by me!)</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>Oh yeah, I was also, without realizing
it, carreening irresistably towards my destiny to be a musician - I was
playing in this pretty cool band, sometimes called Fluid, sometimes called
Ruster Patem, sometimes Little Brother...Our major influences were Traffic,
The Band, and Procol Harum, with some Taj Mahal, Soft Machine and Stones
mixed in too. But we did mostly original material, songs, and long jams,
sometimes composed with hallucinogenic chisels and easels. The only credo
was "make it real each time" and its corrolary, "you can't step in the
same river twice" so we kind of had this unspoken rule not to ever repeat
anything. Except for certain magical safe spaces discovered on other 'planets',
which I guess, were okay to return to.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>Now that I'm a parent myself, with
a kid in college, frittering away my money (NOT REALLY! she's 10x more
serious than I ever was about her studies, and works and starves herself
like St. Teresa, and may one day go to Africa and REALLY resemble St. Teresa!)
Anyway, when I was at NYU, the 2nd half of the year, my folx were faced
with the prospect of sending NYU yet another piece of their hard earned
lucre, or else 'keeping it in the family' - so they proposed this to me:
I could crash with them, at their uptown crib, and they'd give ME the money
that they would have paid NYU (now one of NYC's richest landlords, I hear...)...</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>So of course, I said, ummmmmm.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>And then the band decided we needed
to go into the Recording Studio to put some of our tunes down on tape -
to take the next step to Fame, which seemed all but assured to us at that
point in our young passionate quest. A&R Studios on 7th Avenue took
our music and our money, and spit out a great tape, which we took around
and began to learn about the crushing nature of the music business.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>So I lived under my parents roof,
at 20 for around 6 months.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>And it was pretty hellish.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>Anyway, one night, we'd both had
enough of each other, and the fight didn't seem about to end.</font></font>
<br><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>So I walked out, and slept on a
park bench.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>So for that one night, at least,
I WAS a Drifter.</font></font><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2></font></font>
<p><font color="#BF0361"><font size=+2>Even though the bench was on Fifth
Avenue.</font></font>
<p><font size=+1> <a href="/NewTom.html#Drifter">back to the present</a></font>
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