Before Wormtown

One day in the early 1960's, my mother was driving us kids across the city in the station wagon, and WORC was playing a new record entitled, "I Want To Hold Your Hand." I remember we were coming up to the light on High Street, at Pleasant, when the song ended. And I said, "Well, I guess he wants to hold her hand!" We all laughed. We'd never heard any music like that before. But that was the beginning for me, the day that Bob Briar played the song on WORC, the first airplay the song had gotten in the US. Some time later, when the Beatles played on Ed Sullivan for the first time, I was in complete and utter awe...

The day after the Beatles played on Ed Sullivan, and after gym class at Grafton Jr. High School, a bunch of us decided to comb our (very short) hair forward after showering. After all, if the girls in the audience screamed so wildly for the Beatles with their hair combed forward, what did we have to lose? We went from there to Mr. Holland's Earth Science class and he was absolutely dumbfounded to see all these guys with their very short hair combed forward.

Things were very different in those days.

But it was the Beatles who demonstrated that rock'n'roll stars could actually play their own instruments, write their own music, and make all the girls go crazy. Prior to that phenomenon, rock stars weren't seen as musicians or songwriters. It was all very different before the Beatles burst upon the scene.

Within a couple of years, me and Bob Jordan and Joe Baskowski formed a band and called ourselves "The Unknowns." We played at sock hops at the high school, and at the local youth canteen in the Baptist Church in the center of Grafton.

We were all of fifteen or so, but it was all about playing the music. Bob prepared for our youth canteen gig by spending a long time gluing feathers onto a sweatshirt, a stunt that his mother apparently never let him live down, and the result of which was fortuitously captured by my mother that evening when we played.


The Unknowns went through various iterations, playing here and there, and eventually metamorphosed into The Wabbits with Dennis Wren. I tended to be wound just a little too tight for all of this, though, and opted out of the whole "band" thing after I was turned on to turning on, in the summer of 1967.

I didn't really tune in or drop out, though. I was a "suburban" hippie.

I'd lug my guitar down to the Y-Not coffee house on open mic night and play a few songs. There was a coffee house at Assumption that was pretty nice, too. Mostly, though, I spent three or four years trying my best to figure out... well, trying to figure out whatever came up. It was a 40 to 50 month haze. Lots of concerts, lots of visits to Norm Schell's apartment on Congress Street, lots of hongries satisfied at Grafton Pizza in the late night hours.

And then there was Stonewood. My sister Joanne and I played with this band for a few months. We gigged up in New Hampshire, and below is one of only a couple of pics I have from that excursion...



Things went sour with that band, and I decided that that was it. I never wanted to have to deal with "band" stuff again. It was bad enough having to lug around all that equipment, but the possibility of having to deal with any more abrasive personalities or bruised egos just to play music really lost its shine for me. The bloom was definitely off the rose, by 1971.

So... I got married. Seven years later, I got divorced. After that, I published a magazine called "The Karmics" for almost a year, hung out at the Garden of Delights all the time, and eventually got wrapped up in a CETA gig at WCUW as the "assistant engineer".

All of that, and much, much more, happened before the "Wormtown" moniker was coined.