At the Cumberland Conservatory in Maryland it was summer 1969
and the students were doing what all twenty-one-year-old hormone-flooded male
musicians did: bitch and moan that they were better than those rock musicians
on tour. The pop guys thought glissando was an Italian word for vagina. The country singers thought folk was a verb. Doo-Wop
used funk as that verb’s past participle.
It
was the era of protests, the Summer of Love, Woodstock and the Viet Nam War.
Pre-recorded cassettes had been available for three years, the first transistorized drum machine could be carried by a single
person and didn’t need its own room, and the apex of music recording technology
had been reached: The eight-track. Everybody smoked, the drinking age was in
flux, the Stonewall Rebellion was still a novelty, and live concerts were all
the rage. For some, sex had become a team sport and AIDS still hadn’t been
discovered.
Into that environment a bunch of music performance majors
launched themselves as a garage band and played gigs basically for gas money. They
got a contract with a record label that turned out to be a distributor, set up
a summer of Love, Woodstock
and the Viet Nam War. Pre-recorded cassettes had been available ummer tour on the fly, wrote some original music and ignored every
convention in popular music, not to mention never did develop business sense.
Did You Ever See A Leg Grow? was good, it was fun, it was dead after fourteen
months.
Over the coming months I’ll be showing sneak peeks at their story
in the blog, sharing the art work and seeking input for other stories and books
of interest to early Baby Boomers. It’s gonna be a blast.
