Memoirs, Chapter One. Have Drum Will Travel, The Hounds of Fate
DETROIT 1947-1968 Motor City Fashion Plates I’ve never enjoyed reading somebody else’s childhood memories, and I have a lot of sympathy for the Freudian analysts who have to root around in that territory. I would never inflict
Books Robert Traver I was a bit of a latecomer to books. As a kid and through most of my teens I was much more interested in music, my buddies, and, as I got older, girls. Almost all of my
TORONTO 1968 I had been to Toronto before and I had found it colorful, and actually, quite to my liking. Houses were painted whimsical colors, a practice that would have gotten them vandalized in Detroit. I enjoyed Yorkville Village, Canada’s
D.C. 1990 — PRESENT With vocalist, educator and former Washington Redskin Dick Smith. Playing timbales in Malcolm X Park I selected Washington D.C. because my recently widowed mother had moved there, and I wanted to go through the motions
AFGHANISTAN The place I wanted to reach, Afghanistan, was pretty much as I had pictured it. Mountainous and cooler, it featured a lot of open spaces, stone huts, camels and the best hashish in the world. It also had some
LOS ANGELES JUNE 1969—JUNE 1969 A Way of Life, Gone with the Wind Instruments The unpleasant visuals of Detroit finally sent me flying to California. I had been hearing and reading such wonderful things about San Francisco that I had
SAN FRANCISCO 1969-1979 As the bus was crossing the Bay Bridge, I saw visions of what SF was going to look like. Nancy Walls had gone there a year before, called me up, and gushed that it was the
BURMA 1979 Hong Kong was a bore, utterly, and Singapore not that much better. Very commercial, very strict and not very musical. I met some very nice people, and had a fairly good time, but it wasn’t the exotic Orient.
NEPAL Nepal is one of the jewels of the international bohemian trail. I have been there twice and I would probably be happy to spend the rest of my life there, even with the crown prince machine-gunning his entire family