Page 92 - Been There… Done That!

Gary Graham
D.C. came to a complete stop with riots. We were restricted to our apartment building for a week with the National Guard on the roof with machine guns. Talk about bizarre, a swimming pool and a cookout and girls and guys on the roof with the National Guard and a town two streets away visibly burning down. What had been a dream come true had turned into a nightmare. All I wanted was to get the hell out of there. The nightclub business took a massive hit because people didn’t want to go out at night for a while.
It was a crazy time and one of the few times that I lost focus on what I was doing. I went to O’Harro and told him business was sketchy and that it was apparent he couldn’t afford to keep paying the group what he had been. As an afterthought, I think he would have figured out a way to make things work, but we were too beat up mentally from the riots. While O’Harro was confident he would eventually build the business back up, I told him I didn’t think so and that I was going back to California. And that was pretty much it. I flew back to L.A. and Keith headed to San Francisco to spend time with his family. Of the hundreds of clubs I worked over the years, including concerts, the owners I looked up to and admired most were Voss Boreta and Michael G. O’Harro.
By May of 1968, Bob was out of the military and drove from Minnesota to L.A. and I sent for Keith so we could get back to playing. We gathered at a rehearsal hall we used and started going after it like a son of a bitch. In those days agents would go around to rehearsal halls checking out the different groups. One day an agent walked in and made us a proposition to put a show together. He had a deal to send a musical show on a Far East tour, so we agreed
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