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and a beautiful figure. She told me she had married very young, and she too had just turned 21. The other woman turned out to be her sister-in-law, who was also estranged from her husband.

      I discovered later that Siegrid had married a wealthy uranium prospector who was twenty years her senior. Despite having everything money could buy, their marriage was not working out. They lived alone in a building he owned made up of nine apartments, all of which were empty except the one they lived in and another where Siegrid’s cats lived.

      For Siegrid and me it really was love at first sight. The following night she and her sister-in-law were there again and afterwards I took her back to the hotel where I was staying. We talked all night, we felt like we had so much to say to each other. This was the woman I had been waiting for, an intelligent, beautiful soul mate.

      We talked much about philosophy and spirituality and I confessed to having had some remarkable spiritual experiences with LSD. I had taken two acid trips to date. She listened wide-eyed. ‘I have two doses with me,’ I told her. ‘Oh goody, let’s take it right now,’ was her immediate reaction.

      Within an hour the drug had taken effect and we were surfing the cosmos together, my first time with another person. We were having the same symbolic experience, a total appreciation for each other as the female and male principles, the Yin and the Yang, transforming visually into Hindu gods and goddesses. We could both hear the music of the cosmos and see colours beyond the range of human experience. We were melting into each other.

      It was one of those great acid trips—no down moments, no bummers, and no bad heads, nothing negative. When the sun came up we were so happy we got in the car and drove to the roof of a supermarket, a car park as large as the supermarket beneath it. We were the only people there. We got out and spontaneously sang songs from West Side Story and danced around the roof. We were inseparable after that and consummated our relationship on the third night.

      On the last night that Siegrid and I spent together she said she was going to leave her husband. I told her I was going to break up with my girlfriend Bunny immediately by telephone and I did. We phoned each other everyday for three weeks and Siegrid announced that she wanted to come to NYC to live with me. My parents didn’t know what to think, but they agreed to have Siegrid live with us. We spent a year of bliss in the converted loft atop my parents’ apartment, which I helped my father and uncle to build for me when I was 16.

      Unfortunately life wasn’t pure bliss. We needed money because I quit working with the Crew Cuts. There was no question of getting a normal job, this was the ’60s; it was unthinkable. A partial solution was Siegrid’s valuable jewellery, which she sold without telling me. We were able to live off that for a while. One morning, after what was probably our twentieth acid trip, we were listening to the radio and said almost simultaneously, ‘We can do better than that!’ We were so disgusted with the current songs on Pop radio. We started writing songs together that day. I taught her how to sing harmony, and sometimes she would take the lead and I would do the more difficult harmonies. We wrote for two voices almost always, for us to perform. Soon we were doing gigs around New York as Tony & Siegrid.

      After surviving a couple of abortive attempts at securing a manager and a dreadful audition with songsmiths Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, we somehow ended up at The Richmond Organization (TRO). Company boss, Howard Richmond, had started in the business as a publisher; his first published song, ‘Put Another Nickel In The Nickelodeon’, became a huge hit. He later signed many successful American songwriters including one of my favourites, Pete Seeger. We were assigned to a publisher/manager called Marvin Caine who had an A&R friend, Danny Davis at RCA Records, and that’s how we ended up with a recording deal. We wrote what we thought were some really good songs, and till this day I still wonder if we had had a more sympathetic A&R man and producer then maybe we could have achieved something much greater. Unfortunately, out of the whole batch of songs that we had written Danny picked a quasi hillbilly song called ‘Long Hair’. We wrote this song as a novelty/comedy song for our live shows. It was kind of our ‘fuck you’ song to rednecks, albeit the Brooklyn variety. Back in ‘65 it wasn’t easy having long hair. ‘Are you a boy or a girl? Are you a boy or a girl?’ I have heard many men of my generation brag that the proper retort was, ‘Suck my cock and find out!’ I am dubious that you would escape without a severe beating if you said that in a diner in Kansas. I’d hear this question over and over again every day and when we travelled anywhere out of New York City it would be even worse. We seemed threatening and we were threatened, sometimes with implied violence.

      As a debut single I detested ‘Long Hair’; it’s an awful song.

       Long hair, long hair so you think I’m queer,

       Well hush up your mouth and chugalug your beer,

       Because I don’t really care what you think of my long hair.

      It was a wordy song with intentional ‘r’s in them so we could sound like real hillbillies. ‘Long hairrr, long hairrr’—we’d stretch out those ‘r’s for as long as possible. Ironically it started to get airplay on New York radio. One guy who loved it was a DJ called Zacherly. As a ‘VJ’ in the 1950s he would dress up as a ghoul on late night television and introduce horror films from the 1930s and ‘40s. He would cut in scenes of himself into these films where he would do things like chop a slimy cauliflower in half, pretending it was a human brain. But he loved ‘Long Hair’ and played it so much it became a minor local hit. I think it reached the 30s in a local singles chart for a week before it dropped out.

      Having saved a little money, Siegrid and I left my parents’ house and moved to 50 West 88th Street, which was only half a block from Central Park. Here we continued to drop acid and sometimes communed with nature in the park. At New York’s first ‘Be-In’ (the precursor to ‘Love-Ins’), about 10,000 of us descended on the park where we openly smoked pot and formed a long human daisy chain. We held hands and ran through the park screaming and laughing. We wore beads and had flowers in our hair and our trousers were flared. We witnessed in awe Alan Ginsburg and his lover Peter Orlof sitting on a big boulder openly smoking a joint. The New York police were powerless; it wasn’t that they didn’t dare do anything, they were just bemused by it all—one or two cops even had flowers stuck in their caps.

      Being signed to TRO meant I was spending more time there than writing songs and I was getting into some production work. I used to make demos in a little studio that was in the same building as Atlantic Records, which is where my childhood friend Bruce Tergesen had gone to work. Bruce came to my 9th floor studio one day and said, ‘Yeah, that sounds really cool. Let me have your tape and I will go down and play it to Tom Dowd.’ Dowd was the electrical genius that put Atlantic Studios together and also became a legendary producer. Now and then Bruce would sneak me into Atlantic Records, so I could sit at the back of the room to witness a few recording sessions. One such session, not long before I met Denny Cordell, was when Arif Mardin was adding the orchestra to Aretha Franklin’s ‘You Make Me feel Like A Natural Women’; it was fantastic to see an orchestral overdub session, my first. At some point Mardin came into the control room for a playback and was not pleased. He seemed to address everyone in the room in his Turkish accent, ‘Something’s not sounding right, what’s not sounding right?’

      I tapped Bruce on the shoulder and whispered to him that the French horns were out of tune.

      ‘My friend Tony here said the French horns are out of tune,’ said Bruce. I thought I was going to die and be evicted for being so bold, in that order. Instead Arif had it played again and said, ‘Your friend is right.’

      By the way, through Bruce I got a pithy answer from Tom Dowd regarding my own demo: ‘Tom says, “More bass”.’

       Chapter 2 London Makes Its Marc

      Now that I was doing what I’d dreamed of for so long, I started to settle in London. For a while I stayed at Denny Cordell’s flat on the Fulham Road but I needed to find somewhere a little more permanent as life there was crowded;

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