I was on tour with Sam the road manager and the pianist Rich Dworsky and we’d done six terrific shows — even I, the naysayer, thought they were good — and were headed to do the seventh and last at a nearby venue on the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which according to some accounts was an iconic week in the saga of my generation and according to some people I knew who were there was a miserable few days of loud music, rain, bad drugs, and chaos, a crowd of almost a half million that had been planned for a crowd of fifty thousand. Janis Joplin sang and Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and I’d written a parody of CSNY’s “Teach Your Children” for it.
Rich and I were going to perform for 500 and I got in the back seat and we headed for the historic site and after a few miles I felt I’d forgotten something at the motel and wanted to get my briefcase out of the trunk to look for it. Except I found it hard to say this. Strange. Words came out of my mouth but they didn’t make sense. I could tell that I wasn’t speaking coherently but I kept trying, a few disconnected words at a time. And Sam the man pulled over and I tried to get out and he stopped me. A few minutes before I’d been an author, college graduate, and Episcopalian and now I was a wayward child.
