I wasn’t very smart in those days about business or looking after my own interests. A friend of my father decided he wanted to start his own coffeehouse, and he planted it right across from the Flick Coffeehouse on US one near Red Road in South Miami. He hired me to recruit all the talent you needed. Going to the Flick one afternoon to steal the cook for our new coffee house was when I met Gamble Rogers and started our personal relationship. Before then I had only been an audience member when he performed. I’ll tell that story separately.

So there we were painting, wiring, hanging lights in speakers, and of course a lot of us were involved in the music business, recording industry and let’s just say we had some connections.

So one night in November 1968 one of our gang comes in with an album with a completely white cover. Yes, the White Album! Before it was released to record stores! We put it on one of the turntables and it got to the song “Why don’t we do it in the road!” So we did. We put a speaker out the front door facing the highway and turned it up full blast. It was probably mid evening. Still plenty of traffic on Dixie Highway, US 1. And we danced in a conga line right out onto the median strip of the highway and back again. Crazy memory.

The really cool thing about that coffee house, even though the bastard never paid me a penny that he had promised me, was our opening acts: one was a funky group call Bunky and Jake. But the headliner was John Hammond, probably the first white musician the black blues musicians excepted as they are equal. Getting to meet him and know him alone was worth all the work I did on that coffee house.