Here’s some miscellaneous, not so close encounters with The Band and The Byrds both. I attended the upstate NY State University College at New Paltz in the early seventies. My girlfriend and I had a friend then who commuted to school from Woodstock, not too far away. She invited us up to visit one weekend, and while there drove us right past the Big Pink house. There was nobody there, but still.
That summer, ’71, my girlfriend got a job working as a TWA ground hostess at Kennedy Airport in Queens. I stayed up at school that summer working, while she stayed with her folks. She called one day to say she met The Byrds, who were boarding a flight back to Los Angeles. And not only that, Roger McGuinn had propositioned her, asking her go back to L.A. with him.
I’ve borne McGuinn a grudge ever since, even though my she declined his entreaties. and missed her chance at becoming a groupie. Now that I’m thinking about this fifty years later, I’d still like to punch him in nose.
Mike
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