The "house on the hill" was a two story colonial style building situated on Bennetts Road, East Setauket (just outside the University) and should be referred to in future writings as the place where it all started, although this area has since been re-developed... If you ever saw the movie "Animal House", that was remarkably similar to the Bennetts Road House.

Dave Roter and I moved into the Bennetts Road House (BRH) in the Fall of 1966. The original occupants of the BRH included me, Tom Stone, a pipe smoking philosophy student, David Roter, sometimes Sue "Suzy Creamcheese" Gerchick, Danny Englehardt (also a guitar player) and later Andrew Winters.

Andy, who was a high school student from Smithtown, couldn't take living at home and moved in with us.

Jackson Browne showed up with Greg Copeland and Adam Saylor in a mangy looking Nash Rambler station wagon at the Bennett Road house in the winter of 66-67, when I first lived there.

Greg was the co-writer of "Buy for Me the Rain" with Steve Noonan and Adam was the guy who got killed or committed suicide in "Song for Adam" on Jackson's first album.

Noonan was living in NYC where he was a Vista volunteer and working on his first album.

Around this time, there was a story by an undercover reporter, Jerry Parker, which painted a picture of the life for the Long Island Press (or Newsday?) that was featured in the Sunday edition.

As the university was growing and hippie life was starting to emerge the local press sent out Parker to do an undercover story on the alternative lifestyle.

He showed up at our door posing as an applicant to a graduate program and asked to stay with us for a week or so. We smelled something fishy in the story, but we weren't engaged in any criminal behavior other than occasionally smoking a joint.

We called him "Jerry the Cop". We were only half-surprised to see the cover of a Sunday edition featuring his story.

The visit predates the band by at least a couple of months, but the story probably came out in the summer of 67.

If you could find that article [in the archives], that would be a golden snapshot of the house just before the band got going...

I first visited the Bennetts Road house in spring of 1967 when the car that we drove from Clarkson to the Cafe Au Go Go to see the Blues Project caught on fire and, after we got it running again, we brought it over to the house of some people that Don knew and abandoned it in the back.

I'm not sure but when I came back there later in August of 67 it was still there.

I had to attend summer school that year because I had failed to graduate and, it being 1967, wasn't paying much attention to school.

I had a classmate named Joe Dick who, just by coincidence, was a fantastic drummer. We started playing with David, accompanying him on his songs.

Andy and Don were high school friends (from Smithdown High School) but Don was a couple years older.

The real beginning of the Underbelly was a jam session we had with Donald who had been my best friend in high school, me playing a bass with a missing string (first time on bass), Joe on drums and I don't remember who else joining in.

It was on a par with anything you might have heard or read about the Dead or the Airplane or any such thing from the sixties - great, spontaneous music.

Also in attendance was Pearlman who at that time was working for Crawdaddy magazine and had recently come back from the Monterey International Pop Music Festival. He considered himself quite the dandy - a real impresario in the making.

When he heard the music that night he went nuts - it was as though he had taken LSD and found Santa Claus on the same night... that was the beginning, must have been in August that year, before Albert came on the scene.

Donald went back to college until that Fall then he came back.

We were doing animation stuff, it was really neat.

One of the studios we used to do freelance work with was a place called Steeg Studios and they had done a soundtrack for a film for a cosmetics firm and one of the office boys had brought in his band to do it and that was Allen Lanier.

He and I started talking and I told him about Meltzer and Pearlman. I used to think we were gonna take over the world, which Pearlman may still do. I see him as sort of the Henry Kissinger of rock & roll. He's a really brilliant guy.

So I brought Allen out to Long Island one weekend. A friend of Andy's from high school was really a hot guitar player, phenomenal guitarist - Donald Roeser and his friend Albert Bouchard. Albert was drumming.

Jeff Richards, a fellow art student at Stony Brook started to show interest in our lifestyle, and came around. I was "dating" Joan Shapiro and painting in classes with Allen Kaprow, Nam June Paik and Ed Countey.

Yes I never jammed at the House on the Hill (named after the Hank Ballard tune). John might have got this wrong.

I was under the impression that Allen jammed at least once at the House on the Hill before I got there.

Sandy Pearlman was not only manager and producer, but he was also lyricist for a large body of material and Sandy was there the first day that I ever played with Donald and it was Sandy who looked up at this party one night and said "hey you guys play great together - ever thought of getting a band together?", so he's been a part of the group integrally ever since the very very beginning...

It was crystally clear from the beginning that Donald was an exceptional guitar player, one of those innately talented people that learned fast and had his own voice.

I think it was mostly that that led Sandy to promote the very fledgling band. To a lesser extent he was also interested in another local band named Alice.

On the basis of these two groups he referred to Stony Brook as a "cultural nexus" in Crawdaddy magazine, which he co-founded (with Meltzer?).

His connections were crucial to getting Soft White Underbelly off the ground, at a rate probably unthinkable today.

Yeah.. I said I'm going to be the drummer on this thing - I'm going to get back in this - you know, the guy in Chicago, this guy Jeff - he was good but I really thought Gee - we really had a good thing going in that Travesty band, y'know and I really wanted Travesty to work - we had such a good time - we were always laughing and telling jokes and just being stupid, y'know...

When I came back, I didn't go to the House on the Hill directly which would have made sense... I stayed with Donald's parents because I was getting tired of living on my own to be honest and having to worry about eating y'know because I didn't have any money whatsoever...

My deal was if I stay here, I will paint your house for you... and I did, I actually did paint their house...

I never jammed at the Bennetts Road house but I did spend some high times there. I've looked for it in the past couple years and I can't find it. I think it's gone.

The whole thing started in September 1967 when I was about to head off to California to try my luck on a different coast. I needed an emergency appendectomy and the time to recover so didn't leave.

You know what? I never met him... Joe had a job or something - he couldn't do it full time and he had some kind of family obligations - and the fact is... I wanted that job [Laughs] and I was going to have it...

Joe Dick's family had a very successful construction business and so he was involved with working with them when I came on the scene.

I found this out years later at a gig where we met for the first time. That's why he wasn't around when I got there.

By the time fall rolled around I was ready to go back to school. Things seemed to be falling apart. Andy had to have his appendix out. I remember one night down at this theatre that Pearlman was remotely involved with, I think Moby Grape was playing there.

I said look, we're gonna have a band. We'll get a place and get it going.

It looks like the terrain there has been leveled. The house was set back from the road about 100 ft. There was a large yacht hull by the railroad tracks that ran along the west side of the property.

Behind the house, over the "hill" was a field of wheat or corn. This whole area is much more developed in the 45 years gone by.

The house was an old colonial style. There was a small central porch with columns. If you ever saw the movie Animal House, that was remarkably similar to the Bennets Road House.

But the house on that photo could be it - it was a corner lot, but not at the corner.

It's hard to tell but the set back from the road seems farther. There were no trees in front of the house, but years could have put some there.

Those don't look like OLD trees. My recollection was that the house was white. The photo looks like brick, but it could have been painted.

You can see from the gravel road that development is underway in the area behind the lot. The yacht hull would be on the rise to the right of the gravel.

What happened is... Sandy Pearlman's girlfriend, whose name was Joan Shapiro, she had a house that she rented with 5 other girls and we started practicing at the girls' house...

I mean, I brought my drums over to the girls' house and all of a sudden, instead of the House on the Hill being the focus, it was Joan's house...

And actually - Howie Klein was there and Howie was president of the Students Activities Board at Stony Brook so Howie was like I'm going to put you on every bill, y'know - you guys will be able to make some money, and he was telling Wiesenthal this, and Wiesenthal said OK, let's get a band house - that way we can practice all day long and all night and we don't have to stop because someone has to study or whatever...

So that's what we did, we got a band house... "

I only stayed at the Roeser's for a couple weeks. Just long enough to paint their house.

Then I stayed with the SB girls for a couple more weeks and as soon as we got some paying gigs, John got us the house in St. James which allowed us to practice enough to get good.

I first jammed with Allen (on guitar) and Les at Joan's house. Andy was recovering and played bass for a little bit.

I met Pearlman there and met Meltzer a few days later at a Doors concert at Stony Brook (Also Robby, Ray and John).

We liked each other the first time we met. I can see it like yesterday, upstairs in Joan's house.

Joan's house was in a brand new development just South of Stony Brook and just off of Nicolls Road.

I travel that road all the time and there only three possible places where it could be: Hastings Drive, Oxhead Road or Barker Drive. I think it was Hastings but I haven't driven down there to check it out.

Quickly people started to pay attention to what was happening and I realized that when summer ended everyone would scatter to the four winds. I decided to rent a house.

I managed to find us a summer cottage at 625 Jefferson Avenue in St. James NY owned by Salvatore Sapienza. I said let's do it.

As to when this was, I'm sure I leased the place at the beginning of the semester - end of August or beginning of September '67.

Oh he had all these great schemes - he sold shares in the band [chuckles]... he made T-Shirts that said Soft White Underbelly on them, he was very good...

That's where I met Sandy Pearlman, and I also met Les Braunstein there, now known as Les Vegas... I think he knew Joan - or one of the girls...

The house was owned by this guy Mr Sapienza and his brother-in-law, Fred, and he was always threatening to murder us if we messed the house up or didn't pay the rent on time which we never were.

The band rented a house together in St. James, Long Island from a family named Sapienza who we always thought were mafiosos; they had a bocce court in the back yard, real NY Italians like in Mean Streets. Anyway, that's when Albert came into the band.

So Joan takes me out into the woods in St. James, a few miles from Stony Brook, where the band has a practice place. The Soft White Underbelly.

She leads me up the path to a little house alone in a clearing. Some guys are standing around outside. Joan greets them with a wave.

"Yeah," says Albert. "Were takin a break for this." He holds up a fat joint toward me. I am already high but appreciate the comraderie of sharing another joint.

After we smoke, I follow the boys inside to an inner room. It's wall to wall with amps, instruments, and drums. Each man turns to his pile, pops some switches and rotates a few dials. Ba Dim Dim! That bass is loud.

And then an icy scream whips across the air like a smack in the face. Electric guitar. But I've never heard one like this.

When I was a student at Stony Brook University in the fall of 1967 young Sandy Pearlman started bringing the boys around to the college. At first they would jam in the dorm lounges. One Saturday night in November 1967 a Hendrix-Cream copy band named Alice was playing in one of these lounges. The boys and Sandy were hanging out listening. Alice lent them their instruments and let them sit in. They had no singer then. They jammed like you and I breathe--every waking moment it seemed.

SWU let me sing a Doors song "My Eyes Have Seen You" during that set, which they expanded into a long jam after the second verse. I stood right next to Donald and Andy Winters, their original bassist, who was quite good. Donald was all over his guitar, as the saying goes. He flew. The room tripped out with them playing in it. The boys were tight and fast and rocked hard even then. This was 1967. Pearlman knew exactly what he had.

They began opening for every rock concert at Stony Brook. One of their best performances was at the Grateful Dead concert in the gym. After their set the Dead were rigging up. Bob Weir set his Gibson SG against his amp. When he walked away the guitar fell over and the sound of the neck cracking filled the gym. Weir was upset to say the least. Donald also played an SG so guess whose guitar Weir used that night? Mr. Roeser at his kindest.

The boys lived in a house on Lake Avenue in Saint James, the next town over from Stony Brook. I hung out with them a couple of times. The walls of the rooms were painted black. They practiced in a spare room. One bedroom had a fabulous mural of Jim Morrison and the Doors, artist unknown to me. Jim was depicted as a strutting lion.

I asked them if they needed songs - I had started writing some of my own. No, they said, they had plenty. I asked them if they needed a singer. No, they'd found one - probably Les. One thing I remember is the boys were always kind, even in rejection. Polite and kind. They got the success they deserved.

Summer of 1968. I was asked to join guitarist Eddie Schrager's band as bassist and singer. Eddie borrowed the SWU's amps when came time for our Stony Brook gym concert. I remember driving to their house in Great Neck with Eddie in my '60 Chevy to pick them up--three Fender Twins. The boys were still asleep but for one, who let us into the basement studio to fetch the amps.

That's all I can remember about the boys for now. These are sweet memories indeed - happy to share them with you...

Robby Barkan's memory is pretty good, better than mine for the most part but the description of the St James house is a little off.

Jeff Richard's room had all the walls and ceiling painted black except for the painting of Morrison. Richards did all the painting himself. He was an excellent painter (and singer). None of the other walls were black. Little did we know that Richard's room was the matriarch's.

My bedroom was the largest and also the practice room, not a "spare" room. There were usually many people in that house at all times.

Meanwhile a friend of Donald's and Albert from a previous band, Jeff Latham, came in with his girlfriend so there were eleven of us in this, little, tiny house. We had this rope ladder that went up into the attic, and we used to go up there and get stoned.

Basically I think the communal apathy set in. Nobody would have enough love in their heart to take out the garbage and do the dishes. Everybody felt that they were the only one that was doing it. So I was feeling that too.

I remember once dumping over all this garbage in the middle of the kitchen, throwing chairs around. So I started getting a reputation of something of a madman which was making it harder to function.

We were there until the beginning of summer '68. Sapienza was very shocked and upset because Jeff had painted Sapienza's mother's room black (bad omen).

Les Braunstein's father had died I think when he was in College - he'd died not too long before - he had a sudden heart attack and that was it, he was gone, and he died right in front of Les...

Anyway, his mother decided she wanted to sell the house, which was in Dix Hills, and move to Florida, down where the weather's warm... anyway, she sold it so we had a few weeks before the owners were gonna move in, so we went there...

They had a huge humungous basement - it was a humungous house, I think Les' father was in advertising or something - he was very successful...

We practiced there for a couple of months - we were working on our stuff and at this point Donald had started coming up with some amazing stuff, y'know, started blossoming musically, and to not just becoming an impressive guitar player but actually coming up with riffs and stuff which was very intriguing, doing suspensions of chords - musically very sophisticated that I'd never heard before..."

We all lived at Les' house. I'm not sure for how long.

November that we finally got any money. We had some pretty basic needs. We needed a band house and we needed equipment, and some food wouldn't hurt either.

Kippy was the one that found the house on Terrace Drive in Great Neck. It was a big Tudor house with three floors and a full basement. The owners were nowhere around so that seemed perfect.

Kippy and I got the master bedroom, not because I was the singer (that would never happen) but because it was Kippy who had found the house. She'd been the only one diligently searching the papers for a house for us to move into after we got the record money. The master was the biggest bedroom with its own bath, but everyone had a good space. A big old Tudor house. There was plenty of room for everyone in there. And we all moved happily in and began to prepare the practice room. That was a room in the basement where we blocked off the windows and covered the walls with thick insulation. When all that was done, all you could hear outside was a low muffled sound, while inside we played as loudly as we wanted. As loud as the future Blue Oyster Cult. We never had a complaint. The neighborhood knew we were there but there was never any real problem. The Underbelly were lawbreakers but not hoodlums. Each one was generally quiet and polite. Our noise came when we played. Occasionally the local young came around (There's a rock band living up the block!) but the band didn't encourage it.

We all lived at Les' house. I'm not sure for how long.

I know that Kippy found the Great Neck house and I doubt we could have afforded it without the Elektra money so Les' version sounds more valid to me.

Once we moved away from Stony Brook, the mixer and dorm party money dried up and we were in for more hard times.

During the incredible, history-making summer of 1968, I moved with the band into the new Underbelly house at 5 Terrace Drive, Great Neck, NY. Then I went back to school for my senior year, graduated and finally rejoined them for good in January of 1970

The initial occupants of Terrace Drive were Albert, Donald (not yet Buck at this point), Les Braunstein, Andrew Winters, Allen Lanier and Richard Meltzer and his girlfriend Roni Hoffman. Over a period of a time, Richard and Roni left, and Eric Bloom joined the crew, and then Andrew Winters departed, to be replaced by Joe Bouchard.

The first time I lived there, between my junior and senior year in college was the summer of 1968. I would return again in January of 1970 and become a permanent member of the house until our time at 5 Terrace Drive would come to an end.

I just happened across your website, as I was reminiscing about my early days living in Great Neck, Long Island NY. I lived around the corner from The Soft White Underbelly on Terrace Drive.

I had gone over to the SWU house the same week that the Beatles White Album was released (I had just turned 11). I remember discussing the LP with members of the SWU, and listening to the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat LP (more specifically the cut "The Gift") there.

I remember looking at the SWU list of tunes to rehearse. The only one I recall was called "Bonomo Turkish Taffy".

And that's it!

Donald and Albert had bedrooms on the 2nd floor. Les had a live-in girlfriend and took the best room in the house which had it's own bathroom on the 2nd floor.

Les had an old beagle as I recall and the house was overrun with cats, at least 4.

On the main floor was the kitchen, a small non-working bathroom off the kitchen where the cats did their inside 'business', a dining room and a living room plus a glassed-in porch where Richard Meltzer lived with his girlfriend.

By this summer Wiesenthal had acided himself west (somewhere along the line Albert had got drafted and he took some acid when he went down and Wiesenthal stayed up with him telling him all about how important it was to save the world and so Albert went in with that line and they just sent him home so next time he hadda queer his way out of armed service) and Richards had graduated so all that was left was the basic band members so they moved to Great Neck.

Got one of them decaying mansion type places where F.Scott Fitzgerald mighta lived, bad pipes and bad wires and caved in ceilings for 300 a month or 4.

Les got there first when they moved in so him and his sweety Kippy (she used to cook a good pork butt) grabbed the biggest room, the only one that had its own bathroom (real sneaky fxxkers and everybody hated 'em for it on top of hating 'em already).

I'll never forget the first time we entered the place that would become the second "band house." It was a pretty and somewhat rundown Tudor-type house in an upper middle class neighborhood in Great Neck, N.Y. It sat on a nice piece of property, with a white stucco and beamed exterior and a large front porch.

You entered a small foyer that led to a large living room with lots of windows and a fireplace. The living room led to an enclosed porch that eventually became living quarters initially for Richard Meltzer and ultimately for Allen Lanier. The living room opened to a dining room and the kitchen was off the dining room to the back of the house.

There were three large bedrooms on the second floor and a balcony that faced the street. French doors allowed access to the balcony. The master bedroom was on that floor and had its own bath, and the other bedrooms shared a second bathroom. There were a couple of rooms on the third floor and the third floor became living quarters for one person. Andrew Winters lived there initially, and then Eric Bloom made it his home.

The basement, which became the band's rehearsal studio, was a dark place with low ceilings at the far end of the kitchen. The guys put up studs and attached insulation. The insulation ended up being a soot magnet, and the dark basement got even darker as time went on.

The initial occupants of Terrace Drive were Albert, Donald (not yet Buck at this point), Les Braunstein, Andrew Winters, Allen Lanier and Richard Meltzer and his girlfriend Roni Hoffman. Over a period of a time, Richard and Roni left, and Eric Bloom joined the crew, and then Andrew Winters departed, to be replaced by Joe Bouchard.

It didn't take long for this fairly typical suburban neighborhood to take on a distinctively different flavor. First of all, we didn't blend well into our surroundings. The fact that we were accepted so quickly was both heartwarming and surprising.

The area was upscale,and only 25-30 minutes to mid-town Manhattan by train. Any town that close to New York City, is by definition, a pretty expensive place to live. So, there we were, a bunch of hippies, with all the requisite accessories. . . beat up cars, an old van, several cats, lots of long hair, strange clothes and an odd assortment of visitors coming and going at all times of the day and night. We kept weird hours, and were weird. What can I tell you. If the collective "we" ever moved next door to the current collective "we," I'd be keeping my kids very close to home!

So, we divided up the bedrooms, attempted to make the place livable and functional, and settled into a scene the likes of which didn't resemble anything remotely normal or mainstream.

The music scene was starting to build its legacy then, and so was the band. And there we were, in the middle of it, experiencing life through a musical filter. Actually, at times it was more like a haze.

The first time I lived there, between my junior and senior year in college was the summer of 1968. I would return again in January of 1970 and become a permanent member of the house until our time at 5 Terrace Drive would come to an end.

The years between saw the coming and going of many people. Musicians, friends, visitors, and the occasional neighbor who would bring us food. I remember the day when a guy from across the street brought us some fish he'd just caught. He figured we "could probably use it." Of course we could.

The kitchen was interesting. We had no curtains and a window that looked out onto the driveway and the next door neighbor's house. I can't remember who decided to paint the window silver, but someone did. It was cheaper than any curtain or shade we could buy, and no one could be bothered. All I can say is, the paint provided us with all the privacy we'd ever need.

The kitchen was inhabited, actually ruled, by particularly vile cat named "Tiger". He was one of several cats residing in the house, two belonging to Les, "Frumius" and "Bandersnatch," and a tabby belonging to Andrew, "Captain Pissgums." Tiger was a stray we picked up in the neighborhood, whose tail was 'dead', probably as a result of a run-in with a car. He would sit in his lair to the side of the refrigerator on a pile of paper grocery bags. He would lurk and sometimes attack people who came too close, but mostly just sat there looking sullen and unapproachable.

The Tiger, who resembled "Churchill" from Stephen King's "Pet Sematary", contributed to the non-domestic atmosphere in that kitchen along with the occasional piece of French toast nailed to the wall above the stove, (a bra hung there for about a week once), and the unmistakable aroma of the chicken heart/chicken neck feast ("chicken necks, what the heck, why should I get out of bed for that") that Les Braunstein would make for the gang.

Hey, it was protein, it was cheap and it was plentiful. You could really fill up on these ucky little morsels smothered in Saucy Susan bottled barbecue sauce. We would generally descend upon the local Pathmark grocery store as a group once we'd scrounged together enough money to shop. I think the chicken parts cost something like 19 or 29 cents a pound.

We had 26 cats at one time in the GN house! Oh! the cat stories are epic.

During a long period of time, Helen (Wheels) Robbins lived with Albert in the second floor bedroom at the front of the house. I'll never forget when the "boys" left Helen and I alone while they went to record the so-called "California record" (currently known as "St. Cecelia").

It was winter and the house was a heat sieve. There wasn't a good window in the place. We were always needing oil delivery and the oil company didn't really trust us to pay our bills. They demanded payment at the time of delivery.

I can still see Helen and I standing in the kitchen, while the delivery guy...all gross and dressed in oily blue overalls, made us an offer he thought we couldn't refuse. Heating oil - in exchange for.... (excuse me while I laugh out loud)... some attention of the most personal kind.

We laughed long, we laughed in front of the guy, we laughed for years afterward. At the time and even though we were amused by his nerve and his incorrect assumptions about us, we quickly whipped out the required payment in cold hard cash. And he never came back.

When Albert called me up in the middle of the night in August of '70 asking me to join the band he said "you gotta come right away because we're opening a tour for Led Zeppelin!"

Of course I said I'll get there as soon as I finish my last production at the Vineyard Players. I was the musical director.

So I drove through the wickedest Labor Day traffic I've ever seen from Martha's Vineyard to Great Neck LI. I got to the house and I said I'm ready for Zeppelin.

The night promised to be both uncomfortable and way too hinky and kinky, so Donald and I decided to drive to Great Neck and return the next day.

We moved out of the GN house about a month before I married Denise which was in May 1971.

At that point we didn't have a band house but we had Phil King who was getting us regular paying gigs.

It no longer exists. However, you can go on my fb page or other sites and find a photo of me standing in front of it (it looks boarded up after a fire). I am holding a guitar in the photo. The photo has been used in several web pages.

Newsday.com or Newsday the newspaper took me there about a decade ago for a photo shoot and that was the best photo from that session and I've used it several times.

I moved into a housing project in Glen Oaks, Queens. And for a while everybody went their separate ways as far as living quarters.

"We were about to quit beause we were always running in the red. But we gave them a demo that had "Redeemed", "I'm on the Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep" and "Then Came The Last Days of May" - and they loved it.

"We used "Last Days of May", the demo version, on the first album because we couldn't improve on it.

Pearlman came up with the name Blue Oyster Cult from a song he'd written only a few days before the contract was signed.

We got the Dix Hills house after we got the Columbia contract and we needed a place to do some intensive rehearsal for the first record.

We'd started working on the first album songs in Great Neck and then wrote Cities in one day at Johnny Winter's loft in NYC. Steve Paul let us use it...

I believe that the band moved into the house at the end of summer, or maybe in the autumn of 1971. When I moved in - with my friend, Bruce Kapler (long time sax player on the David Letterman show), the band had just moved in. Eric had the master bedroom and was the "house manager". He basically dealt with the landlord, paid the bills, etc.

I was 19 and Bruce was 18. We knew Ken Berkman, the band's attorney. We were looking for a cheap place to live and Eric wanted to rent out the den on the first floor. Until that time, I had never met any of the band members.

Besides Eric, Allen and Patti Smith lived in a little room by the garage, but they were mostly in the city. Don (Buck) and Sandy had a room; Joe and Sarah had a room; and Albert and Denise had a room.

Don and Sandy moved out fairly quickly - as they found an apartment for themselves and Sandy had had it with living with everyone else.

There was almost no furniture in the house. The living room had a drum set and Hammond B3 organ in it, and that was it.

David is wrong about me living in the Dix Hills house: I never lived there. I was still in Queens the whole time.

The house in Dix Hills, (L.I.) New York was to be the last "band house" for the Soft White Underbelly. It was a large, sprawling ranch house that sat back from the road on about an acre or so of land. It was a typical, upscale place with large rooms on the main floor and an upstairs area with a couple of bedrooms over the garage.

I must admit that my memory of this place is not as clear as the others, since Buck and I lived in NYC's Greenwich Village for a summer and then moved into our own place in Huntington, NY after that.

It was the band rehearsal place, as well as the home for a number of different people including Eric Bloom, a couple of fine young fellows named David Ramage and Bruce Kapler (now the Sax player in the David Letterman Band), Joe Bouchard and Sara (soon-to-be-wife), and Phil (soon-to-be-dead) King.

The Dix Hills house was in Vanderbilt Parkway in Dix Hills NY. It was owned by the Viemeister family (not sure of the spelling). Peter Viemeister owned the house. I was the only band member living there, on the 2nd floor.

David Ramage and Bruce Kapler lived on the 1st floor as tenants. Later in life Bruce Kapler was the resident sax player in David Letterman's band on CBS Late Night for many years.

David later owned a book store in Huntington LI, became a family man and later on was an EMS technician in NYC.

Key to the Dix Hills story is our friend Phil King (Friedman) who was crashing there at the time of his death, but that's a longer story. The band rehearsed in the living room.

No one else lived in the house except briefly, Phil King moved in. He was basically a guest who the guys were too kind to throw out. He showed up and we couldn't get rid of him. Unfortunately for Phil, someone else took care of that one night.

On the night he was murdered, he had a girl staying with him - they were in Allen and Patti's room after they had permanently moved to Manhattan.

I can't remember the order of people moving out, although I think that Don and Sandy were first and then Allen and Patti. I left in the early summer of 1972 and Eric might have been the only one still living there.

Gawlik and Farcas, although they came over a couple of times, lived elsewhere.

A one-time amateur roadie for the band, Harry Farcas was also a folky-style guitarist, and helped write "Redeemed." Farcas is now an iridologist in Southern California.

08 May 1971:
Come to the first SB outdoor Spring Folk Festival G quad lawn 12 noon-6p.m.
Sat. May 8. Dave Spivack, Harry Farkas, Myra Dud & Cuticle, Toni, and John & Elliot. There will be an open mike from 4 p.m. on...

27 Oct 1972:
This Week in the STONY BROOK UNION:
Friday, October 27
RNH* - Evening: early, Harry Farkas; mid, Cathy Rotolo; late, Lorelei Allan.
* and every day at the Rainy Night House

22 Nov 1974:
The Golden Bear Cafe in O'Neill College features Andrew Winter (formerly of the Soft White Underbelly and Blue Oyster Cult), Harry Farkas (formerly of Santos Sisters) and David Roter at 10 p.m.

Bill Gawlik. He used to live in our band house. Drove a taxi in the city and had a machete underneath his seat. True.

Gawlik certainly never lived there when I did, so maybe he moved in after I left, I don't know.

And by the way, Phil didn't move in to help with the rent. He just showed up one day and we let him crash, and then couldn't get rid of him.

He never paid a dime and, in fact, ran up a huge bill on my phone (big for then and a 19 y/o making about $50 a week.)

Like I said, I left in the early summer of 1972. Phil's murder ruined the house for me. It was really isolated, the police didn't tell us what happened and I was alone (besides Phil's girlfriend, who left immediately after she was interviewed by the police).

The band was up in Rochester playing and I was, frankly, terrified. I didn't know who killed Phil or why, and I was afraid that they would come to the house.

Thankfully, Sandy (Nasci, not Pearlman), rescued me by letting me crash in her and Don's apartment until the band got back from their trip.

But, after that, I never felt comfortable there.

By the way, Bruce had left sometime after Christmas to go to Syracuse, NY.

One of the first big shows that BOC ever did was at Stony Brook University.

It was the Byrds, BOC, and Mahavishnu Orchestra. Besides Patti Smith, Richard Meltzer and Roni Hoffman were also there.

We drove in a caravan of vehicles to Stony Brook from the band house in Dix Hills.

Here's the tale of the incredible press release party that was held in the Dix Hills house.

There were many famous rock writers there, including Lillian Roxon who wrote a column called "Top Of The Pop" Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs. These folks, and a number of others, were bussed to the house from NYC for a night of schmoozing, music, potent brownies and a lot of merriment.

It was a glorious night for the band, who set up their instruments and played on the lawn directly behind the glass sliders to the kitchen.

It was a night when the sound they created and the songs they played was dubbed "the music of the spheres." It was the night that officially launched the start of a thirty year career.

And the rest, my friends, is rock and roll history.

It was after the first album was out, maybe as we were working on the second album.

It might have been the night Patti Smith gave me the lyrics to Vera Gemini which was close to my birthday, May 24th. That was quite a party.

We had a Hammond organ and Leslie in the living room. We might have played an early version of 7 Screaming Diz Busters.

I seem to recall that we played inside and the people listened on the lawn. Joe would probably have the most reliable memory.

Yes, the famous press party. It was wild. I thought we played in the living room of the house, but it might have been on the patio. I'm not sure.

There was a full sized bus parked in the driveway and bunch of press people. I don't remember specific names at that time, but everybody seemed to be having a grand time.

What I remember the most from the whole night was the band wanted to make a dramatic entrance. So Eric said let's all pile into my car, a souped-up Chevy Camaro.

So the five of us squeezed in his car and he gunned it across the lawn, making all kinds of noise. There was dip in the lawn and the car bottomed out on a small hill, but we kept going. Jumped out of the car and went right to the bandstand and played our usual manic set.

As far as the specific date goes I'm think spring of 72 is about right. It was after the first album was out and we were rehearsing what became the Tyranny album. I wrote Dizbusters and Hot Rails and Wings Wetted Down in that house.

"The Revenge Of Vera Gemini" was the first song that Patti Smith ever gave to me, for my 25th birthday, May 24, 1972. She gave me this lyric and said, 'This is for you.'

She actually gave it to me; we had a little birthday party for me at our band house in Dix Hills. We even had people from the record company come out, and we served them hash brownies. Everyone got so stoned. It was a total disaster.

So she gave it to me on my birthday and said 'This is for you, for your birthday. You should make it into a song. Chop it up, do whatever you want!'

And I said, 'Oh, is this about me?' And she said 'No, Bob Dylan has the same birthday as you.' And I said 'You're kidding.' I didn't know that at the time.

And she had actually written it about Bob Dylan, something about getting snubbed by him at a party. It was about how she was going to get her revenge. And so I wrote music to it, the next day, actually.

And I played it for Donald and he said, 'You got a lot of nerve, just stealing this song of Bob's, Positively Fourth Street.' And actually he didn't say it, he sang it, (singing like Bob Dylan) 'You've got a lot of nerve, to steal his song!'

Anyways, I said, 'Oh, sounds like that, huh?' Yep. So I went back to the drawing board, pulling it out every six months or so, trying to make it not sound like Positively Fourth Street. Anyways, it took me pretty much four years to write it!

I was there for that press party. It took place in that living room I was telling you about. It was packed! I don't recall when it was, but it was when I was living there.

If the party was to celebrate anything, it was probably the release of the album.

So that might help to pin point when it was.

Lester [Bangs] and I met in early 1971, right after he had moved from California to Walled Lake, Michigan, to work for Creem magazine. I was hacking out a living as a paste-up man for the Lovable Underwear Company at 200 Madison Avenue, and I was writing on the side. He called me one night and asked me to write for Creem.

By the time we encountered each another in the flesh, later that year at a party on Long Island for the Blue Oyster Cult, I was on the verge of quitting my job at the underwear company, which I did in January 1972.

Lester visited New York again in February and March of that year, and it was then that we began to get acquainted. We had a few things in common: Neither of us had college degrees to fall back on, and we were both drunks.

Lester Bangs: Jook Savages by Nick Tosches [1995]

I was at at the Cold Spring Harbor gig and I was also at one of the Rockpile shows.

Edgar Winter was also on the show and Paul Simon was standing next to me in the audience. He was with Columbia Records, as were Winter and BOC, so we thought he was checking out his new stable mate.

You are missing a show. They played at Wesleyan University in Middletown CT. It must have been in March because Phil King gave me a ride back. They played in the Student Union.

1277 was the number of a subway car I rode in with Bill Gawlik coming back from NYC after a jazz concert. And indeed it had "KING" sprayed in red paint on the inside of the train car. Graffiti was rampant in those days.

Pretty scary sight when Phil King had only been murdered only a few days before.

I did much more work here than with the other collaborative songs. I remember staying up most of the night reworking Sandy's lyrics. Just rearranging the order of things so they were more singable.

The next day I went down to the living room in our rented Dix Hills house and wrote most of the music on our Hammond B3 which was conveniently set up in the center of the room.

Albert and Donald made a few suggestions and developed the jam at the end, but this song is a lot of me. I always took heat for ripping off an Allman Brothers riff, but it came out cool in the end.

A lot has changed since we lived there. Because both of those Courts you can see on the map (Vandercrest and Pinnacle) were not there when we lived there, it is really hard to figure out where everything was.

The house was definitely a 2-story Ranch with the garage and driveway on the right from the front.

It was really rural there, with woods behind the house and a trail through to a wide cleared area for high tension power lines. The property was several acres and the house was quite large.

On the map - if you can see where the Dix Hills Park Fitness Trail hits Vanderbilt Parkway (County Road 67 on the map), I believe the house was right across from the Park entrance, although, in those days it was not a road like it is in the street view from the linked map.

Now go to "Street View" right in front of park road and look south. There are two adjacent driveways. Our house was the one on the left. You can't see the house because of the foliage and because the driveway is long.

The one on the right was owned by the landlord's parents.

The five members of the Blue Oyster Cult are working in Eaton's Neck on a song by drummer Albert Bouchard called "My Love Can Burn," and as usual Donald Roeser wants to play his guitar good."

... Most Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with no recording or performance scheduled, the Blue Oyster Cult convenes in a subleased, one-story ranch house in Eaton's Neck. Lead singer Eric Bloom, the group's only bachelor, occupies the headquarters.

Guitarist Donald Roeser (a/k/a Buck Dharma) lives in Melville and bassist Joe Bouchard (Albert's brother) in Centerport. Pearlman lives with his parents in Smithtown. Albert Bouchard has a longer trip, from Glen Oaks, in Queens. Allen Lanier does a reverse commute all the way from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he lives with poet Patti Smith.

You may recognize Patti Smith's name if you keep tabs on Esquire's Heavy 100. She made it this year, and so did Blue Oyster Cult: "The last underground band, but signed with Columbia so have probably gone legit. Bizarre critic R. Meltzer writes lyrics."

But if anybody in Eaton's Neck is aware of the semi-famous neighbors, the semi-famous neighbors don't want to know about it. The few inquisitive kids are not encouraged to come around, and the band protects surrounding ears and sensibilities by never practicing past 7pm.

In their pre-legit days, they knew everyone near the house in Great Neck where they lived and practiced. They also spent crumby weeks touring late into the night. Now they're family men, with salaried positions. It's a business. The business is taxing and not especially lucrative as yet, although they love it. But it is a business.

The Eaton's Neck house (can't recall the address): again I was the only band member living there. It was a 9 month rental.

The main highlight was a burglary while we were on tour and all my records and tapes along with a few instruments were stolen. I believe some kids broke a window, took stuff and ran. I lost a Fender Stratocaster and I think Joe lost a bass.

I wrote the licks to ME-262 and Subhuman on the old upright piano that came with the house.

"Astronomy" was written from scratch to fit Sandy's lyric. The "clock strikes 12" lyric was a later line in the poem that Sandy wrote. I moved it to the opening line for obvious reasons.

The melody came to me as I was walking on the beach near our house we rented on Eaton's Neck Long Island, NY.

I stayed in Eaton's Neck after Eric rented his house in Port Washington around the end of the rental period.

The white house is by a Long Island marina, right next to a boatyard full of dry-docked luxury yachts. It's a rare sunny day and the large second-floor living room, bare white-walled and shag-carpeted, is brightly lit. There's a pile of drums in one corner and the rest of the room is occupied by the Blue Oyster Cult.

That's another song where I got the lyrics from Sandy, and I felt pretty good about it. At that time, we moved our house again, out to Eaton's Neck (ed. a small cottage, rented for the writing of the album - Eaton's Neck is near Northport).

We were like 50 yards from the beach. And it's corny, but it's actually true: I used to walk down the beach, and one time walking down the beach, I started thinking up that melody. So it came from one of those rehearsals there.