I met really good people in the dorm, guys who taught me things. One of them was a kid from Levittown on Long Island (which we all thought made him from New York City). His name was Jeff and he made quite an impression: he had the best stereo I’d ever seen and some black opiated hash that was the best stuff I’d ever smoked. I mean, the walls were melting. In high school I would sometimes smoke a joint on the the way to school, but that was weed from a less sophisticated place than New York: home-grown, flavorless, its greatest impact a headache. It was Columbus weed!

This Jeff from Levittown remained a friend long after the dorm. He went right from the Broadcasting Department at the College Conservatory of Music to a job at Cincinnati's public radio station—WGUC—and quickly made a name for himself. I asked him to come in and be one of the producers when my band recorded a 45 in 1978. He was an intense guy who got married three times. He died of a heart attack a few years after he’d gone to work at another classical station, this one in Texas.

The dorm was a crazy place to live in the early 70s; to say drugs were rife would seriously understate what was going on. There was a fellow from another dorm who would arrive with a suitcase of pharmaceuticals and organics. Truck-driver speed, small white amphetamine tablets marked with a white cross, were consumed by the handful. I saw my first acid casualties and first meth addicts. I started smoking pot when I was 16 but it didn't become a daily thing until my first semester in French Hall.

Meddle was the album du jour. The first cut on Side 1 is an extended track (5:56) called One of These Days. At about the five-minute mark, in a flurry of echo and extremely heavy guitar and drum, a strangled voice almost buried in the mix calls out One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces! This is perfectly designed to freak the shit out of anyone listening under the influence of psychedelics. There was a malevolence to Floyd; this wasn't four lads from Liverpool. We all knew Syd Barrett, the guy who founded the band, was an acid casualty; my roommate and I both had his two solo albums.

On April 23 Pink Floyd played in Cincinnati's acoustically superb Music Hall. They mixed the concert in four-channel, so those long searing guitar slides from David Jon Gilmour (CBE) would travel not just from left to right, but also from the back of the auditorium directly through your head to the stage. At one point I stepped out for a bathroom break and in the hallway outside found many tripping fans, heads in hands and crying; they’d taken and/or heard more than they could handle.

It's difficult to read but here's my transcription:

Dear Fellow Frenchians,

There has been a marked continuance of drug use on our floor. Word of the this has spread throughout campus and we are known as the "drug floor." Unfortunately, this title has leaked out to the Campus Police and other officials who are quite disturbed!

As of this writing I want to notify everyone who uses drugs to be aware of the consequences. There may be police roaming the halls, and a bust means expulsion from school and possibly a jail sentence.

The RA was a nice fellow who knew exactly how much influence he had with the drug floor. I'm sure someone in administration had a talk with him. I don't recall ever seeing the police in the dorm. I know no one modified their behavior. Later, several of my friends did get in some serious legal difficulties when police seized a kilo of pot hidden in their basement. Fortunately the search warrant was botched and the case later thrown out, but not before some serious worry.

At the end of the school year everyone I knew moved out of the dorm and into off-campus housing. I headed back to Columbus to live with my parents, which in retrospect was a poor decision. I decided not to go back to UC. I was sick of college, sick of being poor, and sick of not having a good stereo like Jeff’s. I applied for the autumn semester at OSU. I was confused and had no idea what I wanted except for the stereo.

On February 1st a chill wind blew through the dorm rooms of French Hall. The following morning somebody in Washington DC was going to pull three-hundred and sixty-five birthdays out of a bowl and maybe disintegrate your comfortable suburban existence. Each birthday was assigned a number based on the random draw. If the number lay between one and eighteen you had better make your plans, otherwise you were going to be fighting in Nixon’s war (formerly Johnson’s). College deferments no longer existed and only the number mattered.

It was one of the few nights I can recall where the drug use centered on alcohol. Someone had snagged some liquor; orange juice and soda were available as mixers. We just didn’t want to think about it. In the morning I awoke from my hangover to radios up and down the hallway broadcasting the birthdays and the numbers. I heard my birth date and froze solid in the bed. The announcer was fumbling—“3, that’s uh, 3-4-0.” One three-digit number and no boot camp, no sergeants, no army, no death in the jungle. Or alternatively, no bus ride to Toronto.

My great-aunt Ellen sent me a sweet letter to congratulate.

Most of decrepit French Hall housed students from the College-Conservatory of Music, the music school that existed even before the University. I was a student at the CCM, too, but in a smaller department devoted to broadcasting and musical theater. Some of my best friends were members of various student ensembles; for the first time in my life I heard a lot of classical music. Most of the young string players were obssessed with occassionally atonal modern pieces and I heard a lot of Berio and Webern and Stockhausen (and Pink Floyd).

As CCM students we got free tickets to see the LaSalle Quartet, artists who recorded for Deutsche-Grammaphone and used the school as their home base. They all taught there. I remember watching them play a late Beethoven String Quartet, complex and beautiful music. I've been fond of string quartets ever since, and often prefer chamber music to large symphonic pieces.

I’m not returning to the University of Cincinnati in the fall and I've convinced myself this is a good idea. It’s summer in Columbus. I move back in with my parents after a year in the drug dorm. I work in an office downtown in a file room, a job my father arranged for me with a probate judge. I work with two die-hard Republicans, older men, not far from retirement. There is a huge contrast between me and the men I’m working with. When they go home for the weekend, apparently—this is from their discussions—they put in a lot of lawnmower time. I don’t do that; I take acid in a shed behind a friend’s house and listen to Yes LPs.

I enroll back into college at OSU, taking Intro to Fiction, Geology, and Philosophy. I went to one Fiction class, in an auditorium with a couple hundred people. Class sizes in Cincinnati are considerably smaller, and I question what it is that I’m going to get out of this class. I never attend another. I just drift away. At the end of the semester that rarest of honors, a 0.0 average. My parents know none of this.

I pick up Sandy but stop at the house for a minute. I stand with her in the family living room and my father is hassling me about staying out late. “What do you do after three in the morning?” he asks. (Are parents trained to give setup lines like this? I feel like I'm in an Abbot and Costello routine.) “None of your business,” I reply, cool as ice. None of this is real; I'm in a movie. “Out!” he replies, “out of my house.” I leave with Sandy and never live there again.

I picked up a Japanese knock-off of a Lieca at a junk shop and started taking my first 35mm pictures. I started with TriX and never found a film stock I liked better. I took shots of Binder (also a nacent papparazzi and a natural model) around the older three-story house where I lived with a diverse group of high school alumni. The house was just around the corner from Larry's, a venerable OSU watering hole, where I was happiest with my new housemates around a pitcher of beer. They became very unhappy with me after a few months and kicked me out; I'm not sure how I alienated them. I am sure there were good reasons.

Another trip to Fogarty's cabin near Baker's Mills, NY. Beard: Jeff; tie-dye: Fogarty; glasses, long straight hair: Fogarty's sister Kathy; cigarette: ME. Others and photographer unknown. I smoked cigarettes from around 1970 until the end of college in '76, usually Camels without the filter; I felt they had more authenticity. I was a two-pack-a-day man. I got a headache immediately every morning right after I lit up and went to bed every night with a mouth full of ashes. I stopped when I realized I couldn't breathe very well at the top of a flight or two of stairs.

One of the last pictures taken inside the three-story. I loved taking pictures of pretty people and Sandy was one of my favorites; she always insisted on taking a few of me at the same time. We weren't boyfriend/girlfriend anymore; we'd only had that status for a few months into my freshman year at UC. We were still hanging out and becoming friends. I wore the crucifix around my neck for years as an ironic gesture only dimly understood. I still have a fetish for Catholic religious gear.

This was one of the first images taken in my bedroom on 19th Avenue. After I was kicked out of the three-story I moved into a junky duplex with CB, Jack, and Jack's dog. They worked with me at an Arby's at Lane and High just off the OSU campus. I remember mopping the floor there while "Reeling in the Years" played on a radio. The Lord of the Rings mural—based on the ubiquitous paperback edition—was painted by a previous tenant.

The shower at this place was an exposed pipe hanging off a beam in the basement. I had my first experience of cockroach infestations. OSU off-campus housing remains pitiful to this day, and we three young men made it as disgusting as we could.

I bought a '62 Stratocaster for $200 from a guy I worked with at Arby's. According to the date stamped on the neck, it came off the line on November 2, 1963, twenty days before Kennedy was shot. I played it for years, though it hasn't come out of its case recently. I developed a special love for that instrument, and it would be the first possession I'd grab in a fire.

Jeff was my first actual friend, and it took a change of schools and neighborhoods to find him. A gregarious kid named Sean who lived two doors down introduced us; Jeff had a model train set in his basement and I was fascinated. He sold me my first two Beatle singles when we were thirteen, picture sleeve copies of Paperback Writer b/w Rain and Yellow Submarine b/w Eleanor Rigby. Music was all.

Now it was 1972 and like me, Jeff took a year or two off from college. He joined a busy touring band called Pear and I've posted a Columbus newspaper photo of the outfit. The date at the top-right looks like my mother's handwriting.

My friend Bob also took up guitar in a local act that I remember playing long term gigs at OSU lounges. Bob is on the far right in the picture. In high school Jeff, Bob, and I had played together in a small combo called the Crane Mountain Backsteppers; we played local 60s-style coffee shops doing accoustic folk and folk rock covers. Interesting that we all had bands later. Bob was the original bassist for The Ed Davis Band in '77-78, then took over on guitar when Byron moved to NYC.

An image taken during another Adirondack venture that I can barely remember. I know we went in the early fall and I think it was just Sandy, Fogarty, and myself. I have no record of anyone else. This pic is adjacent to one of my only memories from the trip and a disturbing one. Coming down from Crane Mountain we lost the trail; with sundown approaching we had to make a short jump onto a mossy rock to get over to a path where we could go down again. Unfortunately that mossy, slippery rock—only a couple of inches wide—was hanging over a cliff.

It kept getting darker and there was no way we could reverse our steps and make it back to the trail before dark. The tops of the trees at the bottom of the drop were all around us. Fogarty and Sandy were already across when I panicked; I couldn't bring myself to make the jump. I was holding all of us up and, like everyone, having horrible thoughts about a night on the mountain. After about five minutes I made myself jump.