“We had moved to San Francisco, so we were recording in L.A. It was shortly after their move out west that the band began recording Elephant Mountain, their third album and the effort that would bring them national attention. I took them into rehearsal the next day with The Youngbloods and my manager said, ‘What are you doing singing a song like that? You have this angry young man thing going on.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. So I rushed backstage and got the lyrics from Buzzy after introducing myself, and he was glad to give them to me. I knew that song was my path forward, not only as a musician, but as a human being. So I went down the stairs and I heard some music, and I thought ‘Damn, it must be an open mic or something like that.’ And for some reason, instead of turning around and going home, I went down the second flight of stairs and there was Buzzy Linhart and he was singing ‘Get Together,’ and just like in those movies about the Bible, the heavens opened and my life changed. We had to invent a band out of a bunch of folk players and a jazz drummer and a bass player who had all of three weeks under his belt. We needed to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. I was walking up Bleecker Street one Sunday, so I thought that if maybe the Au Go Go was dark, I could call the boys and maybe we could rehearse. “ The Youngbloods were playing at the Cafe Au Go Go for nine months, opening for whoever was there. “I had never heard any of the earlier versions,” Young says. “At one point, I took a summer off to play with my new band, and when I came back, I said, ‘I’m sorry, fellas but I can’t go back to The Youngbloods.’” The song, which was written by Chet Powers (famously known by his nom de plume Dino Valenti), was already a standard, having been performed by the Kingston Trio, a pre-Byrds David Crosby and the Jefferson Airplane by the time Young heard it sung by the late Buzzy Linhart in the basement of the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. Ironically, the song “Get Together” landed in their lap almost by pure happenstance. So we went home and packed up and moved out there.” And then we walked down the street to the Avalon Ballroom and there were 400 people in there instead of 40 like when we were playing in New York at all these little discotheques. When we played San Francisco for the very first time in 1967, when ‘Get Together’ came out, we checked into this little cheap hotel down the street from the Avalon Ballroom, and I remember throwing my bag down on the bed, turning on the radio, and there was ‘Get Together.’ Nobody had told us we had a local hit record. It was a very special time for human beings. We wanted to have some peace and to stay out of the war. “We were all brothers and sisters in our own discovery of this beauty and all these things we wanted to have. “We had some beautiful times, the times where the people were so into the music, they were part of the band,” Young recalls. Indeed, that relationship led to a success that started in the late ’60s and extended into the early ’70s. And we became fast friends, just playing on that porch.” The fella I was staying with had sold a joint to an undercover guy and got arrested, so I went to Corbitt’s place and I never stayed anywhere else after that while I was there. “He sent me a cryptic letter when I was playing at Club 47, and it said, ‘Don’t go home, come to my place.’ I barely knew him at the time. “We started playing together on his porch in Cambridge (Massachusetts),” Young remembers. It’s amazing, even though you have to keep taking them, trying different antibiotics. You’re taking these antibiotics and your symptoms disappear. Some damage may have been done to my memory, but that might be age. It’s still there, but I’m a different guy. So for the past year and half, I’ve had no symptoms and no active Lyme. So five or six years ago, I went on this regimen that he invented for his wife who had it. Horowitz, was looking for a cure using a combination of five or six antibiotics. If you have it for years like I did, you have chronic Lyme.
If you get on it immediately, you’ll probably be clear of it immediately. “Nowadays, if you get bitten, you should keep that tick and send it in, and then you’ll know within three days if you have Lyme disease and the other nasty stuff that comes along with it. “It wasn’t until the ’80s that they isolated it,” he explains. Young also says his struggles with the illness lingered over the course of 20 years, half when he was undiagnosed.
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