I had been working in a band called The New Yorkers out of Portland. (After I left that group they rebranded themselves as The Hudson Brothers, which they were. Bill Hudson later married Goldie Hawn and they had a daughter named Kate - the actress.) Anyway, as The New Yorkers, we were signed to Jerden Records out of Seattle, owned by Jerry Dennon. Jerry, as I mentioned above, was a partner with the Brothers Four in a radio station. I was doing some side work for Jerry, recording radio commercials, and he called one day and asked if I'd like to audition for The Brothers Four. Two weeks later I was on stage with the group at the Princess Hotel in Bermuda. My life kept going uphill from there.
As an intersting coincidence, when I met Mark Pearson, the guy I replaced in The Brothers Four, we discovered that we'd been in a band together as kids. We both took banjo lessons from Dutch Groshoff in Spokane when were young. Dutch had his best students play in a banjo band, and we were in that band together when we were about 10 years old. I didn't really know him at the time, but we've since become good friends. Mark replaced me in The Brothers Four when I joined The Kingston Trio. Folk groups tend to be very incestuous. Another example - Bill Zorn and Rick Dougherty, current members of The Kingston Trio, were previously members of The Limeliters. And when I first met Bill he was in The New Christie Minstrels.
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