On July 5th, 1967, I went to the Rheingold Music Festival in Central Park to see the Young Rascals. It was not a festival as we use that term today. The Rheingold Festival was a series of under-the-stars concerts held over the summer in the park’s Wollman skating rink, which had room for perhaps seven thousand fans. Among the other artists who appeared on that stage that summer were Leonard Cohen and Louis Armstrong. In other years, I saw Jeff Beck, Joni Mitchell, the Band, the Byrds and Van Morrison, among many other artists there. Performers did two shows a night, one at 8:00 and one at 10:30. Tickets were a dollar.

In the summer of 1967, the Rascals were on a roll. Their single “Groovin’,” released in April, had hit number one, and two days before the Central Park shows a catchy new single titled “A Girl Like You” had come out. It too would crack the Top 10.

I had just turned 16, and I was an avid music fan. For a New York kid like me, the Rascals, who formed in New Jersey, were a local band. That three of them, like me, were Italian-American (make no doubt about it — their names were Felix Cavaliere, Dino Danelli and Eddie Brigati) also counted for something. In that regard, though their music was much different, they provided a cultural link back to the Italian-American vocal groups that had dominated the charts and my musical attention when I first started paying attention to the sounds around me. A number of my friends, all Italian-Americans, still were loyal to those groups and that sound. Some of them were with me on this night.

Before I go any further, let me say that the Rascals, who recently reunited for a run of shows after years of acrimony, were a great band. Like so many Italian-American musicians, they were obsessed with black music, and even their most radio-friendly hits rested on irresistible R&B grooves. Dino Danelli, is, quite simply, one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock & roll, a master of rhythmic invention but always deferring to the needs of the song — no cleverness or showing off. Cavaliere is a soulful singer, able to combine grit with a seductive sweetness, and he and Brigati, who also sang, were a deft songwriting team. Together, they are in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rascals, deservedly, are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were no slouches.

The Young Rascals, 1965 Photo by GAB Archive | Redferns | Getty

But 1967 was the Summer of Love, and things were changing fast. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had come out in May, and the world had seemed to transform from black-and-white into Technicolor. The Monterey Pop Festival had been staged in June, ushering in a new age of popular music. Psychedelia was moving into the mainstream.

When I had begun smoking weed the year before, it was still a forbidden activity, yet another illicit act I indulged with my hoodlum friends, a number of whom would soon find their way to reform school or, far worse, crippling heroin addiction or early death. But now marijuana and a new substance called LSD were being touted as means of self-discovery, roads of excess, in Blakean terms, that would lead to the Palace of Wisdom.

I was still a kid, and was trying to figure all this out. I was fortunate enough to live in Greenwich Village, right on Bleecker Street, in fact. Even if I was part of the Italian thug element of the Village, all the more progressive currents of what was going on at that time were available to me as soon as I walked out the front door of my building. Smart bookstores and hip record stores abounded, and newsstands stocked cool teen magazines from England, including one I particularly liked called Rave. The offices of the Village Voice, then on Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue, were right around the corner. Much of all that was alien territory to me still, but I could see it, evaluate it and make my way into it, to whatever degree I wanted to, at my own pace.

The Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, 1965 | Photo by Don Paulsen | Michael Ochs Archives | Getty Images

All this to say that, even though I was barely 16, going to see the Rascals felt a bit like a step backwards to me. Though they no longer wore matching outfits, they had started out doing so — short pants and pouffy shirts that made them look like characters from The Little Rascals TV show that I had grown up watching. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were a guilty pleasure for me — that would have been far too sophisticated a concept. But I was much more gripped by the direction things were heading in than by anything the Rascals represented.

So I was surprised when my friends and I arrived in Central Park, and I noticed how much hipper some of the people hanging around in the park outside Wollman Skating Rink before the show looked. They were older — meaning, in their twenties — and they had long hair. They looked like the guys who frequented the cool record stores along Bleecker Street that I would visit after school, still wearing the jacket and tie my loathsome Catholic high school enforced.

These guys were not like the other adults sprinkled among the crowd, who were primarily conventional moms good-naturedly taking their kids to see the Young Rascals. Taking in the scene, I got that feeling that seemed to come over me so often back then. Something was up, and I didn’t yet know what it was. What I did know was that the people I was looking at were not there to see the Young Rascals.