Mike McCoy and I started singing together in college just for fun. In 1968, that fun took us all the way to a sound stage in Los Angeles and our first big stage on national TV.
We met in our fraternity at the University of Washington. On a Saturday night a few of us were sitting around singing when Mike came to the door and added his voice, and we knew right away it was a voice we had to have. We serenaded the sororities, sang at the HUB Ballroom, and by spring of 1968 we were a quartet called The Morning Ride.
That spring we were chosen to represent the University of Washington on Your All-American College Show. We flew down to LA the day Robert Kennedy died, staying just a couple of blocks from the Ambassador Hotel. Four wide-eyed kids from Seattle in blue blazers and stage makeup, and at the end of the night they said, "And the winner is The Morning Ride."
A few weeks later we were back in LA for the semifinals, and in rehearsals we saw a young woman in a baseball cap and a cut-off sweatshirt, singing and playing drums. It was Karen Carpenter. We didn't make the finals, but a few months later I joined The Brothers Four, and the journey to make music became a whole lot more.
60 years later, it's still all about the music and the loving of the game.
