These are photos taken in 1965 of my high school band, The Housemen.
(click on a photo to see a larger version)
 Photo ©1965 Flip McCarthy |
That's me at 17, playing bass guitar and singing, with Carl Peachman on drums.Carl passed away from lung cancer last year at the age of 55. I'll always miss him. He was a brilliant drummer and one of the most wonderfully strange, funny, delightful people I ever knew.For musical instrument mavens, I'm playing a '64 Gibson EB-0 bass, for which I foolishly traded a '64 Fender Precision bass. The Gibson had a shorter neck that suited my playing style at the time, but I wish I could get that P-bass back. We all saved money from our early gigs and bought better guitars, amps, drums, and P.A. systems as we went along. |
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John
Houseman, lead guitar, on the left, Alec Hirschfeld,
rhythm guitar on the right. Alec was our third
rhythm guitarist and our most polished.The band was named The Housemen as a
tribute to John, who started the whole thing and taught
me to play bass, and later guitar, for which I'll always be in
his debt. |
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 Photo ©1965 Flip McCarthy |
Alec Hirschfeld with his Fender Jazzmaster guitar, and Carl Peachman on drums. |
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After seeing The Beatles in "A Hard Day's Night" we all went out and bought Beatle boots with Cuban heels. The teachers at Hasting High School feared for our souls. |
 Photo ©1965 Flip McCarthy |
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 Photo ©1965 Flip McCarthy |
John Houseman with his spanking new Gretsch Tennesseean guitar. In 2003, John writes, "I think I paid $250 for it, with a deluxe, hard shell case. The Country Gentleman was about $400 — too much for those days. Who'd a thunk they'd be fetching today's prices. If we had hung on to those old instruments, instead of selling them at half price to come up with a down payment for the next one, we could retire. I traded that Gretsch with 100 bucks for a [Fender] Esquire, which was just a wood block with only one pick up." The Country Gentleman John refers to was the guitar George Harrison had just made famous. An early '60s Fender Esquire in good condition costs about $6,000-$9,000 today. As well as being a wonderful artist, John still plays a terrifically mean guitar. |
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Carl Peachman, who was starting to grow his hair like Ringo. You can't see, but he's playing Ludwig drums, the kind Ringo played. |
 Photo ©1965 Flip McCarthy |
The pictures below were taken some time in the spring of 1965.In 2002, our drummer, Carl Peachman, passed away from lung cancer. His sister, Carol Boylan, was going through his possessions, found some color negatives, and very kindly sent them to me. I had them developed and was transported back to the spring I graduated from high school. The photos were taken in and around Hastings-on-Hudson, my home town just outside the New York city limits. Some were taken at the train station and most of the interiors were done inside Hastings High School. |
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 From left: Alec Hirschfeld (rhythm guitar), Carl Peachman (drums), John Houseman (lead guitar), SC (bass guitar). |
This one was taken in my basement on Floral Drive, where we usually practiced. By chance, I was back in this basement in the summer of 2003, when I travelled back to Hastings to deliver the commencement address at my alma mater, Hasting High School, in late June. My Mom and I drove around our old neighborhood that afternoon and decided to knock on the door of our old house. The man who had bought the house from my parents in 1971 was still living there, and he very generously invited us in. He told me to feel free to wander around, and I was amazed that much of the place had changed very little. I opened the door to the basement, went down, and, to my utter astonishment, it hadn't changed---at all! Not one bit. No paint job, no remodeling of any kind. There were several rooms down there. This room looked precisely the same, minus the album covers on the walls. It was surreal. But also kind of wonderful---as if no time had passed since my family first moved there in 1956. |
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This one has an interesting footnote: it was taken on the waiting platform for the city-bound train. On the right, you can see part of a poster for "The Sound of Music" and you can even make out Julie Andrews' name. If anyone had told me the day this picture was taken in 1965, that twenty-nine years later I would play Julie's husband in Stephen Sondheim's "Putting It Together" in New York, I would have declared them insane. I had more hair then. I don't think any of us read music, except maybe Carl, who had studied drums his whole life. He was an incredibly shy, quiet guy who played in the high school orchestra and band, but he really came out of his shell when he joined The Housemen. He loved to play and he was GOOD. That's Carl on the right here. Note that we're all wearing Beatle boots except Alec, who lived in New York City and wasn't with us the day we bought our boots in Yonkers, next to Hastings. After getting our boots, we went to see 'A Hard Day's Night' and left the theatre jumping around as though we were somehow in that wonderful movie and the cameras were rolling and capturing every move we were making. We wanted to BE the Beatles.
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 From left: SC, Alec Hirschfeld, John Houseman, Carl Peachman. |
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 From top left: Carl Peachman, John Houseman, SC, Alec Hirschfeld (under stool). |
 From left: Carl Peachman, SC, John Houseman, Alec Hirschfeld. |
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 From left: Alec Hirschfeld, John Houseman, Carl Peachman, SC. |
 From top left: SC, Alec Hirschfeld, John Houseman, Carl Peachman (front). |
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Carl Peachman's Slingerland drum set, shown here as a sort of memorial to him. Soon after this, he got a set of Ludwigs, just like the ones that Ringo played (see above). |
