Underground News in New York City

Chuck Collins, host of Chicago's Underground News in the '70s asked me with a smile, “How would you like to come with Howie and me to New York City to interview John Lennon?”

I had nothing better to do, so I said yes. Doing a show in New York with Chuck, Howie Samuelsohn and the regular Underground News entourage sounded like fun. After all, it was 1974.

In order to interview John and Yoko, you had to run the gauntlet of their close friends, Troubadour David Peel and writer A.J. Weberman amongst them. Peel is known for playing his guitar in Washington Square Park and improvising topical songs like Have a Marijuana and John and Yoko in New York City, and Weberman‘s fame was made from his Rolling Stone articles about Bob Dylan’s garbage.

The first thing we did when we arrived in NYC is settled in on the fifth floor of the Chelsea Hotel. My next-door neighbor, as I recall, was a very sweet brunette; a dreamy young hooker wearing a blue diaphanous baby doll pajama set day and night. Other neighbors I saw in the elevator numbered the Andy Warhol star, Viva, and Clifford Irving, author of the Howard Hughes hoax biography, and his wife Edith Sommer.