CORRECTION: I've corrected a couple of details of my introduction to Alan Merrill's piece, following information from him. He also just sent me the story behind the writing of his best-known song, which I will publish tomorrow.

As promised, today's feature is a fresh story about a Dawn Patrol fave: the Left Banke. Alan Merrill, who is currrently writing his memoirs, has generously agreed to share his recollections of auditioning for the legendary Sixties pop group.

Now, even if you're not into Sixties pop—if you've found this site through WMCA DJ Kevin McCullough (who featured a recent Dawn Patrol entry on sexual purity on his show yesterday)—there's a good reason to read Alan's story. It shows how, when we fail to attain something that we want very badly, God may have yet have prepared something far better for us.

Alan ends his story on a note of victory: After being rejected for a job that he wanted more than anything—membership in a successful rock band—he achieved success on his own, at a time when that band had broken up. But what he doesn't tell you is his even greater success, nearly 10 years after the Left Banke's rejection, when his song "I Love Rock N' Roll" became a massive worldwide hit for Joan Jett.

After over a decade of playing music, two days of songwriting changed his life forever. That song is like a child that will keep providing for him when he reaches his old age—especially if it keeps getting covered by megastars like Britney Spears (who did it on her 2001 smash Britney). And there's no telling if he'd have written it had he joined the Left Banke.

Alan's experience reminds me of all the times during the recent two-and-a-half years when I was seeking a full-time job, when I came so close to getting a job I really wanted, only to have it fall through. My faith was sorely tested then. It would seem like it was God's will for me to get a certain job; everything was falling into place. Then my boss-to-be would be hospitalized with brain cancer, or the paleoconservative editor of the magazine where I applied would tell me I had the wrong position on immigration, or I'd get my dream job doing publicity for World Trade Center oldies concerts and...you get the idea.

There were times when I felt stupid for thinking, "Well, maybe God has something better for me..." And there were many times when I would look at friends who had been out of work longer than me—who had been unemployed so long that they were practically unemployable, in need of job rehabilitation—and wonder if I would share their fate.

But when I look back at that period of my life, even though I know that the days went by at a snail's pace, in retrospect it seems to have gone past in a blink of an eye. I wouldn't want to go through those experiences again and yet, I understand now what I wouldn't have known then—that my life is so much the better for not having gotten what I wanted at the time I wanted it and in the way I wanted it.

James says, "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts." Our lusts are temporary. Our needs are eternal. God won't necessarily grant the former, but He will certainly grant the latter in the fullness of time. The key to happiness is having the wisdom to discern the difference, as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his original, unabridged Serenity Prayer: "...Living one day at a time/Enjoying one moment at a time,/Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,/Taking, as Jesus did,/This sinful world as it is,/Not as I would have it,/Trusting that You will make all things right,/If I surrender to Your will,/So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,/And supremely happy with You forever in the next."

So, when making choices, look for the sign that point "One Way"...

The Left Banke. Well, I auditioned for the band in spring 1968, with a cattle call of about 50 people with guitars in hand. I found out about it in a Village Voice ad, as it happens! It came down to two guys at the end of the auditions, Bob (then Robbie) Kulick and myself (pictured at left). Ironically Bob and I would play in the Meat Loaf lineup together years later, from 1986 to 1989.

The ad copy for the Left Banke auditions is probably still in the Village Voice archives. It would have been placed in the paper around the same week that the group's single "Dark Is The Bark" was released, somewhere in the early months of 1968.

The Left Banke's managers, Rubenstein and Ottenger, and [bass player] Tom Finn and [drummer] George Cameron picked me out of the bunch at a tiny midtown rehearsal room, and I was so happy. I had the edge over Kulick because I could sing harmony, essential to the Left Banke sound. I can remember Tom Finn throwing me a one-note vocal part on their massive hit, "Walk Away Renee." We did it in the key of A and my note was E, a drone all the way through the chorus.

Afterwards, I went to give a lesson to my guitar student Tony Sales [son of Soupy] that day after the audition, and he was sitting on the bed in his room with his girlfriend Nancy Allen when I got there. They were both very happy for me.

At the time, the Left Banke were still a famous band. It was a rather big
deal. What the band and the management didn't tell me was that they
actually hadn't decided whether or not to fire the current guitarist Rick Brand. Ah, the intrigue!

They never told me Rick hadn't been fired. They did tell me he was [allegedly] going to jail for pot possession and they needed to replace him. This was a half-truth, I would learn later. I rehearsed with Tom Finn at the Bryant Hotel and straightaway learned their current single, "Dark Is the Bark" and "My Friend Today." In a few days, I knew the group's entire first album and a few newer things written by Tom Feher that had been tailored for the band.

[Lead singer] Steve Martin [not the comedian] was distant all the time. He seemed a snob, very good-looking and self assured. He had a great voice, I knew that, and he had all the confidence to go with it.

I was never quite told that I didn't have the Left Banke job, but never
told that I did either. In fact, there was no real "job." No money ever changed hands. It was really just a series of free rehearsals I did with them at the Bryant Hotel.

Then I was told that manager Rubenstein was being drafted in to the army. This was factual as far as I know. He was truly being drafted into the army. The real truth was it was pure chaos.

The managers were simply not managing. I got close enough to the Left
Banke in those few short weeks to understand how a band so talented and gifted could be stalled and stagnant. It was a mess, top to bottom. The whole bunch of them, mad as canaries.

I went up to the office and wanted answers. When I got there Rick Brand was standing there talking to Billy Ottenger, one of the managers. He was talking as if he were still in the band. I waited a while, listening to the conversation, and then realized I had been "played."

I was furious. I stormed out of the offices and gathered my composure. I didn't want to make a scene in front of Brand. I realized then and there that he didn't know that auditions had taken place to remove him from the group. I then called Ottenger from my home and asked him what he was playing at. He lamely told me the band was breaking up. He said he was sorry. That was the end of it.

The Left Banke mess is clear to me now as a case of the blind leading blind, but at 17 years of age I was pretty upset at them playing with me like a cat plays with catnip. I didn't know that they were all quite insane. To me they were successful, so I thought they must be professional. That was not the case, at least in their dealings with me.

They never replaced Brand, carrying on to do the 1968 release Left Banke Too essentially as a vocal trio augmented in the studio by session players. The album is a really fine work, but it was the last really significant musical work they'd do as a band.

In the end, I got so disgusted with the Left Banke that I decided to leave New York entirely in the summer of '68 and join my mom (she had remarried a UPI senior vice president based in Tokyo) who had been residing in Japan already for about a year.

It was a decision that would change my life in a very positive way. I had been living on my own in New York at 41 West 72nd Street [near Central Park and the famed Dakota], enjoying the freedom that any teen would with my own place, paid for, with no parental restrictions. Still, the Left Banke experience was the last straw. I had to get away, far away. Japan seeemed just about far enough. New York suddenly looked gray and held no promise, at least in my teen-angst mindset.

By the winter of 1968, I had formed a band in Japan called the Lead, and we had a chart hit single, "Aoi Bara (Blue Rose)" on RCA Victor records. By mid-1969, I went solo and had a successful run as a Japan-based, domestic-market pop star. I had left the Left Banke situation behind me, and buried my anger about what had happened.

About two or three years later, I went to Tom and Margaret Finn's newly
opened Ice Cream Parlor on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Finn had
become the proprietor of a popular and trendy place. I was on holiday from my work in Japan, visiting relatives and friends in New York.

Finn's then-wife Margaret greeted me warmly, remembering me from my rehearsals with Finn at the Bryant a few years prior. Finn however looked down his nose at me with flip arrogance and said, nearly sneering, "I thought you went to Japan."

I replied "I did, I'm signed as a solo artist to Atlantic Records there."

He looked shocked and speechless. I was pleased.