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Harold Orenstein

Harold Orenstein was my friend, mentor, and music attorney. He represented just about everyone at one time or another, which is a topic we will touch on in future stories. He had a weekend house on a lake in Dutchess County and would take the train Friday afternoons from his office, which was right across from The Russian Tea Room (which is another story) in Manhattan, to upstate N.Y. where he had his car parked in someone’s one-car garage. The car was an Oldsmobile Delta 88 station wagon with fake wood sides and glass ceilings that came from a dealer in Harlem. When I eventually asked him “You bought this in Harlem?” he said “No, it was given to me” (it happened to be given to him by a great soul singer named Jackie Wilson for all the nice work Harold had done for him...this is yet another story). So, I dubbed that car as “The Jackie Wilson Mobile.”

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Encounters with Allen Collins

The Southern Drawl Band (SDB) was booked to open for the Allen Collins Band (ACB) in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. one evening. The ACB was (essentially) Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rossington Collins (minus Gary Rossington)...pretty much all the remaining original members of Skynyrd. So, Southern Drawl Band’s management created a promotion ad for the show: a full-page ad in a music publication named Music Machine Magazine.

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The Southern Drawl U.F.O. Flap

It was a concert show with fine dining and night skiing. The band was all set up, and the sound checks were in place. We were set to go on around 9:30pm (I believe), so before the show, the band’s road manager Mike Morris gave me a lift home to take a shower (I lived right up the road from Mt. Storm). Upon arriving home, we saw this gigantic floating aircraft with multicolored lights floating stationary and motionless in the sky.

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