After I graduated from Hackensack Middle School in the summer of 1972, my father arranged to send me and my mother to the French Riviera for three weeks. I was very excited about the trip, because the English music papers said that T. Rex would be touring France at the same time we would be vacationing there. We checked into a hotel in Nice, and I hit the ground running trying to buy tickets to the show. This wasn’t easy, to say the least. First, I had to search all over town for the billboards that concert promoters in France traditionally plastered on the sides of buildings back in those days to advertise upcoming shows. Failing this, I located a ticket agency where no one spoke any English. With the aid of a bi-lingual dictionary no bigger than my thumb, I managed to communicate my desire for T. Rex tickets, but no one knew anything about the show; it was so frustrating!

The next day, my mother and I were told that a serious mistake had been made in our hotel reservations, and that we would have to check out after three days, not three weeks! This was mid-August, the absolute height of the French tourist season, and we were asked to leave although we had nowhere else to stay. We first cruised around Nice, stopping at the Hotel Negresco (which you can clearly see in Elton John’s video for "I’m Still Standing"), then searched day and night for lodging in other cities like Saint Tropez (the Hotel Byblos, where Mick Jagger stayed, wouldn’t take us, either). My mother spent hours driving up and down dangerous highways such as the Grand Corniche (which, I believe, was the same road that claimed the life of Princess Grace of Monaco), until we finally gave up and decided to return to the United States. I remember waiting for a flight at the Nice airport, when I caught sight of an intriguing-looking group of four people walking past me. I was sick, tired and jet-lagged, but something told me that what I was seeing was none other than Maureen and Ringo Starr, together with June and Marc Bolan! I tried to catch up to them, but the four people disappeared down an escalator heading the opposite direction, and to this day, I’ll never be 100% sure if it was them or not. Stranger things have happened, though!

We finally got back to New York, and much to my mother’s annoyance, I started to get a second burst of energy as soon as the plane landed (I had been quite ill during the first part of the trip, so that wrecked her plans to stay in another part of France for the rest of the original three weeks; she never let me forget this for the rest of her days). The morning after we returned to Hackensack, I slipped out of the house to the newsstand while my mother slept, and purchased the latest British music papers. To my astonishment, I learned that those French tour dates had actually been canceled, and instead a tour of the United States had been scheduled, with dates planned for both New York City and nearby Passaic, New Jersey! This information gave me the inside track on the September 14, 1972 show at the Academy of Music in Manhattan as well as the September 16, 1972 concert at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, and by that evening, I was the proud owner of tickets to both these shows that were almost front-row center, just as I had vowed to be that night in the balcony at Carnegie Hall! One promise down, and one to go...