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In 1968, the duo found cheap digs in pre-gentrification Brooklyn, on President Street in Park Slope, where they sat around on ancient, shabby couches and plotted their assault on the music business. When classmate Terence (Boona) Boylan scored an album contract with Columbia Records, he asked the boys to join his session band at Jerry Ragovoy’s midtown Manhattan studio, the Hit Factory, where they got to work with the legendary drummer Herb Lovelle and listen to the “Ragman” tell funny stories about his life in the music business. All these things, plus, for good or ill, a natural, shared drollery, were already apparent in their music and lyrics. By then, in addition to jazz music, they had independently become enamoured of Chicago blues, soul music and, to an extent, the vibrant subculture that embraced the British Invasion, Bob Dylan and, as the Coen brothers have put it, the “new freedoms”. Before they were out of high school, Donald had taught himself jazz piano and Walter had become adept at both bass and guitar.Īfter meeting as students at Bard College in upstate New York, they began writing songs together on the piano in the common room of Walter’s dormitory. On the other hand, like many American boys of their time, they had a healthy enthusiasm for baseball, baseball players and Topps bubble gum, the gum that came with baseball cards in each package: Flip ‘em, scale ‘em. Unlike many schoolboys of their place and time – the late 1950s and early 1960s – Donald and Walter liked to read literary novels and listen to jazz records. This was, at least in part, because of the Cold War and the constant, looming threat of a global, nuclear holocaust. Nevertheless, like many folks back then, they were afflicted with a needling agitation just below the surface of everyday reality. The streets of their youth, though just a few miles from these wonders, were for the most part, placid and suburban. That being said, the neighborhoods they were from should not be confused with the Manhattan of Broadway shows, Wall Street, Greenwich Village and Harlem. Once upon a time, there were two boomers, Donald and Walter, who both grew up in slightly different parts of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area.