Today they’re household names, but it started with a leap of faith: “These guys had so much energy and kavanah, so much warmth and spontaneity"

I

’d been playing in rock ‘n’ roll bands in downtown Philadelphia throughout my teen years. Later I attended Woodstock and played with some bands in New York, but I was a bit of a rebel then, so I guess things come full circle. It was September 1970, the morning after a very successful gig in Greenwich Village — I woke up and just said my goodbyes to everyone around me. Something else was calling me, but I didn’t yet know what it was.

My mother and my aunt were going to Israel for a bar mitzvah, and I found myself on a plane with them. Beyond my own bar mitzvah, I didn’t really have any connection to Jewish observance, but there, in the most beautiful place I had ever laid eyes on, spirituality stirred within me. I ended up at the Kosel, putting on tefillin. I asked Hashem what I was here for, and within a few weeks I’d found my way to yeshivah.

I wound up staying in the Diaspora Yeshiva on Har Tzion for 12 years, and during that time I met other talented guys who wound up in the yeshivah as well, and we’d jam together.

Motzaei Shabbos was our time for music. We would go to the kever of Dovid Hamelech, adjacent to the yeshivah, and play what we called King David’s Melaveh Malkah. There wasn’t that much to offer in the Jewish music market then, so students, tourists, and Israelis heard about those jam sessions and piled in. During the summer tourist season we could have 800 people packed in there. Our rosh yeshivah, Rav Mordechai Goldstein ztz”l, understood us and facilitated our musical self-expression.