Top L to R: Johnno, yrs truly, Gene, Bottom L to R: Mark & Neal

When I think of the Knaves I think about darkness and light. It was an awfully long time ago. Seems to me everything went into darkness at the Kennedy assassination and the light didn’t start showing until right after Kent State. We started playing together in the fall of ‘64 and disappeared late spring-early summer ‘67. In that time we recorded a number of tunes for a number of different producers including "Leave Me Alone" and "the Girl I Threw Away". We were very popular among the city-kid, lousy home, rebel without a clue crowd. We were a collection of real head cases.

There were three incarnations of the Knaves. The original band was a four piece: Gene Lubin on drums; Neal Pollack, bass; and Mark Feldman on rhythm guitar and back-up vocals, neither of which he did very well, but he looked just like one of the guys in the Dave Clark Five; and yours truly on lead guitar and vocals. I also wrote and arranged all the tunes and taught Neal how to play bass. We got together sometime after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in Feb. ‘64. Our first gig was the following autumn when we played at the cafeteria of the brand new Niles North High School. We were all growing out our hair and dressing like an English band.
Turtle-neck shirts, black sport coats, gray slacks, and Filipo Verde beatle-boots that we had to get at Smokey Joe's on Maxwell St. For a while I was talking with an English accent and telling people I was from Manchester. For equipment we had an insane collection of amps including a Gretch Longhorn Bass, that we picked up at a barber shop in Morton Grove, a pebble grain aluminum covered Cordovox with a lyre cut-out over the speaker, and my Ampeg Reverb Rocket, that was real weak and I got with my bar mitzvah money. Neal was playing bass on a Guild 3/4 size M35 guitar with a rag under the strings. Markie had a super flash Harmony with three pickups and a lot of gold plate. I had a sweet little ‘60 and 1/2 SG-Les Paul Gibson..also from my bar mitzvah money. Lubin had a great set of Slingerland Radio Broadcaster drums. We plugged mikes through our amps. For most of ‘64 and the first half of ‘65, we played teen clubs on the north side like the Way Out and the Limit in Skokie, private parties, and with our phony i.d.’s, a few mafia night clubs in and around Chicagoland; the Mousetrap in Rockford and Bourbon a GoGo in Rush St. name a few. By summer of ‘65 we had picked up some "managers" in the form of the Trilling brothers: wise guy, Brian Epstein wannabe’s, tile contractors who took us under their wing and started getting us "connected". We’re talking about Chicago here. They hooked us up with an ancient booking agent named Keith Wheeler who put us into the mafia gigs. And that summer we played in such bizarre venues as the Bunny Lounge above the Club Normandy in Mishawka Ind., which is the wrong side of the tracks in South Bend; and the Interlude on like 63rd and Pulaski in the sout’wesside of Chi.

The Trillings sponsored our first recording date when they got Terry Sachen, the Batboys road manager to bring us down to Boulevard studios in the fall of ‘65 to record . When it became evident that Mark was unable to cut his shit in the studio, we brought in a high school buddy of mine, Johnno Hulburt; to play second guitar, sing harms, blow harmonica, and otherwise add his anglophile-abused rich white boy vibes to the mix. This was the second version of the Knaves. With these demos, the Trillings were able to get some interest generated with Paul Gallis..indie producer and union rep. He in turn brought us to Chess studios at 2120 S. Michigan where we recorded the tunes that were later sold to and released by Dunwich. These are currently available in the Oh Yeah, Dunwich Records Greatest Hits on Sundazed Records vols.&2. I believe we did most of these recordings in winter ‘64-’66.

By this time teen rooms were taking over as venues for young players. They didn’t need liquor liscences and we didn’t need phony i.d. We played the Like Young on Wells St., the Pink Phinque in Rogers Park, the Big Toe up in Lake Forest, the Second Story back in r.p. and bank parking lots, and garage parties. Finally landing some good profile gigs through various "contacts" our managers had with the radio stations. By mid ‘66 we were playing at the Cheetah. Because of our extremely nasty and punkish, James Dean, stuff it, attitude; as well as the fact that we now had great equipment thanks to our managers, and we were buying our clothes..strictly imported mind you, at the Man at Ease..we started to catch on with the Playboy Mansion, fashion photo crowd and started getting great private party gigs. Then Neal got drafted.

Neal took a lot of the Knave’s personality with him when they sent his poor ass first to basic, then to Viet Nam. We were in the middle of our record deal, and we got Stuart Einstein, a friend of my genius step-brother, to come in. Stuart was a wonderful musician and a sweet guy where Neal had been aggressively rudimentary and 104% up yours attitude wise. The band was never again the same. We actually recorded two more tunes, "Stuff" and "Inside Outside" our next single after "LAM" and "TGIF", which were just barely released. We actually played our highest profile gigs during this time doing some t.v. spots and opening for the Kingsmen and actually headlining some big concerts for WCFL with such other Chi town hardies as the Roving Kind, the Trolls and the Shadows of Night. But we weren’t getting rich quick enough and we were starting to fall apart. Lubin got married and had a kid in the oven. Johnno decided he wasn’t getting his share of leading my band. I was doing all kinds of drugs, trying to move out of my family’s house, move back, go to university, and be a combo of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend and Howling Wolf all at once. Something had to give and it was the Trillings. They decided their investment wasn’t going to get paid back and, in collusion with one of the band members, had all our equipment ripped off. It was spring of the summer of love and we all went our separate ways.