Has it really been 40 years since I started down this music highway? My first real gig was at a Holiday Inn in Downtown Charleston, South Carolina, for two weeks in February 1968. I was two years out of high school, had been playing guitar for a little over two years and I knew about 40 Bob Dylan songs – no one wanted to hire a one-man Dylan cover band, so I set out to learn some popular songs of the day. I didn’t care much about songs other than Dylan songs, but I wanted to work, so I learned. I could do “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and “This Guy’s In Love With You” and I can’t remember what all else but I learned. The summer before I had hitchhiked to Newport, Rhode Island to the Newport Folk Festival and saw Arlo Guthrie sing “Alice’s Restaurant.” In the fall of that year I got a copy of the album and learned that whole song. That was how I got my gig in Charleston. I auditioned for the Holiday Inn singing “Alice’s Restaurant.” They gave me a roundtrip airline ticket and room and board at the hotel plus $150 weekly salary. I was in high cotton. By August I had grown tired of playing for businessmen who weren’t really listening and I was thinking about another way to do this music thing. I had been writing songs in earnest and had picked up quite a bit of performing technique over the months with Holiday Inn. I was in Buffalo, New York when I met Mark Goldfarb. Mark played bass and knew about the Coffee House Circuit out of New York City. We teamed up and went to New York to audition for the Circuit at the Bitter End on Bleeker Street. I was too nervous to hang around at the club to see if we got the job, so Mark found me down the street somewhere and told me we got picked to go on tour. I was 19 at the time, and I remember thinking I could do my own songs for an audience of mature college people who really knew their way around. Learn More: keithsykes.com