Back in September 1969 I was starting my third year at Penn State, and I see from the archives of the Daily Collegian that the rock group Blood, Sweat, & Tears was coming to campus.

As I liked their music, I’m certain that I went to that concert, but I have no memory of it, and I don’t have the ticket stub. Oh, well, I guess I can’t recall every concert I attended.

But as I started to write a few months ago, that third year brought some new faces to the dorm. I was still rooming with Jeff in 517 Mifflin Hall, but just down the hall in 514 there were two new guys, Dave Royer and Perry Harris.

Dave shared a last name with one of my Richland classmates, Darryl Royer, whom I’ve written about in conjunction with the upside down hamburger, and as Dave Royer hailed from Lancaster, it was quite possible that he was related to Darryl, but I don’t recall ever asking him if he was. Given that Dave had long, hippie-length, dark hair, was totally into progressive rock music, and gave off a counter-culture vibe, and thus seemed the complete antithesis of Richland’s Darryl, I guess I simply assumed that there was no way that the two of them could possibly be related.

Dave truly was fully committed to rock music and some forms of jazz. He listened to it all the time on his component stereo system, and he took excellent care of his LP collection. He even took care of the album covers by buying clear plastic covers for each one, to preserve them as carefully as possible.

He got me to do it as well. Over the next few years I invested quite a bit in those plastic covers for each of my albums until one day when the bookcase that I had built to hold all my LPs had become full, I realized that if I took off all those clear plastic covers, I would save enough space to free up half a shelf. Which is what I did.

But I digress.

Perry Harris, Dave’s roommate, was from the other side of the state, a small town called Brownsville near Pittsburgh. Perry seemed like a pleasant chap, and I recall sitting with him shortly after we met and filling him in on the holdovers on the floor from the previous year. That would have included my roommate Jeff, Terry Carroll, who was still in the single room 520, and Ken, the fundamentalist Christian in 518, the room next to ours, as well as Ken’s more level-headed roommate Tom.

Here are Blood, Sweat, & Tears in a concert from February 1969. They had started off a few years earlier with Al Kooper as their lead singer, but they weren’t getting much traction on the top 40 charts, so they dropped him and brought in Canadian David Clayton-Thomas. Alas, Clayton-Thomas had an arrest record in his native land and in order to get permission for him to remain in the States, the band went on a United States Department of State-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in May/June 1970. That did not sit well with rock fans who tended toward anti-governmental views (this was the Vietnam War era). They managed to get over that little hump.