Indeed, everyone who heard R,J. Fox's harmonies and the shimmering guitars, seemed to come away impressed. Certainly there were some folk and rock antecedents for their sound - including Crosby, Still & Nash - but they were also fresh and new. Sherry offers, "Quite honestly, some of that vocal sound came from the work we did in school - the chorales, the madrigals all the intricate vocal things we learned from that. I loved that aspect of the group‹ there's nothing like singing in a group; it's such a joy."

It was through Crosby and Barncard that the third major player in our saga - Laura Allan - comes into the picture for the first time. Born in Southern California to a talented but troubled jazz trumpeter named David Allan and his wife, Laura was mostly raised in Berkeley - her stepfather worked with the Educational Testing Service and her mother became an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley (where she works to this day). Laura, too, started playing music young: She picked up the guitar at 7, and through the influence of her stepfather, learned tunes by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston and, on the classical side, Richard Dyer Bennett. By age 15, she had moved for a period to Germany, where she sang in an R&B-oriented band called Group of Soul. She finished high school back in Berkeley in the late '60s and by her own account "dropped out of music for a while." Well, not entirely. This irrepressible free spirit spent hours playing congas in the loose drum circles that were (and are) a fixture on the Berkeley campus; meanwhile she also took up the flute and autoharp. She spent time living in Big Sur and traveling in bohemian hippie circles, and eventually joined a theater group called the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company: "There was a lot of om-ing and eating vegetarian food, but it was a really good experience," she chuckles. "It was a pretty intellectual crowd and they had some interesting productions. But beyond that it reinforced the idea that I liked to perform."

In 1969, Laura met dulcimer-maker Joellen Lapidus at the Big Sur Folk Festival, and the two became fast friends. "I wanted to learn everything I could about making dulcimers," Laura says. "Previously, I had taken an old zither and redid it and painted it. I liked working with instruments." It was in Big Sur, too, that she first encountered David Crosby and Graham Nash. "I barely knew who they were," she says, "but we got introduced to these guys and we jammed. I was learning to play the flute; they had their pre-war Martins and their Mercedes. I was a mere 17, so this was amazing. Then, about six months later, Joellen and I were living in Marin County in Forest Knolls in this cabin. My rent was $32 a month and now we were making musical instruments for the stars. Joni Mitchell would come and stay in my loft. It was a crazy time. When I talk about it, no one believes me," she laughs.

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