It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.
I became a clown when these docs came to the house in Berkeley and asked me to come cheer up kids. I'd just had my third spinal fusion and I was looking for something to take my mind off the pain I was in.
Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'