Chocolate Watchband – "Are You Gonna Be There (At the Love-In)" (1967)

Are you gonna be there

When I make my mark?

Any day now, 2 or 3 lines is going to hit the million-visitor mark.  (I see you shiver with . . . an-ti-ci-pa-tion!)

We’re almost to one million visitors!

Be honest.  When the first 2 or 3 lines post appeared purt near ten years ago, did you believe that my wildly successful little blog would hang around long enough to attract one million fans?

You didn’t?

Well, fie on all you doubting Thomases – not to mention you doubting Barbaras and Dianas and Karens and Lindas!

They’re gonna be there (at the love-in)!

To quote my main man Maino, 

I wave hi to the haters,

Mad that I finally done made it

Take a look and you can tell

That I'm destined for greatness

(What Maino said, brothers and sisters!)

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To celebrate this milestone, 2 or 3 lines is going to host a big-ass love-in.  

Are you gonna be there?  At my love-in?

If you’re not sure just exactly what a love-in is, let me quote Wikipedia:

A love-in is a peaceful public gathering focused on meditation, love, music, sex and/or use of psychedelic drugs. . . . [It] is often connected to protesting social or environmental issues.

We’ll be skipping that meditation nonsense, by the way, and getting right into to the good stuff.  (Don’t expect any crap about social or environmental issues either.)

They’re gonna be at the love-in, too!

The love-in will take ASAP after 2 or 3 lines goes over a million visitors.  If you’d like an invitation, please e-mail me at 2or3lines@gmail.com.  (If you’re a guy, we might run out of invitations before we get to you.  Just sayin’.)

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The Chocolate Watchband was a garage band that formed in 1965 in Los Altos, California.  

Los Altos was a modest suburban community back then, but today it’s part of Silicon Valley and has some of the priciest real estate in the United States.  Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have all called Los Altos home.

The most important thing that ever came out of a Los Altos garage wasn’t the Chocolate Watchband, but the Apple I computer.  (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first 50 of those computer in Jobs’s garage in 1976.)

“Are You Gonna Be There (At the Love-In)” was released in 1967 on the Chocolate Watchband’s first album, No Way Out:

The album has been re-released by Sundazed Records, an independent label that specializes in re-issues of cult sixties albums.

Here’s how the Sundazed website describes the Chocolate Watch Band:  

A band whose reputation has grown exponentially over the decades, the Chocolate Watch Band [sic] are now revered as one of the “Seven Wonders of the World” of garage rock.  Spotlighting the classic lineup – the inflammatory vocals of Dave Aguilar and the roof-rattling guitars of Mark Loomis and Sean Tolby, fronting the rock-solid bass of Bill Flores and the letter-perfect drums of Gary Andrijasevich – the Watchband's first two albums have it all.  Stones swagger snake-hips its way through cosmic significance with just a dusting of eye-opening psychedelic legerdemain to make your neck snap backwards in pure joy.

I love the Sundazed catalog, but they might want to tell whoever their copywriter to tone things down a bit.  Here’s 

One final note: whatever you do, please don’t confuse the Chocolate Watchband with the Chocolate Watch Band, a London band that issued two singles in 1967.

Click here to listen to “Are You Gonna Be There (At the Love-In).”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: