I WAS THE ONLY WHITE GUY IN THE AUDIENCE. HE GOES, “YEAH, I REMEMBER YOU.”
Soul himself. “I’ll never forget meeting James Brown as long as I live,” he says. “He pulls up in this white limo and gets out. I was all nervous because I just idolized him. He says, ‘I want you to meet my latest protégé, Yvonne Fair.’ I thought it was so cool the way he talked, in sort of a raspy whisper. I went to shake his hand, and he goes, ‘Gimme some skin…on the dark side!’ I think I wore a glove for several days because I didn’t want to wash my hand! I was so excited James Brown had given me ‘some skin on the dark side’!” Laughing, Moulton continues, “I told him the story of when I first saw him, years before in Albany when he was doing ‘Please, Please, Please.’ I was the only White guy in the audience. He goes, ‘Yeah, I remember you.’ ” In the mid-1960s, the music scene in San Francisco was just beginning to blossom, and King distributed the local label Autumn Records, who had a staff producer by the name of Sylvester Stewart. “Nice kid,” Moulton says, describing the future Sly Stone. But right at the point where our story could’ve taken a different turn, an illness in the family forced Moulton to move back to the East Coast. The next few years saw him continuing to work in promotion for RCA and United Artists, until a creeping disgust with the disingenuous tactics used to shill records became impossible to ignore. “I got fed up with the music business. I like to be honest about a record,” Moulton states, explaining that he preferred to build enthusiasm about a record based on its real, not invented,
merits. “But they didn’t want you to do that. It might be the owner’s girlfriend who’s singing on the record, and you have to constantly plug it. That’s not my style.” He emphasizes, “There was so much phoniness. You couldn’t be honest; no one wanted to hear that. They wanted to hear the hype. It was all about hype, not about what’s real. You had to exaggerate everything. And I kind of got fed up with that.” In 1970, Moulton was in his late twenties and had spent most of his life in the music business. So, on quitting his job, he did what anyone might in that soul-searching scenario: took a long trip to Europe. “I spent three months there. But I broke a tooth, a front tooth. I had to get it fixed.” Back on the streets of New York, “There was so much pain involved that I wouldn’t eat, and I must’ve lost thirty pounds.” His good looks and newly slim physique attracted the eye of a modeling scout, and looking for something different, Moulton signed on. It was at the modeling agency that Moulton met John B. Whyte, a fellow model who owned property on Fire Island, a popular summer resort located off the shore of Long Island. By the early ’70s, largely thanks to Whyte’s efforts, the Pines community and its sole guesthouse, the Botel (owned by Whyte), had become a prime destination for New York’s hippest and most hedonistic gay men. The reputation of the dances held at the Botel soon reached Moulton’s ears. “Someone suggested that since I liked music, I should go out there and see
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