In the early 1960's six young men got together in Indianapolis, Indiana and moved to California where after many zany adventures they had hit after hit, their own television show and became a famous rock band, whose influences on the history of music rival those of the Beach Boys, the Temptations, the Beatles and the Four Seasons ....

Well that was the plan anyway. This website is a little history of how a band assembled itself into the group of guys who ended up in California and came to be known as Stark Naked and the Car Thieves. It is a story of adolescent fantasy meeting the reality of being far from home. It is about learning the necessity for hard work and coming to depend upon others no more dependable then oneself. And while it's a nostalgic website about a group of guys coming of age in California, hopefully it's more than that. It is also about the fresh eyes of musical immigrants arriving in the mid-sixties in a special era in Californian and American history. Stark Naked never became that household name, never had that big hit that we dreamed of and chased through seven different record labels, so why, is it our story to tell? This is a band that was within a heartbeat, a handshake, a hairsbreadth of many of the events that shaped the times, fun, scary, good, bad and ugly. We were often one degree of separation from the idealistic dream of peace and love of the time and it's polar opposite, the gritty reality of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. We touched a lot of people in these very special years, including our own psyches. Despite the fact that it was a thrilling and wonderful ride that none of us would ever take back, only some of us survived and thrived in this atmosphere. Some of us didn't, and some of us were damaged.

As the players in the band, we expect it to be a comfortable place where we can kick our shoes off and put on slippers and reminisce about a time that continues to press upon our present and future. Whenever we get together we remember our adventures in little vignettes, stories. So we're going to try and recreate that here. While some of the fellows continue to pursue musical interests, none are currently music professionals at the moment. Since we don't have any agenda this can be a pretty free and easy site. It is my hope that we'll never quite finish it, that it will always be organic, continually growing and changing, trying to capture in words, pictures and music the emotions and color of the times, as they were a-changing, from our point of view. For you as a visitor or contributor, we hope you find it interesting, amusing, informative and fun. For us, we're trying to bring these things we experienced and those from contributors into one living, breathing repository of our memories for ourselves and to express to others who don't really understand when we try to tell them. We lost one of our brothers recently to colon cancer and another had a near visit with the angels. We have a deep love and regard for one another though there were times when we fought like brothers do. This is our attempt to get it right, one more time..

THE STRUCTURE OF THE HISTORY
My point of view of the band is one long linear string of events. To me, I was only ever in this one band that began as a vocal group, mutated, evolved and eventually became Stark Naked. So the reason the band members are listed in the Original Player's page in the particular order they are, is because that is the order in which they appear to me, kaleidiscopically joining and changing the only group I've ever been in. But of course, life is actually a parallel process. Most things were going on outside of my limited perception. So despite this limitation, my point of view will supply the backbone, the structure of our story in broad strokes so that other individual stories, other "viewpoints" or vignettes, can be "linked" into this broad narrative.

Hopefully, this narrative will be passed on to others who participated in the history of the band who will make their voice heard here as well. I'll try to represent the consensus of the group members despite my linear recital, while individual comments links will link individual viewpoints throughout, so keep your eye open for those links. That's probably where the good stuff will be.

It is safe to say that Stark Naked's history can be broken up into chunks. Those moments that we remember inside these arbitrary frames were very important to us in our growth as people and may resonate with others who passed through those amazing, dangerous, revolutionary but rarely boring years of the sixties and seventies in California's era of peace, love and music .

Larry Dunlap 2004

Let's clear up Question number one right now. WHERE DID WE GET THAT NAME!