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"When I got out, things had kind of changed for me," says Lewis, who lives near Rochester, New York. "The popularity wasn't quite there any more because of the heavier rock 'n' roll – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, that kind of stuff. So I decided, 'Well, I'm going to Tulsa and just hang with the good musicians.' I wanted to do some gigs and just be a guitar player.
"I didn't want to be myself. I just wanted to pay some dues and learn, get my chops, you know. And I wanted to hang around the good people because if you hang around the good people, the good musicians, you push yourself to try and become that. So I started living in Tulsa, and that's where I met everyone who would eventually be in the group Medicine with me."
Lewis' way to a new band had been paved by still another music figure from Tulsa, Gordon Shryock, who worked in the Los Angeles music industry when Lewis began thinking about moving to Oklahoma. Shryock not only encouraged him, but suggested another member, Billy Cowsill, who had left his popular family band, the Cowsills.
"I knew Cowsill because he'd been a Playboy," Lewis says. "I believe it was in '69. We were going over to Hawaii and playing for eight days, and I needed a guitar player, so I just asked him. I had no idea Gordon wanted him in the band. So when he mentioned him, I said, 'Yeah. Yeah. He's pretty good.' "
So, with two well-known recording artists as frontmen, Shryock assembled the rest of Medicine by drawing from the thriving Tulsa music scene - the husband-and-wife duo of Larry and Ann Bell (on keyboards and vocals, respectively) and a rhythm section consisting of two drummers, Bill Boatman (who had worked in a later version of the Playboys) and Gary Sanders, along with percussionist Valentino Pina. Lewis brought in singer Dennis Janes, whom he describes as "a friend of mine from LA who always wanted to sing, so I gave him a shot. He ended up as just a background vocalist with Ann and Larry Bell."
At one point, many of the band members, including Lewis, lived in the house of Shryock's mother.
"That was at 21st and Zunis," he says with a laugh. "I don't know how I even remember that."
Lewis was installed as the band's lead guitarist with Cowsill the primary vocalist.
"He sang all the leads on the original material we did," Lewis says. "But even if I didn't want to, I had to do my hits because people knew me and they wanted to hear those tunes. I was geared more toward original music for Medicine, but out of all my hits, I picked out the four biggest ones, and we mixed them in with the original stuff."
Medicine, he adds, "played mostly club gigs and outside festivals. We drove to Kansas and Nebraska, to places I guess were concert halls. They were huge, but everybody danced. There was no seating."
When he didn't work with the band, Lewis sometimes performed with other musicians around town, including the then-queen of the Tulsa club scene, vocalist Gus Hardin.
"I sat in on drums, though," he says. "Those were way better guitar players than me. I didn't even want to try it."
Even with a good number of jobs coming along, there were simply too many musicians in Medicine for anyone to make any real money. So Shryock, Medicine's business manager and bassist, tried to raise the stakes by getting a corporate sponsorship, even though, Lewis says with a chuckle, "we were a little too scruffy for that. We all met in a suite in a Marriott somewhere and talked to the bosses, and they just didn't go for it. So there we were. And pretty soon everybody, one by one, just started falling out."
(An advertising poster from late 1970, with some of the members' photos blacked out, has sometimes raised the notion that three of the dropouts were Karstein, J.J. Cale and Jimmy Markham. None of those noted Tulsa musicians, however, was a member of Medicine.)
"When it failed," Lewis says, "it was over, and I just had to start from the bottom and get another set of Playboys."
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