Autobiography pt 2 - 1964 - 1969

The first week in January 1964, Paar introduced a video clip of something he said was a phenomenon capturing England. There were screaming girls chasing four young long haired men, all members of a rock 'n roll band.  Neither Paar nor I could make any sense of it, but it was exciting and new.  I found out later that this was one of the first times the Beatles had been seen on American telelvision.  

In February, the Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show.  I wasn't interested, but my sister was captivated.  I didn't get the short little songs at all.  I was into long classical compositions.  But they looked different, like dolls.  It was an indelible image.  

After the Sullivan show, Beatlemania exploded on AM radio.  For weeks it seemed like it was all Beatles all the time.  At my high school, at lunch in the quad, on the grass, girls would tune their transistor radios to the same station and turn up the sound so they could sing along with the radio.  Nerds like me, did not know what to make of it.  The smart kids got guitars and grew their hair out.  

I was under the spell of classical and avant garde music.  I was a modernist.  I rejected all pop music, the Beatles and their short little tunes for about six months, until I was converted to the music of Bob Dylan, via the Clancy Brothers, the Lovin' Spoonful, and the New Lost City Ramblers.  

I'd heard about Dylan since 1963, and finally heard his voice in '64, but it didn't really register, until Bringing It All Back Home came out. A few of the songs on the A side, especially Subterranean Homesick Blues, Tombstone Blues, and Dylan's 115th Dream, reminded me of Chuck Berry and the Coasters, the music I loved when I was a kid.  They were funny, surrealistic stories that weren't really stories.  It was dadaist satire and like nothing I'd ever heard before.  I was obsessed.  I became an instant Dylan fan.  He was my new idol.  He quickly replaced Charles Ives as my inner musical mentor.  By '65, he was everywhere, especially when Like a Rolling Stone became a hit.  

The buzz on Dylan was in whispers in the underground.  Some guys I respected were into him, and I began to realize he was the coolest songwriter I'd ever heard.  When Blonde on Blonde came out it changed everything for me.  It was like discovering Little Richard or Beethoven all over again.  It changed the way I heard music. It changed the way I wanted to look and even live my life.  It was obviously a masterpiece, anyone could hear that.  It was the first real song cycle in Rock music, and a romantic song cycle at that.  From that point on I started catching up on all the Rock music I'd been missing.  Dylan opened a door to the Beatles and the Stones, and a few years later, Jimi Hendrix.  I was learning to love Rock 'n Roll again.  

The Split: 1965

My fascination with Charles Ives was a gateway to modern music.  At that time there was an enormous amount of musical experimentation.  It was the heyday of the New York avant-garde, and John Cage and Lou Harrison were cutting edge composers.  By the fall of ‘65 my parents agreed to pay for piano lessons with Thomas Ryan, and composition lessons with Wilson Coker, both professors at San Jose State College.  I’d written a piano sonata that impressed Coker enough that he agreed to take me on as a student.  By then I could drive myself to his house for lessons.  

Coker showed me many different types of musical scores and compositional approaches to take.  He was a draftsman, a trumpet player, and a thorough modernist.  As a modernist, he was captured by the score itself.  I was beginning to understand that the score was just a map, whereas music itself was the actual sound made by instruments or voices. If that sounds obvious, it must be said that there were a lot of composers who thought of the score itself as a work of art, actually as important as the sounds it depicted.  

From Coker I absorbed an understanding of musical referencing, the meaning and value of melodic gesture.  His book on musical semiotics (Music and Meaning, Free Press, 1972) validated what I learned from him about music.  All sounds and pitch sequences have a history.  Combinations of notes form patterns and motifs that become recognized as memes.  They acquire extra-musical meaning by virtue of their ability to evoke emotional, literary, or visual associations in the mind. Beethoven’s Fate motif from the 5th Symphony is the most obvious case, having developed over the centuries countless historical, musical, theatrical, and psychological associations.  The strength of the cachet of those four notes transcends any exploitation.  The Fate motif is a musical cornerstone. 

Music, understood as an aural language system, or rather a lexicon of dialects, is unified by the nature of musical gesture.  It is the gestures, the chords, swoops, licks, and melodic hooks which describe the subtext of meaning in music.  To understand and speak this language is to open a window into the sublime.  In this world, all styles are connected to each other, classical to rock, jazz to Indian raga. All forms of music are a language of gestures which can be adapted to any musical style or genre.  This is why music, like language, is so malleable.   

Thomas Ryan was a virtuoso pianist in the 20th century romantic tradition of Rachmaninov, and just the piano teacher I needed.  I learned more from him in six months than I had from both my other teachers up until then.  I respected him as a guide and followed his advice.  But six months after I'd been taking lessons from him, he died of a brain tumor.  I was devastated.  I was accepted by his friend and fellow pianist, William Erlendson, himself a warm hearted and brilliant teacher.  I was doing fine with Erlendson, when, six months later, he too died of a brain tumor.  Was I growing superstitious?  Was this a sign that I was not meant to go in the direction of classical music studies?  

My situation was complex.  I was studying the classical music literature, and taking composition lessons in avant-garde music, while at the same time falling in love with folk and rock music.  I also loved Duke Ellington, ragtime music, and early twentieth century popular songs.  Besides the rock and folk music I was hearing, I listened to Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Vince Guaraldi, all kinds of jazz, blues, East Indian music, and Scottish Bagpipes.  I loved the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Skip James and the New Lost City Ramblers. It was, to say the least, a highly eclectic time to be a record collector.  I was an eclectic sponge, absorbing everything I heard on radio, records, and on television.  

I found blues, especially 12 bar and 16 bar blues, to be the most basic musical dialect, and the most American dialect in all of music.  I realized Beethoven himself was something of a bluesman in that he used the diatonic vocabulary he had grown up with, Bach, Handel, Mozart as well as all the popular musical styles of his own youth, and created a musical world of heightened emotional intensity that hadn't been heard before.  His approach to music was as an essentialist.  His music was of essence and inevitability, like blues.  This is what I was after.  My quest as a composer was to put blues and Beethoven together, to create my own essential sounds out of the rhythms I felt in my body, to reject all types of academic and dogmatic approaches to music, and learn how to hear with my heart.  I had to learn Rock 'n Roll backwards because I'd been over-educated.  I had to learn what to leave out, not what to put in.    

My studies with Coker and Ryan coincided with a period of intense transformation in pop music.  Pop, with its assimilations of folk, blues, soul, country and rock'n roll, produced the most potent and vibrant sounds made up to that time. Developments in multi-track recording were making records which sounded like nothing ever heard before.  Between the years 1964 to 1966 Top 40, AM radio was a dynamic, eclectically democratic format, an amalgam of different styles, all regulated by the sales of records (and not a little payola).  And this all started in the early 1950s when the 45 rpm record replaced the 78.  Top 40 AM radio got so popular it unified a huge audience of teenagers and turned it into an early version of a virtual community.  And when FM radio began to catch on in 1966, it too, became a community for people who liked album music, longer tracks and better sound.  

1965 - 1966

By late 1964 it was obvious that something new was happening.  By 1965, there were the brand new sounds of Folk Rock by the Byrds, twangy guitars and drums with haunting modal folk harmonies.  A  folk duo, Simon and Garfunkle, and the folk pop stylings of the Mamas and the Papas made Peter Paul and Mary seem passé.  No one could ignore it.  White kids had already begun to split into three distinct groups; Beatle fans, Stones/R&B fans, and folkies.  But even that was quickly morphing into something else.  

I was still studying avant-garde, and also Bach, Bartok, and Brahms on the piano. I'd begun to see a relationship between Ives and folk music, and also Ives and the Twilight Zone.  I'd been schooled by Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue.  It demonstrated to me how it was possible to adapt the memes of one genre to another, of blues and stride piano to an extended classical form.  Ives' music was more complex and eclectic than that, using bits and pieces from every style of music heard during the first decades of the twentieth century, throwing them altogether in a cacophony of joyful noise.  I didn't realize that the '60s was the decade where his music was finally understood, or "grokked" as they used to say.  The portals of music were opening all over the world because of the LP stereo record.  Music was getting as big as baseball.     

Listening was equal to practicing.  I listened to everything I could get my hands on.  And I would listen with a musicians ear, for the subtleties of performance, for the soul and energy, and for the technical skill of the soloist and the orchestra.  I’d spent most of the summer of 1965 painting my parents house, inside and out.  I would listen, six hours a day, while I painted, to a classical FM station, KSAN in San Francisco, a station which would, within a year, switch formats to become the sound of Haight Ashbury and the Summer of Love.  And like the radio station, I also made the switch.   

I began to integrate rock and pop music the way I had with folk, into my eclectic sensibility.  There was no way to ignore the sounds coming off the radio, especially The Byrds version of Dylan's Mr. Tamborine Man, the Stones' Satisfaction, Martha and the Vandella's Dancin' In the Street, every Beatle song, the Mamas & the Papas, California Dreamin', Wooly Bully,  King of the Road, California Girls, Marvin Gaye, How Sweet It Is, the Ad Libs Boy From New York City.  And of course, Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, announcing that Rock music was as valid an art form as any kind of music that ever was.  This was a very special time in the history of music.  I still think that to this day.  The first time I heard Like a Rolling Stone was a revelation, a new world of songwriting opening up my mind. 

A track on the album, Blonde on Blonde, reminded me of something I’d heard coming out of my sisters room.  Norwegian Wood was a beautiful song and a timeless perfect performance by John Lennon.  It sounded a lot like Fourth Time Around on the Dylan album. I instantly appropriated her Beatle albums.  They were all I listened to for a while, Rubber Soul especially.  My problem with short song forms broke down as I made the jump into their world.  Through them I begin to comprehend how economically pop songs were built.  The Beatles, above all others, had a harmonic complexity and a sense of inevitability about their melodies that made them unforgettable and ageless, as all great pop is.  Rock music, however, was a language of essentials and simplicity.  It was harmonically basic, rudimentary and powerful.  I related to that.  However, things were changing so fast in music that was easy to get lost in all the different types of sounds coming out, all at once. 

John Cage 1966

Driving is the quintessential California experience. For me, listening to music while driving is one of the great joys in life.  I think I've spent maybe one fifth of my adult life driving.  In 1966 I was sixteen years old.  My dad bought an extra car for me and my sister to use on special occasions.  I could drive to music lessons, and on weekends go to the movies.  

In the Spring there was a musical symposium at San Jose State, featuring John Cage.  I had heard a lot about Cage, the most media savvy of the new post WWII avantgarde.  As Coker's young protege, I met Cage, and he graciously told me his artistic philosophy, which was this, paraphrased:  "People hear a Beethoven symphony and say, ah that's Beethoven.  But it really isn't Beethoven, it is only the sounds he heard in his head and wrote down.  I want to make music I've never heard before." 

Cage helped me see that music could be whatever I heard either inside or out.  Nature, street sounds, all can be music if you hear it that way.  It is up to us to give meaning to whatever we hear; to hear it as music. It is up to us to make the meaningless meaningful.  Cage invented what would later be called sampling, and it was opening up in my mind in 1966.  He predicted the digital age, and he predicted it forty years before it actually happened, which makes him the most important musical prophet of the 20th century.  From Cage's example, all the barriers came down, all the categories were made irrelevant, and all style was there as metaphoric reference point, to use or not.  In the world of 1966, the New! was expressing itself everyday.  

Through Cage I learned to listen and pay attention to the thread of what I was hearing, to use my environment, to listen carefully to everything and remember.  If life is an adventure, then everything in it is sending you signals, communications.  You just need to learn how to read the signals.  For that you need experience.  

A style revolution was beginning to change the appearance of young people into something parents didn't understand or approve of.  And, of course, that was the point, says the old cliché.  Rebellion and revolution were in the air, and to be "different" was a plus.  The confusion between real consciousness and stylistic eccentricity created a self-conscious hipness.  Our fashion statements were harmless, yet they meant something.  They were not just fashion statements, they were small declarations of independence.  It was a time of an infatuation with youth culture itself.  Now, fifty years later, we look back at it and can see a little easier what had value and what didn't last.  

I was pursuing two roads.  One was a style of modern abstract composition.  I had written a one movement Piano Sonata, and a setting of T.S. Eliot's "Landscapes," scored for wind quartet, harp and voice.  I began thinking about song.  I was reading Joyce, Eliot, Thoreau, Emerson, some of the Beat poets, and trying to understand Dylan.  I was enthralled by the Beat movement as it was morphing into early psychedelia, but I had no real sense of what it was.  I was a naive devotee, a young fool mesmerized by the newness of it all.  And I took everything far too seriously. 

In April 1966, I read the popular sci-fi book, "Stranger In a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein.  Love was in the air, the "Love Generation" idea was beginning to capture the imaginations of people who listened to what the music was saying.  The Hippie movement in San Francisco was having an effect on teenagers all over the Bay Area.  Heinlein's book was another awakening.  I became a sort of flower child, even though I thought of myself as a teenage Beatnik.  There was a euphoric spirit in the Spring of 1966 that lasted all the way until the summer of 1967, and I succumbed to it and was captured by the newness of it. I'd never sensed anything like it before.  To this day I believe that this was when the Fourth Great Awakening started in American culture, an awakening of spiritual potential that could change the world for the better.  Or so I, the young idealist, thought.    

Camp Counselor and the Draft - 1966

By the Spring of 1966 the escalation of the Viet Nam war forced me to consider whether I was going to resist and be a conscientious objector, a CO - which meant either working in a state hospital or serving time in prison.  The war was morally wrong to me, and I was pretty sure I wasn't cut out for the military.  I was a musician, a skinny, tall nerd of a kid with Buddy Holly glasses; in no way was I soldier material.  And I had a heart murmur.    

I went to a summer camp where I became friends with a camp counselor who had been a conscientious objector working in a VA hospital for a few years. Don Champion had recently been the bookkeeper at the Hip Pocket Book Store, the predecessor to Bookshop Santa Cruz.  The Hip Pocket had been frequented by Ken Kesey, the Pranksters and Neal Cassady.   Because of the notoriety of that and an incident involving sculptor Ron Boise, the Hip Pocket had the makings of a true bohemian hang out.  

Peter Demma, the owner of the bookstore, bought a metal sculpture of a pair of nudes holding hands.  Now these sculptures looked like beautifully welded together abstractions of two nudes, but they were in no way erotic much less pornographic.  But when Demma put the sculpture on the roof of the book store, the city fathers flipped out.  They got an injunction to force him to take it down.  He sold the bookstore a year or so after that to Neal Coonerty, who changed its name to Bookshop Santa Cruz, and made it a civic institution.    

After the camp session was over I spent the afternoon with Champion riding around the Santa Cruz mountains on the back of his motorcycle.  Because of him and his CO experience, I decided to resist the draft.  I became a conscientious objector.  I wrote a letter to the San Jose Mercury News objecting to the war, and they published it.  This established my credentials for the time I would be drafted.  

Champion became a kind of mentor to me.  He even turned me on to pot.  It was the first time I'd ever gotten high on anything.  My parents didn't drink or smoke, were politically liberal and personally conservative, so I'd been sheltered when it came to alcohol, pills, or illegal drugs.  

Getting High - Fall 1966  

By fall I'd been driving for nearly a year.  I ended up at Don's house one evening. He put on a new record he just got, Country Joe and the Fish. It was a strange and extremely evocative sound that I didn't like at first.  After a while he started to roll a joint.  He wanted to be the first to turn me on.  For me, it was getting late and time for me to go home.  He offered me a hit, so I had two or three.  Nothing happened at all, nothing.  I felt no change and I had to leave.  I said goodbye, got into my car and took off.   

About halfway home everything began to get very strange.  The road stretched and grew into an enormously wide endless street.  Don lived only about three miles away from my parents house, and I'd been to his place more than a few times since summer camp.  By now, we were friends.  So this was weird, because I didn't connect it to smoking pot for a few moments.  Then, as I was about to make the left hand turn off the big street and into my neighborhood, it dawned on me that it must be the pot.  I didn't get scared at all.  I looked at the speedometer and it said I was going about 15 miles an hour.  So I slowed down.  The street looked like a tremendously long tube. It reminded me of a funhouse mirror.  But I figured if I just drove slow and carefully, everything would work out.  

I'd lost track of where I was for a moment, but as I continued through the neighborhood I began to recognize familiar houses, trees, and pretty soon I found my way home, driving at about 10 miles an hour.  I got out of my car and immediately locked myself in my room, got into bed, put the pillow over my head and laughed and laughed.  My first experience being stoned was driving my car.  How California is that? 

When I woke up in the morning I had been transformed.  I considered smoking pot to be a kind of initiation rite, into the world of the Beats.  In my mind, I was now a real teenage Beatnik.  That was my new high school persona, as the seasons turned 1966 into 1967, and the euphoria around Rock music, the Beatles, Dylan, and the new San Francisco scene exerted its enormous influence.  It also ended my relationship with Coker, who, it turned out, hated hippies, and didn't like what I was apparently turning into. When the composition lessons ended, it completed my conversion to rock music.  I was never going back to that boring, mental, avant-garde stuff…… at least not for awhile. But I made a personal decision not to smoke pot until I was out of school, and I stuck to it.   

Winter 1966  

My friend Ira Rubin was a hard core Beatle and Dylan fan, and general lover of good music. He was a year younger in school, but we became friends out of mutual interest.  When the fall semester of my senior year started,  Ira and I checked out the scene happening in San Francisco. The Grateful Dead were playing at the Avalon Ballroom.  The place looked like a stunning old 1920s deco ballroom, perfect for Swing Era dances.  We watched the Dead from the balcony. Both of us were too much into records to be able to understand what the Dead were doing.  It took awhile to figure it out, because we weren't stoned.   

Winter 1966 was so full of images and sounds, I couldn't process even part of it.  I remember going to the movies a lot, by myself.  My favorite film of 1966 was Blow Up.  I thought it captured the cultural moment better than anything I'd seen.  It was the perfect segue from 1966 into 1967. Another British film I identified with was called Morgan, which had come out earlier in the year.  These films were as important as the music I was hearing in making my middle teenage years as vivid and passionately absurd as my inner life would allow, since that was pretty much the only life that mattered to me.  My day to day life as a student was pretty normal looking, and I, and most of us, were still very very innocent.   

Pop music was at its apex, and the split between FM and AM radio was a metaphor for what was happening in music itself.  The record album was beginning to be taken seriously as an art form.  This would change my life, the way I viewed music, and the course I would take as I determined to make songwriting my life's work.  It was now becoming clear that a record album could be more than just a collection of singles.  Being a two sided disc capable of containing around twenty minutes a side, it could never really be simply a group of disconnected songs.  The songs were inherently connected by the fact that they were all on the same vinyl record.  Themed albums were common in the early '50s.  Frank Sinatra had made the music fit the picture on the cover of the album. He made mood concept albums popular. But Miles Davis had done it even earlier, in 1951, with his album The Birth of the Cool.  So the concept album was not that original an idea.  What was original was how it was being applied to Rock music by artists like Dylan and the Beatles.  

With the example of Blonde on Blonde and the Beatles Revolver, I realized that record albums could be like classical song cycles. This was a new approach to an art form originally invented and developed by Beethoven and Schubert.  Now, however, the writers were also the performers.  This made the music more personal and potent. I took it all as seriously as I took any symphony.  The song cycle was an art form I could completely embrace.  At least that's how Revolver and Blonde on Blonde seemed to me.  

Spring 1967

In the Spring of 1967 I wrote the music to my high school musical, the "Birds" by Aristophanes.  Success at high school brought a self destructive cockiness to my attitude.  My ego got big, my arrogance was boundless, my ambition messianic but amorphous. I thought school was pathetically inferior to what I expected, and I began to adopt an attitude of bullshit entitlement.  I was a teenage manic-depressive.  I thought that was normal.  For those times, it certainly seemed to be.  

My friend Bill was the brother of the poet Sandra McPherson, who was in her senior year at San Jose State. Bill had introduced me to Bob Dylan albums in 1965.   Sandy had written a poem in the style of a sea chanty, which was also an obituary.  The lyric was about a sea captain.  I set it to music, ripped from Ives, Smetena, and Irish folk.  I enjoyed it so much, I thought song writing should be my next move.  I wrote a song called "Glass Girl," and Bill and a friend of his, both good guitar players learned it and played it for me.  Their performance was so good I couldn't believe it was the same song.  The song has long since been lost, but the memory of that performance proved to me that I could be a songwriter.  

I'd recently gotten interested in philosophy, religion, poetry and art, especially as it related to music.  I was reading Transcendentalist literature: Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, and Bronson Alcott and his radical ideas of educating children.  My biology teacher was a fan of James Joyce and led me into attempting Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.  Both books were impossible for me at that age.  I didn't realize that they were actually incantational time travel devices which had the power to realign the neurological pathways in the brain and train the mind to pull out multiple layers of metaphor from everyday experience.  Even though I was confused about this new type of perception, I kept Joyce's books close to me from that time on.  I now know that he is an antidote to the onset of our current period of cultural schizophrenic hypnosis.  All great art can take you to a higher level of mind, if you know what you're looking for.  But the greatest art is literally medicine for the soul. 

Summer 1967 

Cultural awakenings are always short-lived.  A generation so enthralled with itself cannot create much that is potentially eternal and lasting.  My conversion to pop music was complete in the summer of 1967 when I wrote my first "concept album."  I had experienced the power of the Beatles' "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and was convinced that Rock music could achieve the level of high art.  I decided I wanted to make albums, records.  I didn't have a clue how to do it.  

My song cycle had a pretty stock theme about leaving home and coming back again. As my first try it was made from the sounds I'd been listening to - the Beatles, Donovan, Dylan, Judy Collins, a pastiche of influences and stolen melodies with words as incoherent and pretentious as was possible to get to in 1967, that most pretentious of all years in pop music.  It sounded great to my ears, but, because I couldn't begin to play what I heard in my head, it remained in my head.  It was, for me, a study in concentration.  I could hear every note of every song vividly in my inner ear.  That no one else ever heard it was probably the best thing for everyone.  But it did give me the experience of imagining how I'd want to hear an arrangement.  It helped make my mind sharper, more vivid, and improved my ability to concentrate for long periods of time.  By focusing, I could actually hear sounds in my head that were as loud and vivid as an external sound system.  This would get complicated later in my life, as my radio brain got louder and louder.  But it was a personal accomplishment to be able to play a record inside my head from beginning to end, and actually hear the arrangements as if it was playing in the room.  

Was I becoming a producer without even knowing it?  Was I developing a vision of my own type of rock music, inside my head without anyone knowing anything about it?  All my parents heard was my banging the piano with my Beatle and Dylan saturated tunes, in a sad attempt to approximate what I heard in my mind.  

 

VII.  College - Fall 1967- Spring 1969

The second week of my freshman year at San Jose State, fall '67, introduced me to Vietnam protests, which started a wave of protests at colleges all over the country.  The San Jose SWAT team marched down the middle of the college spraying demonstrators with tear gas.  In those days I wore a long overcoat most of the time, a 1940s style overcoat that went down far below my knees.  The day of the demonstration I had to go to the administration building to do some kind of class registration.  As I walked in to the administration building, there were two older men huddled together, obviously scared, and looking at me funny.  They asked me what I was doing.  Afterward I realized they were thinking that with my overcoat, I might be carrying a bomb or something.  

College was pretty much like High School, except you could smoke cigarettes, grow your hair long, and wear any kind of clothes you wanted.  I got into a special studies department called Tutorials in Letters and Science.  It was a program designed for people who were in the top 10% and wanted a more unorthodox type of study.  But it was really set up to segregate the hippie kids from the straight college community.  It put us all together in one two story building in the center of the college, where we hung out as if it was a coffee shop.  Classes were casual discussions, a lot of bullshit, and if you were mature, an opportunity to do something creative with your education.  It was up to you to get something out of it.  It was the Fall of Love.  

1968 - Beatles, Apple, first production

In the summer of 1968 I moved out of my parents' house for the first time and into a house down by the college.  This place had the reputation of being the site of the first acid test back in 1965 after a Stones concert at the Civic auditorium.  This was, like most of the houses around the college, an old two story Victorian with a lot of rooms.  I got the converted laundry room in the back. I fixed it up and put my electric piano in there and started playing early Beatles, which in 1968 was considered very retro.    

It started out alright, but within two months began to come unhinged by freaky students dropping acid and partying all the time.  I did get pass-out-and-puke drunk once, but I considered that a necessary part of college experience.  One time was all it took for me.  And as for pot or acid, after my first experience with pot back in 1966, I had promised myself I wasn't going to smoke it until I finished school, and I stuck to it.  But to the kids in the house, I was straight. An outsider's outsider.  I didn't fit in anywhere.  

In November I read an article in the San Jose State student newspaper about a student who had spent the summer at Paul McCartney's house, hanging out with the Beatles at the White Album sessions.  It was my opportunity.  I immediately moved home because I needed the space to begin recording the demo I wanted to send to the Beatles.  I found out her phone number and called her.  I asked if she could take my tape to Paul McCartney.  She seemed agreeable enough, so I went to work.

I'd been writing songs for more than a year, and now, at Christmas time, I was ready to get something down on tape. Somehow, I borrowed a couple of 2 track tape decks and began to produce my songs, playing most of the instruments myself.  I had an Farfisa organ, a Roland electric piano, and a real piano.  I used a drummer on a few tracks, and a guitar player on another.  I don't even remember where these people came from, but it seemed like everyone wanted to help me with my project when they heard why I was doing it.  

I got vocal help from my friend Bill, and from a couple of other people who were willing to sing on my tape.  I didn't sing yet.  It took me another thirty years to warm up to the sound of my own voice.  

I finished before Christmas and got the tape to the young lady, who flew back to England to spend the holidays with her sister who was apparently married to Peter Asher, pop singer friend of the Beatles.  She was a beautiful young woman, kind of a wholesome all-American type, who had a few fascinating observations about her experiences with the White Album sessions.  She said she watched John Lennon record the song "Sexy Sadie."  He started with a crumpled up piece of paper with some lyrics on it, and then developed the song over seventy five takes.  It took all night to get it, but the whole piece was essentially composed in the studio, after grinding out the arrangement over and over again until it was right.  After hearing how they worked, I realized that it was pretty close to the approach I took making my demo tape.  I was learning how to compose using a tape recorder instead of a pencil and paper.  

She gave the tape to one of the associates at Apple, who wrote me a polite letter of rejection.  I was expecting it.  But it had given me an excuse to do something original, even if it was absurd.  I knew then, in 1968, that song writing and producing were what I wanted to do.  But, at the time, everything in music was about bands, groups, getting on stage and doing a show.  That was something I had no knowledge of, and not much interest in.  Later, after I'd been put through the ringer and spit out did I realize my first intuition was right, and following the advice of "professionals" was the wrong way to go.  However, going the wrong way has the advantage of teaching you things you didn't think you'd need to know.....also called "paying dues."     

The Hornet's Greatest Hit - Summer 1969

I had been in college for two years.  I'd changed my major from music to philosophy because I was done with classical music studies.  The piano teacher I'd gotten after Erlendson died was a very nice lady who tried to encourage me, but only helped me to realize that after ten years, I was done taking piano lessons.  What sealed it, however, was that I had signed up for harp lessons, and never made it to one class.  I got an F in harp.  Now I knew I I wasn't the heavenly type.    

The problem was that I'd become a member of the counter-culture.  I was a faux-freak, not really all the way in but moving in that direction.  I couldn't relate to school anymore, was completely confused about who I was and what was going on.  And I was scared about the draft, determined to be a conscientious objector, but still fearful of the prospect of going to jail or working in an insane asylum.  In dropping out of school I'd be taking a certain kind of risk, but I was compelled to do it. 

My two high school friends, Mark and Ira, now graduated, had, with a few other friends, rented a house by the college.  Mark wanted to put on some kind of a show with my music.  His vision was that I would get a band together and he would make little movies of my songs, to show while the band played.  I'd put small ensembles together in high school, the school musical I wrote required a small quartet, but I'd never done anything in rock music before.  

A young woman I'd met a year before, Gwen Davis, a small sparrow of a girl, but who could sing loud, was the choice for female lead.  I'd used her on a few slow romantic songs I'd written for my Apple demo. The male lead was my  friend Bill McPherson, who had a beautiful folky voice, perfect for my songs.  There were a few other people who volunteered.  A young woman named Laura who played guitar.  A high school friend, Van Riley, a solid multi-instrumentalist on bass, and Ira on drums.  Ira wasn't good at keeping a locked in beat, and would speed up and slow down with the energy of the song.  I thought it would be better to look for a drummer who could play steady.  But when I auditioned the one guy who could do it, I realized I was as unsteady as I was accusing Ira of being.  Ira, even though he was pissed at me for treating him so badly, agreed to do the gig, and he ended up holding the band together. 

Mark rented a small theatre in Campbell, California, for four performances on two weekends.  It was called the Gaslighter Theatre, and normally had some kind of old timey ragtime show or something.  He made eight millimeter movies of the songs.  Some were funny, some were artful, but all of it was something no one had seen before.  The first night we had about twenty people in the audience.  By the last performance the place was packed.  

I'd written around twenty five or so songs over the winter and spring of '68 to '69, and the show used maybe 20 of them.  But, after it was over, I was as done with that as I was with college.  The performance was my swan song to the '60s, and also my adios to my teenage years.  I was turning twenty.  I knew it was time to drop acid and see what that experience was all about.  

Up until this time my life had been going along in a rather linear fashion.  One event after another, choices made in an intuitive and logical way.  But now I was entering unknown territory.  The week after the show closed I got a job at Discount Records in San Jose.  Being knowledgable about classical music, I was hired to work the classical records section, which was quite large and extensive.  This was the heyday of Stereo LP records.  Working in a record store, especially if you were a musician, was the equivalent to working for Google today.  It was a great way to keep track of new records, a cool place to hang out and meet musicians, and a place to score pot and acid.  

The store allowed employees to borrow records overnight and listen to them, and buy them at a discount.  I thought the job an excellent opportunity to educate myself by listening to as much music as I could.  

I rented a small studio apartment in Los Gatos, a place very hidden, at the end of a shady street, walking distance from downtown shops and the movie theater.  I began to smoke weed after work, drop acid on the weekends.  Except for my piano playing, I was a quiet tenant, a subterranean, a recluse.  I was an interior explorer, and my mission was to find out where I was at.  And this is where the linear thread of my life ended.  From here on something else took over.  

 

VIII.  Conversion - Fall 1969 

It started with these big heavy headphones.  I could listen to music at night, turn it up really loud with headphones on and disturb no one.  I'd bring albums home from work, smoke a joint and listen to music all night.  Pink Floyd's soundtrack from the movie "More" was a favorite of mine, for space music.  But the headphones were excellent with a heavy bass.  It sounded like the music was inside my head.  

All year it felt like more than just the decade was ending.  A moment unique in American history was ending.  The decade that began with the Kennedy murder, where tv became the lens through which America watched itself, watched the struggle of civil rights, Vietnam, the assassinations of popular political leaders, watched the inner cities erupt in violence year after year, and at the same time was held in thrall by the most soulful, sincere, and meaningful popular music that had ever been written, that decade was now in its last year.  And this last year of 1969 seemed to recapitulate themes from the entire decade and roll them up into a single years worth of headlines.  

My 1969 was experienced as a three part sequence starting with my last semester at college, then led to the stage show/movie performance piece in the summer, and ended with my job at the record store, my moving to Los Gatos, and the beginnings of a relationship with psychedelic drugs that would last until the early 1980s.    

I knew some people who had gone to Woodstock in the summer.  I'd paid attention to what was happening at that event.  Of course, it was the big story in the counter-culture world of Rock music.  It established the outdoor stadium concert as the "next big thing" in Rock, and with the stadium came a new kind of music, louder more powerful, pioneered by and supremely mastered by Jimi Hendrix.  A new slate of bands whose music was tailored to large amphitheater situations.  Bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, KISS, and others were waiting in the wings, and by 1972 completely changed the way Rock music sounded.  They were a newer, different form of entertainment, but they were just entertainment.  There was nothing serious about any of it. 

To me, Rock was more than entertainment, it was a spiritual movement.  At least the music I listened to seemed to be part of a different level of consciousness.  But, I was an educated musician, as well as a fan of the best Rock music, Dylan, the Band, Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles and the Stones.  The newer pop sounds, starting with Elton John, were not for me.  I couldn't relate to much of it.  However, back when I moved into my Los Gatos hide out I was still just barely out of the authority cloud of college, my parents, and my job served my own educational needs.  It only took four months for acid to loosen my grip on reality to the point where I had to quit the job, only to find out that they were ready to fire me anyway.  But back in September of 1969, I embarked on a lifetime journey into music.  I needed to find out what life meant, who I was, and what was next up for me.  

I'd started smoking pot when I moved out of my parents house. I wanted to get stoned and listen to music.  Cannabis changed my whole sense of what music could do.  I could hear much better, everything, every intricacy of technique.  I could hear the soul in in, the meaning of the sound itself. Getting high and listening to music became my evening study.  And writing songs.  I got fascinated with a number of groups and artists, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, the Beatles. Abbey Road had come out in September, the Band had a new album out.  It was all their best work to date, but it seemed like everyone was either saying goodbye to the '60s or else trying to do something that would influence the next decade.    

Laura Nyro's album, "New York Tendaberry" had just come out, produced by Roy Hallee, of Simon and Garfunkle fame.  He was a devotee of massive reverb, and he put a lot of distance between Nyro's voice and piano, and the listener's ear.  This had the effect of listening to something very intimate, alone in a concert hall.  Was I eavesdropping on something that was maybe too personal for me to listen to?  Nyro required a conversion to accept her strange, edgy voice, but once you were under her spell, she was mesmerizing.  

I started reading books by Tim Leary and Aldous Huxley on the psychedelic experience, and I thought it might be good to give it a try.  I needed something to put my troubled head together again.  I had used falling in love, music, anything as a way to escape confronting my own weirdness.  And my relationship with the Source, whatever one called it….God, Mind, or Consciousness was an important thing for me to be thinking about now.  I realized that school, though it had served its purpose for a while, was not really an education.  Only life experience teaches.  I needed something revolutionary to shake up my head.  

I told Mark about being ready to do acid now.  He gave me a half of a hit of Owsley White Lightening, and said he wanted to make sure I had the best lsd available for my first trip.  A couple of guys I knew from the record store got the idea to drop acid and watch a stripper do a private dance with her pet snake.  The mythic potentialities in this were too good to pass up. Where we got this idea is absurd and unknown.  It never happened.  The shrubbery was more interesting.  I think I made it home driving.  I must have, but I have no memory of that first trip except for the colors, how vivid everything got.  I'm pretty sure I drove home early, before I started peaking, but I know it took an eternity that I forgot about when I woke up a day later.  I think I was about to turn twenty.   

Transcendence: October - December, 1969.  

For the next three months I dropped LSD every weekend.  Sometimes I went to the movies, sometimes I just listened to music.  I soon became aware I was being directed to learn from direct experience of the music itself.  I checked out records at the store and listened to the entire history of Western classical music, from Palestrina and Vivaldi, to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, all the way to Ives and Stravinsky, and to Penderecki.  

The fall of 1969 was a fertile time for the music industry.  There were more excellent albums, albums that would become classics, and I got to listen to all of them, and only buy the ones I wanted, for an employee discount.  Working in a record store was a job in a musical library.  Who needed to go out?  I listened to music.

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