Listen To The Band

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My first job was being the newspaper delivery boy for my neighborhood. I wanted to deliver for The Press-Courier, the local newspaper in my city, because it had the largest circulation (which meant making the most money), but I had to start off delivering papers locally for The Daily News, a newspaper from a smaller neighboring city (with a smaller customer base) while I waited for the Press-Courier route on my street to become available. Every few weeks I would call or ride my bike to the P-C offices to see if there were any routes opening up near me. One weekend the newspaper held a flea market in the parking lot behind their office building, and being interested in working for the company I decided to ride my bike downtown to check it out and hopefully meet someone responsible for hiring paperboys. There were dozens of tables filled with various items for sale and I think that the proceeds were going to help some sort of charitable organization. I remember that it was a bit of a carnival atmosphere, with food and game booths and top-40 music blaring out of the speakers that circled the parking lot. But what I remember most about that day is a song I heard over the parking lot speakers, a song called All My Loving. It is the first song I remember hearing by The Beatles.

Discovering The Beatles had a tremendous impact on me. Listening to the radio, I began to recognize that several of the songs I liked were Beatle songs, which led me to buy one of their albums… I believe the first one was “Yesterday… and Today”. This led to more Beatle album purchases - “Rubber Soul” and “HELP!” came next, and quickly after that the rest of their available catalog. I would lay on my bed in my room for hours with my headphones on, playing Beatle albums over and over. For me, listening to their records was like going to school - I studied what they were doing, the makeup of their songs, their instrumentation, their recordings, their songwriting style. As a teenager I would learn to play guitar, piano and bass guitar and also begin to write songs, and The Beatles would be my biggest musical influence - and they still are. I still listen to and enjoy those records CDs.

And I finally got that paper route with the Press-Courier, although The Beatles didn’t help much with that.

It’s Just A Matter Of Time

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I just finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The title sounds like a science fiction novel, but it is really an interesting love story, and I wonder if some potential readers have been mislead about the book, and avoided it, because of the title. I thoroughly enjoyed it - it was the type of reading experience where I didn’t want to put the book down and couldn’t wait to pick it up again - and I especially liked the way the author used the element of time travel as a setting for the love story. The time sequences were coordinated well, but if that is not a favorable genre for you, you may not enjoy it as much as I did. But IMO definitely worth a two thumbs-up recommendation.

57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)

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I don’t watch much TV. We don’t have cable at home because there seems to be so little that is worth watching and I don’t want to spend $30/month for a service that I would rarely use. There are some channels that I would watch, like Animal Planet or Discovery Channel, but until the cable company allows me to choose only the channels I want, I’ll pass. And I have gotten spoiled by DVD movies and TV shows that don’t have commercial breaks, so I can hardly stand to watch regular television programming. The few current shows that I do enjoy, like Scrubs or 24, I rent or watch online. Of course that may mean that I’m not up date with them, but I’m OK with that. Besides, I’ve pretty much given up on 24 since they killed off Tony, Michelle and Samwise.

But TV was pretty important when I was growing up. By the time I turned 13 I was hooked on a horror-type soap opera called Dark Shadows, and I would rush home every day after school to watch. There were also several shows like The Andy Griffith Show, The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Outer Limits that were in afternoon reruns and kept me in front of the TV for a few hours. And I had a crush on Marlo Thomas (That Girl) and never missed her show. Then there was the pièce de résistance of 60s television - Star Trek.

My dad and I discovered Star Trek and we watched during its original run on NBC. It was one of the few things my dad and I did together. I would sit on the floor in front of our TV and watch Captain Kirk save the universe week after week. The Transporter was very cool, Spock was cool, Scotty and Chekov were cool, Lt. Uhura and Yeoman Rand were babes - it was a great show, although it took me awhile to understand the deal with Kirk and all of those female aliens. But I watched week after week, and kept watching when it went into reruns, and I learned more about that show than most people would want to know. I enjoyed the Star Trek movies but I really didn’t get into the later series incarnations like The Next Generation or Deep Space 9. I watched occasionally, but they never held my interest like the original.

I saw William Shatner in person once. I was working at the Culver City Studios (which were the old Desilu television studios) and I was walking from the sound stages to the office area, and as I rounded the corner of a sound stage I walked past good ol’ Captain Kirk. I believe he was on the lot working on one of those made-for-TV movies. So I said “Hi” and he said “Hi” and we passed each other and went about our business. I would have liked to have chatted with him, but we were both working and besides, what could I say to him that every other Star Trek fan hadn’t already said.

Throwdown At The Hoedown

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Last Sunday night Emily and I saw Bela Fleck and The Flecktones. Simply amazing! This is one of those bands that, if you ever get the chance to see them live, you should do it. All four instrumentalists are quite accomplished and as a unit they completely compliment each other. Each of them is amazing - Victor Wooten is well known among bassists as an incredible player, and this show was a live testimony to his expertise. Jeff Coffin’s sax and flute work was perfect - a real pleasure to listen to. “Futureman” (the percussionist, who is also Victor’s older brother) played his drum solo thru a MIDI controller called the “Drumitar” which he wore around his neck like a guitar… he’s quite an interesting character to watch as well as a first-rate musician. Bela is an outstanding player who can make you forget that he is playing a banjo. A very enjoyable concert, and I discovered that I really enjoy their music. So the next day I ordered their DVD “Live At The Quick“.

Listen To The Music

Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
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I did not have a lot of choice in the music I listened to as a kid growing up in the 60s. By fifth grade my friends were listening to the latest rock and roll songs on their AM radios, but my dad wouldn’t let me or my brother listen to that “crap”… we couldn’t listen to the radio when he was around, and we certainly couldn’t have any rock record albums, so all that was left was to listen to what my parents were listening to. Dad had his own record collection, which consisted of albums by musicians like Percy Faith, Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass, Johnny Mathis (great voice), Hugo Montenegro and Petula Clark (which, at the time, was the most modern record my dad owned). For lack of anything else to listen to, I would sometimes play my dad’s records when he wasn’t home, picking out the songs I liked and playing those songs over and over. My mom liked country music, but my dad hated it, so my mom would only listen to her country records when my dad wasn’t home. Some of Mom’s favorites were Hank Williams, Charlie Pride and Loretta Lynn as well as Jim Reeves and Marty Robbins, who were also my favorites. Mom would also listen to the country radio station while driving in her station wagon, singing along with Charlie or Loretta. This was always a problem when my dad needed to use her car, like when our family was taking our bi-monthly trip to San Pedro to visit relatives. He would get in her car and start it, and suddenly the radio would blare out an earful of country music… to say he was annoyed would be putting it mildly.

Of course, the older I got the harder it was for my dad to control the music I was listening to, and eventually I discovered rock and roll. And I soaked it up - 60s rock, Motown, British Invasion - so much really good music to take in. And I discovered that most of the songs I had picked out as my favorites from listening to my dad’s albums were actually songs that had been originally written and recorded by people like Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Smokie Robinson, Neil Diamond, and the team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland… it seems that out of the highly orchestrated cover songs of my dad’s record collection I had instinctively gravitated to the music of my generation. I also discovered the beginnings of my musical ability, which revealed itself in the way I heard music, the way music affected me. For me listening to music was like the enjoyment I got from reading… or even better. And the music that affected me the most, that I enjoyed the most, the music I listened to the most and studied the most, was the music of The Beatles.