Ashes, The Rain And I

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California Girls wasn’t the only song that my high school buddy Tom and I recorded together. We both were very interested in learning about audio recording and we experimented with recording ourselves on our acoustic guitars in Tom’s bedroom. We started off recording with two Sony stereo reel-to-reel tape recorders… I believe that Tom bought his Sony 630 when we were 16, and I already had an older Sony that my dad had given to me. We also had available to us a Radio Shack 6-channel stereo microphone mixer that Tom had modified by adding pan pots - the mixer belonged to our youth group, but we were in charge of the sound equipment so we were able to use it for our projects. And we picked up recording tips where ever we could - sometimes we would hang out at recording studios in Hollywood, but also at that time there was a new audio recording periodical called The Mix, which was published on newsprint. We would get the latest issue from our local music stores and study it intently. We spent hours and hours experimenting, recording ourselves - although most of the tapes have not survived the ensuing years. A few did survive however, like California Girls and a few other songs, like Tom and I with two other friends from high school playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash - although that wasn’t one of our better recordings. One of the songs that did turn out well was Ashes, The Rain And I. This is a song that was originally recorded by The James Gang, one of our favorite bands at the time, and although it featured an orchestra section, it was basically a song played with acoustic guitars, so we decided that we could record our own version. We recorded our guitars - Tom playing his Ventura 12-string and me playing my Ventura 6-string - in stereo (Tom panned towards the right, me towards the left) on one of our tape recorders. Then we played the recorder back through the 6-channel mixer, with Tom singing along and me adding bass guitar, and recorded the whole thing onto the second tape recorder. The final result sounded pretty good, but we were trying to keep the bass guitar mixed pretty low, so it wouldn’t overpower any other instrument and, unfortunately, we mixed it a bit too low - you can only hear the bass on a real good music system, and only very slightly during the verse. But still, the recording came out pretty good, considering our available resources and location - this is the result of two tape recorders, two seventeen-year-olds and their guitars:

Ashes, The Rain And I

King Of Hearts

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In the early 70s I was living in Southern California playing bass guitar in a little-known Christian band called Crossfire. Our band did cover songs from several well-known Christian bands of the time including several songs by a band called Love Song. At the time, Love Song was a premier “Jesus Music” group and was probably at the height of their popularity, so we were disappointed when, in 1974, we learned that the band had broken up. However, in 1976 Love Song went out on a reunion tour, and in March of that year my friend Mark and I went to see their show in Santa Monica, Ca. Sitting in the auditorium waiting for the show, we were primed to see Love Song and a bit impatient, so we were a little disappointed when the show started and out walked an opening act. It was a guy - a tall, skinny geeky-looking guy with thin-rimmed glasses and long, curly blond hair, wearing skin-tight blue jeans that had multi-colored patches randomly attached, and topped off with a blue t-shirt that had a yellow Superman emblem on the front. Mark and I glanced at each other and grimaced, and I said something like “Let’s hope this guy’s set is short so we can get to the real music”. The skinny geek had a nice Martin guitar (a D-28, I believe) strapped around his neck, and he stepped up to the mic amid scattered laughing and started his first song. Right away we realized that the geeky guy could play guitar well, and his Martin sounded pretty awesome. Then he started singing - he had a nice voice and he could really hit the high notes. His songs were very good, and in between songs he made comments and told stories that had the audience laughing hysterically. So after the concert Mark and I headed straight to the lobby and bought the geeky guy’s record album, Welcome to Paradise. I still own that record, and after all these years I’m still listening to, and enjoying, the music of that guy, Randy Stonehill, who turned out to be not so geeky after all.

Several years ago I had the pleasure of playing with Randy. He came to our church for a concert, and our pastor asked him to play “King Of Hearts” with our church’s worship team (I was the bass player). Several months later Randy came back for another concert and asked if our band would play with him again, this time for several songs and also at another concert at a second church. Quite a thrill for a long-time fan like me! Now, I’m not wanting to sound syrupy or gushy, but meeting Randy and hanging out with him really caused me to respect him more than ever. Again and again I saw him interact with his fans, always being patient and treating them with compassion and respect, always stopping to listen and spend time with them. One particular encounter I remember was after a Sunday morning service. Randy had just finished playing and was in the lobby alone at his merchandise table when a man approached. The man started mouthing words and moving his hands - he was deaf, but he was able to communicate to Randy that he wanted Randy to wait in the lobby. The man left, then returned a few minutes later with a friend who knew sign language. Randy took the two of them out to a small, umbrella covered table in the courtyard and sat with them for a half hour or more while the deaf man, through his translator, asked questions and “talked” with Randy. I think I will always remember that image of Randy sitting with them in the courtyard… that’s what I think of when I think about Randy, which I suppose might please Randy more than thinking about that skinny geeky guy in the Superman shirt.

Bad Religion

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I have noticed that people here in America sometimes - well, alot of the time - get the wrong impression about God. For example, there is a popular bumper sticker here that you may have seen - it reads “Don’t drive faster than your Guardian Angel can fly!” Personally, I have never thought it was even possible to drive a car faster than an angel can fly. If you believe in God and believe that He created angels as supernatural beings, capable of performing His miraculous work - the very idea that we as humans can make a machine that can travel faster than an angel is either somewhat foolish or a bit arrogant. And I think that this kind of misunderstanding of God misrepresents God.

But there are different ways that people misrepresent God. There is a web site - I’m not going to print an address so as to not give it any more publicity (and there are probably several websites like this anyway) - a web site that is more than just foolish or arrogant… it promotes hatred of people in the name of God. Unfortunately, there are multiple websites that do this, but this particular web site claims to be “Christian”, to being followers of God and believers in Jesus… yet preaches that God hates people. Not all people, of course - just people who are homosexual. The group responsible for this web site recite their favorite bible verses in an effort to convince visitors that God truly hates homosexuals. And that homosexuals are going to hell, no questions asked. But what this website is really doing is misrepresenting God. They are misrepresenting God by twisting His words in an obvious effort to defend and promote their personal beliefs. Now, I’m no one in particular and certainly not in the position to engage these misguided people, nor do I simply want to get involved in an argument for argument’s sake or throw my pearls before swine. But what I do want to say, to gay and straight people, from what I have read and learned and lived and know about God, is that these gay-hating-website people are as wrong about God as is humanly possible. That God loves homosexuals. That He loves homosexuals as much as He loves hetros. That He loves homosexuals as much as He loves Baptists, soccer moms, priests, yuppies, car thieves, Catholics, liberals, Muslims, goth teenagers, Bill Gates, hippies, bikers, African children with AIDS, conservatives, drug addicts, my first wife, rude fast food workers, high school cheerleaders with perfect teeth, socialists, Wal-Mart greeters, Ronald Reagan, the jerk who promised to build me a custom guitar body and then gave me nothing but kept my $90 deposit, Nicolas Sarkozy, porn stars, drunken neighbors, tree-huggers, Joe Walsh and me. In other words, God loves people. All people. This is such a central theme of the Bible that to suggest anything else is highly deceptive at best and plain evil at worst. Evil not just because they are spreading hatred in the name of God… that of course is bad enough. But even more evil because these people claim to represent God and claim that they are declaring His words. So visitors to that web site might assume that these hate-preachers know God and know his desires, and the visitors may be deceived into believing that this is what God is really like… in other words, that web site is misrepresenting God, with the real evil being that they are causing people to misunderstand God. They are describing God based on personally selected, self-serving portions of scripture instead of understanding the full message of the gospel, which is a message of love, forgiveness, restoration and reconciliation. They are confining God to their limited understanding of His love instead of accepting that God’s love is beyond our understanding. And they are creating a god who is too small to love everyone instead of preaching about the god who is big enough to love anyone.

And God even loves these hate-preachers… yes, I do believe that He does love them. But I also believe that He hates what they are doing.

UHF

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One of my favorite movies is UHF by “Weird Al” Yankovic. Yeah, I know the humor is somewhat silly, but I really enjoy it - I own the DVD and watch it from time to time. Emily and I usually enjoy a lot of the same movies and like to watch movies together, but she can’t stand to watch UHF so it’s one of the movies in my collection that I watch by myself.

Besides starring Weird Al, the movie co-starred several well-known actors like Kevin McCarthy, Sue Ann Langdon, Victoria Jackson and Billy Barty, as well as unknowns Fran Drescher and Michael Richards. Fran would later go on to success in her TV show The Nanny, and Michael became “Cosmo Kramer” in Seinfeld, but when UHF came out in 1989, they were both unfamiliar to most movie and TV audiences. Set in a low-budget UHF television station, the movie was co-written by Weird Al and was a showcase for his off-the-wall brand of humor, and although there were high hopes for the movie’s success, it was released during a summer that saw the release of Back To The Future II, Batman, Ghostbusters II, Honey I Shrunk The Kids and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Unfortunately but understandably UHF did poorly at the box office, however, in the years since its release UHF has become a cult classic and it is currently available on DVD. I highly recommend it… even if Emily doesn’t.

Act Naturally

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My daughter Cyndi thinks I was a pot-head when I was a teenager. I wasn’t - I really didn’t smoke very much marijuana at all and I never did hard drugs - but because of a couple of stories from my past she has the impression that I was a real reefer addict. I do admit, though, that some stories from my teenaged years probaby fueled her imagination. One of these stories is about the time I smoked pot with Don Johnson. Yes, the guy from Miami Vice, although I knew him before the TV show made him famous. It all starts with my high school friend Steve. I always enjoyed blaming things on Steve when we were young, so putting this all on him now is pleasantly nostalgic.

After I left high school mid-term I was out of a job, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do to keep myself busy and make money until my first semester of college started that fall. But Steve had a proposal for me. Steve’s dad is the actor L.Q. Jones, and L.Q. was also a producer. He had previously produced two or three low-budget movies, and in the spring of 1973 was starting production of a sci-fi movie tentatively titled “Rover Blood”. The movie was based on a short story by Harlan Ellison and was being filmed in the Mojave Desert. Steve asked me (and several of our friends) to come out to the filming site and act as extras during Spring Break. I actually wasn’t very interested at first - it was a +2-hour drive to get to the site - but Steve finally persuaded me to go, even lending me a car to drive… an early-70s Toyota Corolla that overheated outside of Victorville and had to be patched together with duct tape. So I found my way to the location, which was out in the desert about 50 miles past the middle of nowhere.

The first day I arrived on the set I recognized the actor who was starring in the film. It was Don - I had seen him in a movie called “Zachariah“, and he was impressed that I remembered him from that movie. I spent the first week helping out around the set, including acting as a sort of ad hoc personal assistant for Don. When the first week was over, the other teenagers headed back to school but since I was an unemployed high school grad, I asked L.Q. if I could stay on as a production assistant, and he hired me. I did everything from making beer runs for the cast/crew to hiding in bushes holding microphones during scenes to playing dead bodies. My biggest scene was towards the beginning of the movie… I was in a gunfight with Don. I had him pinned down, but he shot me in the mouth and got away. It’s a pretty short scene, and there was a longer scene that was shot where my dead body was propped up as a decoy, but it’s like they say in the business, your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.

So for the next 5 weeks I worked on the film crew, and since I was basically a gopher I did whatever anyone wanted me to do. One day Tom the Assistant Director asks me to take a car and drive Don into Barstow, the city closest to our filming location, where Don had left his car for repairs. So I pick up the keys and head for the car, thinking I was going to be Don’s chauffeur into Barstow. But Don walks up to the car and asks “Where’s the keys?”. So I hand over the keys and we get in, with Don driving, and head for town. I would like to point out here that the car we were using belonged to an older female production assstant, and was a very-faded-greenish mid-60s Buick station wagon in a moderate state of disrepair that looked like it hadn’t been driven over 60 MPH in a long time. But Don was a very high-energy type of person, and he got in the car and got it going as fast as it would go, which I believe was around 90-95 MPH, and we headed down the long desert road into Barstow. The faster we went, the louder the old Buick rattled, although at this point I was close to being scared spitless and had stopped paying attention to the random but consistant nuts-and-bolts noises. After we had driven a couple of miles, Don pulls out a plump doobie and lights it up, takes a big toke, and passes it over to me. So we’re crusing along at a high rate of speed in an older vehicle that is in need of maintenance, smoking grass, talking and laughing, when Don suddenly says “Do you hear that?”. I listen, but all I hear is the wind blasting into my open window at almost 100 MPH, and even if there were no wind, the rattling of the car would have blocked out any other noises. I indicate that I don’t really hear anything, but Don insists that he is hearing something, so he slows the car down and we pull over and stop. We get out and circle the car, looking for indications of something amiss, when Don notices a lump on the inside tread of one the rear tires. So we jack up the car and pull the tire off to inspect it, and discover that it is mostly bald and has a spot that had grown a rather large bubble where the tread used to be, and the bubble looked like a ripe zit about to pop. Despite our recent intake of a psychoactive drug, we were very aware of the possible ramifications of the tire’s bubble, which Don pretty much summed up by saying “It’s a good thing I heard that or we’d be assholes and elbows all over this road!”. So we pull out the spare and mount it, throw the bubble tire in the back, and hit the road, again doing 90-95 MPH all the way into Barstow.

So I worked on the set for the next few weeks and then I was unemployed again. And Don and I never got together for more doobie parties, in spite of what Cyndi may think. I believe the next job I took was with a private security company, sitting in their office all night long and watching the alarm panel for a break-in at their subscribers’ businesses while playing guitar to keep myself awake. I didn’t last very long at that job - I was bored to tears, but then again there was no way it could be as exciting as driving with Don Johnson, or as interesting as making a movie, which by the way was finally released in 1975 as
A Boy And His Dog.

School's Out

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As a teenager I got out of high school early. I didn’t drop out - I was let out early as a “mid-term grad”, which I was quite happy about because I was so tired and bored of high school. So tired and bored, in fact, that by my senior year I had stopped going to school on Fridays - I would just stay home and sleep in. I also stopped going to P.E. class. I had always disliked P.E., except on rainy days when the coaches would take us into the gym and let us play Slaughterball for an hour. But since my high school was in Southern California and we tended to have many more sunny days than rainy ones, we generally did the usual P.E. stuff which always involved a lot of running and calisthenics and being picked last for teams, and I was never a jock, nor did I ever want to be one, and that made P.E. my least favorite class. So I just stopped going to P.E. class during my senior year. I actually started tapering off during my junior year, though I believe I was able to squeeze by with a “D”. But for my senior year I had just given up, which did not please my counselor, because our school required a passing grade in P.E. for every semester attended. So by the time I was 3/4 of the way through my senior year it was very apparent that I was not going to pass P.E. class for my last semester, and I was called into the office by my counselor. He gave me a choice - either I finish the school year and make up P.E. during summer school or I leave as a mid-term graduate. I had the “mid-term grad” option available to me because in previous years I had attended summer school three times and I had already earned enough credits to graduate, and what he was telling me was that if I stayed the last semester and failed P.E. I wouldn’t be able to graduate (because of the P.E./semester requirement) and would have to attend summer school later that year. So given the choice of a) staying in school for another 6 months, or b) leaving school now, I carefully thought it over for about 0.73 seconds and decided to leave school. I felt great about my decision even though it meant giving up my job at the local naval base because it was part of a school program. So I was out of school and out of work, and I was OK with the “out of work” part because I felt great about the “out of school” part. But college wouldn’t be starting for another 5 months, and I did need something to do. And that would be provided by my good friend Steve.

Birthday

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Today is Emily’s birthday.

When I met Emily, seven and 1/2 years ago, she was going through a difficult time, and when November arrived she didn’t feel like celebrating her birthday. I wanted to cheer her up, so I went to the closest supermarket and bought her a small, round chocolate cake and surprised her with it. For several years since then I’ve gone to the same supermarket and bought the same kind of cake, but this year there weren’t any available. So instead I got her a larger chocolate cake and a veggie pizza, which is one of her favorite pizzas.

I also bought her a newer laptop. She’s been using an older, smaller laptop and between her blogging and her journals the older laptop is getting too slow, so I bought her a refurbished Dell Insprion 1501 (with a one year warranty) from the Dell Outlet (which has some great deals).

So this birthday, even though she didn’t get her small chocolate cake, she’s much happier than seven years ago.

Happy Birthday, Emily!

Creed

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I believe in God the Father… almighty Maker of Heaven and Maker of Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, He was crucified and dead and buried.

And I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it, no it is making me. It is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man.

I believe that He who suffered was crucified, buried, and dead. He descended into hell, and on the third day He rose again. He ascended into Heaven, where He sits at God’s mighty right hand. I believe that He’s returning to judge the quick and the dead of the sons of men.

I believe in God the Father, almighty Maker of Heaven, and Maker of Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, my Lord. I believe in the Holy Spirit, One Holy Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins. I believe in the resurrection… I believe in a life that never ends.

And I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am.

(The Nicene Creed as adapted by Rich Mullins)

California Girls

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Tom was my best friend on high school. We hung out together so much that when our friends would see one of us, they would ask where the other one was. We met when we were 15 - I had just learned to play guitar and Tom was already playing. We played guitars together, listened to music together, worked at his father’s mushroom plant together, made dorky high school movies together. And we learned about recording music together - we would use two Sony reel-to-reel stereo tape recorders to record ourselves playing guitars at Tom’s house - but while I was spending my 20s and 30s working for the government, Tom was working in music and television studios gaining more and more experience. These days he runs a recording studio, which was our dream as teenagers.

In late 1975 Tom was working part-time in the recording studio of a local college. Since he had access to the studio during off hours, we decided to record a Beach Boys song. So we got together with some friends, spent a few evenings practicing, and recorded “California Girls”. And while I think we did a fairly decent job - sometimes people hear it and say that it sounds alot like The Beach Boys. I don’t think it’s all that close… there are some pretty glaring differences if you listen. First of all, none of us sounded a whole lot like the Wilson Brothers, and The Beach Boys used an organ on their version, but we didn’t have access to one, so we used a harpsichord instead. All in all though, it ended up sounding pretty nice. I sang lead and Tom sang the high harmony part. Tom and I are doing the vocal repeats at the end of the song - I still remember being crammed into the small control room with Tom, crowded around a single mic, singing those parts. Our friends Dale Dimmick and Steve Kiger sang the other vocal harmony parts. Tom played the guitars at the beginning, I played bass, and our high school friend Steve Bollinger played drums. There were a few other musicians (like the guy who played the harpsichord) but I forgot their names long ago. This is what we put together on a Tascam 4-track reel-to-reel:

California Girls

After All These Years

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My latest eBay purchase is a limited edition double CD by T Bone Burnett called “Proof Through The Night and The Complete Trap Door“. I’ve been looking for this one for some time, so I’m thrilled to finally have it. I believe this CD represents the only digital versions of two of Burnett’s albums produced in the 80s - “Trap Door” and “Proof Through The Night”, both initially released on record albums. “Trap Door” is the first T Bone Burnett album I bought, a 6-song EP of electric-guitar-based arrangements that introduced me to, and got me hooked on, Mr. Burnett. “Proof…” is the follow-up album, eleven songs in a similar guitar-based style. These two early-80s albums prompted me to buy one of T Bone’s earlier albums (Truth Decay) and represent my favorite period from T Bone’s discography, and they would be at the top of my list of albums for anyone interested in starting a T Bone music collection. A few songs from both of these albums are included on the recently released “Twenty Twenty - The Essential T Bone Burnett” (which I also own) but the songs from “Proof…” have been remixed for “Twenty Twenty…” and I don’t care for the new mixes… I prefer the original mixes/versions, so I have been looking for this double CD. T Bone Burnett is such an interesting, and IMO, underrated songwriter - after all these years “Trap Door” is still one of my favorite albums, one I never grow tired of hearing. And of course I feel that “Proof…” is one of his better albums, so I glad I was able to track down this double CD release. Next on my list is the CD release of “Truth Decay”.

These days Burnett has become more popular for the movies he’s worked on - among others, he did the soundtracks for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou and Walk The Line - and he is sought after as a record producer, but I see him as a thoughtful and poetic songwriter. I was glad to see that, earlier this year, he released a CD of newer songs, “The True False Identity“. I picked up that album and I enjoyed it, although I don’t feel that it is T Bone’s strongest album… my new eBay purchase double CD set is the music that is currently getting the playing time in my Honda’s CD player.