East L.A. 1969: I lived in a house with roommates, one of which was a jazz musician named LaMont Johnson.

One night I had a peculiar dream: I was a musician in a space-age society, and gave a concert for a small auditorium of people, playing music by moving my hands inside a square ‘grid’. The music must have been really good, because both myself and the audience just got caught up and we were all getting higher and higher and higher.

And somehow, we never came back. We just dropped those bodies. I woke up thinking I’d either been a stupendous musician or maybe an unusual mass murderer.

Over breakfast, I told my roommates about my peculiar dream. And LaMont said, “Such a thing exists. It’s called a syn-the-sizer, and I know a guy who has one.” We stared in amaze. He continued, “Would you like to go see it?”

Two nights later we drove to an industrial area. In East Los Angeles we found a warehouse filled with strange machines all covered over with cloth.

In a small side room I met Paul Beaver, who, along with a teen-age keyboardist, was making one of the earliest US electronic records, later to be called ‘The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music.’

Mr. Beaver and his keyboardist had Moog Synthesizer #2, looking for all the world like a row of suitcases filled with knobs and colored patch cords going from one to another. In the middle of the room, like a miniature refrigerator, was an Ampex tape deck. Beaver would write the arrangement and program the synth. The keyboardist would play the line, and they’d record the track. Line by line, instrument by instrument. It just knocked my socks off.

And that was that, until 1981.

Married and operating Network Answering Service in San Francisco, one day I went to the West Coast Computer Faire, and there I heard the strangest and most beautiful sound. It was faint through the hubbub, but I tracked it to a booth where a guy was demonstrating software which was played a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. I decided to learn to make that beautiful sound.

I told my wife that I was going to get a DX7, and she said, “That’s odd.”

Because one of our answering service clients had a message up about a DX7 for sale. We had served this musician for years; he wrote commercials in an office at Ghirardelli Square. I called him. Although I’d taken his calls for years, we’d never met. He lived in a gorgeous house beside one of the parks.

As I was sitting at his dining room table, writing his name onto a check, I suddenly got the impression I’d heard his name once long ago. His name was Bernie Krause. Flash! I asked him, “Years ago, were you a teen-age keyboardist with Paul Beaver in a warehouse in Los Angeles?”

Yup.

San Francisco, 1976: But it actually started with Lamont Johnson, a jazz piano-player in Los Angeles, in 1969. At breakfast, he told us roommates his great new plan. We would start an answering service, for musicians!

“A what?” I asked. He explained it. Answering services used switchboards to answer the phone when the musician was out. I knew how to operate a switchboard, because of my hotel jobs. As soon as we had a switchboard and some clients, we could all take turns. He showed us listings in the Los Angeles yellow pages. Not one of these answering services specialized in serving musicians!

It sounded like a swell idea. Quickly we were recruited. Me and another guy were sent to obtain an endorsement from the head of the Los Angeles musician’s union. I made up some charts with pictures of statistics going up. We got an appointment.

The gentleman was very kind, and never once laughed at our clown act. He just explained gently that he was not able to endorse one company over another, though he very much appreciated us letting him know about our new company.

I tried to find a pleasant-sounding way to explain to Lamont that we were abject failures. Luckily, none of the others had one whit of success either, and to our great good fortune, we did not start up an answering service for musicians.

Thus it was that, years later in San Francisco, when I opened my phone bill and a little advert fluttered to the floor, I read about this new feature, Call Forwarding.

“Hmmm,” I said to myself, “You could use that to forward a whole bunch of phones. You could build an answering service without a switchboard.”

I did some research, meaning that I got my friend Dennis to ask questions of his answering service. This company had 2200 customers and 30 operators. After allowing for different shifts, this meant that each operator could handle 280 customers. (Later experience revealed no truth whatsoever in this formula.)

After my careful research, I got some phone lines and a bootleg pushbutton phone. I wrote “Bad Air Detector” on the switching box so the phone company guys wouldn’t know what it was. I placed an ad. I waited for the phone book to come out.

The phone rang. The guy asked about our service and I told him about call-forwarding. Our hours? Our prices? He signed up.

In my studio apartment, thus sprang Network Answering Service.

Six a.m. to Midnight. At first, I was the only operator. My favorite station went off the air at Midnight, same as me. Every night, when Midnight came, they played this lovely song called the Pachibel Canon.

And every night, it sounded so sweet.