The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Which is Alive? The Singer or the Song?

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Medford, Oregon, May 2, 2015 — Now that I live on Siskiyou Boulevard, next door is a sometime fiesta. That is to say, the Latino family next door has the house on the corner, and apparently a never-ending extended family and circle of friends. So often on a Friday evening there is a gathering with Spanish music and beer. And when one of the children has a birthday … oh, my.

So when I returned from an errand this afternoon, and saw an inflatable tent thing in which children can bounce and fly around, I recognized birthday in progress. Sure enough, around dark, headlights and cars arrived, families spilled out into the pools of light, and now as I go to bed there’s a wonderful party going on next door.

It’s summer, and I have the window open beside my bed, so I can enjoy the party almost as well as if I was there. Past my window, in their back yard, children run, and scream, and yell stories, accusations, laughter, curse words, and insults. In other words, they’re having a good time.

You might think this would disturb my sleep, but it doesn’t. Somehow I like it, and despite the startling loudness and excitement, it’s pleasant and soothing.

I drifted off, smiling, and then … [Read more…]

The Clanging of Cymbals and Bells

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495 Third Avenue, San Francisco, 1975. These days I ride my motorcycle, and have plenty of spare time in between the postering runs for The Thumbtack Bugle. And while I was out putting up posters one day, I was looking at one of the posters.

I had been hired to put up a brightly colored large poster with colorful, banner-like flags pictured. It was advertising a special ritual that was to be performed by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, at the Nob Hill Masonic Center auditorium on California Street.

Sounded weird and maybe interesting, so I went.

I found it kind of noisy at the time — lots of banging drums and clashing cymbals and blatting, discordant horns — it was plenty weird, and I didn’t understand it much at all.

A week later I was speaking with my cousin Bruce (Richard Bruce Hurn), in Berkeley, and mentioned it because he was studying that same tradition, because they had a study center in Berkeley.

He fell upon the ground laughing. Apparently the ritual that I’d attended was a ritual for the dead.

Gosh. looks like I was in the right place after all!

A Gift from 1986

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Panhandle Park, below my Garret Apartment
Panhandle Park, below my Garret Apartment

Lyon and Oak, San Francisco, 1986 — I’d fallen in love with synthesizers, and learned to compose and play. And how to record these songs. In my garret flat, high above the Golden Gate Panhandle Park, with Simmons drums, a Yamaha keyboard, synth modules from Oberheim and Yamaha and Ensoniq, and an early Apple computer, I created music.

Some of these songs had been first recorded while I worked in Dallas for StarTel. The playing is pretty poor, but so thrilling to be able to do it.

Composing songs, however … was effortless. I had a secret method. I’d start a drum machine or repeat a set of chords, and then just listen for the melody that was already in there. Maybe that’s cheating, but it worked for me.

Enough for a Cassette Tape

I realized I had enough songs “in the can,” to make a cassette tape, and I thought what a wonderful Christmas gift to send to all my fans-  Oops, I mean friends and family. A cassette tape featuring songs by MEEEEE!

So I did. And that’s why … [Read more…]

So Long, Steve Jobs

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October 5, 2011: Apple Computer has announced that Steve Jobs died today.

That sucks, and I’m saddened.

I remember an evening, many years ago, I think a Tuesday, at the regular monthly meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, which was held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator building.

I’d ride my (somewhat small) 360 Yamaha motorcycle down Interstate 280 from San Francisco, and my tushie was frazzled by the time I arrived. But it was worth it. Those were exciting times, with new announcements about CP/M and new peripherals for the Altair. Some of the people attending have now become household words, and I met the infamous Captain Crunch there, who was imprisoned for hacking long distance calls with a whistle that came in Captain Crunch cereal boxes.

And on that particular night, there were two scuzzy guys in the foyer. They weren’t on the regular program, so they’d set up just inside the door but before you went into the auditorium where the “real” program was going on.

They were demonstrating a board they’d just developed that displayed … (gasp!) … colors. (At the time, displays were black and white.)

These two guys reminded me of my hippie days. Steve and Steve, their names were. Wozniak and Jobs.

===

In the wake of his departure, here’s one of my favorite quotations, and maybe it has even more meaning today …

“Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs

 

A White Sport Coat, and Rocket Fuel

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Henrietta, Texas, Easter Sunday, 1958: I have Easter finery, and it is a white sport coat. At age twelve, this seems especially neato to me, because that Marty Robbins song about the White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation is still playing on the radio.

Usually, on school days, like my friends, I wear Levis or Lee Riders with a sport shirt. Because it is so cool to do so, I wear black loafers with white socks. Bobby Mitchell. has explained this to me, and he is a great fashion plate.

Bobby, Eddy Frank, Billy Ray, and several others are studying rocketry, and building rockets from aluminum tubes, hacksaws, wood, and gunpowder. Most of these rockets do not work, but we’re not giving up!

Today, however, I’m wearing Easter finery and sitting in my room, bored, because I’m dressed and ready for church, and the rest of my family is still getting dressed.

So that’s why I was fiddling with the rocket fuel.

[Read more…]

Insult to Injury in the Drum Section

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The band room of Henrietta High School, Henrietta, Texas, 1960: I was a hot-shot rudimental drummer, the head of the drum section. My associates were Noah on the bass drum, and … Linda on cymbols.

Noah had it easy. Just hit the bass drum on every beat.

Cymbols are more difficult, because you must stand, counting measure after measure, and sooner or later you get the the one place where you clash the cymbols together with a great flourish.

Linda had a bad habit of counting wrong. Sometimes we had cymbol clashes in the middle of soft passages. Often we passed the correct spot, and when Mr. Raeke glared, we got a kind of belated cymbol crash.

All this reflected upon me, the head of the drum section, so I tried to keep an eye on Linda, and helped her count the measures, whilst playing the rudimental snare part.

Although not particularly good at counting measures, she’d grown even more breathtaking from the first time I’d ever seen her walking down the street, and on this particular day she wore a snug black medium-weight turtleneck sweater which showed off her lovely figure to perfection, each perfect breast the stuff of dreams.

Today she was counting very seriously, and we were drawing near the correct place.

As the band headed into the last two measures, Linda raised the left cymbol high, and lowered the right cymbol low. Standing upright, her head and shoulders nodding in time, she counted down the last four beats.

Up came the measure, and the cymbols swung!

“Thunk.”

No stunning crash. Just a muffled sound. I looked at Linda’s face, but her eyes were blank, staring into space far beyond the ceiling of the room. It was pain. Wordless. Pain beyond speech.

She had caught her left breast between the cymbols.

Bloggard Travels to Squidoo

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Squidoo.com, May 31, 2008: For those as may be interested, the Bloggard, in his persona as Traktor Topaz, mild-mannered musician at a great metropolitan newspaper, has posted an article at Squidoo.

For some reason, the Squidarians call an article like this a ‘lens.’ So really, the Bloggard has created a lens. So now we know.

The name of the article is Play Guitar How To: Tap Guitar or Pick Guitar?

It has a story of a poor monkey, and some suggestions for fellows as would like to play a normal guitar. (Not everybody needs to play a Megatar. Different smokes for different folks, we say.)

If you enjoy the article, please put a nice commento on the commento formo. Gracias!

Remembering John Lennon

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Entrance to John Lennon's home at The Dakota

New York, December 9, 1980: In the evening, John Lennon returned from the recording session at The Record Plant in New York. The limosine let him out in front of The Dakota, the gothic stone building pictured in the movie “Rosemary’s Baby”, and as he and Yoko Ono approached the building, Mark David Chapman called out “Mr. Lennon?” and shot Lennon five times with a .38 revolver.

Lennon was hit in the torso and the back. He called out, “I’m shot,” took a few steps, and collapsed. When policed arrived, they found Chapman standing nearby, the gun on the ground. A building security guard asked Chapman, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Chapman replied, “I just shot John Lennon.”

Police rushed Lennon to the emergency room at the Roosevelt hospital, but he could not be revived.

Something died for many of us that day.

The sound of the Beatles, coming from the radio, startled us, back in the day. Those were college days for me. But perhaps you remember when you first heard their harmony, the enthusiasm, the sound was new and fresh.

A memory floats, quiet, like a blossom in a busy stream, and rushing around a bend, is gone.

 
 

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