MUSIC

I learned guitar from my brother who was four years older than me. I traded a trumpet for my first guitar. I must have been about fourteen. I had been taking piano lessons since I was eleven but this was a truly golden era in the evolution of rock-and-roll and I was all for it.

One time I auditioned at a local bar, in the middle of the world in Middletown, Ohio. It was called Dana’s. I was shy, insecure and had a lousy voice. Other than that I had a lot going for me. I played some Neil Young songs and a rarely played Rolling Stones song called “No Expectations”.

During the second song, I remember seeing the owner, Dana, presumably the one who was supposed to be listening to my audition, walk outside. He remained there for the rest of my short set. I finished, packed up and left and that was that.

I have continued to compose and play music for over forty years now. One discards illusions about where and when and how and why and how much.......as the years pile on. It’s enough to do something that you love. My fifteen-year-old daughter has introduced me to an entirely new generation of musicians who make wonderful recordings, full of life and poetry and love - far from the bland, annoying realm of popular radio and, especially, away from the incessant repetition of once good or even great songs now turned sour from endless playing day after day, decade after decade and mutated into the wretched “Classic Rock”.

Music, like painting, is a search, a dance, a walk uphill, a struggle with better angels. It is art and art slips easily out of the grasp of those who would rigidly define and limit its possibilities.