my home town

My friend Dale played an electric guitar. I think he saved some money by building it himself, from Allied Radio (which became Radio Shack over time.). His dad was a computer troubleshooter, and he taught Dale about electronics so that he could solder components like transistors and capacitors like a pro. It was all kind of amazing to have a friend that knew all this stuff. He also shared my love for tape recorders/decks. Plus he had a real good ear and knew how to do most of the instrumentals of Beatle songs from the white album that sounded perfect to me. It was like having John, Paul, George and Ringo in your living room. He was that good. He also wrote some of his own instrumental music. In the senior year of high school his family moved from north minneapolis where we both lived to Belle Plaine where his dad opened up or took over a hardware store. So for about a year he sort of disappeared and played in a band called Peace of Whore. He wrote this song called Emotions. I kind of know where that was coming from, as he took my Amboy Dukes' album Journey To The Center of the Mind with him when he left. Ted Nungent was kind of a favorite of ours at the time.
Dale ended up returning to Minneapolis to attend the U of Minnesota and I moved into an apartment on the campus with him. Those were crazy times. Dale dropped out right away and mostly played his guitar. I was the ear for him. Hey, Don, listen to this or that I learned. I enjoyed listening, but I never felt that Dale had achieved a creative self for the most part, but he could learn a Kinks song or a Who song almost by magic. When I listened to music I was not so aware of chords at that time, but more of the melodies. Suddenly I was learning about barring and other theory on the guitar such as the 0 5 7 (key of E would be E A B, etc.), and the music was starting to make sense to me. Up to then I always thought the Beatles were super-human or something. How were they improvising all those great tunes? I was starting to sense some clues as to how it might be done. Actually I had the creativity that Dale seemed to lack. I could write my own stuff with lyrics, but it was more of a singing thing. Dale tried to teach me the guitar, but gave up after a while. He thought I must be tone deaf. Actually his ear was just better attuned to chords and things for making rhythms. But when it came to leads he was not all that good. I was actually pretty good on leads but terribly on rhythms. I also picked up on the harmonica and it was just a natural progression from the music I had heard that included the harp. Once I learned how to do the tongue trick to sound an individual note, I knew how it should sound, then it was easy to blow into just one hole without curling up the tongue. Steve Johnson, another north higher, who lived in an apartment next to ours for a while, showed me the trick. He was actually quite good, he could do Canned Heat riffs. I was more of the I'm A Man by the Yardbirds, The Wizard by Black Sabbath, Foggy Mental Breakdown by Steppenwolf, I Want To Take You Higher by Sly, and other harp tunes by Creedence, Grand Funk and Led Zeppelin. Those were the staple of the musics I was listening to, so that is where I was getting my inspiration. I wasn't deeply into the blues, but of course that was the roots of it. But the thing I learned to play on the harp that impressed me and others the most was J.B.'s Happy Harmonica that i heard on a John Sebastian album. Sort of sounded like Scandinavian folk music or traditional rather than the blues or jazz. I loved to play it and everybody thought I was great, but the problem was I didn't know what to do with it. There was no next step to take. That's when I started learning to bend the notes and do the blues on a blues harp rather than a regular harmonica (or the old standby was another name I recall). There was this place in Dinkytown at the U called the Podium where you could buy pipe tobacco called Apple Jack and harmonicas. I had almost every major key G C A E F and a Bflat. But Steve had some of the more exotic keys and that is probably how he learned the Canned Heat, because they intentionally used those so less people would be able to copy them, Eflat, etc. At some point I figured out that if the song is in a certain key which was the 0 than you play in the 5, so key or E I would play in A. I started learning Jethro Tull riffs on the harp, Ian Anderson had a wonderful style of playing that I liked to imitate. But I never got as good as this one guy I heard playing on a street corner in Dinkytown who just kept improvising and never played the same thing twice as far as I could tell. Boy, I could have stayed there all day and listened. I was into tape recorders, and I always felt sad that I never got the chance to tape any of that street sound that was happening back in the hippie era. It was a period of awesome creativity and improvisation. One of the saddest things about music in my experience is not being able to hold on to these special moments. All you have left is memories of the best things. It is impossible to get it back, but just realize that for a time you had it with you. So it goes, as life moves on to the next posting ...