It has taken me some time to record some of my own guitar playing. This is one of the first songs I ever learned from Gary Bolstad in Berlin, Germany in 1968. It is a Bob Dylan song, “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues”. The melody and lyrics mimic some of my melancholy side in music. Most importantly, I play it on a 12 string guitar. The octave strings add such a rich sound.
Melancholy Music
There is a melancholy and serious side to my music interests. Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues, Sam Stone, and If I Were Young and Didn’t Know, to name a few. Something in my heart of existence is triggered to gravitate to the down-trodden, in some form, is stimulated. Why is not important. What it exemplifies from me is important to me.\r\n\r\nTo me, it examples those tender, understanding, relatebley traits of myself that combine yin and yang, female and male exertions of my being. If melancholy is understood by many to be a sadness of some kind, then let it be. As an observer of the universe, there is no association between feeling and what is. Hmm….. not sure about that.
Why I Went Into Medicine
Kids; Our lives can be so complacent that we are carried on the currents of microscopic time into the next moment of existence.\r\n\r\nI was once asked why I wanted to become a doctor of medicine. It took me a few minutes to gain some clarity on the answer, however, this is what came to me intuitively. My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer when I was twelve. Most of what I remember was the fear on everybody’s faces. In those days, prostate cancer was a sticky note of death.\r\n\r\nI think, at age twelve, I had experienced enough guilt training that my grandiose child figured that I could become a health care professional and save my father. The accuracy of that is questionable, but the reasoning is interesting.
La Jolla De Mismaloya
April, come she will. February 21, 1988
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Tangier 1970
In 1970, Kathy and I escaped the island of Berlin, East of the Elb, and behind the “Iron Curtain”, to Torremolinos, Spain. It was really hot. We took the hovercraft from Malaga to Casablanca, Morroco. After being accosted by helpful youth, we secured a hotel and went for a walk. As we wandered out of town an into the hillsides, we were elated in not being hounded for money. It wasn’t long before we were discovered. Oh, well, it was still peaceful and reflecting.
Dizzy Dean
Some people leave lasting impressions for reasons as simple, and complex, as having taught you something that sticks with you forever.
Dizzy Dean was one of those people. Dizzy entered my life in Columbus, Ohio in the summer of 1973. I had been introduced to the local watering hole, Dick’s Den, on High St. in the Ohio State district of Columbus, Ohio. At the time, I was attending Ohio State and working at the University Hospital, running pump for open heart surgery. It was the time of love, not war, peace is the only way, era of my life, and the times.
I had been connected to some locals, Ralph Leesburg, specifically, by Gary Bolstad, who I had spent great times in Berlin, Germany with while stationed with the US Army Medical Corp.
Dizzy had been arrested on possession in Indiana and had spent two years in the state penitentiary. While incarcerated, Dizzy had written a manuscript of the history of jazz in the US. It amazed me that he had accumulated so much knowledge and transcribed it onto written pages. He shared much of his knowledge and taught me some fundamentals of Jazz that have stayed with me ever since. I include here a recording of me playing the chords that he passed on to me. My rendition is much different than his due to poetic license, however, the 12 bar blues is always open to interpretation.