![]() We didn’t have a hippie audience that was eating organic food and discussing the cosmos they were listening to the Grateful Dead.” His fans in the 1960s - “Our biggest audience was middle-class Jewish guys from the suburbs. went to Europe and played their butts off.” Europeans have a different view of jazz, because all the jazz musicians who were abused in the U.S. ![]() He’s usually involved in the drug trade, or he’s a down-and-out degenerate, or he’s a weirdo with a beret. Jazz to them, if it’s ever brought to them through TV, is a guy who’s being presented as a crime character. Jazz - “I think there are kids in this country that have no idea what jazz is. I went back to the dentist the other day and he had switched back to KJQY (K-JOY), or one of those mondo-elevator-music stations, and I was grateful.” I went to the dentist, he had his radio tuned to `The Wave,’ and it was nauseating me. New Age music - “It’s one of those things you get to experience at the dentist. Most of the people who tell other people what to like are pretty ignorant, though it’s through no fault of their own, since most of them are probably graduates of American schools.” Music critics - “What somebody writes about what you do is pretty irrelevant. The music listener will eventually go the way of the snail darter, and there won’t be anybody stepping in to save them.” They either watch music or dance to it, but listening seems old-fashioned. I’ve never been the kind of guy who needs a whole bunch of friends hanging around.”ĭwindling attention spans - “Very few people listen to music anymore. I wasn’t a quarterback, and had no intention of ever becoming one, so who needs this guy? To me, that didn’t make any difference, because I was totally happy working by myself. And (people) could care less if I loved music or did whatever it was. His teen years - “I was a guy with a big nose, overweight and pimples typical teen-age geek. My three favorite guitarists then were Johnny `Guitar’ Watson, Clarence `Gatemouth’ Brown and Guitar Slim.” My favorite drummer at the time was Louie Bellson. Instrumental transitions - “I wasn’t that great a drummer I didn’t have the coordination to really be that successful. Each district in town had really hot bands, and it was very competitive.” If kids going to school there now had any idea just what kind of a colorful and interesting musical life San Diego had back in the mid-’50s, they’d be extremely disappointed that it doesn’t exist there anymore. I really missed it when I moved away, but now it’s turned into something completely different. The San Diego music scene - “I loved San Diego. The rest of my studies involved listening to records and playing in bars.” So I went to the library, because all of the books that you need to learn the mechanics of music are available there, and they’re free. There were no composition classes, because American public schools don’t offer them. ![]() They were my teachers in orchestra and marching band. Kavelman was the first to introduce me to 12-tone music. I don’t know if they’re still there, but I’d like to tip my hat to them. Minor.’ Robert Kavelman was my music teacher at Mission Bay High. His San Diego teachers: “The music teacher at Grossmont High was a guy named Benton Minor, who signed all his passes ‘B.
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