I was fortunate enough to have taken a lesson from Ted in L.A. long,
long ago in a galaxy... etc.

Ted was a prime example of the kind of mind-blowing genius who somehow
remained humble and generous. Ted reminds me of a great story told
by the late, great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

Oscar said when he was a kid learning the piano, his dad played him a
recording of Art Tatum. He tells how he started crying and begged his
father to tell him this was not one but two people playing the piano
at once!

Ted's book, Chord Chemistry is the most important guitar book ever
written: thousands of chords in only two positions. Most chord
encyclopedia repeat every chord 12 times. Chord Chemistry has the most
important ear training exercises for a guitarist who really wants to
understand harmony.

 

 

Here's a video taped at a wedding in 1989 where Ted plays a medley of
beautiful standards.

It's thanks to video tape technology from the last century that we can
hear this and to Youtube, the technology of today that we can still
see and hear it today.

Continued from part 1 & 2 of My "Night" with Gala Dali

The gig was in some large venue, I'd say a few thousand people and the cigarette lighter thing at the end. Impressive. No Gala before the gig, none after. Well, when I invited her, I thought she wouldn't show, so I wasn't surprised.  When you play music in front of thousands of people who make a huge light show of tiny flames at the end, you don't think about some middle-aged lady you'd invited on a lark to stop by, anyway. Several of us went to hang out with some people we had met at the concert, and here's where things got foggy. A lot of drinking went on, no drugs, not that alcohol isn't a drug, but my recollection of how things happened is gone. Some of the highlights have stayed with me all these years.

First we somehow found ourselves at the seaside and got on a small fishing boat. I recall a lot of rapid Spanish and suddenly we were headed out in the harbor. A while later, as charming as this was, everyone was getting like "ok, we better go back" because it kinda looked like we were gonna go fishing seriously and we did have other cities to play in! While I don't know what the fishermen made of all this, they did bring us back to the shore.

We then somehow got to a bar. Funny how it always gets back to a bar. So this bar, and it was now maybe 3 AM, is filled with the kind of people you'd see in a 40's movie set: sailors in striped long sleeve T-shirts, huge brawls starting and ending with no one watching or caring. We had a bunch of drinks, and left, passing in an alley, by a bakery where someone went in and brought out a bunch of fresh rolls. Christ, this should have been a credit card ad: trip to Spain: $800. "Fresh-baked bread in a dark alley near the sea, priceless."

It was 8 AM when we returned to the hotel. I went up to my room and its unmussed bed for my guitar. On the way down I stopped at Gala's room and knocked. Gala opened the door in a nightgown and bade me come in with an arm whose palm went in an arc from me towards the inside of her room.

"So, you couldn't come and see us play last night?" I said, trying to be cool.
She said "Oh, I was there and after, I see Dali and tell him of your great success." Then she took some hotel stationary and wrote several lines on it. She pointed to the paper and said, "You come for lunch sometime. You take a train to here" indicating the name of the place they lived on the Costa Brava "and then you take taxi here. I pay for taxi."

The note she signed, an invitation to come and visit Gala and Salvador Dali in Cadaquès, a note that for all I know could have been sold at auction for the price of a very fine bottle of wine, was stolen out of my car in the late 70's.

The unforgettable closing line though, the one that has rung throughout the decades since the  incident, and the last words to me from the 80 year-old Gala Dali were: "But if you rich... I no pay taxi!"

I remember this story as one in a collection of things I've lived that  are a little out of the ordinary, but I'll bet Gala herself had a  million of these interludes with men half her age if Wikipedia is to  be believed.

 

Photo: Mundo Desconcertante (Jorge Louzao Penalva)

Salvador Dali Museum, which I would have had a private visit to had I gone. Damn!

38 years ago on the road

We pulled into the city of Barcelona after a dry and dusty bus ride, but we expected comfort. The expression, "it isn't the Ritz" was not appropriate as this actually was The Ritz we were booked into. We crossed the vast lobby, "we" being three black men and three white, three bearded men and three clean-shaven, but still totaling six musicians altogether, plus two great roadies there to schlep things, check us in and pay. This group of 8 males ranged in age from early twenties to late forties. A fairly wide sample of humanity with, as a bonus, one of us wearing a turban. He was also carrying a bag with 12 bottles of Louisiana Hot Sauce.  

The moment we had entered what must have been a wondrous place 40 years earlier, a svelte Russian-looking woman in what would be called stretch-slacks had been following our sauntering gait across to the desk, and when I sat on my road case, her eyes settled on me. (Why?) I was tired, and as I gazed over I was thinking of a middle class suburban housewife on vacation, but it didn't seem right. As I reflected on the anomalies, she rose and walked directly over to me. 

She was at least twice my age, perhaps more but she was not bashful when she said, "You are artists? My husband is an artist." The accent was there, fairly strong but unrecognizable to my then inexperienced ear. Not Spanish, though, at any rate. Coming from Los Angeles, I naively believed I'd have recognized that. As we moved through Spain I realized this too was an illusion.

Photo: FirstRozic

"Yeah, I guess you could say that." I managed, in a neutral tone, already losing interest. "Maybe you have heard of him," she intoned. "Salvador Dali?" I looked at this woman for the first time, directly, and my own Russian background from two generations back saw something in those eyes that went deep and yet, I somehow didn't believe what she had just said. It wasn't until I later asked the hotel concièrge who this woman was and heard his incredulous answer, "But you didn't know, Senior? that is Senora Dali." 

 
Continued here: http://randulo.posterous.com/200911-second-meeting-with-gal

If you're too young to know who Cream is, wikipedia will tell you. I recall going to see them in Minneapolis in their heyday. Oddly enough, they played in a small venue and the size of the crowd may be why Jack Bruce refused to play at all. Now a trio without bass can be a pitiful thing. In fact, Bruce, who I imagine thought he was the leader and most talented of the band at the time, probably thought his not playing killed the gig. Not true.

You know how your grandma said "if life throws you a lemon, make lemonade"? Well, that's what exactly Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker did. They got up and played jammed for at least 45 minutes. I'm pretty sure Clapton wasn't singing at all in those days, but he was inventive enough to pour out some amazing shit and Ginger was able to dance around it on the drums. I don't doubt that what was played on the stage was more exciting than Bruce's somewhat generous version of himself.

Clapton and Baker didn't just shove it because Mr. Bruce refused to play, they took responsibility and got up there. There is a dearth of souls out there in this day and age who'll do that, and a glut of those who are always blaming others for what happens in their lives.

In 19ss (sixty-something), I played 5 or 6 nights a week in a bar in downtown Minneapolis, the Vincent van Go-Go. We called it "The Vincent". I can't recall if the bad had yet changed names to The Soul Heirs, or were we still Froggy and His Friends? I know that Doug "Froggy" Nelson quit early on and Warren L. replaced him on drums. Warren is still around in Mpls, selling clothes, something he was always interested in more than anyone in the band. He picked out the "uniforms" we wore and called the combinations for each night. "Clown and pumpkin tomorrow night, guys!". That referred to a checkered top and pumpkin-colored pants.

On bass guitar was Charlie L. The latest news I have on him was his arrest for pilfering 'script drugs in houses listed on the real eastate market. When bass player Michael Brown joined us, Charlie played rhythm guitar. He was the main vocalist and sang Ray Charles' version of You Are My Sunshine. The less said about that, the better, I think. When Charlie took the occasional guitar solo, my longtime friend Zippy Caplan qualified the sound as "nursery rhyme leads". Michael was a cool guy, very laid back black dude who played the shit out of a Fender 5-string bass. We used to go out for food after the gig mosts nights, usually to Embers.

The waitresses were memorable at the Vincent. Phyllis and Jackie are the two who come to mind. I tried, but never got next to either one, but they were both very nice to me. I don't like the expression "hit" with relation to women, by the way, and have always thought Jimi's "Let me stand into your fire" the ultimate perfect image of the act. Nevertheless, I did neither with either.

I recall only a few of the tunes we played. I remember practicing the harmonics for hours in the solo of Nowhere Man by the Beatles. I think we probably also played Sea of Love, as I can recall Charlie singing that. We must have played more Beatles tunes. Also She's An Artist, Don't Look Back, or whatever that Dylan tune was called. I remember Dave "Snaker" Ray (RIP) or Spider John Koerner (holy moley, Spider is like a decade older than me). One of these guys came in to the bar one night and told me I "needed some guitar lessons". I took that advice decades later when I took a lesson from the truly great Ted Greene, who wrote a book every guitar player should study, regardless of what kind of music you play: Chord Chemistry.

I look back at these days of (relative) innocense with pleasure. I was lucky I guess not to fall victim to forces that ruined many peoples' lives indefinitely, including drug and alcohol abuse but also getting drafted into a particularly ugly and motiveless war. And this bar gig came just at the very beginnings of what was later know as the sexual revolution.

It's an old slogan, I even recall a store in Minneapolis that used the name "Life Socks". The pessimistic ode reminds me of the story of 'D', a young woman I met years ago. D was probably less than 18 when she began hanging out with musicians. She was sexually active in a day when everyone was, but she never really had a relationship with one guy for the first few years of her adult life. She had a sweet disposition and got along with everyone. She didn't seem to mind being used and always acted like this was her role. Then she got into hard drugs. What was unique, was that her personality didn't change, she was still sweet, never put anyone or anything down and didn't resort to stealing to feed her habit, although she did widen her sexual network to include more users, in order to get off.

At one point, we were in different cities and exchanged letters for a while. One day she wrote me saying she had finally realized she had to clean up, she wanted to change her life, and she went to rehab. As is often the case, she met her soul mate in that program. This often is not a good thing, but they both turned their lives around to the point that they got married and had a child. They embarked on a "normal" life, jobs, raising the kid, etc. I never met D's husband or saw the child, but from what I heard, they were doing allright, until the day her husband died in a car crash. Not too long after I heard that news, another piece of news came in, D herself was also killed in an auto accident. I never heard what had happened to the child or whether he or she had even survived.

Somewhere on the planet, an orphan of these two extremely unfortunate people lives (I hope). You probably have no idea how hard it is to escape from heroin addiction, but these two people somehow managed to do it against enormous odds and they were headed for a (hopefully) full life. A life outside of what we used to call the merry-go-round, the cycle of addiction where you live to cop illegal drugs and will do absolutely anything to get them.

D made a lot of people "happy" in her short lifetime and that life, more than any other, makes me hope that somehow our essence (soul, if you will) is recycled in the cosmos somewhere.

The 70's were turbulent times, sure. But on an individual level, have you ever shot a gun? Although I've never owned one, I shot an automatic weapon a few times in the Air Force. There have been many times where I would have enjoyed shooting something inanimate, but never to wound or  take a life. The story I'm about to tell was documented in a comic book called "Fu**t Up", which I will attempt to dredge up on the Interwebs  Real Soon Now, since I haven't found my copy of it to share.
 
Paul, a highly-talented drummer, tattooed ex-Marine got home after a  long and grueling rehearsal with a bunch of guys who couldn't read  music. He started talking to his wife, who was watching "Let's Make a  Deal". After a few attempts to get her attention, he went into the bedroom and came back out with a hand gun. The wife looked absolutely terrified, Paul fired several rounds in to Monty on the tube, silencing the latter forever, albeit not the former. One wonders what the rest of the conversation was like?

Although I'm not a country music fan in any stretch of the imagination,  I was introduced to the music of Patty Loveless through her husband and producer Emery Gordy, Jr.
 
Emery was the kind of talented person I respect most, someone who is  deeply professional, yet totally humble. He produced Patty's later work  after a long career as a sideman with Elvis, Neil Diamond, John Denver, Emmy Lou Harris and a bunch of country stars too numerous to mention. He also did a great Jimmy Carter imitation.
 
I know that Patty had throat surgery and that her husband was a ham  radio operator. For the nine weeks after her operation, she could not  speak or talk. Emery tried to teach her Morse Code, as well as using pen and paper with yellow Post-It notes. According to the Wikipedia article, "after this her interest in Amateur Radio developed and she was eventually licensed with the callsign KD4WUJ".
 
Though I never met Patty, I did spend some good times with Emery in L.A.  and later in Paris when he flew over in Denver's jet for a gig. I had  also heard that Emery nearly died of an illness but I believe he has recovered. At least I hope so because he was one of the nicest people I've ever known in the music business.