On Valerie Day’s podcast, LIVING A VOCAL LIFE, she asks every guest a couple basic questions. They’re the bookends of the show. The first one is, WHAT IS YOUR FIRST MEMORY OF SINGING? That usually happens between the ages of three and six. At the end of the show, Valerie asks, IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND SAY SOMETHING TO YOUR YOUNGER SELF, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE? What would you say to that kid?

So much to say…

Everyone chose around age fifteen. We all have our own version of what that was like. To go back and talk to my younger self was always my ULTIMATE SCI-FI FANTASY! [I wouldn’t mind going back and helping to produce some of those NU SHOOZ records, too…kid do you really need four tambourine parts?]

All of the guests on Valerie’s podcast said basically the same thing. They told their fifteen-year-old incarnation;

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL
YOU’RE NOT CRAZY
THIS PATH IS OPEN TO YOU
THAT PATH…

…MAYBE NOT SO MUCH

Everybody said it. I found that fascinating.

Oh…

If I could only go back and tell my kid self what the dead-ends were…but we’re not allowed to do that. It’s the PRIME DIRECTIVE, like on Star Trek or any Time-travel story. You’re not allowed to interfere with the past. And I get it. Our younger selves had to make their own mistakes…to learn from them.

But we have this longing to go back into the past and say, “Hey baby, relax. It’s alright. You’re beautiful. You’ve got a thing on that piano, or yeah, DANCING is not a stupid career if you’ve got the dance in your bones.”

I had a lot of dead-ends.

I thought I wanted to be a Pathologist because of a book I read. You wanna go back and say, “No, get your hands on a guitar as soon as you can. There’s MUSIC in your head.” But you’re not allowed to say that because you’re on the deck of the Enterprise, and you’re not allowed to communicate with that rogue planet.

My own journey into music was slow but constant. There was a Tom Lehrer record on the turntable when I was five. I played it over and over and picked up a lot of unsavory lines I didn’t understand.

THE GUY WHO TOOK A KNIFE
AND MONOGRAMMED HIS WIFE
THEN DROPPED HER IN THE POND
AND WATCHED HER DROWN.

[Note: I picked one of the cleaner ones here.]

The Golden Age of Sixties music was happening all around me. Herb Alpert and the Kingston Trio and Bobby Darin. Uncle Tony was a professional trombone player. He had a striped jacket and straw boater for his Dixieland gigs. From age seven to around age eleven, I just played army. I fought in both the European and Pacific Theaters, of course. Then I wanted to be a Scientist and spent all my spare cash on beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks.

I didn’t really want to be a scientist. I was into the theater of it. My laboratory was a stage set.

*John Smith, military school. 6th Grade.*

I moved to L.A. in the summer of ’66. Herb Alpert was on the radio playing ‘Taste of Honey.’ I could imitate his trumpet solo. My mother asked, “Do you want to play a musical instrument?” Nah, I said, mostly because it was her idea. It would be another five years before I picked up an instrument and fourteen before I had a band of my own.

But for all the dead-ends, there was this constant gravitational pull toward a life in music.

Plaintive chord changes thrilled me before I knew what they were. Go listen to ‘Tears of a Clown.’ Do it right now, and see if you don’t get a few tears of your own.

I could probably list a hundred songs that changed my life in some way. This is a list of songs that tipped the scales toward a life in music and away from Pathology.

HERE ARE NINE SONGS THAT MADE ME WANT TO GET INTO MUSIC

...which kinda turned out O.K.

“I Was Made To Love Her” Stevie Wonder

I remember where I was when I heard this. Squeezed into the back of a V.W. bug. We were on our way to go swimming in some Ohio lake. It was the summer of ’67. My introduction to Soul Music?

No, there was one before that.

2.) “Natural Man” Lou Rawls

Maybe that was my introduction to Soul Music.

No. I think there was one before that.

When I was seven years old, that would have been 1962, I got the measles. In those days, they said the measles could make you go blind.

So they gave me a pair of kid-sized sunglasses...

And not crappy ones.

Legit horn-rimmed Marcello Mastrioni SHADES!

And they gave me something else.

A BABY BLUE TRANSISTOR RADIO in a brown leather case embossed like a pair of brown wingtips.

And I remember the first song that came out of that radio.

3.) “Java” Al Hirt

[Yeah, I know it doesn’t count as a Soul tune.]

What was playing that answer lick?

“Da-boo-dat

Da-boo-dat

Daba-dooby-aba-dat”

To my seven-year-old ears, it sounded like rubber bands. It took me twenty years, no lie, to figure out that they were tenor saxophones.

Now we jump forward a couple years.

4.) “Mother Popcorn”
James Brown

There was this black family that lived down the alley, Frank and Amanda Miller and their six [count ‘em...six] kids. Two of them were deaf/mute. My mom worked three jobs, so they kind of took me in. Frank was building a supercar in the garage, a ’49 Plymouth with T.V., C.B. Radio, a refrigerator, and shag carpets; the kind of ride Curtis Mayfield would have called a ‘Gangster Lean.’ Frank worked at the Naval shipyard over in Long Beach. He brought home all kinds of wires, meters, and parts pulled out of old battleships and destroyer escorts. Amanda, meanwhile, was taking care of the six kids.

So...one day, she comes to me and says

“I’m goin’ to the record store. Tell me two songs you want.”

She bought me two 45’s.

5.) “Love Makes a Woman” Barbara Acklin

And this was the other one.

[By the way, Amanda Miller taught me how to dance the Popcorn.]

6.) “Say a Little Prayer”
Dionne Warwick

Eighteen years later, we got to meet Dionne Warwick on the Solid Gold show. I chickened out of telling her that I was thirteen and loved her stuff with Burt Bacharach. She was really tall. So was Marilyn McCoo.

Maybe THAT was my introduction to Soul Music.

7.) “More Love”
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

8.) "Tears of a Clown”
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles (see above.)

9.) "Nina y Senora" Tito Puente

There was so much Latin music going on in Portland in the ’70s. This is a sample of what was playing in our apartment around 1977.

Oh, But I left out...

10.) “Bread and Butter”
The Newbeats

Some early New Orleans soul…love that piano part. ‘Judy in Disguise’ is another piano part like that.

And the song that made me switch from Pathology to Music

11.) “Message To Love” Hendrix/Band of Gypsies

Four bars of that song and I was hooked.

That’s what I gotta do with MY life.

[Oops…there were more than nine.]

A girl named Leanne gave me a broken guitar from her parent’s closet. The bridge was dangling from a single string. Of course, the first thing I did when I got home was…pose in the mirror, like Hendrix in Life Magazine. The next thing I did was try to learn to play, and I didn’t miss a day for the next fifty years.

So…

That fifteen-year-old worked it out for himself. And maybe the dead-ends are important. Maybe they add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. They add up to who we are now.