This one was kind of a departure for me. I was fresh off come complex chords and progressions in the last track and was becoming fascinated with more serious music – not songs, particularly, but music that flowed and, hopefully, took the listener to deeper places.

My compositions pretty closely reflect whatever mood I’m in when I write them. Chord progressions like this one, written in the early 1970s in my high school years, express the complex emotions most of us have at that age.

This one is an interesting piece. It begins in a rather ordinary way, but there are a couple of change-ups – the instrumental equivalents of a chorus and a bridge – that are quite unexpected and in fact rather rich and almost philosophic.

This was intended as an instrumental, but only the backing chords were recorded, as I intended to develop the lead instrument lines later.

Just a little frolicking melody I stumbled on while tooling around with my guitar.

This is a pretty lame attempt to fashion a complete song out of the few stanza’s I had previously written.

You’ll find a complete commentary on this song noted on the original take here.

Here are the lyrics:

My mind cries all alone within my body,
but still the tears don’t show.
And I just want to tell you that I’m slowly,
losing touch with all I know.

So foot in front of foot I make my way,
across the crowded vibes of thought.
Trying to separate conflicting images,
That tell me what I’m not.

Music written and recorded in the early 1970s

Guitar only, no vocal. I think I just recorded this to make sure I could hear the music cleanly for any future development.

This is one of the few songs with lyrics that I wrote in the very beginning of my compositional journey. I don’t recall ever thinking about starting to write lyrics. In my memory it just seemed natural I guess.

In those days The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Mommas and the Papas – all strong influencers of my music – had already broken up. So, the notion of lyrics was just a natural part of my notion of what composing was but I simply hadn’t paid it much attention in the early days, as I was much more interested in the music.

Interestingly, at least to me, is that I started composing on the piano in 1962 or so, when I was about nine years old, and The Beatles had just started to become known here in the USA. So, my development as a composer was largely tied to their rise and demise.

As related previously in this text, my mom was in the kitchen and heard my step-dad playing a new composition on the used upright piano he had bought to express his music. She liked it a lot and came out to compliment him on it and it was me playing something I’d composed.

Now I imagine I’d been playing around on the keys for a while, since one doesn’t just sit down for the first time and compose something. At least I suppose not. But actually composing something just happened. I was simply tooling around, learning how notes sounded together, found a combination I liked, added to that, and that’s what I was doing when my mom came out. I never even had a conscious thought at the time about trying to write music. I was just following some interesting sounds to see where they might lead, they way one might hike down a path to see what’s over the next hill, or the way Home Simpson might drop something important that he was doing to chase after a dog with a fluffy tail.

But once I realized I had composed something and my mom liked it, I started doing it all the time, also because it made me just like my step-dad, like most kids do with their parents when they are young.

Beyond that though, the first time I tried my hand at lyrics in order to write an actual complete song was when my mom and dad were putting together an idea for a feature length animated cartoon they hoped to sell through a friend who had a contact to Disney. It was called, The Adventures of the Mighty Toad Patrol.

This was based on our actual Boy Scout Patrol from Troop 8 in Burbank, California. My step-dad was the scoutmaster and I was the patrol leader of the Toad Patrol. The Toad Patrol got its name from our very first campout, which was held in a park in Burbank (we weren’t ready for the wild yet) and the place was literally crawling, and sometime hopping, with toads.

My parents wrote a script for the movie, my step-dad wrote the music (my mom co-wrote the lyrics) and my dad developed all the characters in a variety of original detailed drawings. They decided to do an audio recording of the entire script on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder they had and also included me so I wouldn’t feel left out and we could have this whole experience as a family.

I remember that I decided to write a song for the movie myself, and if I recall correctly, I didn’t tell them about it until I had finished it – music and lyrics, just like my dad!

I played it for them and they actually liked it. Looking back, it was pretty simple, but they wrote it into the script as a scene around the campfire when the Patrol Leader (me) sings a song (that captured the woodland spirit) to the other members of the patrol.

I still have that tape around here somewhere, and I’ll share it when I find it.

Getting back to THIS song – wow, long way around – I was used to the concept of writing lyrics, but just hadn’t done it much. When I did, I found it as easy as music, and just as much fun, and flowing just as nice as you please.

Here, then, are the lyrics for What I’m Not, my song about about trying to discover “Who am I?” like most of us in high school.

Lyrics

My mind cries all alone within my body,
but still the tears don’t show.
And I just want to tell you that I’m slowly,
losing touch with all I know.

So foot in front of foot I make my way,
across the crowded vibes of thought.
Trying to separate conflicting images,
That tell me what I’m not.

Music written and recorded in the early 1970s

You can almost hear one of those childhood Slinky toys cascading down some steps in this frivolous melody. In case you are wondering, of the roughly four hundred musical entries in my Composer’s Sketchbook, I only named a few of them at the time I wrote them. Titles like this one (Slinky) were added later when I fest transferred these tracks to mp3 and also now, as I see how they strike me at the moment. So, take the titles with a grain of salt and don’t put the monikers in any kind of historical context with the song itself. Like, who cares about all this anyway? I care.

To me, the rhythmic undulations of this one conjure up an image of a desert trek. When I wrote it, I was thinking of traveling music in a journey movie. All in all, it’s kind of a gentle mesmerizing piece with the characters in the movie occasionally falling asleep in the saddle and then being gently jostled awake by the interesting little recurring guitar riff that represents something unexpected along side the trail. I have also thought this might fit well with a paddle boat making its way up river in the late 1800s as it winds through the African savanna.

Written and recorded in the early 1970s.

This song’s origins run a bit deep. When I graduated from Elementary School, my parents gave me an 8mm movie camera with the old reel-to-reel film. I shot all kinds of scenes on my last day of school, but the film slipped the sprockets and I got nothing. (Fortunately, I had also taken some still photos, so not all the memory moments were lost.)

My parents felt really bad that the present they had gotten had caused problems instead of joy, though honestly I wasn’t really down – it was more just parental thing where you want your kids to be happy and hate it when you do something nice for them and it doesn’t work out.

So, though they really didn’t have any money and were always scrimping to get by, they bought me a new Super-8 movie camera that has just come out from Kodak and used film cartridges that just snapped into it – nothing to thread.

I took to that straight away and started doing all kinds of special effects shots, timelapse, and animation. I started putting together my own films and eventually put an expensive (for me) Canon 814 Autozoom Super-8 movie camera on lay away for a year as I saved up the money. That whole 12 month span I only spent 29 cents on myself for a bag of sunflower seeds, and all the rest of my allowance and money gifts went to the camera.

Once I got it, I really delved into filmmaking. I read everything I could find about it, and made a whole string of movies. I entered one of these in the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards and got Honorable Mention in one of the categories. Even got my picture in the local paper with a half-page write up! Wow.

Well, by the time I was this far into my Composer’s Sketchbook, I was also well into making movies. I was particularly interested in film history and loved the silent era – especially the comedians, such as the Keystone Kops. The music for these comedies was played live in the theaters on whatever piano they had around and was always some soft of spin on Honky Tonk.

So, I set my mind to teaching myself how to play rinky-dink piano, and this song came from right in that era.

How about that – a long, boring story that (though it took its sweet time getting there) ultimately hardly ended up anywhere, and clearly wasn’t worth the wait.

Imagine that.

As with all teenagers, there are times when it seems like you are pushing as hard as you can and life is pushing back. Feels like you are getting nowhere fast. It’s frustrating. You wonder if you’re ever going to make any progress toward your goals, much less your dreams.

Let me tell you. It feels the same way fifty years later, only now you’re also running out of time.

And so, this song, Slog, summoned itself from out of my subconscious to express that feeling. Though it isn’t very inventive, with a little multi-tracking of several appropriate instruments, it might just capture the mood.