57 years ago today

A while back

This was a good day on Telegraph Ave....in 1966 I was talking with this old Beatnik across the street from the Forum and he was telling me about his world travels searching for a cure for his heroin addiction. He said in the hymalayas he found what he needed in Buddhist meditation. I decided to go to Mo's book store to look for something on that because it seemed like a good thing to know. It turned out that after the Viet Nam war heated up I spent a lot of time helping returning friends with that exact heroin addiction. As it got dark a white van drove up and the guys were unloading their gear so he and I went to help them. For that reason we got to stay for the show. They were The Steve Miller Texas Blues band.

After I was talking with Boz the lead guitarist and he said kid what do you do and I told him I write so he asked if I wrote songs ... I said I call it poetry and tore a page from my notebook and gave it to him.

Some years later he recorded his first album and he turned that scribble i gave him into a song.

By that time I was long gone... living th the yukatan... photographing glyphs for the Myan Dictionary. But back in 66 … Mo caught me and my two friends Rob and Jim swiping classical music LP's ... he knew it was us.... we'd borrow them and return the next day for credit to buy books. He told us it would be better to be able to keep his eyes on us so he offered us a deal... He had an alley next to the store and he was going to close it up into a tiny store that he would own but we could run and pay him rent.. ANYTHING WE WANTED... SO.... we opened Shambala books in the back and Lhasa Karnak herbs in the front... Mo ordered all the books from India and thats how I got to teach myself Sanskrit because UC Berkeley didnt have any classes in Sanskrit in those days.

Not all we learn is in the classroom in university... I had a classical music radio program for five years in Mendocino county public radio... Sunday Morning Clasdics on KZYX.. that was because I lost a finger making a curved staircase for an 1800’s restoration I was working on so I quit playing music for a long time but the Radio progrwm was a good creative outlet.