xxmikexx

A partial name has come back -- Julie? Damone, daughter of singer/drummer/producer Vic Damone.

Another was Jason Sachs of the Goldman-Sachs Wall Street firm family. (But it was not known as Goldman-Sachs at the time.) Not an artsy type but my goodness did he have expensive clothes. We were all required to wear a shirt and tie (I wore them with black jeans :)) but Jason was always dressed to the nines like a wealthy conservative banker which, of course, his father was. Let me tell you, Jason was not the life of the party, this from me moi Mikey, who can draw ANYBODY out into a conversation -- unless his name is Jason Sachs.

There's more to the Jimmy Hernandez story ...

After high school we went our separate ways. But a few years later I ran into Jimmy on a New York Central train headed upstate out of Manhattan. I was on the train because I was going to Peekskill to spend the weekend with my cousins and, as it happened, I decided to bring my Stratocaster along.

Anyway, there was Jimmy sitting in one of the cars along with four other guys. Mutual introductions having been made, it turned out that they were an unknown group who called themselves ... The Kingsmen ... and who had a record that was just starting to happen called ... Louie, Louie. (I'm completely serious here.)

They were all on their way to Albany where they would open for ... I don't remember but it was a name act. They got their guitar and bass out (not the drums and not the electric piano), I got mine out, and we had an unplugged jam session courtesy of New York Central, who were experiencing some kind of departure delay. Anyway, the guys liked my playing invited me to join the party up in Albany.

But I declined the offer and got off at Peekskill. Of course their record hit it big time later in the year and who knows what trajectory my life would have followed if I had stayed on that train.

I don't recall how they and Jimmy had hooked up, or why Jimmy was on the train, but most likely he had become their road manager.

End of story, or at least of the Jimmy story. I never saw or heard of him again.

Kids at Rhodes who had famous parents ...

Well, let's see. She was really shy but there was Letty Ferer, daughter of actor Jose Ferer.

There was ... d-word, my mind is going ... extended senior moment and I can't remember anybody else just now. I'll have to come back to this later. However, I remember one girl because I wrote about her elsewhere on this site several months ago.

It was ... d-word ... either Carol Baker or Carol Lynley or ... d-word ... Oh well, it'll come back to me, and so will the other names, and when they do I'll extend this thread.

Anyway, the key thing here is that this girl was famous in her own right, as a teenage movie actress. (It was her parents who were complete unknowns. :))

Perhaps between movies (I don't recall), she was with us for only about six weeks. Everybody thought she was very stuck up because she wouldn't talk to anybody, but I guessed that in reality she was simply intensely shy like a lot of famous people. (Which is why they go into acting, so they can be somebody other than the shy persona they can't lose any other way.)

And so it turned out to be. I struck up a conversation with her one day and found her to be very funny, very charming, very grateful to have somebody to talk to. I tried to screw up my courage and ask her out but I never was able. As I realized in later years she probably would have said yes because most child stars live in a bubble and never get asked to go anywhere. (So typically they miss the experience even of making out, for example. How sad.)

This, by the way, was during the period before my high school classmate wife and I had hooked up permanently. Had I dated <Carol Lynley?> goodness knows what might have happened after that.

Tuesday Weld! That's who the other possibility is. So it was either she or Carol Lynley, I'm not sure. (But I think it was Lynley.)

You may well be right, skylab, but note that I said "jazz SUPPER club". Most of the places on West (52nd?) were lounges. If I recall correctly, Upstairs At The Downstairs eventually booked in an unknown piano playing singer/songwriter named ... Bobby Short ... who never left, so no other acts were booked in until Short died. (No, I dont know where the supper club was located. I was never there.)

Here's another part of the story that you'll relate to. Our school was a prep school, and even though I was born into poverty, by the time I was ready for high school my father had pulled himself up and was a high ranking corporate staffer at General Electric, my point being that he could afford to put me through Rhodes Prep, which he did.

Many of the kids at the school had famous parents -- actors, musicians, more about this immediately below. Anyway, it really wasn't all that unusual for me to have a guy like Jimmy for a friend. And some of the school staff had bright futures ahead of them too ...

Like my music club teacher, Nat Hentoff, already a jazz columnist for for Downbeat Magazine, and who is a political columnist today. I joined that club only because everybody had to belong to at least a few clubs. (My others were, predictably, debating and chess. :) I cut both of these as often as I could get away with.)

Anyway, I had Nat Hentoff telling me what to listen to and as long as I didn't have to lay out any money I followed his recommendations. (He even lent me a couple of records. The others I borrowed, mostly I think from the 42nd Street Library, which was only about ten blocks away from school.)

You're not the only one who doesn't buy any payware. There's plenty of excellent freeware available, like your beloved Christensen Eagle.

But payware widens the range of choices. Evidently that's not important to you but equally evidently it is to me.

Yet I straddle the fence. I own the Dreamfleet 727-200, but I'm also the custodian/maintainer of the fsOC (FS Open Components) 727-200. (This aircraft is credited as follows: Airframe by Erick Cantu, FDE by Charles Fox and panel by Richard Probst. I'm simply making changes, mostly to suit my personal taste.)

So I quite deliberately acquired both aircraft, one payware and the other freeware. It's because I really like 727s and I suppose I'm collecting them. I even bought the CaptainSim 727 a year ago though I haven't installed it yet.

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Anyway, I understand your not buying payware aircraft but surely there are payware FS and operating system utilities that you own?

I was being half-facetious. A fellow simmer insisted that I install the Christensen Eagle that he flies. I did, and found it to be a marvelous aerobatic aircraft, just as you so obviously have.

Trouble is, I have no interest in flying aerobatics. I like to watch it, but having done 1-2 hours of basic aerobatics in a Citabria (I have a PPL) I discovered that it's not for me. Rather, my thing is hand-flying big iron in IFR conditions.

So is your thing flying the Eagle, which motivates the repaints, or do you just like the way the aircraft looks? (I do too.)

Oh yes ... You will notice that I hang out here at FlightSim.com, and that the FS Flight Training venture is with FlightSim.com.

There's a reason for this ...

It's because Nels Anderson and his business partner Dan Linton, and Rick Frerichs, the fellow who does the site programming, are just as committed to excellence as I am.

Yes, they are in business to make a living and a profit. However, they know that what DEC's Ken Olsen taught is true -- if you always Do The Right Thing, the money will follow.

I then offered the postproduction sparkler software to a telephone friend, our closest competitor in the sequenced music business, Trantham Whidby of "Tran Tracks". I invited him to come to dinner in our midtown apartment studio, we met face to face for the first time, and we had a really fun evening because even though he had no interest in the sparkler after all (see below), he was a musician/entrepreneur just like me, and we spent most of the evening talking not about business but instead about music.

You see, Tran had been a professional keyboard player. In fact, he did the keyboards and MIDI stuff for the Hues Corporation when they went on world tour. ("Rock The Boat", remember?) Tran was so good that he could and did, single-handedly, crank out 5-7 sequences a week versus our ten (much better) sequences every six weeks.

So by the time we shut down Tran, who had entered the business six months after we opened our doors, had a huge catalog, something like 350 songs to our 120 (only about 30 of which were really good, it having taken us a year to learn what to do). Trouble was, all of Tran's sequences were quantized -- it was the key to his high productivity, that and the fact that he did not spend time analyzing the music the way I did.

"Look, Mike" he said. "You and I both know that without you Passport isn't going to make much headway, so I'm going to assume that they won't be real competition for me. Similarly, with you gone I automatically inherit first place. The fact is that everybody will now be coming to me for sequences, and they'll take what they can get, which is standardized quantized sequences with standard drum notes."

That was the extent of his and my wife's and my business discussions, maybe ten minutes in all. Then we sat down to the REAL business of the evening, which was a nice dinner laced with conversation about the musicians we knew in common, industry scuttlebutt, the music we each liked and didn't like, and so on.

Aside: I failed to mention earlier that we kept extensive records of our customers MIDI rig configurations, and that in addition to the sparkler I had written production software that allowed us to deliver versions of our master sequences that were custom tailored to the customers' equipment, including to their drum machines. Passport hadn't been smart enough (in my opinion) to demand that software so they didn't get that stuff either.

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As ye sow, so shall ye reap. :D In the end Passport got a bad deal but were, in my opinion, absolutely 100% clueless that I had rocked their chops simply out of spite. Had SOB been a good guy and met my fifty thousand dollar price I'd have given them the sparkled sequences along with the customization production software. (But not the sparkler itself.) Furthermore, I'd have actively helped them to enter into the business and be successful -- because while they had bought me out, in an emotional sense it was still my baby and I wanted to see the child grow up and prosper.

But that never happened because in my opinion they slapped me in the face, something that bean counters who look only at the nominal bottom line are very good at. They always see the announceable profit. They almost never see the invisible losses -- the profits that might have been -- because they are bean counters, not visionaries.

In my opinion Passport's entry into the sequenced music business made barely a ripple in the waters of the world of working bands. Tran inherited the mantle of Number One, and he has been hugely successful in the years that have followed, a success that he worked very hard to earn. (Trust me, to crank out a complete pop music sequence in a day is tough to do, especially if you have to run a business on top of it all.)

In the end Tran's business strategy was much more successful than my own. However, while I had known that we could turn the profitability corner by cheapening our product, I refused to do it. You see, our customers bought from us because we were not simply the best there was but the best that could possibly exist. The worst of our sequences were on par with Tran's. The best of them will never be topped. Our customers were counting on us to make their bands sound as good as a two-man band can ever sound -- and we delivered on that.

The fact that the business was a financial failure doesn't matter much to me. (Because I had a ball. The journey is far more important than the destination.)

You see, I answer to the Man In The Mirror, and he's a pretty tough critic. If I don't satisfy him then I have nothing at all in a reputation sense.

dobar,

Have patience. Webmaster Nels Anderson personally handles all file library submissions but I'll bet that he simply couldn't get to it.

As he told me very early this morning by email when he explained that he could not process my article yet, today is Sunday and even he needs to take a Sunday off now and then.

But if you're unsure about the method for packaging and uploading scenery, how about taking the question to one of the forums, whichever one seems most appropriate.

I haven't heard of pet rattlesnakes but years ago I knew I guy who had a pet big snake, I think it was an anoconda. (Whatever it was, it wasn't a constrictor and it wasn't venemous.)

At any rate, my colleague swore that the snake knew him, and that it was affectionate in its own way. Having seen his photos I do know that the snake would drape itself around his neck and shoulders. This was simply a guy I worked with. We disliked each other so I was never over to his place and never saw the snake for myself.

"Cats will just never be as smart as dogs."

That's true. And dogs will never be as smart as horses. And chickens will never be as smart as cats.

So what? The question here is whether various animals make nice pets, not how they'll score on an IQ test.

East Anglia. Norwich. You do know that English place names are magic to USA peoples' ears, yes? Some of my favorites ...

Slough

Portsmouth (but we have one too :))

The Strand (whatever that is)

Hadrian's Wall

Knightsbridge

Kensington

.

.

.

And on and on.

Now for some of my favorite USA place names ...

Six Shooter Mountain

Tie Siding

Superstition Mountains

China Lake

Watervliet (Belgian?)

.

.

.

And on and on.

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Why did you blur the photo of the Spit? Was it to provoke exactly the feeling that I got from it?

dobar,

Somebody (me) IS going to be telling the site membership about the blogging feature. I have a feature article in the works even as we speak.

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Your avatar looks like a Spit but it also looks like a grainy wartime photo. Would you care to comment?

And tell us about Beccles Airfield -- I've not heard of it.

You know, guys, many people would be interested in what you might have to say.

All we're doing is having conversations in public. The only difference between this and talking in an airport lounge is that, because everything's in writing, we can't pretend later that we didn't say what we actually did say.

So you must have friends, and you must enjoy talking with your friends, yet you don't question why they would want to chat with you.

Same deal here. In the immortal words of comedienne Joan Rivers, Can we talk?

So ... The rug is tourist kitsch of the worst kind -- because it's a joke, like a T-shirt. (As in "My grandparents went to Cairo and all I got was this expensive but meaningless rug.") The inscriptions mean absolutely nothing, and the artist probably planned it that way, perhaps as some kind of subtle Colonial Getback. But it's an attractive rug, so the Egyptologist grandmother and the Cairo native grandfather bought it -- because they liked it anyway.

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P.S. RGB and I having discovered that we both speak French, I turned my talents to writing Limericks for her in her native language, a crime against nature. :D Here's my best ever ...

La reine Francaise nom de Marie

Antoinette avait dans belle Paris

Une palais ci grand que

Le Peuple demand ce mais

"Let them eat cake" elle a dit.

RGB calls my writings of this kind "Francais Torque" -- twisted French. This Limerick means ...

The French queen Marie Antoinette had a palace in Paris <Versailles> so opulent that The People <of the Revolution> demanded to take it over. Here reply was, "I've got mine, Jacques, f-word you."

My apologies, skylab, but when my memory fails, as it obviously did in this case, I have no way of knowing it.

I hope I'm not getting Alzheimer's but it's a fact that my wife can tell me something and two days later I'll remember nothing about it. Another thing is the classic senior moments, for example an everyday word that's on the tip of my tounge that I just can't retrieve and for which I have to use a circumlocution.

The good thing about a failing memory is that you can't tell when it's failing, so it's really not a problem at all. :D

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EDIT: Sometimes I can be quite dense. I didn't get your joke till just now, eight or so hours later. So I didn't forget anything here after all.

Almost certainly you're right about it being the shotgun. More than most guns, because of the large powder charge it puts out a huge square wave of sound. It's the fast rise time that does the damage.

Tell us about Viscounts. I've ridden them here and abroad, and twice had the privilege of riding up front (in England in 1960), but I have no idea what it's handling characteristics are like. I would guess that it's lighter on the controls than a Connie or DC-4/6/7, but you tell me.

I meant that my blog post was finally ended.

As for ringing in the ears, it does count if it's a ringtone. :D

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Seriously, I sometimes get ringing in my ears too, and while it bumps the music sometimes, it too is a curse. Yet I can tune it out much of the time. In fact, I can overlay it with music and push the ringing to the back of the mix.

So in that respect I guess I'm lucky compared to you.

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EDIT: What IS always in my background is the high-pitched pink noise hiss of , I assume, blood flowing through my ears. But it's been there so long that it doesn't bother me the way the ringing does.

And now to try to get to the point …

I was forced to become our producer, a job I had not realized would need to exist. I thought that I would be able to simply give an assignment to the keyboard player of a band (who was typically the MIDI guy) and get a finished sequence back 2-3 weeks later, his having worked on it in his spare time, as the spirit moved him, which wasn’t very often. (As the leader of a duo once said to me with complete sincerity, and in his exactl words that I will never forget, “If JJ and I had wanted to work for a living we would not have become musicians.”)

But things didn’t work out that way. Experience soon showed that the only way we were going to get a good sequence back was for me to study each and every part in tiny detail so I could issue cautions and warnings to the guy who would be doing the sequencing. Because I had learned that there is a difference between note-for-note and sonically perfect.

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For example, in Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour” there’s a faint triangle part that runs through the whole song. Even I had missed it in casual listening, but as I began to analyze the piece the part suddenly leapt into my consciousness, where it remained. Now I could hear how the triangle interacted with all the other instruments. And then I realized that at a subconscious level I had been hearing the part all along, as would the audience listening to the original recording.

So it was my job to identify not only the note-for-note stuff but also all the subliminal stuff, and to bring it to the foreground so that our musicians would now be able to hear and sequence the parts. Even then it was common for me to have to replace whole tracks in the delivered sequences because, as it turns out, even musicians with golden ears have selective weaknesses in their hearing.

Even though I play bass, one of my weaknesses is background bass parts. So in George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”, my ace sequence guy had to point out to me that there were actually five different bass parts way back in the mix. He could hear those parts, but he had to show them to me before I could hear them. Yet I could hear every nuance of a Larry Carlton guitar solo, which he could not. And so I would do his guitar tracks for him – bar by bar because I can’t play lead, only hear it.

(I should mention that we did almost every track live. I wouldn’t allow any quantized parts though I would allow looping in drum tracks. Later I created software for enhancing the live feel of our sequences, another story for another day.)

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So that’s how I got back into the business of listening to music over and over again. I simply HAD to, whether or not I liked the music that the marketing part of me determined that we needed to be selling. So I learned to listen analytically, and I learned to appreciate music from a whole new viewpoint. In particular, I quickly became able to sort music into four boxes – I like/dislike it, versus it’s good/bad music.

So …

Walkin’ On Sunshine -- Katrina and the Waves -- bad music, and I hate it.

Shotgun -- Junior Walker and the All-Stars -- bad music and I absolutely LOVE it.

Every Breath – The Police – terrifically good music, but I absolutely HATE it

Pick Up The Pieces – Average White Band – great music and I simply LOVE it.

I made these assessments after listening to the pieces we might cover 50-100-150 times. It takes that many listenings for even golden ears to learn to stop hearing only the foreground parts and instead dig deeply into the mix. My job was not done until I was hearing everything that the original producer had put into the recording.

Today I still listen to music that way. So, for example, 2-3 times a year I’ll listen to “Get Down Tonight” by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. And I’ll listen and listen and listen until very tiny nuance of the solo guitar part is once again in my mental playback of the song when I’m away from the computer. Until I can hear the exact way Harry Casey (K.C.) mic'ed the drums. And so on.

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I have to do stuff like this even today because otherwise the tape recorder in my brain takes over. You see, I hear music all the time. ALL the time. Even when I’m asleep. 99.99% of the time it’s other people’s music. 0.0001% of the time it’s original music that I suddenly hear but that’s gone again after one hearing.

But I’m not crazy, and I’m not alone. About 15 years ago I caught a 60 Minutes interview with Miles Davis. He said the same thing – that he hears music all the time. Ed Bradley then asked him “Are you hearing music now? While you’re speaking with me?” “Of course” said Davis, and I knew exactly what he meant.

“What are you hearing?” asked Bradley. Davis’ reply was roughly “I’m listening <note that he said ‘listening’, not ‘hearing’> to a James Brown piece. I’m listening to the way he arranged the instruments spatially, and to the way the instruments are interacting in the stereo field.”

Well, I knew immediately which JB piece he meant – When You Touch Me – because I listen to it from the exact same viewpoint. And now, as I write this, the piece has begun to run in my brain. I will not be able to stop it, it will stop of its own accord when it is good and ready to stop, thank you very much.

Trust me, this business of always hearing music is a curse, because I can’t control the playlist. I never know whether the song I’m hearing is going to stop in an hour or a month. I can override the playlist, but that requires constant attention, and it usually makes me unable to code or write.

Worse still, it's sometimes music in the bad-and-I-hate-it category. It's my brain's way of saying "Look, Mike, there's no such thing as bad music. Every piece has some kind of redeeming qualities, even "Walkin' On Sunshine".

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And with that I declare this blog to be ended.

That's an interesting point, Bob, let's talk about it. However, it then gets us into the question of what constitutes music. Here's my problem ...

I certainly agree that the music of the west, and of Polynesia, is mathematical. We have octaves, thirds, fifths, harmonies that can be discussed analytically. We have rhythms which even more clearly can be described mathematically. We allow ourselves much more freedom for melodies, variations in timing timing and pitch control being the essence of singing styles, but the singing always takes place with a backdrop of mathematics.

But then we come up against something like Tibetan music ...

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I can relate to Chinese and Japanese music. Their ideas of pitch interval are different from ours but I believe they still have octaves. I certainly can relate to Egyptian music, which is one of my favorites because they have 8-bar music patterns, something that we can relate to directly. I can relate to Greek polyrhythms too, the most famous western example being Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", which is in 5/4 time, easier to comprehend than 13/4, which is very interesting indeed.

I can relate to the music of India with its 100+ ragas because we have ragas too, as in 12-bar blues, technopop, country swing, and so on. (We call them "bags", not ragas.)

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But when I bought my first and only album of Tibetan music, I was both floored and stumped. I couldn't believe it.

To me it did and does sound not like music but instead like a cat fight. Obviously it's a form of (religious) communication, and it uses things that we would recognize as specialized musical instruments (like bells), but there was only "melody" -- no discernible trace of harmony or rhythm -- and there seemed to be no rules for the melodies.

Certainly there was no concept of octave. I didn't analyze it at the time but the monks' voices (I don't recall any chorales) probably were simply wandering around within the span of, perhaps, a fifth.

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Never before or since have I encountered music that I could not identify as music. There might be other such human music -- music with no rules that would be apparent to the western ear -- but if so I have not heard any.

So aliens might communicate the way Tibetan monks communicate with the gods in their "melodic" chants, but there would be no mathematical content to this kind of thing, as far as I can tell.

Okay then. Herewith, a link to one of my favorite (but very obscure) music videos, Bootsy Collins as Bootzilla in "Party On Plastic" ...

My kids can't believe what I listen to either but my younger grandson can -- he got the music genes and he too loves James Brown.

The original artist is War themselves, the same folks who did "Cisco Kid" ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgZVnamjEsQ

and "Slippin' Into Darkness" ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3lbsEfwhK4&feature=related

Along with Eric Burdon they also did "Spill The Wine", but I really dislike that number and will not provide an URL. :D

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Well now. If we can only get together on jazz funk that is still a very large universe of music. How do you feel about ...

James Brown

Herbie Hancock

We3 (I think that's their name)

Sly Stone

James Brown

George Clinton

Bootsy Collins (Rubber Band)

(Did I mention James Brown?)

And not in a funk vein but how do you like ...

Sugarloaf

Steve Miller Band

Cannonball Adderly

Steely Dan

Isely Brothers

Doug Kershaw