Subject: music

Craig,

This is Gordy from TestingTesting again.

Thanks again for your music postings at BookNotes. I must do more of it myself. Almost wrote you again when you featured Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. One of my favorite albums. (Yes, I said the album word. I have the vinyl. I just need to get the turntable fixed.) But now you had to go ahead and invite comments!

"I do this because I am passionate about music. I listen to it all the time. I would be devasted if I was to ever lost my sense of hearing."

"If you wish to make a comment or share an experience with me, I welcome your input."

The following just happened. I have no idea why. I bear no responsibility for this. You've been warned.


I share that passion for music too. For me, it started one hot summer day in the California central valley (Vacaville) at a swimming pool when I heard Rock Around the Clock coming over the pool's PA system. I was 11 or 12 at the time. I count myself lucky to have experienced Rock 'n Roll from those beginnings. Fats Domino, Little Richard, early Elvis. Yes, even Pat Boone.

I had early exposure to World Music. My dad was in the Air Force and we ended up living in Japan from 1957 to 1961. That was ages 12 - 16 for me. The exposure to Japanese culture had a big influence on me. The traditional and non-traditional Japanese music was all around. I still love hearing the samisen and watching Sumo.

The only English radio station was Armed Forces Radio which played the top hits once a week. I had a little transistor radio with the earphone plugged in the side of my head. I associate some of this music with a long ride in the morning on a school bus traveling though the Japanese countryside so they must have been playing it on the radio in the morning too. Again, listening with my little transistor radio. I remember listening to Louie, Louie on that bus. Also singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

I was a little late on the uptake with the Beatles. By then I was in college. We were living in the Seattle area (where I've mostly lived since). My little sister went to see the Beatles in 1964 when they came through town. I dismissed them as a teen fad until I saw Hard Days Night. Whoo boy!

It must have been around 1967 that I moved from a passive music listener to an active music listener. That's when I got a turntable, a receiver, and headphones. No money left over for speakers. My first two albums were Miles Davis' Miles Smiles and Dave Brubeck's Take Five. I listened to one and half tracks of Miles and had to stop. Brubeck was much easier. It didn't take long before Miles was at the top of my listening list, particularly as he moved towards going electric. Then there was Blonde on Blonde which I think is one of the best Rock albums ever. There had been lots of rumors about the new Beatles album so I went down and preordered it at my local music store. Sgt. Pepper didn't disappoint. By now I was listening to everything from Wanda Landowska playing harpsichord to Stockhausen's electronic music and Bulgarian folk music.

Then one Halloween a friend said "You've got to listen to this record" (That record word.) There was a picture on the back of the album cover of this woman dressed in the most outlandish costume. And I'd never heard Summertime sung like that before! Whoo boy! Janis and Big Brother were just the beginning. The music was just exploding.

By now I had speakers and was living in this 3 story 6 unit apartment building built in the early 20th century. I was on the second floor. The building was inhabited by freaks. (They call them hippies now. We called ourselves freaks then.) I always thought that music should be played at the levels it was recorded at. Surprisingly, this concept is not universally shared. I was concerned that my neighbors might be hearing what I was playing and object so I asked one of them it there was a problem. "Oh no! We really like your music. When you start playing we just turn our music off and listen to yours." Cool!

My next music rush was around 1974. I was back at Boeing by now. A young engineer sat next to me who was from Sao Paolo. He turned me onto Airto, Jorge Ben, Baden Powell, Milton Nascimento, and the incredible world of Brazilian music. (I'd been prepared for this by sitting in a 60s movie art house watching Black Orpheus.)

(The amazing thing is that I still have all this vinyl and most of it is still in great shape. Got to get that turntable fixed!)

Then the music stopped for me. Part of it was that the music was going through a valley in the late 70s but I was letting life get in the way too. It was a traumatic time personally and there wasn't time in it for music. Raising 3 small kids is a handful. So I pretty much missed most of the 80s. I'm sure you've seen it in a lot of people of a certain age. "They don't make music like they used to! When I was young..." .

Then one day in 1992 we get a new guy in our group (I'm back at Boeing again). He's young and wearing an earring. This guy looks interesting, says I. Not the usual dull Boeing type. In conversation it turns out that he used to sell tie dye shirts at Grateful Dead concerts. Cool!

And I find out that the music hadn't stopped. I had. He turned me on to the Violent Femmes and the Dead Kennedys. We drove down to Shoreline Amphitheater south of San Francisco and saw three Dead shows. There were tears streaming down my face as Jerry sang Standing on the Moon while pictures of the Earth, from space, were being shown on giant scrims surrounding the stage. Only one other group has been able to take me to the emotional levels that the Dead were able to.

It was a year later, early 1993, that my young friend comes to work all excited. "You've got to see these guys!" That fall they were back and we saw Phish in Bellingham. Whoo boy!

In late 95 I crashed at my brother's place after a Phish show. He lived in walking distance of the show. I went on and on about how he had to see these guys. It was just a few months later, early Jan 96, that I was listening to a Phish bootleg in my car. There was a song on this tape that I loved called Divided Sky. In the middle of this piece Trey starts playing this incredibly beautiful melody on the guitar. The whole band stops and there is just Trey and that melody. Then Trey comes to the end of the melody and doesn't play the last note. He just holds it, teasing the audience, then plays that note and then the band comes back in and just builds and builds to an incredible climax. I was on the way to pick up the same brother's ashes. He had died a few days before and, for a reason I still fully don't understand, I wanted that song playing when I picked his ashes up. I wanted to remember him with that music. Two years later my kids and I were at a Phish concert when I heard Divided Sky live the first time. It was hard to see through the tears.

My kids are 19, 21, and 22 now. Sharing music with them was a two way street. As I discovered the Violent Femmes and the Dead Kennedys I played them to my kids. They loved it. My oldest was 11 when I had an extra ticket to see Dylan and she insisted on coming along. She also said she like the guitar player that played all those notes - Stevie Ray Vaughn.

My Middle School graduation present for my kids was to take them to Eugene and camp in the parking lot while we saw multiple Dead shows. An incredible shared experience that I hope warped them for life. Jerry died before my youngest graduated but we followed two shows of the Further Festival the summer when he did. Until recently we would go camping with Phish.

I went to get a CD for my oldest. I had no clue who was hot. This was when I was still getting back into music. The salesman at the record store said "You should check out these guys". I bought her Nirvana. And then they turned me on to their music. Whoo boy! I cried when Kurt Cobain died. These last few years have been a golden age of music. When you get beyond Corporate Music there is so much.

Then in August 98 music took another turn for me. I became a music producer, sort of. I started building web sites for a living in 95. I left Boeing in early 98 to freelance on my own. One of my early sites was for my musician friend Derek. (He grew up in London in the 60s and has amazing stories of the music scene there.) I wanted to put RealAudio clips of his songs up and our ISP suggested we do something live. In March of 97 we webcast LiveStock 1.0 where we tried to do everything all at once and almost had nervous breakdowns before it was all over. In August 98 I wanted to try it again and to do it very simply so that we could do it on a regular basis and TestingTesting was born. This little goof of an Internet webcast is not a money maker. The expenses come mostly out of my meager pockets but having this live music in my living room every other Monday evening (it was every Monday evening for the first year and a half) has been an incredible experience. Whidbey Island, like most of the Islands in Puget Sound, is a magnet for creative people and there are so many amazing talented people here. (Austin seems to have a few musicians too.)

Instead of being a just a music listener I've also become a music enabler. Does that sound bad? Actually, it's great. The core of TestingTesting is to bring a musician(s) into the living room with the TestingTesting House Band and wing it. The show has a certain structure but we are mostly winging it. I do the announcing, pushing the show along, the sound and the web site. Things are best when we don't know what's going to happen next. It becomes a group improvisational effort. This has been the most rewarding music experience for me. There have been so many moments when the magic of live music has happened in my living room. One of the first was a show I've kept up on the archives - the Old Crow Medicine Show. That evening opened before the show when Derek started playing the old Dylan song Peggy-O and the whole band just piled on and we knew we were in for a ride. After an hour of the most intense music they launched into Rock Me Mama and it was another of those magic moments where you were suspended in some timeless and spaceless void where there was only the shared music that you just wanted to go on forever.

TestingTesting is something I do on the side to keep my sanity. It has involved me with music and musicians in an amazing way.

It was during one of our early shows that I got an guestbook entry that we should do video. It was from Zoe. I ended going over to her place to talk video. In a conversation she mentioned Jean luc Ponty. I went home and e-mailed her about Jean luc and how he played for Frank Zappa on Hot Rats and how I liked music and the violin and also a violin player named Jerry Goodman who played for Mahavishnu Orchestra and before that for a little known group called the Flock. It turns out that Zoe and I have what are probably the only two Flock albums known to man. She has become the love of my life and part of TestingTesting.

There is an instrument case sitting next to my door. It was lent to me by a TestingTesting alumnus. She had asked me If I played an instrument. I said that I didn't but that I had wanted to learn how. What did I want to play she wanted to know. Actually, said I, I wanted to play the accordion. Funny you should say that, said she. I now have her sister's white mother of toilet seat accordion in that case. It's a student accordion but has a full keyboad and sounds pretty good. Vern Olson said he would give me lessons. I need to give him a call soon and finally take him up on that.

Vern plays accordion for the Shifty Sailors. It's a group of about 15 men that sing sea chanteys and related songs here on the Island. At the last show Joanne, of the TestingTesting House Band, said we should have Vern and his brother on TestingTesting. He's one of those musicians who can just play forever. That will be a show!

The music journey never ends. We either get on the music bus in whatever capacity we can or we get off. I think life must be a bit duller for those that have gotten off.

Gordy Coale
business: www.electricedge.com
webcast: www.electricedge.com/testingtesting
weblog: www.electricedge.com/greymatter