Gentle On My Mind

The picture was taken in 1966 when I was 12. I was asked to visit a nearby school and play for an English class. It wasn't my first gig but it was the beginning of neighborhood fame. That is an album cover. The title is the humorous response to, "Whatever happened to that kid?"

The guitar is a Stella 12 string. It was a big beastie but I was a determined kid. A few months later, my sister friend and I would pass the audition to play for the Cerebral Palsy Telethon at a local TV station. Being kids, they put us on in the middle of the night. Ralph Embrey, a famous Nashville impressario was hosting. The next morning at ten, I would be roused from where I was sleeping on the floor to come see Ralph who told me someone had called and would donate $5 if I would sing "Gentle On My Mind" on camera. Having no fear then, I did just that. Ralph then looked at me and said, "Your Dad called that in" then asked "I know Glen and he can't remember all the words to that song. How do you do it?" I told him, "My Dad asks for it a lot."

Dad didn't want me in the music business. He said it was a rough game and I had too many brains for it. We were asked that morning to come to Muscle Shoals but my parents declined and for the better or worse, it would presage things to come. I would play it one last time on TV three years ago on a morning show when the host who remembered me playing it for his father on TV years earlier in the 80s asked for it. I told him I didn't think I could remember the words, but he insisted and I did. Dad got up early that morning to watch it proud as he could be.

A year later as Dad lay dieing, I sat in the next room and sang this song for him. We can't know why we remember all the words until we need them. Then life is clearer and all the moments that didn't make sense do. Art isn't about fame. It is about service, reflecting emotions so it will make sense.

I did see Glen in an airport many many years later and was on the flight with him. I didn't introduce myself because I have a rule about not being rude to famous people, but I think I would have liked to tell him the story. Dad would have liked that too.

Haunting Faces

Some faces haunt me and not in a bad way, they become hazy images at the periphery of consciousness that never quite go away.

Kate Bush - Anyone who knows me knows I'm a Bushaholic. I believe she is the finest female rock musician - no contest. Yes there are plenty of more famous, bluesier females but Kate captured the heart of what it is to be rock: she goes her own way and never repeats herself. Kate is the Queen.


Dame Wendy Hiller - the essence of the smart self contained actress who had a way of reaching around to find the heart of the part. She was not a classic beauty; she was a quiet determined intelligence who was beautiful and above the fray of an industry that consumes women like chocolate.


Cecile Chaminade - the most famous woman composer of an age and possibly one of the greated composers of that age, she wrote salon music, songs, orchestral works, opera and more. They buried her before she died because she refused to modernize and she was a woman. She blazed the trail for all the women composers after her and her reward was to die alone in a small apartment with an amputated foot and a broken heart never having met the man who was her equal.


There are beauties that we should not let go of or forget even if fashion and other's needs say we should. We empty our hearts onto our lives only to find our hearts are the only springs that fill them. The price is we must stay where we stand while our lives flow away into ever deepening fog, but if we do not remember beauty, it will be as if we never lived at all.

Music Tribe Alert!

Music Tribe:

I’ve completed the scene in Facebook/Vivaty integrating the videos, music other materials:

1. Smooth. Easy Drag Drop and Go.

2. Integration: fast dialog building for pulling in YouTube, Facebook, and externally hosted audio

3. Time to setup: about eight hours total. It sets up in minutes, then you customize and I have lot of media assets to put in there. For those of us who have to spread work across pages, this is the BEST way to integrate them as services.

4. Results: Excellent.

Bands on Facebook who don’t build one of these for their act and business quick need cranial exams. This is the way to get it done in social network markets.

As the stagecraft objects improve, this will also be how albums are made, released and navigated. In fact, these become the albums++.

Big juju, musicTribe. Bery big.

Media convergence at long last!!!