1st "Follow the Sound" Instalment
How to Watch "Follow the Sound"
Video Book Title - Follow the Sound
Sections
(1) The Music
(2) The Way I Play
(3) Home Where the Highway Has No End
In this instalment -
How to watch “Follow the Sound”
And
About song #1 from the “7 Songs” collection, “Stop Watch”
*****Scroll down to below the Transcript to find the song video “Stop Watch”*****
(Transcript)
Follow the Sound is arranged in 3 parts. The parts are called The Music, The Way I Play (which is a chronicle), and Home Where the Highway Has No End. The story is designed to be viewed in sequence as you would a book.
Only this first instalment has a lengthy explanation. But most of the songs are accompanied with descriptive remarks.
Background info: I took violin lessons as a pre-teen, first in Downey, California, then in La Mirada California.
Later, as a teenager in La Mirada I became more interested in rock music. I abandoned the violin, and began teaching myself how to play guitar. Within rock music, my first attraction seemed to be with the bass lines of many of the songs I liked. So I somehow got myself a bass guitar which I then played in a typical teen garage band.
But guitar still was my primary interest. All I had was an acoustic guitar, a Yamaha FG-75 that my dad had given to me. I think he bought it at the Swap Meet in La Mirada. I still play that guitar today. Being so seasoned as it is, it’s capable of making sounds like no other guitar. It’s a great guitar. I love it. It’s my oldest friend.
Continuing with the background info: I had been making up my own simple little rudimentary songs in La Mirada.
The composition and fine-tuning of these songs continued when I lived on Maui, and continued further when I returned to California, first in Long Beach, then Chino, then Oceanside. Since at least the time that I was living in Long Beach, I began trying to figure out how to get my music out to the public.
It was that process - that of trying to figure out how to get my music out to the public - that I began recording my songs on my own home recording equipment. Then by the time that I was living in Chino, those recordings began to coalesce into what I now call “collections.” The first of those collections I call “Summer of ‘77 Keepables,” recorded in Chino, CA in the summer of 1977. The songs on “Summer of ‘77” were -
1. Kihei, Maui
2. Full Moon
3. Fearless
4. Night Dive
5. Faw-Ixed (Naming confusions happened and I now call it “A Salute to the Noble Ladybug”)
6. Captain Nemo Music
7. The March of the Skelingtons
8. I Would Be Surprised
By 1981 (while I was living in Oceanside) I had “perfected,” to some extent, 4 songs and I took those 4 songs to a professional recording studio in San Diego (it was called “Studio A”). The 4 songs were -
1. Fixed (and Prefixed) - So named spur-of-the-moment at the studio. I had accidentally confused it with “Faw-Ixed.”
2. The Train Song
3. The Pyramid
4. Latest Jazziness
I made audio cassette recordings of The Train Song and The Pyramid and began sending them to record companies and radio stations. One L.A. station played The Train Song on a late night program. Lynn and I both heard it together on the radio.
Lynn and I had made a few moves after that. First to an obscure and bizarre place called Aguanga, outside of Temecula, California (Aguanga, by the way, is where we lived when we met Red Skelton), then we moved to Canyon Lake, Texas, then we moved to Sequim, Washington, then we moved back to Canyon Lake, Texas again. Whew!
While there at Canyon Lake for the second (and last) time, I took the audio recordings of 7 of our songs that Lynn and I had both made together, and I put those songs to video. That was approximately 2010 or 2011. That’s the second collection and this collection which I called “7 Songs.” The songs on this collection are -
1. Stop Watch
2. Jesse
3. Fixed (and Prefixed)
4. City Driving
5. The Train Song
6. Castle in the Sky
7. The Pyramid
After Lynn died, I made a third collection of home recordings, that I called variously “Captured - The Performance for Posterity.“ I may as well have called it “Monty Dicksion and the Household Implements” because I included the use of household implements in the making of those songs. My objective with that collection was not to get my songs marketed but merely to save them for posterity. This collection was made in Canyon Lake, Texas in 2015. The songs on that collection were -
1. The Truckin’ Song
2. Kihei Maui
3. Cool vs Cool
4. Nights in White Satin
By 2015, I determined in my mind that I had to leave Texas and return to California. My preference was Oceanside because that’s where I think of having “grown up” because I had many significant life events from having lived there twice before.
But Oceanside was too expensive for me. Then I thought of Yucaipa, which is in San Bernardino County in what’s known in Southern California as The Inland Empire. I never had liked The Inland Empire before. I was a beach guy, an ex-surfer. But I remembered that my mom had lived in Yucaipa just prior to and up to the time of her death. And anyway, there is a lot of nice mountain scenery in Yucaipa and it’s a far more affordable place. So I ended up moving to Yucaipa.
I’m telling you all this background information because where “Follow the Sound“ picks up is with the fourth collection of songs that I made. But it was necessary for you to know that before this 4th collection there were the other three, “Summer of ‘77 Keepables,” “7 Songs,” and “Captured - The Performance for Posterity.”
The fourth collection is named with the abbreviations A-L-A-I-C-M-I. “ALAICMI.” That stands for “As Live As I Can Make It.” Why it’s called “As Live As I Can Make It” is explained in The Way I Play, the chronicle section. The ALAICMI collection is a collection of 30 songs. I began making the ALAICMI collection in 2020, after we were hit with the covid hoax, and my plan was to use the songs in that collection to help me fight the crime, corruption and injustice going on in the world.
And the reason I’m telling you that Follow the Sound picks up with how the ALAICMI collection began is because you must first watch the 7 music videos that are in the “7 Songs“ collection.
Believe me. That’s necessary.
Then, still before Follow the Sound will fully make sense to you, watch the music videos for the songs that are in the ALAICMI collection, and be sure to watch them in sequential numerical order. I advise you to play the audio through good speakers that are capable of shaking the floor.
Again, it’s necessary for you to go through those songs before you continue watching the rest of the Follow the Sound. Believe me. I’ve planned this whole thing out. You’ll be glad to know that you won’t have to go through the other two collections. Those are not available for you anyway.
But you need to do these other two collections before taking on the chronicle portion of the story, which, as I said, is called The Way I Play so that (1) the chronicle portion of the story will make more sense, and (2) after the chronicle section, the story returns back to the music again, but in a much different way.
Thank you for your patience through these instructions on how to watch this video book.
I hope your trip through this video book will be an enjoyable one for you. I also hope there will be something within its contents that you will find beneficial. That’s what it’s made for!
About song #1 from the “7 Songs” collection, “Stop Watch”
"Stop Watch" is a song I made up on the piano way back when I was in high school. This recording was made over 20 years later, in Canyon Lake Texas in about 1992. The instrument was a keyboard called an Ensoniq EPS.
Now let’s get started. We’ll begin with the first music video in Section 1 (‘The Music’), “Stop Watch.” Thus we officially begin Follow the Sound.
--------------------
Stop Watch