Chapter 18

	There has always been one "Perfect Music" session that remains indelibly fixed in my memory.  I'd like to take this opportunity to try to describe it for you.  Although I have the session recorded on tape, I can't really remember what month or year it took place in, but I do remember the evening very clearly.
	The night started out quietly as usual with Pat and I setting things up and getting the studio ready.  Pat tested out the "Space Bass" to make sure all its features were in place and working.  I plugged in the mikes and tested them on my tape recorder and made sure it would roll.  We then distributed calimbas, flutes, and drums around the studio.
	While we were involved in this task the gentle whisper of the river was interrupted by the sounds behind the studio of several vehicles--two cars and an old pickup truck.  Doors slammed and footsteps crunched on the gravel crossing the street.  The fence door on the back (street) side of the studio opened.  The procession of this evening's players thumped single file across the narrow boardwalk passing in front of the chest high window over the work bench.  I recognized every one, all were friends.  The group included Futzie Nutzle a fine draftsman and cartoonist, Bruce Dreffer a friend of both of us, a carpenter whose name I can't remember, and several other of our mutual friends.  They knocked; I told them to come in.  If no music was playing people knocked, not knowing for sure if it was really happening again or not.  Neither Pat nor I knew the answer to that question until people showed up, but they did for an uninterrupted twelve years of Thursdays.  That's approximately six hundred and twenty-four Thursdays.
	Still it was always a guess whether anyone at all would show.  We never advertised in any way other than to make a few phone calls for the first one.  We just got the studio ready and waited for the faithful to come, and they always did.  In the winter it was necessary to have a short stack of firewood next to the potbellied stove, but this night was a cool, dry evening probably in the early fall season.  The air was cool and fragrant with the spicy smell of redwood trees.  The river was singing a friendly burble.
	Our friends entered and we exchanged greetings; joints were rolled and lit.  Soon more people arrived and the studio, now fragrant with pot smoke and incense, began to fill up.  Pat had the "Space Bass" hooked up to a speaker which he turned on.  I started the tape recorder and we were ready to start.  I gave my ritual pre-starting instructions, "Let us all be still and listen to the song that is always playing," then after a short pause in which the river asserted its gentle presence, I continued "Let whomever hears the first note be the first to play it."
	This short invocation always produces a momentary heightening of pressure, a certain self-consciousness, a feeling of "who me?"  The weight of this tension grows quickly until someone breaks the silence.  Then the music simply flows out of everyone like a water faucet being turned on.  One by one all are drawn into the song.  This wasn't wishful thinking, I've witnessed it every Thursday night for the twelve years I conducted "Perfect Music" sessions.  Now I should mention that the carpenter who came this evening had never before played music of any kind.  The young man driving the pickup was a very courageous fellow who stood with me defying bulldozers clearing and grading through a meadow (used to pasture horses) for a new bypass route.  I was there to film the travesty.  I wanted to get a shot straight into the huge bulldozer as it moved towards us.  This was a project that was very unpopular with the locals, but which unfortunately we could not stop.  But let's get back to the session.
	The tension continued to build until Pat came in softly strumming the strings of the "Space Bass."  I followed with a calimba and soon all were involved.  We were rolling!  Everyone in the studio was playing.  Several people joined Pat on the "Space Bass."  Flutes were twittering bird like, or riding above it all with longer notes and sustained melodies.  More participants joined me playing calimbas, following my simple instructions, "Put it between your knees and play it like a typewriter."  Now we had an amplified calimba section.  The studio was throbbing.  We were all floating in the air, at least that's what it felt like.  Underneath it all the river kept up its sustinato momentarily drowned out, but like a bass line anchoring everything to the earth.  We throbbed, we buzzed, self-consciousness was completely overcome, there were no wrong notes.  This was as close to Paradise as it's possible to get.  We were truly experiencing "Perfect Music," we were making it happen!  Men and women getting together, trusting one another and letting it rip.  No rehearsal, no score, no key, no rules, perfect music, perfect freedom.  It was like a dream but we weren't dreaming, this was as real as it gets.  What I call "real reality."
	As I may have mentioned earlier in a previous chapter, there was a large, five foot in diameter, metal Coca Cola sign suspended from the rafters behind the throne-like Model T car seat.  It was round and curved at the edges and produced a wonderful gong sound with majestic overtones that hummed for a long time after it was struck.  We had hollow steel tubes wrapped with rags at one end to soften the blows, which we used to play the gong.  When striking the gong rapidly with these two homemade mallets, it was possible to produce a drum roll like sound sensation which buried each stroke in the massive vibrations they were creating.  By this technique the sound could build into a thundering roar.
	Now that the calimba section was fully established and several people were on the "Space Bass," I switched to the string bass and Pat picked up one of his homemade flutes to join me in a duet.  After this I picked up my soprano sax and blew a solo cutting through with the sharp edge sound of the horn.  Then as the music reached full volume I went to the gong and started the roll I described, softly at first but slowly building to a fortissimo roar as the music climaxed.
	I let the gong's roar gradually subside and noticed a kindred note sustaining out of it.  Then I recognized what it was.  It was the engine of the pickup as, unbeknownst to me, the young fellow that drove it had left the session and was turning around and shifting up the hill (it was a stick shift), in the street behind the studio.  The sound caught everyone's attention.  It was so perfectly appropriate.  That old motor was singing like a bird as it turned around and shifted up the hill.  The gong faded slowly, all other sounds stopped and we all just listened as the old engine pulled up the hill and faded out of hearing, disappearing into the night.  Only the river continued.  I turned off the recorder.  We all looked at each other after a prolonged silence and then broke up with laughter.  What a thrill!  It was indescribable even as hard as I have tried to tell you about it.  It was miraculous!
	We immediately listened to it back and were just as impressed or even perhaps more so.  Everyone left only after the whole tape was over.  Later Nutzle and I decided to do a joint illustration of the pictures the music inspired in our imaginations.
	We named the song "The Legend of the Indian Dog Man of the Cosmos."  The legend goes something like this.  In an Indian village of tepees next to a cornfield a white dog with black spots realizes that to this tribe dog meat was a delicacy.  He comes to the conclusion that he must transcend himself and become and Indian.  With the help of meditation and a little herb he manages to transcend himself and becomes a spotted, floppy eared Indian brave.  The Great Spirit notices him and his astonishing feat and presents him with a solar powered flying automobile.  This is a huge thrill for the Indian Dogman, who immediately takes off and tests out his new wheels.  He flies around in the cosmos getting more and more excited, and eventually goes so fast that he and the sun car melt down and disappear.
	Nutzle and I just sat down in the studio and, listening to the tape, started drawing on three large pieces of poster board.  Not much was said until we had finished the project.  When we had filled up the three panels, we analyzed the drawing and came up with the title for the piece and the legend to go along with it.  If this seems a bit like a backwards process, well that's for sure the way it was done.
	Our idea was to use these three panels to create a fold out poster to go inside a long play record and use a part of one of the panels as a cover.  That was the drawing of the Dogman with goggles and a World War I leather helmet, ears flying out in the breeze behind him, driving the sun car through the cosmos.  Unfortunately this project, like so many others, has never come to fruition, but I still have all the pieces of this project and the hope that some day it will.  It was truly a miraculous evening and one incredibly beautiful experience I would love to share with the rest of the world.