My Music: LET US REMEMBER and RONDO

Above are two new friends I made in Kansas City, more about them soon. First, an update on things in New Jersey. My friend high school Mike was attending the University of Missouri in Kansas City, living with relatives there, and he returned to his family home in Bernardsville, NJ for the summer of 1970. A friend he’d made at college, Karen, decided to join him for the summer break, also staying at Mike’s family home. Karen was introduced to all of Mike’s friends, and she dated a few of them, including myself. She was my first girlfriend, and things moved along quickly. By the end of the summer I was in love, and made plans to visit her in Kansas City in the fall. My second year at the School of Visual Arts began in September 1970, and I had enrolled in an experimental program. It was fun, but I wasn’t learning a lot. When I visited Karen I looked into transferring to the Kansas City Art Institute, and was accepted for the second semester beginning in January. My family wasn’t thrilled about this, as the school was considerably more expensive, but I could rent a room somewhere with Mike to save costs, and when I went out in January, we found one in an old farmhouse, conveniently mid way between Mike’s school and mine, being rented by the Miller family. Tom Miller was a garrulous 1950s beatnik who had become a house painter, and he and his family rented out all the rooms they weren’t using. Mike and I fit in well there.

Though Karen had enjoyed my fall visit, when I arrived in Kansas City in January, she chose to avoid me, I’m not sure why. Perhaps I was putting too much weight on our relationship for her. I was sad, but Mike and I went to our schools and enjoyed the atmosphere at our rental house. Also living there was John Taylor, above, and we became friends. John played guitar, and we often had jam sessions in either his or my room, augmented perhaps by a few puffs of illicit substances. John’s girlfriend Sue had studied violin growing up, and she sometimes joined us. I think we did some interesting work, John’s lead steel guitar blended well with my nylon string picking, and while Sue was hesitant about jamming, her smooth long notes added a lot to the mix. At the end of the school semester I came back to New Jersey and worked full time, but in January 1972 I returned to KC, though I didn’t have enough funds for art school, so I just roomed with Mike again and had fun for a few months on the money I’d saved. I brought my first Teac reel-to-reel deck and Electrovoice micophones with me, and John, Sue and I recorded a few hours of music, mostly improvised jams. I wrote one song, originally called simply “John’s Song,” later retitled. It had lyrics, but the recording I made of the sung version didn’t turn out well. Another recording of just the instruments was better, so in 2001, when I was going through all my reel tapes and transferring the best parts to digital files, I recorded a new double vocal track and put it over that version. Here it is: Let Us Remember.

Above are the lyrics from my notebook, about 1972. The other tracks I recorded were improvised, and/or covers, so I can’t really claim them as my music, but there was one track that qualifies, my attempt to write a short classical piece for Sue and I. Here it is: Rondo for Guitar and Violin.

To fill out the personal story, when I returned to Kansas City in 1972, Karen was also rooming at the farm house. Our relationship was revived, but somehow it was not as strong for me this time. After a few months, out of money, I broke up with Karen and again returned to New Jersey and the job I had there at my friend Randy’s father’s company, where I stayed for a few years, not going back to art school. During the summer and fall of 1970, when first with Karen, I wrote some poems, but no songs, or at least none I finished. I would return to writing songs in the summer of 1971, they’re up next.

Let Us Remember and Rondo for Guitar and Violin are © Todd Klein, all rights reserved.

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