Meetings with Remarkable Men. A Friend Passed Away this Week and Now is a Good Time to remember Good Times We Had Together.

Ken III & Ken IV in a horse-drawn carriage

In the late 1970s I met Ken Coghill III when we both worked at Analytics Communication Systems, a defense contractor, in McLean, Virginia.

He had a hobby of building his own laser light show and inviting people over to his house to watch it while he played the record China by Vangelis...

He also owned a personal computer called an IMSAI 8080 with sound cards that he programmed to play classical music... This was a very early personal computer long before the TRS-80, Apple or IBM PC. The sound cards produced square waves at the same frequency as piano notes... Sadly, square waves are very horrible sounding and an irritating noise that made me want to just turn the damn thing off... However that was the state of the art of synthesizers at that time... And he seemed to like it because he spent thousands of hours programming that machine... 

I met him right about the time I got divorced from my first wife and I decided that I wanted a guitar... So I learned to play the guitar... And I wrote down the lyrics to my favorite songs in a notebook and would go sing them in public... Including at his house... Then I got an electric guitar... And I talked to Ken into buying a synthesizer so we could play music together... That turned out to be an amazing journey... Soon I bought a synthesizer and together we would play music in his basement for hours and hours and hours... These were analog synthesizers that could make many bizarre sounds... Mostly sounding like the soundtrack from science fiction movies like Forbidden Planet... But Ken was a big fan of synthesizer music... And now we were making it! While the laser light show projected swirling galaxies or clouds or whatever on the ceiling... 

He invited friends of his over to play music (or just listen) Most often Mark, Leon, Ford and Tom...

These Musical Jam sessions made his wife Charlotte happy because... "Here it is a Saturday night and I know where My husband and son are... Safe at home instead of out carousing with hookers!"

Charlotte was a daughter of the Confederacy and her grandfather carried the flag at the Battle of Bull Run. She's still owns the flag but it's on permanent loan to the museum in Manassas,  Virginia. One day she took me on a personalized tour of the battlefield... She was very knowledgeable... And pointed to important locations... Like... "Over there is where the Yankees ran away!" - The first battle of Manassas was quite an event because the people from Washington DC thought it would be amusing to go witness a battle... Then they found out that war is an astonishingly horrible event and went back to Washington DC very quickly... 

Charlotte also requested that we go to the Smithsonian Institute and see the Chippendale dollhouse... Not surprisingly, it was furnished with Chippendale furniture... 

We went to two rock concerts together... Blondie... Which was so damn loud that it ruined the concert... And Tangerine Dream at the beautiful Warner Theater in downtown DC... We were so close to the stage then when the smoke machine went off we were covered... And that kind of freaked me out because I was concerned about breathing... And carbon dioxide... That was especially excellent concert because I'd spent the whole day wandering around the National Art Gallery high on LSD... 

We also went to a fantastic movie theater called the Uptown which had a giant screen and a rock concert volume sound system... We saw The Wall, the Right Stuff and Koyaanisqatsi!

We traveled a couple of times... I like to drive and Ken would get us invitations to interesting places... We went to see a laserium show at a planetarium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania... And there were very few people in the audience... So after the show was over Ken introduced himself to the laserist and told him that Ken had built his own laser light show... And that interested The Professional so he let us play with the actual laserium machine... I found it too complex to operate because it had a bunch of knobs and none were labeled and none had any obvious purpose... But Ken was able to make it work... 

We also went to New York City to see the Museum of holography. This was a state-of-the-art show in the early 1980s when holography had just been invented... Ken was always good for Cutting Edge Technology...

We all went out to a very dark field in rural Virginia to look at a comet... Ken's friend Ford had a telescope that rotated 360 degrees once a day... Very handy to keep stars in focus... I've never been good at watching the stars because my vision is blurry... And it was especially blurry that night because I had smoked marijuana before driving... I was Safe for driving but bad for comet watching...

Ken worked as a purchasing agent when I first met him... And then later as a programmer at Tom's small computer company... And then finally he got a job with the County of Prince William as an Oracle SQL programmer... That is powerful but incomprehensible language... When I went to college for computer science that's the only class that I had to take twice... Because I just didn't get it!

One of Ken's friends owned a sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay. Four of us went sailing on a lovely sunny day... And then a storm came up... And it was actually dangerous... And the owner of the boat, while being rich enough to buy a boat, was incompetent as a captain... So the other guy who was sailing with us staged a mutiny and made the owner go below deck while he piloted the ship back to shore safely... This was all very exciting but I was scared... The boom swung wildly from one side to the other and it whacked Ken real hard and knocked his glasses into the water... No chance of recovery... 

After playing music in Ken's basement for years I bought a battery powered portable synthesizer and speaker system that I took to the banks of the Potomac in Virginia... Right across the water from the DARPA headquarters... So at night, I made crazy "spaceship taking off" type sounds... Just to freak out the government engineers... At DARPA... I imagine that they wondered "What is that? A UFO landing?"

Ken also introduced me to the book: Godel, Escher, Bach... A legendary manual exploring the possibilities of computer science and technology... Years later, when I worked at Radio Shack, I actually put together a system where a video camera filmed its output on a monitor... And that created Visual Echo tunnels... Because the camera was seeing what it was displaying... Zen Trippy!

Ken named our band Solar Wind

I did the painting in black light acrylics...

Ken III & Ken IV

The reason I'm sitting down while playing

is that I had two Morley Phasers

and I operated them with my feet... 

Mark mockingly asked me one time...

"Are you playing guitar

or driving a truck?"

and the reason my face is blurry

is the photo was taken in low light...

And I was nodding my head in time to the music...

Kids these names would call it head banging!

this has to be Mark's PAIA machine.

That he assembled from a kit

while he was stationed on the Aleutian Islands

with the United States Coast Guard.

IMSAI 8080 Computer

Ken playing the Synthesizers.

Amateur radio operator Ken

I had both of these KORG synthesizers... And the little one on top was used by Kitaro to do the Japanese flute sound on the the Silk Road theme... What's really cool is that my friend Ken had a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland Juno 60... So when we played together each of us sounded different... And I could tell who was playing What notes... When the other guy came over with a KORG Mono-Poly I couldn't tell what he was doing and what I was doing...

Hypno-Disk Animated GIF ---> AND <--- The Trance Inducing Lyrics to “Space Hymn” by Lothar and the Hand People: Link to the VIDEO of Theremin Music and Synthesizers... Spinning Rainbow Spirals

(spoken) Now, sit in a comfortable position. Close your eyes and listen very closely to the sound of my voice. Imagine that there is nothing but you and the sound. Floating freely high above the Earth. Now, as you listen you will begin to relax. Every sound you hear relaxes you further. Just you and the sound. Your arms and legs feel heavy. Very heavy. Like lead. Every sound takes you deeper and deeper. Nothing can disturb you. Every muscle, every part of your body is relaxing further and further as you drift down deeper and deeper. You are floating away from the sound of my voice but you can still hear it. Imagine you are riding down an escalator. Slowly going down farther and farther into deep relaxation. Feels so good. Now, I’m going to count backwards from five to zero and on every number you will go another level deeper. Relaxing more completely on every count until I reach zero. On zero you go twice as deep. Backwards from five to zero. Deeper on every count and on zero, twice as deep. Five, so relaxed. Four… Three… Two… down, down, One… Zero… way, way down. Imagine you are floating high above the Earth in deep space looking out on the universe. Floating free in Space. Uplifted and filled with a silent “Ahh” watching the movement of the stars.

(sung) Standing on the Moon, filled with thoughts of home, Earth so slowly turning, twenty thousand years, human hopes and fears, are we finally learning? Riders together on a Starship of stone, living together, trying together, dying alone. La La, La La La…

If everyone listened to this song the world would be a better place. 

The Video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oVz9qTtRBU

When I was a child we went to visit San Francisco often as my dad had friends there with children of the same age.

Once we visited the Exploratorium, a science museum housed in the old Place of Fine Arts from the Pacific Exposition of the 1915... I really liked the music playing inventions that allowed random tourists to play strange devices that were controllers for synthesizers. They were pre programmed to play the "right" notes so we could jam and have fun without having any musical training or skill. There was another display of "virtual reality". It involved wearing a VR headset and wherever you looked that's where you went. It was a video game inside a long tunnel with floating spinning cubes with people's faces. One looked like Jerry Garcia. The goal of the game was to fly thru the cubes... They also had a strobe light dancing area where we cast shadows onto a wall that was painted with phosphorescent paint. Every second a light would flash and you left a shadow that lasted about 10 seconds... so you could "stack" shadows to form dancing images... FYI: You can see the building in the Movie "The Rock" with Sean Connery in the scene where he meets his daughter...

Dad's friend worked as a psychologist for the Jewish Boys Club and he had some very interesting "Mind Games". My favorite was a mirror game where you tried to do mechanical skill puzzles while looking at your hands in the mirror. Like "thread a needle" with a thick needle and rope... He also took us fishing for crabs in the bay.

We also went mining for Shark's Teeth in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There was a privately owned hill of sand that you could sift for teeth. We had a wooden box with a wire bottom that we would pour sand thru. The teeth would remain on the screen while the sand went through. It amazed me to think that this hill at high elevation had once been on the sea floor. However, there were shark teeth and sharks left them behind when they were swimming around a million years ago. Makes you wonder about the stories of Noah's Ark. Maybe it really happened!

Read more of my autobiography at:
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html