The Kite - part 1

No - the title does not refer to a device that is flown in the wind at the end of a long string... The Kite was the name of one of the bands I was a member of during 1969 in Escondido... Now - the name "The Kite" was not my idea... Truthfully, I wasn't very fond of it... But since nobody else liked any of my suggestions I was stuck with it :-)

In addition to myself (on lead guitar) the group consisted of Bill Palashewski on bass, his neighbor Gary Johnson on drums and a keyboard player named Mike Carman. There was also a couple of "on and off" members - another guitarist named Richard and a vocalist named Richard Warila (I think).

Gary, Bill and Mike were freshmen when I arrived at Orange Glen High in the spring of 1969... I don't recall exactly how we met... It's possible I saw Bill at Finder's music and recognized him - or just overheard a conversation at school... But - long story short - I ended up playing with the group. At the ripe old age of 15 I was the "geriatric" member. All the others were 14 and under.

I had a lot of song ideas floating in my head at the time. And the amazingly cool thing was all I had to do was play the guitar part and the rest of the group jumped in and started doing really interesting things. Within a couple of hours we had the entire song arranged... We seemed to always be on the same page - at the time I had no idea just how rare that is...

So - during an all day session in the early summer of '69 I put a cassette recorder on the floor and captured some of our songs. I've extracted a few short samples to include in this blog entry...

Caveats:
Like I said - this was just a cassette recorder on the floor - and the tape was 40 years old when I converted it to digital. So it's about the worst possible representation of the actual music...
And I was still playing that 12 string Vox guitar upside down with half the strings removed. The neck was extra wide and that really hindered my playing. (I switched to a Fender Telecaster a month or 2 later - it was like night and day.)

Also - note that since Blogger won't let you attach sound clips I took some screen grabs from an 8mm movie of "The Kite" and put them together with the sound clips to create wmv files... There's no way I'm including the actual 8mm movie. I don't mind a little embarrassment - but that's just too much...

The first clip is a screen grab of bass player Bill Palashewski and the song is an original instrumental. It's one of those things we put together in a matter of hours. If you listen closely there's a lot of interesting interaction between the instruments.



At some point later in the song we shift from minor to major chords with the bass line walking up and down the scales. Changes the feel from "melancholy" to "triumphant"... Unfortunately, the keyboard missed the transition (minor and major don't sound so good together) - so I didn't include it in the clip :-)

The next clip is a screen grab of drummer Gary Johnson and the song is another of my originals... There were lyrics but our vocalist was on vacation in Montana so we only recorded the music... All I remember from the lyrics is: "Stop! Don't mess with my heart - you're going to break it".
Now - I may be seriously deluded, but I really like this song and honestly think with some polishing (and decent lyrics) it could have been a commercial success... And if you disagree ... Well - I don't want to hear about it :-)



The final clip is a screen grab of me... Yeah - laugh it up :-) ... I often wore a neckerchief when playing. (Hey - at least I wasn't wearing my Nehru jacket...) And I have no excuse for the hair - it's always been random when it gets long. It probably looked totally different the days before and after :-)
The song is a clip from a 6 minute jam - we just picked a key and played. Unfortunately, someone was banging away (rather badly) on some bongos near the cassette recorder... (There were a lot of people in the room at that point...)




BTW: Later that summer I switched to wearing a Dashiki on stage. Yeah - they sold them at K-Mart at the time :-) People used to laugh on account of me being a cracker and all - but it was honestly the most comfortable thing I've ever played in... And it went well with my "peace symbol" sandals :-)