Facebooking

I'm becoming a fan of Facebook. I signed up for Facebook a while back when people started asking me if I had a page there, but I didn't pay much attention. Since then I've learned a lot. For one thing, if you make friends with Lynn Kelley on facebook, you get a LOT of new friends links and contacts, which is a very good thing. Thank you Lynn.

Another thing I found out is that it's a great place to find old friends you've lost touch with. When I was in my early 20s I was in the USAF band (honorably discharged after four years, mind you). I played with some great musicians and made some great friends I've since lost touch with. This week I was able to contact some folks that I hadn't talked to in almost 30 years. One was a guy named Burdette Becks. Burdette was as natural a musician as you could find — a jazz flute player and singer. Come to find out he's living in Germany and over the years has played with the likes of Bob Hope, Wynton Marsalis, Dionne Warwick, Lou Rawls and more. He's told me that his band may be coming to Newport News for a gig in the future. I hope so and I'll let you know. You should check out his site to hear some great music that includes some seriously good guitar playing.

Another friend was Paul Sammons. Paul was the penultimate bandmate, a (really) great arranger, guitar player, singer and plain ol' entertainer, plus a nice solid guy to boot. Oh, and though he was kind enough to never do it in front of us, he played the trombone too. We would cuss Paul sometimes during rehearsals for making us play a tune for the umpteenth time, listen to each other, keep a solid groove, pay attention to dynamics.... pretty much all the things that real bands do that amateurs don't. But you can bet when we saw the response we got from our audiences, we stopped cussing and started thanking Paul for his leadership. If you want to see something really funny, click on Paul's Memory Lane page and just by chance, see a picture of me playing the 1960-something cherry-red Gibson ES335, which I still own. I paid 300 bucks for it back then. I'm pretty sure it's worth more now. The picture is of us playing at the Iowa State Fair in 1978 and is the last one on the page. I'm on the right, and yes that is a cowboy hat. Paul is happily living out his "retirement" in Arizona and is the star of The Saguaro Sunset Band. No doubt, Saguaro sunsetters are boogieing hard when Paul's band cranks it up.