The Blues Is Where It's At!

Regular visitors to this blog sense that I think the world is nuts.

It gets nuttier every day. I don't know what today's news is, because I haven't watched TV or listened to the radio all day -- and it is now 10:26 PM (PDT) on Saturday night.

Throughout the day, I've thought about the 1960s. I keep wanting to build a separate blog about it and encourage others who lived through the 1960s, as I did, to share their memories and thoughts.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. Many of us who lived through that decade were too stoned to remember it!

So what?

A few years ago, I was coming out of the Radio Shack store at Culver Center in Culver City, California. Comedian Robert Klein was walking toward me. We sometimes ran into one another in Chicago's Old Town in the early 1960s when he was at Second City and I worked at a nearby blues bar called Big John's. We hadn't seen one another in almost 40 years, I said "Hi" to him.

"I know you," he said, "but I can't remember from where...."

When I mentioned Big John's, he smiled, laughed, knew me right away. "Those were great days, weren't they?" he said.

I stay in touch with a couple of people I knew back then, mainly blues pianist and singer Corky Siegel. Robert, Corky, and I are about the same age. My memories of Chicago's Old Town in the 1960s are still so fresh that it seems like yesterday. And, I have a bunch of photos I could post that would show what a great time we had back then.

Maybe the world isn't so nuts after all....