Bop ‘til I Dropped

When I was in the fifth grade, I discovered Rock & Roll. My first records were 45 RPM albums by Bill Haley and His Comets and Elvis Presley.  The music hit me like a bolt of lightning.  I was one of those kids who could not get enough of the music, and I could “bop ‘til I dropped”.

I began playing guitar in about the 9^th grade.  I had taken piano lessons for four years when I was in elementary school, but little of it affected me emotionally.  No so with the guitar.  After all, Bill Haley played guitar. Elvis Presley played guitar.  My father played guitar, and he guided me when I needed some good coaching.   He would give me a song and encourage me play it in every key. 

I knew of a boy who had an older brother in a country band.  When the older brother moved out to go elsewhere, the younger brother started selling everything in his older brother’s room.   I bought a jumbo model Kay guitar from that boy. I also bought a stack of 45 RPM records by Hank Williams, who had been dead for several years, but whose music was still well known.   

Hour after hour, I would strum a guitar to those Hank Williams records.  I wrote my first song, Sittin’ and Starin’ in high school.     

In 1971, while teaching at Washington State University in Pullman, WA, I wrote my first song with Doug Sharp, a mathematician I met at Texas A&M when we were both in graduate school.  Doug shared by love of music, and we admired the work of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Ian & Sylvia, among others.  Late night music listening seemed to lend itself to songs with poetic lyrics.  Doug is a natural poet, and we began writing songs with a poetic aspect to them.

The result:

By the mid-1980’s Doug and I wrote more than 50 songs. I built a recording studio in my garage in Houston and some friend musicians helped me demo these songs.

The musical friendships led to my forming Dr. Fry’s Texas Medicine Band in the mid-1980s, and we became a popular band in Houston until about 1994, when I began devoting full time to my work in a national economics consulting firm based in the College Station/Bryan area.

However, in about the year 2000, I rerecorded songs in a professional studio, using my band members.  The recording resulted in two discs that received heavy play in countries in Europe, as well as Australia and New Zealand, with some in the United States – everywhere where DJ’s could control their playlists rather than have playlists dictated by corporate interests. Those releases were played so much that in 2000 and 2001, Dr. Fry’s Texas Medicine Band was among the most played independent artists in the world. 

On this site I will visit songs and point out aspects of them that are interesting to me.  I will show you some of Doug’s poems.  I may talk about interesting events that occurred when the band was active.

Subscribe, and I will take you on a musical journey.