Second Semester at Grant McEwan College #

Things felt quite a bit different in that second semester because Wes and I were becoming fast friends and often played and jammed together. I started playing keyboards now more than guitar, even though I was still a guitar major. There were so many good guitar players at the college and all these practice labs had a keyboard of some sort in them all so I played that instead. I was often late for my Keyboard class which was a mandatory class for anyone who was not a keyboard major. The problem was that we usually were jamming at noon and the other guys who were all ahead of me didn’t have a class right after noon which was when my keyboard class was happening. I would sometimes lose track of time so I would come by, and Charlie Austin, who I admired and who approved me during the audition portion of the entrance exam, would see me and just wave me off, I didn’t have to attend. I had already blown him away with my mid-term performance which was way beyond what they needed to do to pass this class. Charlie gave me an outstanding final mark in this class.

I was more available for Ruben as well during this second semester because I was no longer working at night and getting decent sleep every night. I can’t remember if I took possession of my car or not, but I suspect that I did not, so still going to college by bus. It’s a bit cloudy here, so it would make sense that I would have my car because I do more work for Ruben at this time and he is in the industrial area which has very limited bus service. If he needed additional musicians I would pull them from the college and they were more than happy to do it just for the experience. I had one teacher who could not understand why I was even at the college because I did not seem to apply myself in the same way as the other students. He couldn’t understand how I could be such good friends with Wes who was dedicated to playing his guitar. Any chance he had I would be the butt of his jokes. One weekend Ruben got the contract to tape all the talks at an AA conference and have tapes available the same day. There were several talks all going on at the same time, so there were three of us taping these meetings and then Ruben would be duplicating the tapes on his cassette duplicator. After the talks were over they were setting up for the dance that followed with a live Blues Band and who was in this band, the very teacher who would always give me a hard time in class. We saw each other and he thought that maybe I was there for the conference because I was in AA. I of course told him I was there to record some of the talks. This might have been his first clue that I was somehow connected to the recording industry.