Imagination Piano Chords

[Maryetta Worm]

Thatcomes through crystal clear on Imagination, a new collection of singular songcraft that could only spring from the creative consciousness of Peter Lewis. founding member of the legendary San Francisco rock group Moby Grape.

Everyone has its one approach when it comes to songwriting. What is yours? Was it any different this time around? Have you found the recent isolation creatively challenging or freeing?

But after the heyday of Moby Grape, we reconnected and resumed our old friendship. When she passed away in 2018, I took it personally. There were others who may have been closer to her. Nonetheless, I had known Kris longer than almost all the other people in my life and this is what both of these songs I wrote about her are about; dealing with the loneliness that gets left behind after having to let go of someone we feel deeply understood by.

I would truly appreciate it if we can discuss some of the early days. Would you like to tell us how The Cornells got together? What sort of venues did you play and what did your repertoire consist of?

So far as the fame of my mother is concerned, my brother, sister and I were mostly shielded from it. One exception that comes to mind was when I was about eight years old. Our parents had taken my brother and I to New York. We went by train and were just getting off in Grand Central station when some fan noticed my mother and started yelling out her name.

The first time I saw Katz, he was standing in a shadowy corner of the rehearsal studio we practiced in. He always wore black, had a black goatee and straight black hair, combed over a skull shaped head to a duck tail in the back; very beatnik looking. The next morning I got a call from Newark saying that Katz liked what he heard and wanted to meet with us about putting our band together in San Francisco.

I think in order to survive as individuals in a society, everyone has to create some kind of interest in themselves. The songs we were writing in Moby Grape were born in the process of trying to do just that; in other words, to make ourselves interesting.

So far David had only produced comedy albums for Phillis Diller, a stand up comedian. But if signing Moby Grape gave his standing a huge boost at Columbia, it also put him under pressure to prove himself. So you might say in the studio, the combination of his ambition and our intense desire to carve out a place for ourselves in the rock music scene created a critical mass.

It took us only two weeks to finish. But listening to the playback, I remember thinking we had surpassed my expectations. The mixing was done in New York by David Rubinson, Skip and myself. But to spite the adulation we got from Clive Davis and all the other high ups in New York, on the flight home Skip and I were subdued. It was as if we were both unsure about how to sustain the great outpouring of energy it took to make that record and in some way knew the apex of our Moby Grape experience was already over.

I think most people would agree that in a prophetic sense, this was us looking into the future. Nonetheless, the actual making of our debut album still is and most likely always will be the highlight of my life in music.

For me the whole history of the band was a highlight. Some of it may have been exhilarating and some a disappointment. But feeling so much more fully alive after Moby Grape than I did before still makes it all seem worthwhile. I got the chance to turn even my downers into songs that people might listen to and even identify with. As an artist I consider this a great privilege.

When we got back, Glen Campbell was already done playing (solo) and Vanilla Fudge was in the middle of their set. As it turned out, since they both had the same instrumentation, it was decided that Vanilla Fudge would let the band we found to back up Sonny and Cher use their equipment.

I guess not to be outdone, Mosley goes next. Except for leaving our underpants on, Don, Jerry and me are also in the water a second later. However long this took, the kids on the hillside are now all on their feet cheering and screaming when I hear the sound of sirens approaching.

But we figure if we stay in the water, instead of having to get their guns wet, the cops would probably just wait till we got out to arrest us. But then a van with police markings pulls up and some guys with wet suits climb out. Now the kids on the hillside are booing.

How I met John was through a young woman landscaper who was putting a lawn in at the new house I bought. After hearing that I was a musician, she told me about also working for John McFee and then took me over to meet him.

It took us two weeks to complete the project. Afterwards I remember thinking to myself that I might have finally become a real song writer. Maybe this was because I always seemed to have second thoughts about the songs I had written in Moby Grape. But the new tunes on my first solo CD sounded complete to me, as if there was nothing left in them to rearrange, or add something to.

What are some of the most important players that influenced your own style and what in particular did they employ in their playing that you liked? What are some fingerpickers that inspired you?

I would have to say the most important was Joe Maphis. Joe was a regular on the weekly country music TV show Town Hall Party. I watched it every week religiously just to see him play. What fascinated me about him was that Instead of depending on a rhythm guitar player to back him up while he played solos, Joe played his own rhythm.

I was just learning how to play guitar then. As it so happened, Joe Maphis was managed by the same man that handled Art Linkletter, the father of Bob Linkletter from The Cornells. Art was a very nice man and somehow arranged to have Joe Maphis show up at one of our band practices. It was there that I saw how he was able to play his own rhythm while soloing. Instead of using bar chords, he used his thumb to nail down the sixth sting, allowing him four instead of just three fingers to play the notes. In the meantime Joe used a flat pick to comp along.

Of course the grandmaster of us all is Chet Atkins. Chet used a lot of bar chords, a thumb pick to give him more freedom in his right hand. He was the virtuoso that every finger picker I know looks up to.

Any question about my favorite guitar players would not be complete without including Roger McGuinn. The Byrds first record was just on the market and already had me captivated. The songs spoke for themselves. Their vocals to me were a light in the darkness. But the sound of that Rickenbacker 12 string was more than something new to believe in musically. I had to see it.

My good fortune is to be surrounded by people who love me. But interactions between people are in constant flux and nobody can completely control who or what might unexpectedly show up in their lives. With this as a starting point I wanted to consider in this new album, the possibility that the stronger they grow, the more our dreams become the future and our waking lives the battlefield on which to keep them from becoming nightmares. My personal weapon of choice here, as it always has been, is my own imagination.

Nice to have another band member of the legendary band featured here. One of the finest interviews in the site; Peter Lewis shows that not only is he talented but also deep in relating his storied life and career.

Later on, Fry meets another woman, a waitress who serves him a drink, and when she squeezes his shoulder he realizes he will remember her forever because she has confirmed his existence just when he needed it confirmed. He needs desperately to be validated by another human being, to be viable for her, to be touched by her, in order to know that he really is alive. His eyes go from woman to woman with continuous longing that this one or the next one will change his world and give him a sense of meaning and purpose.

Fry finally reaches a kind of mystical awareness when he goes to Kansas City and sees a painting by Francois Gautiere entitled The Midwife, a picture of a peasant woman giving birth. Fry studies the painting and wonders what brought him to Kansas City and the museum. Symbolically he becomes the baby in the painting coming into the light.

The main character, B, is sitting with his wife and two sons in their comfortable home. B is listening to a song sung by a dead man (Jim Morrison), while his wife reads a novel about women in the stone age. The younger son wears earphones and watches MTV. The older son sits with his back to the others, picking out mournful chords on the piano. The composite image is of four family members cut off from one another, severed.

…spared the wattles and the hemorrhoids, gum disease, plastic teeth, rashes, the tedium of long-term economic problems. He seized his youth, went down in flame, knew or sensed in advance the consequences of survival.

B decides that it is possible to live too long and to not really be alive in any meaningful sense. He realizes that within his own home he is as isolated as when he is outside of it, where everyone he meets, from his neighbor and friends to his co-workers, is a stranger wearing a mask. B decides that the only remedy for his alienation is to be found in taking some kind of action, to do something, rather that just constantly thinking about doing something.

A thousand eyes from the temple watch him unblinking, a balding, aging, fleshy man dancing alone in the candlelight of this suburban house in the fashionable northside of the city of K. The music screams in his brain as he flails and dances, turns like an airplane tipped sidewise, a pinwheel, the mandella, writhes like a snake, jumps lizard-like over his chair, spins, buckles, leaps up again.

Duff Brenna is the author of six novels and one book of poetry. His awards have included the AWP Best Novel Award, a San Diego Writers Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, Cream City Review, StoryQuarterly, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. (updated 7/2010)

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