I left the New Generation in 1970 to study photography at Art Center College of Design.  As much as I loved photography, when I got a good look at what photographers did every day I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do -- an expensive lesson about the difference between doing something for fun and doing something for a living.  So I dropped out of school and began my years as a professional musician.

Oddly enough, this period began with a brief partnership with Tom McReynolds.  We teamed up as an acoustic guitar and vocal duo and played at several clubs in the L.A. area under the name “Sam ‘n Ladders.”  (The name was one of my worst-ever creations – it was supposed to be a joke, because when you said it it sounded like “salmon ladders” – the things salmon ascend when going upstream to spawn – and I thought this was really funny.  Go figure.  Nobody EVER got the joke.  For the record, Tom was Sam and I was Ladders.)  It ended when Tom got sick and I had to go on by myself for several nights.  I realized immediately that I liked it much better working as a single, so I went that direction for a while.

Work was scarce, though, and just at the moment I was thinking that music wasn’t going to work out, I got a call to substitute on bass guitar (which I had never played) with a trio working at a nice club called the Branding Room in Santa Monica.  I ended up replacing the regular bass player and working with the trio for the next year.  It was a great experience professionally but a terrible one personally – the guitar player (and leader) of the group was a truly deranged individual who took joy in making life miserable for everyone around him.

After that I played in a number of different groups, and traveled almost constantly through the remainder of the decade.  Rick Rhodes (then Rothstein) and Bob Brandt and I had remained very close friends, and for a time – a great, unforgettable time – we played and lived and traveled together in band called Wonder (originally “Wonderclam” – shortened over my objection).  To be out on the road with my best friends, playing rock and roll and having fun night after night in small towns where by virtue of being professional musicians we were all minor celebrities – this was good.  Young adulthood had arrived.  We can (and still do) tell a million stories about this period, which is dear to our hearts.

I left the group in early 1974, driven by the need to hole up and do a bunch of recording.  I did that at my family’s cabin, then tried, on the strength of those recordings (which are still among my favorites), to pursue a record deal back in L.A.  I had not a single clue what I was doing in this regard, however, and made precious little headway.  It did lead to a period of about eight months working in a recording studio, however, and that was great experience.

In late 1974, I rejoined Rick and Bob and we went on the road again with Wonder 2.  Once again, we had the times of our lives, and don’t get any of us started on the stories unless you have the whole evening.  It ended in mid-1975 when Bob left to return to school (having decided to become a minister) and Rick and I each moved on to play with show groups on the casino circuit.  My most successful years as a working musician were from 1976 to 1979, when I played trombone, guitar and pedal steel guitar with a Las Vegas-based group called “Sidro’s Armada,” which was never well known to the general public but was something of a legend within the Nevada casino community.  My years on the road ended with an attempt to start my own show group, starring me.  Despite my best efforts it didn’t really get off the ground, and I pulled the plug at the Holiday Inn of Ogalala, Nebraska, nursing a voice that had virtually disappeared from overwork.

I spent the next few months living in Bob Brandt’s famous garage apartment, figuring out what to do next.  It was tough – my entire identity was as a musician, but I had reached the point where I realized that things I wanted in my life – like normal relationships with other people, for example – were not really possible without a major change.  I couldn’t really settle on a new “vocation” as such, but one day I realized that everything I was even considering required finishing college.  So I went back to school at age 28.

At first I felt like a professional musician who was going to school, but within the first eight or nine months I came to feel like a student who used to be a professional musician.  School was much easier and much more fun and interesting the second time around.  I graduated from UCLA in 1981 with a degree in Sociology.  Unsure what to do with such a degree (I came close to entering a Ph.D program in Sociology, but fortunately came to my senses), I played music again for a while – this time as a single, playing guitar and singing in restaurant lounges.  It paid the bills, more or less, while I continued to think things over.  Eventually I entered the UCLA School of Public Health as a graduate student in the department of Health Education.  I got a masters degree in public health from there in 1984, but never worked in the field – midway through the program I had decided to go on to law school, which I subsequently did, also at UCLA.

While there, through a law school friend, I met Sherry Novick, my wife of nine years.  I got my law degree in 1987, then came north to San Francisco to clerk for a year for Justice Stanley Mosk on the California Supreme Court.  That was a wonderful experience, but then I had to pay some serious dues – three years in a major San Francisco law firm.  To sum up three years in three words: I hated it.  But I got my career-making break when I landed an in-house legal job with Lucasfilm Ltd. in Marin County.  I worked for the Lucas organization for the next five years, including several as general counsel for LucasArts, George Lucas’ computer game company.  This was a great period, in which I discovered that there actually was a career in law that I could enjoy – built around deal making, intellectual property, and playing a positive role in getting things done, as opposed to being part of the adversarial process that pervades so much of legal work generally.  After five years I had pretty much done what there was for me to do there, though, so I became general counsel for Maxis, a publicly-traded computer game company in Walnut Creek (if you know “SimCity,” that’s Maxis).

I had been at Maxis for one year when it was acquired by Electronic Arts, and my job disappeared.  I was treated well, however, got a good severance package, and through a fluky set of circumstances – and without any actual intention of doing so – slid into private practice.  So today, a year later, I have a solo law practice based in an office in my home.  Its going great.  I do the same kind of work I did as an in-house general counsel, but for about a dozen different clients, including Lucasfilm, Maxis, Electronic Arts, and a number of other companies, both large and small, located from Marin down to Silicon Valley.  Most of my work centers on transactions involving intellectual property – software development, technology licensing, internet stuff, etc.  After spending six years in-house, I’m really enjoying working with a bunch of different businesses at the same time.  And the independence is terrific, not to mention the commute and the dress code.

The light of my life is my daughter Natalie, age 7.  I think because I was relatively old (39) when she was born, I have been able to appreciate and savor the experience of parenthood in a way I’m sure I could not have at an earlier time, when I was still so involved in figuring out my own life.  She is a bright, gregarious, funny and thoughtful kid, and we’re very close.  I could go on and on about her, but I think it is enough to say that being her dad totally blows away anything else in my life.

My wife Sherry is right up there too, of course – she is a sweetheart, and is one of the most respected policy consultants in the state legislature.  She is chief of staff for Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (from Berkeley) and is the reigning expert in areas of family policy, welfare, and health and human services generally.  She fights the good fight day after day in a political environment that would have chewed me up and spit me out years ago, and she’s a great mom as well.

I still do a lot of music.  I have a pretty decent (and growing) midi and digital audio recording setup in my office, and I use it a lot.  In particular, I’ve been recording children’s music – both traditional and original – for the last couple of years.  I also do a lot of music at Nattie’s school.  Last year, when she was in first grade, I sang songs with her class for a half hour every week, and, along with the music teacher, accompanied all the different acts in the school talent show.  Big time fun.

So today my life revolves around my family, my work and my music.  I would like to socialize more but its hard to find the time.  Email has made it easier to keep “in touch” with people, but there’s something a little eerie about the idea of all these people holed up in front of their kayboards, feeling like they’re in touch with each other.  That’s one reason I’m looking forward so much to the reunion – face to face is much better, always.