Concert Schedule Our Catalog MP3s Publicity Materials Songwriting Tutorial Send Us Mail
Excerpted from Chapter 48 of the book, "The Code"
The Day of the Dolphin
1977
On Wednesday, April 6th, I was
admitted to Japan on a flight from
The concerts were fabulous, very
well received. It seemed that the
Japanese audience had read the liner notes of everybody's albums. They knew all the players and applauded
enthusiastically as they were introduced.
David Lindley and Stan Selest sat in with me
to do several of the new songs from my album.
Governor Jerry Brown flew
over from
Lloyd Segal and I decided to
take a sightseeing tour one morning, and walked out of the hotel and down into
the subway station on the corner. We
stood there on the platform, and had not a clue as to which train, or which
direction the trains would take us. We
saw a large graphic on the wall with lines going off in all directions, and
lots of Japanese characters explaining what it all meant, but we couldn't
understand any of it.
We left the station and
walked across the corner to enter the station again from a different
point. This time we saw the same
graphic, but it was hanging on the wall at a ninety degree angle from the version we had
seen in the other entrance. It still
made no sense to us. Se we left the
station and began to walk down the boulevard.
Before long, we came to a
station for an above ground commuter railroad, and we decided to go to
As we rounded one corner, I
was amazed to see the thirty-seven foot high Buddha of Kamakura. I recognized it immediately from my dad's old
"Operation Lifeline" book that I had as a kid.
It looked wonderful to me. We
discovered that we could go inside through a door in the back. Light streamed in though the holes in the
eyes, and it was an amazing view.
I was curious to see how
thick the bronze was, and by tapping and reaching around the sides of the door,
felt that it was about three inches thick, probably thicker in some
places. It looked like it had sagged
some over the years it had stood there, and who knows the Tsunamis and other
disasters it had withstood. What a find.
On the way back to our hotel,
we stopped at a little stand deep in the maze of streets, to have
something to eat. We came to understand
that we could order eel, and decided that we would try it. As the chef prepared the dish, he handed us
each a wooden skewer with some pleasant tasting white fish meat on it.
As we finished that, there
were two more, but these were definitely made up from other parts of the eel, and
were a little more difficult to get down. Then
the last skewers appeared, and we were hard pressed to manage to finish the
meal, and not offend our host. It seems
that the expectation is to eat every bit of the eel,
and most other products from the sea, probably healthy, but a little hard to
swallow.
On Tuesday, April 12th, we flew
back to
Visit
the Kennedy Center archives.
If you don't already have RealPlayer
you can download it for free from Real.com
Please send any correspondence or requests for
information to:
Compass Rose Music
Direct your e-mail messages to:
Steve Gillette, gillette.steve@comcast.net
or to:
Cindy Mangsen, cindymangsen@comcast.net
Come back for more information, lots more Folk Music
resources on the Internet,
our concert schedule, and of course, the jokes.