MUSIC SMARTS Celebrates at UCI Charter Class Reunion

After a walking tour of the University of California at Irvine, I hosted a reunion gathering of alumni, students and staff at the gigantic UCI bookstore.  UCI was founded in 1965, with William Pereira as the architect of the original campus, home to approx. 1500 students.  Ansel Adams photographed the stark space in 1968, located in the middle of an old cattle ranch.  It was used as a location for the 1973 sci-fi classic, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.  Today there are nearly 30,000 students in a vast planned community that now stretches for miles and miles near the Southern California coast.  It has become a breeding ground for smart Homo Sapiens.  My alma mater, sigh.

Here I am, surrounded by my book-signing event team and waving at the curious crowd. Class Reunion. Photo by Sandy Pritzker.

Directly behind the author is charter classmate Glen Pritzker, who is now a charter school teacher!  We discussed his challenge of chaperoning a Grind/Freak Dance last week with high school freshmen who are eager to “get it on.”  The Pritz confided to me that when we went to school long ago, a freshman dance was a prelude to “getting it on,” not an exhibition of carnal allegory on the actual dancefloor. Yikes!

On the far right is charter classmate David Goodman, Ph.D., founder of the Newport Neuroscience Center.  Goodman and I talked about UCI Prof. Richard E. Whalen (1934 – 2001),  who hired me as laboratory manager of a biofeedback experiment involving hypnosis and alpha brain waves.  The subjects were women between the ages of 18 and 35.  As a 20-year old student on the “work-study” program, I got my photo on the front page of the LA Times, in white labcoat and shoulder length hair while attaching EEG electrodes to a young lady who would soon be plunged into darkness wearing headphones so that she could listen to her brain. It was a groovy time, folks…

That UCI experiment was pivotal in my first meeting with John Lennon, as our biofeedback conversation consequently lead to his invitation to join the Beatles at Abbey Road.  I had never been in a recording studio before.  Who’s in charge here? Go figure!

If you are in New York City for the annual Audio Engineering Society Convention, I will be signing books at 3pm on Saturday, October 10 in the AES bookstore at the Jacob Javits Convention Center.