I believe it was 1970 when I wandered up the street from my home to the Sausalito Art Fair. It was held in an old elementary school. As I approached I could clearly hear thunderclaps coming from the auditorium. 1
What I saw when I entered was one wild-haired man standing alone on the floor in the center of an otherwise empty auditorium. In front of him on a table was a huge electronic machine covered with knobs and festooned with wires. 2
The machine was connected to stacks of huge speakers in the corners of the room. The man would fiddle with the knobs, then hit one key on the keyboard and the room exploded with a full-throated thunderclap. 3
I was skewered. Transfixed. I had never seen or heard anything like this before. After getting the thunder he wanted, the man began to play music. Strange sounding music with tonalities that didn’t occur in nature. 4
The machine was a Moog Mark III. The man was Doug McKechnie, who went on to become a legend in the San Francisco music scene. Here’s a current article about him. aquariumdrunkard.com/2019/12/02/bla…
At the time I was deeply involved in the psychedelic light show scene in the Bay Area. Light show of the day were analog, manual, and they made jazz bands look well-organized. 6
Light shows were creative and beautiful, but essentially out-of-control. When I saw the control that McKechnie had over his medium, I envied it so. 7
Several months later, I heard that there was a Moog synthesizer at Mills College in Oakland that ANYONE could rent. I enquired, and sure enough, ten bucks would get you an hour with a fully equipped Mark III with a pair of massive Ampex 4-track tape recorders. 8
I spent many happy hours in the Mills College Tape Music Center making the most ungodly sounds. It turns out that sounds in nature are complex, while sounds that originate with oscillators are simple. Making the simple sound complex is freaking hard. 9
Sure, I had control, but I was trying to control a tsunami with a bucket. I had a lot of fun, learned a hell of a lot about sound, and learned that I was a terrible musician. 10
The Moog is an amazing machine, but modern digital synths actually allow for more practical performance use. Still, the Moog synthesizer was the very first computer that I ever programmed. Yes, it was an analog computer, but a computer nonetheless. 11
I don’t think it was a coincidence that a couple of years later I started to learn how to program digital computers. It was a natural progression. And it was Doug McKechnie who planted that first seed. 12
Of course, digital computers give you awesome control over everything, but then, now you have to control EVERYTHING. So, back to the tsunami-and-bucket problem. 13
BTW, it was a long drive from Marin to Mills College in Oakland, but it turned out to be a lovely campus. It was the first all-woman college west of the Rockies, founded in 1852. They had only recently begun to allow men into their graduate programs. 14
Nine years later, when Sue and I were searching for a place to get married, I recalled the chapel on the Mills campus. We checked it out. It was a lovely circular redwood and stone affair done in a distinctly secular fashion, and that is where we were married. 15 
