First There Was Music: Reflections on a Life

By David Solbach

From "First There Was Music": Propinquity is not all, but it is critical. For most of my contemporaries life has been short and nasty because they were in the wrong place at what was the right time and place for me. Coming of age in the 1960s, in North America, was not without risk. If you were black or gay or female you were confronted with barriers ranging from glass ceilings to murder. A few blew their brains out with drugs, over fifty thousand were devoured by the Vietnam war. Life was not easy for the handicapped. But for those stuck in Kenya or Bangladesh the world we inherited would have looked like opportunity incarnate. Stumbling into San Francisco in 1965, as I did, was the luckiest choice of my life. Lucky, because I didn't choose it for the weather, for architecture that screamed for renewal, for 'culture.' I chose it because I was socially more comfortable here than anywhere I'd visited. I was wowed by its Victorian charm-it was the only American city that satisfied the exotic imaginings of cities that I'd garnered from film and literature. But I would have stayed even if it had been an ugly urban sprawl like Los Angeles. In addition to arriving at a propitious time I had the good fortune to be white and male in a racist, sexist world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1727183428
• ISBN13: 9781727183429
• Release Date: September 2018
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"