Topanga Records

About

Anyway, I had been playing guitar and singing since I was fifteen. (Yes, it was the Beatles and their Ed Sullivan appearances that inspired me to play guitar.) After my high school rock group, Mixed Emotions, broke up somewhat traumatically for me I played solo with an acoustic guitar during my college years at U-Mass.

My friend, Dan Martin, and I started a coffee house on the campus, called “Hello Friend,” named after a poem Dan had written. I remember, “Hello Friend, we can kiss and our mind’s bend….” I would often accompany Dan during his readings, playing my newly acquired Gibson J50. I still have that guitar—even used it a little bit in the studio—but it needs some work so it’s in semi-retirement for the moment.

After graduating from college I got my master’s degree and then became licensed as a marriage, and family and child counselor (it’s now called marriage and family therapist.)

More school and two Ph.D.s later, I trained and became licensed as a psychologist. I first worked in the public sector, for a county mental health clinic, and then in 1985 I decided to go into private practice as a psychologist, consulting with some agencies, but mostly focusing on psychotherapy.

Moving to Los Angeles in 1989 I started my Santa Monica and then later my Los Angeles offices, where I still sit and talk with folk about their lives and their hopes and aspirations and try to help figure out what “the next right thing” there is to do.

I had always been oriented to writing, though not very productive. I found that patients would often refer back to notes that I had written for them to think about—so much so that I started writing some notes in a more generally accessible format. A friend invited me to speak on the radio for a weekly mental health spot. Wanting to both inform and not sound scattered, I started writing a script for each topic so that I could keep focused while on the air. That gig ended in less than a year, but it forced me to get productive in a manner that I had never been before.

When I was in San Bernardino I was called a lot for newspaper stories. Though I had left for L.A., one day I got a call from a reported who I had consulted for and I pitched the concept for a weekly column. It turned out that her editor had been the original reporter that I had worked with fifteen years previously. Thus started Your Mind Matters, which ran continuously for seven years as a newspaper column before cutbacks at those newspapers (and my original editors moving on) resulted in my present move to an Internet-based column (without deadlines, I am happy to add).

This takes us to my meeting with L.A. County Mental Health Director, Dr. Marv Southard. We were sitting with a group of mental health professionals talking about ways for responding to the new funds that a recent state bill would bring. I happened to be sitting next to Dr. Southard, when he said parenthetically to the group, “There are certain things that everybody need.” I immediately grabbed my pen and then wrote down on my notepad, “Everybody needs,” then I started a list of things I felt everybody needed. I went home later that day and started with some chords and those words (imagining, for the moment, a Bob Dylan or a Neil Young singing along with me). I took a bunch of verses to my neighbor and friend, Loni Specter, and we joined together to finish the song.