My 37th track to pass the million plays mark on Pandora just did so today!

Years ago, I had a friend named John Tekinder. He took guitar lessons from me for, I don’t know, maybe 15 years. John just wanted to play electric blues guitar and so that’s what we did every week, every Tuesday specifically. He’d often tell me stories about when he was in the Navy in World War II and one story he told me often was about the day he and a sailor named Joe LaMastro (that’s how I heard the name although I would later find out it was actually Joe LoMastro) were on the deck of the USS Essex, an aircraft carrier. He and Joe were talking when they looked up to realize that a kamikaze Japanese plane was headed right for them. They scattered. John lived to tell the story; Joe did not.

John died of asbestosis in 1999 but the week before he passed, I went to his house and played a tune I’d written for him. We sat in his kitchen and I played Tuesday Blues. Not long after, I played at his memorial service too, just before the military honor guard did their thing. And I composed a tune called In Memory of Joe LaMastro (again, which should have been correctly spelled Joe LoMastro). That tune just passed the 1 million play mark.