But the Beatles had just released the revolutionary “Rubber Soul” album that week, and Jack Douglas was not about to be denied this opportunity by a couple of guys quoting regulations. When they arrived in Liverpool, British immigration were neither amused, nor welcoming, immediately informing the boys that they would not be allowed into England. A cheap, one-way ticket on a tramp steamer across the North Atlantic in mid-winter, with a crew who often seemed like drunken pirates, no visas, no work permits, no nothing, “except our guitars, little Champ amps, and a suitcase.” Opportunity? Maybe. Finally, Jack told Eddie: “What we really need to do is go to Liverpool, where all the action is.”Īnd that they did. Jack and his friend Eddie Leonetti had already formed a few “kid bands,” with each band getting a little bit better as they fired and replaced players and improved their own skills…but musically, they were pretty much just copying everything that was English.
That’s what got me into music.” The Mersey Soundīy the time Jack was 18, the Beatles were making waves on both sides of the pond. By the time he was in his early teens, “I was playing anywhere I could - folk music, hootenanny time. So, Jack course-corrected a bit and taught himself to play guitar. Y’know, I totally understood it.”Īnd then, before too long, another opportunity…not as unexpected, but just as impactful - an acoustic guitar, a Harmony with a cowboy painted on it, fell off another freight car, along with, as luck would have it, a Mel Bay chord book. I still think they’re cool, as a matter of fact.” Connecting to a dot much later in his life’s journey, he adds, “I think that probably opened the door to Yoko, to everything she did. When his dad listened to the music Jack was making, he threw off the headphones, but Jack “thought were really cool. He was enraptured by the sounds themselves and the ability to edit them into unusual compositions.
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Unexpected or not, Jack seized the opportunity and started recording things, anything, everything: the musical themes from his favorite TV shows, the sound of the elevated train that went by their apartment, even the sound inside of his mother’s vacuum cleaner tube, which he’d record at the fast speed and then play back at the slow speed. Naturally, his father “found” one that fell off a freight car from Chicago - only to discover that the box actually contained a new-fangled contraption called a tape recorder. When his parents got tired of Jack asking to play his music on the family’s sole record player, they decided to get Jack his own record player. Being a magnet for opportunity is certainly helpful, but it doesn’t mean much unless you’ve got the courage to open the door and charge through it.
“I knew there was something cooking.” Jack Douglas for AGEIST by David Harry Stewart Opportunity Is What You Make Itīeyond his musical talent and restless spirit, two things stand out in Jack Douglas’ life story: his ability to attract opportunity and his willingness to leap at it with abandon. He could sit down at a neighbor’s piano and play out the melodies: “Any score, it didn’t matter,” Jack recalls.
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“Back then your parents took you to the movie…it didn’t matter if you understood the movie or not…but the music always got to me.” The crazy thing was, he remembered the scores of all the films he saw. As Jack recalls, “Things frequently fell off of freight cars…that’s how our apartment was furnished.” His parents’ goals for him were pretty much just not to get involved in crime, which was generally how things ran in their neighborhood. Jack grew up in a working-class neighborhood (at its very top), with one uncle who was a drummer and another who was a big mafioso.
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