Going to high school with the Minneapolis funk musicians of the 1980s


I was on Linkedin yesterday and I saw a familiar face from my high school days, one of the funk musicians that I knew.

His name is Carlos Boyce, and you may know him as the Song Doctor. Or you may not know him, he never got as famous as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, who went to a different high school, but at about the same time, in Minneapolis. No, I never met Prince, but I knew a lot of funk musicians who went to my high school, which was Washburn.

Now please don't ask me about funk music - I know nothing about it. Like most of my friends in high school I played a music instrument, but I guess you could describe my style as "easy listening" - no one ever shouted at me to "play that funky music, white boy!"

I lost touch with my high school friends when I moved away from Minnesota in 1977, and it's kinda fun to reconnect with them now that we're senior citizens. To my delight we're older but no wiser, and I enjoy the petty comments like "I heard that he was talking about me!" We're not so old that we don't care anymore, I suppose that will happen in our eighties, or maybe never. I guess I'll see.

Like me, most of my high school friends weren't particularly sociable. We tended to do things that solitary people do. I did a lot of drawing, my friends would practice guitar, or drums. To this day whenever I see a musician on stage I wonder how they made the transition from hours and hours of solitary practice to getting up in front of people, and it's amazing. Some people never do it, and for them I often think that music can be their life without being their livelihood. 

For my funk musician friends, music was, and is, their life.
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