My wifes’ top five

My top five

202-224-3121 short version
for PSAs

Self Portrait (above): I practiced the drums six hours a day the summer I turned thirteen. When my sister grew up and had kids, she would not let them take up the drums. I’ve never figured out why.

What Inspired Me to Be a Musician

by Lloyd Ferris

BA, Research Methods in Social Science
MA, Social Psychology
BS, What I Like to spread around

In my generation, everybody and his brother wanted to be a rock star.  Some of us aspired to more doable goals, like saving the world from nuclear destruction, or eliminating poverty from the face of the Earth.

I kinda wanted to do all three. This website is my humble attempt to do exactly that (why not have it all?) before I go join that great garage band in the sky.

You see, I went to High School in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s — in the afterglow of the Summer of Love, at the height of the Vietnam War. All my friends were in the peace movement, and I wanted to be with them with all my heart and soul.

But my father remembered how when Britain allowed Hitler to roll over Czechoslovakia in 1938, it only encouraged his aggression, leading to World War II as we know it. Dad was always quick to remind me of that. He was also quick to remind me that Stalin murdered 30 million of his own people, so communism anywhere, even in tiny Vietnam, must be resisted as much as Nazism. (I learned many years later that the number was probably more like six million, still not good if you are one of the six million!)

In any case, the dilemna of how to end the cold war without giving in to the evil communists, and how to eliminate poverty without becoming an evil communist, set up a philosophical tension that served me well when I quit the music business forever for the first time at age 21 and set out to answer three questions: 1) What causes war? 2) What causes poverty, and 3) What the hell can we do about them? Read more