Album Notes

Here you have the music of Peter Dubow, a noted San Diego songwriter who also played keyboards with many of North County's best-known musicians. This album, a tribute to Peter by his musician friends-just a few of the many people who knew him and loved him-captures the spirit of his work, at once playful and pensive, intelligent, vibrant, funny and poignant. It presents 14 of his songs, chosen from an ample catalogue by the musicians who played with him over the course of a lifetime. It also includes an extemporaneous recording of Peter himself, from the music room, playing and singing one of his last songs, "Raining in the Heartland."


Born in San Diego in 1947, Peter grew up in Oceanside, where from a very early age he took a keen interest in all the burgeoning manifestations/flashes of what we can now see as post-war popular culture (although Peter himself would never have called it that). We're talking incipient television (Dave Garroway and Steve Allen come quickly to mind), comedy (Soupy Sales, Peter Sellars, Beyond the Fringe, Mort Sahl), and every aspect of popular music (from Dave Brubeck to Little Richard). What at one time might well have been vaudeville, now writ large across the entire entertainment panorama of 1950s America-this was Peter's metier. (He once conducted an interview with Cal Worthington of Dodge-sales fame, named the family parakeet "Elvis" in 1956, and appeared briefly in Woody Allen's Bananas.)