The Slow Series: Layover

by Mischa Hedges | Mar 8, 2022

The following is part of a series by Randy Lutge, a longtime friend of Michael Hedges and Manager of the New Varsity Theater in the 1980s. Randy Lutge went to Gunn high school in Palo Alto, California — the same school as Alex deGrassi and Will Ackerman. While studying at U.C. Berkeley, he studied “ethnographic filmmaking,” a study that would inform much of his later life’s work. During summers at Cal, Randy toured Europe, playing guitar and singing in the band “Montana” with college buddies. In 1974, his father took the lease on The Varsity Theater in Palo Alto and asked Randy to join him there as a manager and live music producer. He would eventually become a partner in that business. When the lease ended at The New Varsity, Randy spent 17 years with Alexia Moore Wine Marketing. Today, he is a professional photographer/videographer living in the coastal town of Mendocino.

The Slow Series: Michael plays Layover slowly

I believe it was sometime around 1983 that Michael taught two workshops in Palo Alto at the invitation of Rick Van deVeer. During one of those sessions an attendee asked Michael how to play a certain part of one of his compositions. Michael demurred and said, “Oh, you don’t want to play my tunes, better that you discover your own creation.”

But Michael incredibly generous, and sometime after that “master class” we were hanging out at my place in Palo Alto, enjoying life in the eighties, when Michael acquiesced to a friend’s request to learn some of his tunes, by recording them played slowly. We weren’t set up as a video studio, so these videos were shot in my living room using a desk lamp for lighting.

These roughly-edited video tutorials were subsequently released on YouTube.

This footage has helped countless students of Michael’s work learn these now-classic tunes, many of which Michael debuted at the New Varsity Theater. The “slow” series includes, “Lenono,” “Two Days Old,” “Layover,” “Ragamuffin,” and “The Happy Couple.” The videos show much of the sweet, generous personality of my dear friend.

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