Chris Dedrick
Be Free

Chris Dedrick on Be Free:

1972 was somewhere on the cusp of a new age, so they were saying. It was a new beginning in my life. Just out of the Airforce Band in Washington D.C., a graduate of some amazing peace marches, and having finished with a six-album contract between the Free Design and Enoch Light's Project 3 Records, I moved to Canada looking for new musical possibilities and some fresh air. My first project in Toronto was a solo album. I had songs written and was writing more - they were coming to me in a way that was not conceived for Free Design. They were expressing some inner desire to break the mold, or at least expand the artistic boundaries. The ideas were for solo voice, and it was for me to see if I had anything worth saying.

The world was not waiting for me make a solo album, and not many ever found out it happened. My own daughter never heard the songs until 2000! A fellow about my age from upstate New York wanted to manage my new career; we used to meet in Toronto at the new health food restaurant at Rochdale on Bloor Street to make plans. One problem of that time in life is not recognizing the difference between what you think you know and what you actually know. So the recordings went very well, but the business plan self-destructed. The album was never released, and I settled down to pay the bills. I literally never listened to the album for 20-some years.

In the years that followed, my move to Toronto started to make...

Chris Dedrick on Be Free:

1972 was somewhere on the cusp of a new age, so they were saying. It was a new beginning in my life. Just out of the Airforce Band in Washington D.C., a graduate of some amazing peace marches, and having finished with a six-album contract between the Free Design and Enoch Light's Project 3 Records, I moved to Canada looking for new musical possibilities and some fresh air. My first project in Toronto was a solo album. I had songs written and was writing more - they were coming to me in a way that was not conceived for Free Design. They were expressing some inner desire to break the mold, or at least expand the artistic boundaries. The ideas were for solo voice, and it was for me to see if I had anything worth saying.

The world was not waiting for me make a solo album, and not many ever found out it happened. My own daughter never heard the songs until 2000! A fellow about my age from upstate New York wanted to manage my new career; we used to meet in Toronto at the new health food restaurant at Rochdale on Bloor Street to make plans. One problem of that time in life is not recognizing the difference between what you think you know and what you actually know. So the recordings went very well, but the business plan self-destructed. The album was never released, and I settled down to pay the bills. I literally never listened to the album for 20-some years.

In the years that followed, my move to Toronto started to make more sense. I met some local musicians who seemed to have something I was looking for. I had been reading a lot of Ouspensky, Casteneda, Sadhu, and Alan Watts, and the idea of being ready to find a Teacher (capitalized because it was clear in my mind that this was to be something very much beyond the mundane) was pressing on me. These musicians in this rather quiet, un-hip town had a special clarity that they attributed to their association with a gifted pianist/lecturer/poet from the Maritimes named Kenneth G. Mills, who would become my Mentor.

In the rear-view mirror, the events that followed 1972 give a perspective not available then: the recording of a final Free Design album in 1974-75, the lessons with Kenneth Mills that led to his founding the Star-Scape Singers with their many European tours and Carnegie Hall concerts around a core of the members of the Free Design, my career moving to composition for film and television, the eventual reissue of Free Design albums on CD, parents, sister, and friends that are gone -- so much life in these 28 years! It was the compilation CD for Varesse last year that brought Be Free off the shelf (the search for the authentic bonus track). Soon a Japanese label was on to the solo album, and now this North American edition.

It really is like a time capsule, and when it's cracked opened there is something very fresh and valid about it. For me to hear it again and face my "younger self" reminds me of the sincerity and openness of the time. The songs were prompted by my own experiences, but the completion of the lyrics found imagination usually more interesting than everyday life. Any connection to actual people is almost purely coincidental.

Is there a pervading message within this album? The "free love" of the '60's, as attractive as it was on the surface, was already being looked into for deeper meaning. In 1972 it was dawning that real love was not possible without a degree of inner freedom and an awareness of a more universal definition of what is "good". I didn't really have the vocabulary to express all that, and it took a lot to begin to see the practicality of a standpoint beyond the personal one. Still, this snapshot from '72 of a life and a quest that can be played and replayed as songs has a timeless quality. It seems that we all pass this way.


"You Are My Lover"

Is there anything sweeter than love? Pure, sensuous, joyous - wrapped in a youthful dream that it will last forever.


"I'm A New Man"