About Doug Crate
I was born in 1950. By then, the radioactive glow of a couple of nuclear bombs mixed with the dust of a couple hundred thousand people had settled all over the globe. My mother’s breath during my time in her womb mixed this dust with my body. It was truly a different world I was born into. I grew up with an inner and outer life that didn’t quite gel. I, as well as most other kids, was fed The Lone Ranger, Superman, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and a bunch of lone hero male role models. We also were exposed to the Judaea-Christian world in which we were taught to turn the other cheek and that what you do to the least you do to Jesus. He was the focus of the religion. Jesus wasn’t around when I had to deal with packs of kids from other neighborhoods that intimidated and beat up smaller kids. The world I observed was based on might makes right. In the school yard, the biggest and meanest ruled and that reality seemed to flow into the adult world. Truth became a relative term and quite flexible as I learned to survive in an often threatening and hostile world. As I grew older and more aware, I could see in the adult world a sophisticated and subtle dance around these tugging polarities of love your neighbor and survival of the toughest. There seemed to be a game happening, but I couldn’t quite grasp the rules. I made my share of blunders and missteps trying to learn to be part of the incrowd. My high school experience was a disaster and right here I want to apologize to those I hurt or offended. Perhaps the epitome of high school was showing up drunk for a graduation party, staggering over to the punch bowl and fruit cocktail in a watermelon and barfing over the whole thing…..REALLY.  I had attended twelve different schools during my elementary and high school years and never really developed the ability to forge true relationships. So I drifted through high school slowly becoming more and more disenfranchised from the mainstream. With my first attempt at college came my exposure to pot and I found a new peer group in which all you had to do was use to be in. I dropped out of college and was drafted. I started an anti-war paper with a buddy, got discharged for not being adaptable to the military and after reading On Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau, made a conscious decision to abandon the norm of which I couldn’t quite grasp anyway and seek out that glowing bubble on the edge of my consciousness. I called it Edge City.
During this whole time, I had one stable center and that was my guitar. I started playing at the age of twelve after hearing a guy named Bob Dylan on a neighbor’s radio. There was an electric current; an honesty; a magic that forever has stuck in my soul. As I became more disconnected from my immediate environment, I started learning music by Simon and Garfunkle, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and of course Bob Dylan. This initial growth was cocooned in the confines of my bedroom. By sixteen I had met misfits like myself and we began to play out.
With John Kennedy’s death I sensed a shift around me. Then Martin Luther King’s death, then Robert Kennedy was murdered shortly after and the world took on a menacing hue. Then the deaths of Janis, Jimi and Morrison and I was off to discover a new world. This world came in the form of books and music. Carl Jung’s book Dreams, Memories and Reflections in which I learned about archetypes helped to start shaping my new world. The Transformation by George Leonard articulated my growing awareness that we as a culture had strayed from an important part of ourselves that was found in nature. I was a sponge and absorbed books on psychology, religion, culture, history, current events….anything and everything. There was Gary Snyder, Kerouac, Wendall Berry, Stephen Gastin, Shunryu Suzuki , Carlos Castanada, and a host of others helping make sense of a world that was becoming increasingly foreign to me. And at the center was my music. I heard contemporaries like The Moody Blues, The Beatles, King Crimson and their 21st Century Schizoid Man, and a bunch of others speaking of an awareness that was beyond the material world I grew up in. My music began to reach for this awareness, to share it. I wanted to add my voice to the world vision taking shape in these exhilarating and tumultuous times. This vision gave me hope for a future in which humanity could work together to share the earth’s bounty in a culture of inclusiveness, generosity, and nurturing. When I left the Navy, I was nineteen and politicized. This was 1969 and Vietnam was blowing a big crack in our culture. I hung out in Boston talking with SDSrs, Marxist/Lenninists, anarchists and started playing in the streets, occasionally getting gigs, sharing in and shaping the new culture. But after a few years with drugs and drifting through the underbelly of lower socio-economic culture, my idealism became tempered by reality. So I left the chaos of the city, and tried to follow Thoreau and Ram Das back to basics….chopping wood and fetching water….literally. I lived in a small shack with no electricity or running water. I met a lot of refugees from Babylon in the Maine woods. We patched our separate realities into a common cause and for a few years, we marched together into an idealistic future and my music kept me alive with enough income from bars throughout the state to keep me in clothes and basics. I grew some of my own food and heated my little cabin with wood I cut by hand. It was simple, cheap and beautiful. By 1975, I had a little farmstead with milk goats and chickens, a nice garden and fruit tress. I had a wife and two sons and enough income from music to keep my little arc afloat. I was blessed to watch my sons spend their early childhood here. Poverty was not a problem until my health started going in the late 1980s. I had kept a low profile while raising my sons and running the farm. But with my health going from too much smoke in the bars, I was compromised and unable to run the farm. I decided to try to get my music to a more widely recognized venue. I started playing out of state and I tried getting into concert venues. By the “90s, after performing for more than twenty years I decided to go for it. I put out two CDs , Atomic Orphans and New Day, and hired a promoter. I got good reviews in Australia, New Zealand and Eastern Europe, but no money and no signs of moving up the ladder. I needed health insurance and playing in bars until I was 70 and keeled over in some hole in the wall was not a pretty picture. So I went back to school for the fifth time and got a degree that allowed me to become a social worker. I’ve been working at Community Health and Counseling Services in Bangor, ME since 1997. I work with the homeless mentally ill and addicted. I have put out two more CDs in that time. They are Dog Soldier and a live recording of a show I did at the Grand in Ellsworth. That CD is called Live at the Grand. So now I am happily married to an angel named Misha. She is also a social worker at Community Health and Counseling Services and has two wonderful adult sons. She took my name…so she is Misha Crate. It’s been two plus years now. We got married by our wedding tree, a big beautiful red maple in our side yard on Sept 29, 2006. I play nine months a year (Feb – Nov) at a wonderful pub called The Whig and Courier, in downtown Bangor every 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month 6:00 to 9:00. My job as an outreach worker is challenging, but rewarding. I am currently reading a couple of books. One is Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson which is a wonderful book that for me ties together my hippie and gardening roots with my Zen sitting which I have done for 30 plus years. The other is by Eckhart Tolle called A New Earth which ties in the Ram Das and New age consciousness with the growing awareness of many of us that we will never feel like we have it together or be in the right spot or have the right situation to be blissful. Of course we know this too! All there ever is is right here and now. I garden and have planted fruit trees here in Winterport, ME and I still have the old hippie homestead in Newport, ME. My sons get to visit and stay there occasionally and my wife and I go out there as often as we can to hear barred owls and coyotes. I play my songs every day and enjoy the little gig I am pleased to have. I am not as much a social activist as I once was. I still have some connection with the Peace and Justice Center in Bangor, ME and WERU community radio in Orland, ME….of course my music still calls for us to come together and celebrate our gift of life on this fragile planet. 
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