When I was 10, the whole family was shipped off to France. I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t like I had a lot of friends in the United States because we moved so much, but I guess I worried that I wouldn’t know how to function there.

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Conversely, when it was time to come back to the States, I didn’t want to leave Europe. During winter and summer vacations we went all over western Europe as a family, which was great. I just knew I was going to be bored when I got back to the States.

I had developed a very strong itch to travel and spent much of my time planning my escape. When I was 18, I finally did make it back to France, where I worked in a winery for the summer in Orange (a commune in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region).

Right about Vietnam

After France, my father worked in Washington DC. The family lived in the suburbs, in Annandale, Virginia, near DC. This was the late ’60s and a lot was going on politically.

I became vice-chairman of the student moratorium organising student strikes against the Vietnam war on the Pentagon steps while my father was working inside.

Me and three friends started our own underground newspaper called The Judgment. The principal called me into his office after we were distributing issues in the hallways one day and said, “I’m expelling you from high school.” I immediately called NBC, it became national news and they had to reinstate me on the grounds of freedom of speech.

We had huge family arguments about the war. But years later, after my father retired, he called me in for a private discussion and said, “Son, you were right about Vietnam. We should never have gone.”

Goodbye politics

The only moral argument against the war my draft board would accept was being a Quaker. So, as a conscientious objector, I attended Guilford College, a Quaker college in North Carolina.

I majored in political science but I actually became less political during my time there. I was becoming more internal, getting into art and music. I thought, politics, this goes nowhere, you just have to do what you can to express yourself and not harm anybody.

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One of the reasons for the change was that, on the first day, I went to the college bookstore and this book just jumped out at me, Toward the Truth, translations of lectures by Thai monk Ajahn Buddhadasa.

I didn’t know who he was, I was just really impressed. After that I wanted to meet him. I developed a fantasy of Thailand and imagined that it must be this wonderful Buddhist paradise.

Peace and quiet?

The vehicle that finally got me to Thailand was the Peace Corps. Immediately on arrival in 1977 we got really good language training, six hours a day, six days a week for nearly three months at three upcountry locations, moving from one to another. But Thailand wasn’t as peaceful as I had imagined, as there was a lot of political conflict going on.

There had been a student massacre in October 1976 and I arrived in March 1977, so the situation was still very tense. My job was teaching grad students English at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, in Bang Mot, about half an hour south of Bangkok.

While I was there, they had a bonfire in the university square where right-wing students burnt all books with a red cover. There was a 1am curfew instituted that continued until 1982.

Years later, I was laughing when we had a short curfew during the red shirt occupation in Bangkok and people were so upset, saying, “Oh man, it’s been two months!”

Finally we meet

I left the Peace Corps after a year and went to India and Nepal. After that, I got a fellowship to Berkeley, where I did Thai studies. I went seriously deep into the classic literature. After 18 months, in 1981, I came back to Thailand to do my field research. That’s when I knew what fluency was, because just in the taxi from the airport to the city centre, I could read every billboard.

I went south and finally met Ajahn Buddhadasa, the monk who’d inspired me to travel East. I ended up spending time with him at his monastery and translating two of his books.

A new chapter

Before I went to India and Nepal, I stopped off at a Bangkok bookstore and found two Lonely Planet guides, one for Sri Lanka and one for Burma.

I bought them both thinking I’d go to Sri Lanka and Burma on the trip. I never did. But I read them cover to cover and realised this was a completely new paradigm for travel guides. So I wrote to Tony Wheeler (the co-founder of Lonely Planet), suggesting a Thai guide. He wrote back and said, “Send me a sample chapter.”

I sent a chapter and he sent me US$9,000 and I was on my way. While I was doing my postgraduate field studies in 1981, I was also researching the first edition of Lonely Planet Thailand. It became their fastest selling guide. Tony and I became friends and I even helped him find his first US office in Berkeley, California.

Triangulating

From 1981, I spent about half my time in Thailand and the rest in the US and Mexico. Those were heady times and I did everything from updating the third edition of Lonely Planet China to building some houses in Mexico to writing articles for the San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times in America. But it was getting to be too much.

I divorced the woman I had been living with in Mexico – she got Mexico, I got Thailand. That was the settlement. Life was too precious to split three ways, so from 1997, I’ve devoted myself to Thailand. I was based in Chiang Mai for 12 years and have been living in Bangkok since 2008.

Setting the score

I started music really early because my mother was an accomplished pianist. I started taking piano lessons at seven. I later moved on to the saxophone. I started playing guitar at 12. That’s the only instrument I never had formal lessons in.

I didn’t really understand Thai music when I first came to Thailand, the chord progressions and rhythms seemed strange. But after more exposure, I started to get it. I learned enough to eventually compose some film music.

I booked a studio for a month and hired northern musicians to collaborate with me. That experience really deepened my love for the vernacular styles of Thai music.

GI Joe

I’m not an actor but, because of my expertise in Thai language and culture, I’ve often found myself behind the scenes in film production. I’ve been asked to help with location scouting or to translate text or to find extras, all kinds of odd jobs.

I’ve had a few small parts here and there, too. Then, all of a sudden, last year (2022), three movie parts came my way in quick succession. I play a Catholic priest in Inhuman Kiss 2, a sequel to the massively successful 2019 film, which was picked up by Netflix.

The other two films are still in post-production. In Morrison, which stars the tremendous Hugo Chula Alexander Levy (aka Chulachak Chakrabongse), I play an ex-US Air Force pilot who has been living in Thailand for 50 years in a decaying hotel.

In the third film, The Letting Go, a Swedish production, I play another US military veteran who went AWOL from Vietnam and now lives as a hermit in northern Thailand in a shack in a very remote area.

Rambling on

I’ve been playing in bands ever since high school. My present band, Midnight Ramblers, is a Rolling Stones cover band that we formed about four years ago. We play about six times a month.

I sometimes feel like, wow, it’s tiring. But you know, the reward is that you start playing the gig and you have a great time. And then you have to lug the stuff back, and those thoughts come again.

But what I’ve been saying to myself in response lately is, well, if I wasn’t doing this, I’d just be sitting on my a** at home, and that’s not good for me either. Maybe this is what I need.

Physically, it’s a form of exercise. And standing there all night, the thought processes of putting everything together, the guitar effects and remembering the songs, reminds me that it can’t be too bad for longevity.

You need to constantly challenge yourself, you can’t be complacent. Just look at the Rolling Stones!