The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/114745
looking through it. I did that a lot. And I'm not sure what that did except open up even more possibilities to me. But the time I spent in the library doing that, was time spent not doing the assignments." Salwitz was intrigued by all his courses. "I had this love, and still do, of mathematical equations and the way they look and the implications of it," he says. But he was feeling increasingly daunted by the amount of course work he was shouldering. He cut back his credit load from 18 to 12 hours but felt stressed and fearful about letting his parents down back in PittsƂeld, Mass. Around that time is when he met Geils and Klein. "Being 19 or 20 years old, there's a lot going on in a person's life," he says. " Especially then. The Vietnam War. Draft deferments. All that stuff. It was a hard time…psychologically, really deep. The world back then was an uptight, confusing place and it was difƂcult to concentrate on that much of a work load. At the same time, I was totally enthralled by all those subjects. It was like tug of war." Eventually music won. "What I never, ever, lost was that deep interest in physics, which, until this day, has expanded into a huge interest in cosmology," he says. When he designed his Magic Harmonica with co-creator Pierre Beauregard (an invention that was patented though never produced commercially), he was thinking of physics, or rather, pitches and mathematical relationships between notes and chords. "It's a fascinating instrument from a mathematical and musical point of view. Much of what I learned in college helped me understand something about the physics of the way the harp is working." SANCTUARY AT WPI physics. He typically spends the morning reading books like Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe, Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, or Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe. The rest of the day is spent practicing. He continues to perform with two blues groups, in addition the occasional gig with the reunited J. Geils Band. He also teaches harmonica to a few lucky students and, when he has time, catches science lectures on YouTube. Thoughtful and intensely self-reƃective, Salwitz still has a serious streak. He is deeply curious about everything, which, he admits, proved to be a fatal drawback in his WPI days. "My propensity was to hang out in the library and just look at one book after another," he says. "I would go down the aisles in the library and just look at the spines of the books and see what would intrigue me and pull it out and open it up to the middle and start A lot of time has passed, but considering they are legendary rock stars, both Klein and Salwitz are surprisingly appreciative of their time at WPI. Just as the J. Geils Band music progressed from blues covers to rock to pop, life is a progression, Ƃlled with transitions, modulations, and chord changes. Though their preoccupations have changed since those distant engineering days, the basic lessons remain. 'WPI was about learning how to think," says Salwitz. "That's the point of a technical education—learning what steps you need to take to Ƃgure out a problem." Klein looks fondly upon his college days for a different reason: Without WPI, says Klein, "I would have never met Jay and Dick. I got introduced to the wider world. I learned what I wanted to do. It was a good school. There were some very bright people there. Especially the ones I bribed to do the Fortran computer stuff that I couldn't Ƃgure out!" J Winter 2013 29