Doug Hream Blunt learnt to play music at the age of 35, by taking an evening class in the Golden Gate neighborhood of San Francisco in the late 1980s. The class was organized by a local high school music teacher and his wife, and held in a small home-built studio of their garage. In the years to come, Doug wrote and self-pressed an album called “Gentle Persuasion”. The other students of the class became Doug’s band members, while his teacher joined on vibes and his wife on bass. (Doug learnt to play guitar from the teacher, who actually didn’t know how to play himself - thus letting Doug develop his very own (wild!) style of playing). Doug then let the album sit in his garage for five years, before he started taking it around to a few shops around SF. For promotion, he would play acoustic, solo shows for patients and elderly people at a hospital where he worked as a nurse’s aid. At a few occasions, he also arranged to play on the City Visions Public Access television show, which, like his record and hospital shows, went pretty much unnoticed.Today, Doug is starting to receive a cult following. With admirers such as Ariel Pink, Dam-Funk, David Byrne and Jamie Lidell, he has had a direct influence on the art and music of Dean Blunt, who has not only taken his name, but also created work following the steps of Doug - recording music with non-musicians and sidestepping other norms for ‘how things should be done’.