DITCH DIGGING AND BEYOND

Doug Semler grew up, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. His dad being of German ancestry, Doug was imprinted with the polka zeitgeist at an early age. From the 4th grade, he tried every brass instrument except the slide trombone, winding up as a high school band tuba player. This inevitably paved the way toward personality disintegration and mastery of the electric bass.

The Crystal Pistol in his home town hosted a wide variety of Country and Bluegrass artists, including Willie Nelson and Doc and Merle Watson; Doug absorbed them all. He saw the Beatles in 1966 and was drawn to the San Francisco Sound in 1967; in 1969 he was blown away by live performances of the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead.

Doug took up the bass while attending the University. Influenced by the student radical movement, he dropped out of college in his junior year to live a life of anarchy and play music, and entered the ranks of the blue collar working class, where he received "a whole other type of education." When his father said, "You don’t want to be a ditch digger all your life!", he thought, "why not?"

He joined a band that played around at VFW halls; his first paying gig was in front of a crowd of 5000 at the October Days rally at the University. Revolution and music were in the air, and his bassist instincts prevailed. He continued to play in bands through a return to college, then took to the road as a carnie, doing County and State Fairs.

He left Ohio with a guitar in 1989, going to the mountains to forget a woman and rediscover himself, and ended up in California. In Sequoia National Park he worked as a restaurant cook and played in the Big Tree Boogie Band. In 1990 he moved to Santa Cruz, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.