component of a young man ’ s education and cultural blooding . Anecdotes from the time suggest Chet enjoyed encounters with the opposite sex , and threw himself into sailing , driving , visiting bars . He had a certain reputation as a daredevil , willing to take on any challenge with a cool and unflappable demeanour , but there was as yet no sign of intoxication or dependency . He was an average kid , a typical item in a familiar demographic . Outwardly at least , he seemed no different from a thousand similar young men from the American interior who suddenly found themselves defending a new world order . Back in the States after a two-year hitch , he went to El Camino college in Los Angeles to study harmony and counterpoint . It wasn ’ t a school with a particular reputation for music . Two of the Beach Boys went there , though Brian Wilson , another wayward genius , did not trouble to graduate . It ’ s hard to see Chet Baker thriving in an academic environment and he later admitted that few of the lessons ever stuck . “ I wasn ’ t much of a student ”, he told a British journalist in 1985 . “ I couldn ’ t see the point of much of what they were trying to teach me . I could hear it , but I couldn ’ t write it down or make sense of it as book-learning . I sometimes thought I knew more about music than the teachers . They didn ’ t like that .” Chet ’ s formal musical understanding was little more than rudimentary , which makes his instinctive melodism all the more remarkable . Despite the experiment with formal education , it seemed that something about the Army drew him back . Perhaps , like Edgar Allan Poe , he just craved a little order in his life , the certainty of three square meals a day and no requirement to make decisions for himself . He re-enlisted and joined the Sixth Army Band at the landmark Presidio in San Francisco , a building imposing enough to have been suggested by President Harry Truman as a suitable location for the new United Nations organisation that was supposed to do what the nations had failed to do in 1918 and restore a settled peace .
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