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SPEAKER: What was it like growing up in the home of an inventor? Was he tinkering with other things besides--

REYN GUYER: No, he didn't tinker with his paper concepts very often at home. But he was always considered by his friends as a very creative person. And he would write skits for almost everything he was involved in. He would put on great extravaganzas for the Christmas show at church. And people would rely on him to put the scripts together for things.

He had ideas for television shows, game shows. And in whatever fashion that he could put it together, he would get some friends, and then he'd go to a studio and film them. So we were always doing screwy things like that.

SPEAKER: What other things did you do as a child? Did you like to play sports? Were you somewhat reclusive?

REYN GUYER: A combination--

SPEAKER: Did you have a lot of friends?

REYN GUYER: A combination of being reclusive, being very small for my age. I did play sports. And I did play hockey and golf and ended up playing football, even, in high school. But I was asthmatic, so I was restrained from playing those sports. And I enjoyed the written word then.

But I was also very dyslexic. I didn't know that until I got out of school. But I wondered why I was bouncing along the bottom of the school food chain, just barely getting by. I would sit in my room at night and study the history lesson. And it wasn't until later I discovered my capacity for putting sequences together was very-- it was and is very poor.

And I'm still the guy that leaves his hat on the bus, Gus. I've got more mittens and more gloves sitting in more restaurants and more cubbyholes. I don't know where they are just simply because my sense of sequence isn't very good. I always have to make sure that, let's see now. I started with this. I came in here with this. What have I left? And usually, I've left something even after I've checked to see if I've left something.

SPEAKER: Well, it's interesting how a lot of creative people have problems with dyslexia.

REYN GUYER: I think they're-- I think it's almost a rule and not the exception. I think there-- I believe that there are compensatory skills that a person develops. If they are not competent in certain areas, they learn to fake it. They learn to think in different ways. Or maybe the brain just does think in different ways.

Maybe there's more right brain activity. I don't know if they've done some tests on things like that. But why the dyslexic doesn't make the synapse that other people do in terms of memory, in terms of retention, in terms of letter reversal. I still can't trust myself to recall a sequence of numbers like telephone numbers. I have to write them down, and then I have to check to see that I didn't reverse one of the numbers.

SPEAKER: You became interested in music as a child.

REYN GUYER: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER: How did that happen? The usual route? You took piano lessons?

REYN GUYER: No. Yeah, I took piano lessons, but I was so dyslexic that I couldn't-- I still can't read music. And I probably took piano lessons for 10 years and really applied myself, but I somehow couldn't recollect it. I can play by ear a little bit in the key of E flat. And I learned from a fellow by the name of Charlie Thompson, who a lot of people in town took from. And he taught me where to search for the notes that I heard.

I always had a good sense of harmony. And my family loved to sing. So my mother and my father and I, as soon as I was able to carry the tune, would sing harmonies around me, my mother the top part and my father the baritone. And both of them had decent voices. And so we had fun. We'd go on trips, and we would sing harmonies, singing songs.

SPEAKER: Did you start writing songs at a relatively young age?

REYN GUYER: Yes, guilty of that. I wrote mostly funny songs. And I know that they were-- a friend of mine and I, Scott Hogan, who lives in Minneapolis now and one of my oldest friends, he and I just played for groups, for parties, for friends. He had a guitar, and I had a baritone uke. I'd write the music. He'd learn the new songs that were hip on the radio.

And between the two of us, we'd had kind of a-- he'd learn "Wake Up Little Susie," and I'd write something about an animal song or something that was a little bit risque. And we had a lot of fun.

SPEAKER: You are the head of one of the largest music publishing businesses in the country.

REYN GUYER: Well, we are a good-sized independent publisher. That's not one of the biggest publishers. No. When you talk about the Sonys and MCAs and so forth.

SPEAKER: Well, among the independents, you're pretty significant.

REYN GUYER: Yeah, they're doing very well.

SPEAKER: Yeah. What made you got interested in that business? And this is something you pursued after the Nerf Ball and Twister had exploded onto the scene and were doing quite well.

REYN GUYER: I had always written music. And so when some success in the toy game area arrived, I had quite a backlog of songs that I still was singing to myself and to friends. And so I decided to put them down at Sound 80 in Minneapolis, Herb Pilhofer's old place. And there was a group of musicians that I worked with. And they, too, had written some songs.

And so at one point, I hired a lady to head out and try to do something with those songs. And she went to LA and Nashville and didn't do very well. And one of my kids, Ree, who was a potter at that time-- and quite a good one-- she said, you know, Dad, let me try that.

And so she went down to Nashville and started poking around. And the next thing we knew, we got a little office down there. And I said, I'll give you three months. And she convinced me that there was something going on there and that we should continue. And she kept talking me into it. She was a hell of a good salesman.

And pretty soon, we stayed with it long enough so that here we are again, hanging in there long enough to have found that it's a working, operating publishing company, and we're having a good time. We've got some artists now that we're developing. And it's quite exciting.

SPEAKER: One of the aspects of your music publishing business is getting into creating songs for children and tapes for children that can be used on long car trips. And I'm thinking specifically of Curly Lasagna. Can you tell me about that character?

REYN GUYER: Well, Curly grew out of some of the early work we were doing in Nashville. And now he has been transferred up to publishing companies here in Minnesota. I was the voice, and we needed a name.

SPEAKER: So you were Curly?

REYN GUYER: And so I am the voice of Curly and the voice of Pesto. And we've since added Pesto as his small-- Curly is from [? OX14, ?] the planet of [? OX14. ?] And he comes down to entertain us. On [? OX14, ?] things are much more developed than they are on Earth. And actually, the job of the people in [? OX14 ?] and the job of Curly, who is an agent, really, from [? OX14, ?] is to come down and keep things together here on Earth.

SPEAKER: Do you play guitar?

REYN GUYER: I played guitar so badly that I don't play it on the radio.

SPEAKER: Oh, rats. Because I was going to ask you to sing a song, play a song.

REYN GUYER: Sure.

SPEAKER: Do you want to give it a try?

REYN GUYER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: OK.

REYN GUYER: One of the things I don't do well is remember the words to my own songs. That's part of my dyslexia. I always have to have words in front of me. And in this instance, you having put a guitar in my hand--

[STRUMMING]

You having put a guitar in front of me, I'm going to try to remember the words to the simplest children's song that I've ever written and the oldest.

[PLAYING GUITAR]

(SINGING) Now, all you girls and all you boys

Pick up your games, pick up your toys

And don't forget the wagon in the street

Get the bat and find the ball

And put the buggy in the hall

And don't forget, when you come in, to wipe your feet, Oh

Gotta get your 'jamas on, 'jamas on, 'jamas on

Gotta get your 'jamas on

You gotta get to bed

Gotta get your 'jamas on, 'jamas on, 'jamas on

Gotta get your 'jamas on

You gotta get to bed.

Now say your prayers--

No, C. Not C.

Now dilly-dally, diddle-daddle

Get a move on

Hop! Skedaddle

You would think we had a million years

Hang your clothes up in the place

And scrub your teeth and brush your face

And don't forget the gum

You left behind your ears, Oh

Gotta get your 'jamas on, 'jamas on, 'jamas on

Gotta get your 'jamas on

You gotta get to bed

Gotta get your 'jamas on, 'jamas on, 'jamas on

Gotta get your 'jamas on. You gotta get to bed, Ah.

Let's see. The last verse goes like--

Now say your prayers and hop in bed

And just remember what we said

We do not want to hear another beep

And when at last, the day is ended

And the silence has descended

They sure can turn to angels when they're fast asleep, Oh

Gotta get you 'jamas on, 'jamas on, 'jamas on

Gotta get your 'jamas on

You gotta get to bed

Gotta get your 'jamas on, 'jamas on, 'jamas on

Gotta get your 'jamas on

You got to get to bed

That was the first song I ever wrote for my children.

SPEAKER: Thank you very much.

REYN GUYER: We used that on Curly Lasagna, but we use it for the younger children.

SPEAKER: Maybe I could use it now.

REYN GUYER: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER: That was great. Thank you.

REYN GUYER: Yeah. Thank you.