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My Musical History, in Brief

If my dad hoped I might someday take over the Sylvania, Ohio, insurance agency he built, he made a big mistake by taking me to see Jimi Hendrix when I was in 8th grade. Following Jimi’s 2nd heart-stopping feedback intro during “Foxy Lady ” (”Here I come, baby… I’m comin’ to getcha.”) I forever turned my life over to the rock n’ roll gods.

I spent my teenage years wearing out a ‘69 gold top Les Paul Deluxe, sneaking off to concerts in nearby Detroit nearly every weekend, and writing songs on a banana yellow piano squeezed into my bedroom. The day after I graduated from high school, I hitchhiked all over North America for 3 months.  Next came one semester of college; dropping out as quickly as possible to join a band in need of a guitar player.

I became part of a group that would eventually be called The Raisins.  After weeding out dozens of less hardy members via constant gigging and stubborn insistence on playing our own songs (net: poverty), we emerged as a band with a minor record deal. I wrote a regional hit song called “Fear Is Never Boring”. The Raisins went back in the box and I formed The Bears with my childhood music mates Chris Arduser, Bob Nyswonger, and friend/mentor Adrian Belew. The critics loved us: we toured incessantly, snagged a record deal, made albums, filmed videos that got played on MTV at 4 a.m. and almost became famous.

The Bears went on a decade-long hiatus and, sans Adrian, became psychodots, recording several albums, gigging and maintaining a lovely cult following. (The Bears recently emerged from hibernation and cracked the AAA charts with more albums, a DVD, and mini-touring. I’ve made two solo albums and played on hundreds of recordings by other artists as a session guitarist. The ‘dots are still rockin’, too.)

Since the purchase of my first 4 track reel-to-reel machine I’ve been under the magic spell of recording and studio craft, grateful to the musicians, engineers and producers who taught me how to make records: learning it’s one thing to write music, another to play an instrument and yet another to play a studio.

During my peripatetic existence I toured with the Cincinnati Pops under the baton of Erich Kunzel, recorded with The Ohio Players, studied African music with Nubian oud master Hamza El-Din, drank coffee with Frank Zappa in his kitchen, talked recovery with Eric Clapton, blurted “I love you” to Jeff Beck immediately upon being introduced to him, shared a candy apple with Ted Nugent, opened for Kiss (my girlfriend snubbed an advance from Gene Simmons), and once had music publishing clearly explained to me by Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd while he decorated his hotel room walls with ham slices. Robert Fripp recorded the solo for one of my songs. I’ve hobnobbed with members of Spinal Tap and Talking Heads, Counting Crows and King Crimson, Little Feat and my beloved MC5, and experienced exquisite terror when gods like Todd Rundgren and Mick Jagger came to see my bands play. I’m leaving the gloriously sordid parts out here; Mom sent me to gentleman school, and the bodies aren’t all buried, yet.

The most wonderful connection came when I met and instantly fell in love with a beautiful girl from Chicago after a gig in Florida. Susan and I are now the parents of 4 teenagers. The band stuff  pales into nothingness compared to life in the fastest lane: being a dad.

When Sam, our first baby, was on the way, I received a request to write a jingle for a local restaurant chain. My commercial music experience up to that point had been as a session guitarist and vocalist. The advertising world represented The Dark Side to me. However, I had diapers to buy and a mortgage to pay… so I swallowed my pride and lifted a melody from an old Raisin song, inserted the immortal lyrics “347 - 1111″, and to my surprise produced a very successful piece of music whoredom.

I continued to perform and record with my bands, freelancing as a session player and commercial music composer, learning the magical techniques by which music is scored for film and video. The creative thinkers behind advertising, branding, design, animation, film and video were some of the brightest people I’d ever met. Most were misfit artists, one way or another, and I had fun working with them.

I was hired as the composer for an audio house and spent the next ten years writing, arranging and producing a thousand instrumental scores, dozens of  jingles, and numerous songs for short films and theatrical presentations, creating music for network television, tire shops, non-profits, chili parlors, sea lion shows, software developers, candy companies, hospitals, major league sports teams, plumbers - you name it. I never stopped album production and gigging: it kept me in tune with the world I came from.

In a leap of faith, my decision blessed by my family, friends, and the world’s greatest psychotherapist, I quit working for the Man, fulfilled a non-compete commitment from hell the following year, and in 2008 started my own company.