I was born in a tumble-down shack at the edge of the prairie. Wasn’t everybody?
It was at age 4 when I first decided I wanted to play music. I saw my sister practicing piano and wanted lessons too. I studied a lot of classical music, but always preferred listening to pop. My older brother liked the Beatles, while my sister listened to the Carpenters and the Jackson 5; anything that was popular on the TV. When I discovered music that I liked for myself, it was bands I heard on the radio. I remember loving the bass coming from the speakers in our family car on “Whole Lotta Love”, and the Stones “Only Rock and Roll”. Growing up in Wisconsin, I was culturally comfortably separated from any “scenes” where various types of music originated, so I felt no contradictions in loving Judy Collins alongside the Sex Pistols alongside Ray Charles alongside Return To Forever.
Mott The Hoople. No sentence there, just thought I’d write it. Bob Marley, Earth Wind and Fire, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith. Oscar Peterson. Another name that stands up perfectly on its own with no need for a sentence around it. I could fill a page typing Stevie Wonder over and over again, but I’m digressing--and you understand. Suffice it to say, as did Duke Ellington, that there was only good music or not, and I was happy to find it where it was. Overjoyed, in fact.
I know I’m naming a lot of music from the seventies. Funny how things sort of fall off after that....
No, actually in the 80’s I had some great experiences coming to New York and getting to play and tour with a number of great bands all roughly connected to what was known as the Black Rock Coalition. The BRC was spiritually spearheaded by a classic funk band that I finally got to be a part of named Defunkt. We were all black then, or some glorious third color in-between, until the LA riots reminded us that we weren’t. But while I was that third color, I got to do my first European tour with Kelvyn Bell’s Kelvynator, and later Melvyn Gibb’s Eye & I, and finally Joe Bowie’s Defunkt. There was also this great singer I got to play with from Rutgers, who turned out to be Regina Belle (fancy that!). We appeared on the Arsenio Hall show, and I rode in an elevator with Isaac Hayes. These things happened.
I sat down here to write my bio, and what you get to read is a big list of influences and bands that I was in. That’s the way it goes. It’s a life story I’m happy with, and for many years was the only thing I was really concerned with. And we haven’t even gotten to the Pixies.
Somewhere along the way, I got a composition degree from Indiana University, which I barely bother to mention except for a bogglingly wonderful group of people who were all there at the same time. Not just mind-boggling, but everything-boggling. When you are boggled like that, you stay boggled. I had the privilege of learning music alongside and playing with Everett Bradley, Shawn Pelton, Jon Herington, Jim Beard, Chris Botti, Bob Hurst, Edgar Meyer, and Curtis Bahn...as soon as I begin to do this, I get worried I’m going to overemphasize one name, or forget another. Search on any of those names, if you don’t know them already. Those will get you started. IU was a cool place to be then.
What I wanted to talk about, remembering the reasons I sat down to write this, is how I got going as a songwriter-artist. You can maybe deduce the long answer from the list above, but the short, possibly surprising, answer would be two words: Bob Mould. I’ve gone through some changes since then, but the combination of simple noise along with amazingly concise and gorgeously brief melodies totally reopened my head to the wonder of the 3-minute song, and that after having lived in the land of the stretched-out solos for many years. Start with “Celebrated Summer” by Husker Du on the album “New Day Rising” if you need to know more. It was a great reminder of the thrill of discovering new music, and fore-shadowed my love for many of the nineties bands, particularly the Pixies, Pavement, Nirvana, Liz Phair--also my redirection into country with Uncle Tupelo and submersion into honky-tonk music.
By the way, Bob recently did me the honor of signing my copy of that very album i mentioned. Above his name he wrote one word--“Practice!”
Riding a wave of inspiration from these new bands, I formed two woefully under-self-promoted bands of my own, one called Play with Shawn Pelton and Reggie Washington, and another, Brickface, with Jack Daley and Julius Klepacz. Those two bands ran the gamut musically from my r&b/funk/punk background in Play, to the Nirvana-alt. country exploration of Brickface. We played at Ludlow St. Cafe, the Bitter End, Nightingale’s, Sine, Arlene’s Grocery. I was also beginning to learn, later in the nineties, to produce. Which threw me more into personal contact with many great writers. An album I made with Deanna Kirk led directly to an artist in Hamburg named Eva Keretic, who led me to the artist responsible for my being in Berlin right now, writing these words on my laptop in a hotel room. That artist is Germany’s Marius Müller-Westernhagen, and we’re preparing for his arena tour this coming October.
But I have to back-track now to my involvement with Tina Shafer’s Songwriter’s Circle, where I’ve had the privilege of performing with her and many other great artists over the past few years. Many people I’ve worked with have been a part of the shows at the Bitter End, and there I was made to feel like I had a place to bring my own songs to. I think I owe the will I had to finish my own CD “The Means” to the encouragement I received from Tina and others from that scene. And now I’m rich and famous.
The End.
Not really! Other things I wanted to mention in this bio (‘cos it’s a BIO) were the Emmy’s (3) I’ve received for writing various things for TV, and some fun vocal work you may have heard, notably doing the voice of Elvis for those Viagra commercials. There was also a featured moment during the first season of “Nurse Jackie”, when I was coached ironically into doing a Bob Mould-like version of the Mary Tyler Moore theme! Life is a great circle which we are doomed and privileged to reinvent.
Also a matter of great pride to me are albums I’ve produced for Tina, as well my friends in Long Island Andrew Fortier (formerly signed to Chrysalis) and Eric Crugnale (of Rockefeller’s fame). There was also the fabulous Jenny Bruce album ”Soul On Fire”, Everett Bradley, Renée Goldsberry and Ellen Woloshin. I’m also in the middle of wrestling down another of mine which will be called “The Honors”.
I should say something, I suppose, about my own music on “The Means” and the upcoming “The Honors”. As I said before, I’m very much in love with the impact you can make in the confines of the 3-minute pop song. There is a punch and drama that comes from simple hooks, messing with people’s sense of expectation and taking them on a little trip. A trip they hopefully want to go on again and again when the melody is stuck in their heads. Nobody did it better than the Beatles, but I’m not filling my records with 12-string Rickenbackers and sixth chords. Brit-rock is a strong influence on me, but I spent too many nights killing funk grooves not to have the bottom of my songs at least sorted out in kind of a Motown way. (OK the Beatles did that well too). And I also listened to too many George Jones jukebox songs to not let some lonesome personal poetry creep in. And I also puzzled over too many Steely Dan songs (who I got to tour with alongside Boz Scaggs, Michael McDonald and Phoebe Snow) to not throw the occasional harmonic curveball. So you tell me what kind of soup that is. I just have to make it at this point and let other people tell me what it reminds them of. I’m glad I got my chance to record, and hope the stars keep aligning to do it some more. That’s all the bio I’ve got right now. Buy my damn CD’s! He said with love and a trace of desperation.