Biography
I Am Born (Or How I Conquered the Music Industry and Became a Star)
I was born in the poorest part of West Seneca, one of the more wealthy
suburbs of Buffalo, New York. When the NYS Thruway was built, it cut a big
ugly swath
through our property values, but inertia being what it was, our family stayed
where it was. My father was a foreman at some engine manufacturing plant and
my mother was a 'homemaker'.
Anyhow, Dad died when I was 6. We all drifted, starless, mapless, mindless, and drunk, until, at 8, I met up with a guy named Paul Rinedoller, who held under his arm a cache of Beatle albums. I had never seen such an attractive, compelling, shining example of aesthetic perfection in my life (The Beatles albums, not Paul - Paul's not bad, tho...).
Paul and I immediately formed a hockey stick, paper drum set, and tiny compact tape recorder microphone band. The songs that we seemingly most often mimed (and the songs that can still get me through a really bad day) were "Thank You Girl," "Devil In Her Heart," "I'll Get You", and the like.
My first guitar was a Hait (along with a Hait amp....see, they matched) which mom bought at Brand Names, a catalog store on Union Road. My first year or so with my guitar was an exercise in tuning all the strings to the same tone with maybe a 5th or two thrown in. My early raga-like drones were a perfect, almost undetectable forgery of those early Beatles hits. Kidding.
By the time I learned to tune the thing, I had met another like-minded fellow named Dan Lewis. Dan, Paul, and I were thick as thieves for years. I am proud to say they are still friends. In fact, Dan and I recorded “Drink The Beast With Me” together, as together as two people 800 miles apart can be, I imagine.
Dan, Paul, and I recorded songs as if they were singles, series of songs as if they were albums, and treated our little cassettes as a real, meaningful body of work. What this did, in hindsight, was make us believe in ourselves and our own skills as well as our own shared history. We never got arrested for drugs, never got girls pregnant, never stole things. We were never out causing trouble, we were never really lonely, and we never really considered stopping. Not until we were approaching our 20's.
After reality encroached and we were forced to disband and get down to serious life, I never did. I've had various jobs, I've tried all sorts of things, no more or less than anything else. But music, the things I learned from that first great band I was in, never left me. I have been fortunate enough to have played in a fairly wide array of musical ensembles.
I've played bass and sang in a 40's revival group, a comedy music group that parodied TV commercials, a country band (East Of Idaho), played guitar and sang lead in a Raleigh funk band (Cabarrus Street Allstars), I've played bass for very large productions of well-known Broadway and off-Broadway musicals, I've been a Musical Director for a Buffalo dinner theater, played bass guitar for radio commercials, written copy for same, I've acted in productions in college (I was Doc Gibbs in “Our Town” at Buffalo State). I have a college degree in Vocal Performance (I like German but not really French---sort of ambivalent about Italian) and so on and so on.
But nothing I've done in music in my adult life has had as much of a personal stamp as Drink The Beast With Me. Everything is my fault. The good bits, the bits that sound really nice, are likely due to either Dan Lewis or Brent Lambert over at Kitchen Mastering in Carrboro. I can listen to it repeatedly, and unlike earlier endeavors on CD, I accept the mistakes and stuff because there's an overall tone I have finally achieved. So it's cool. Like you and me, it's imperfect. But it IS. Thanks for getting here.