My Story
The Early Years
I grew up in the Boston area during the 1960s and 70s, the middle of 5 kids. My parents were fans of Big Band music, and often had music playing at home and in the car. People like Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Patsy Cline, and more. My dad was a self-taught piano player, who could play the melody for almost any song he knew. He was NOT a fan of Rock and Roll, largely due to Elvis more-or-less replacing Big Band as the new popular music. To my dad, it was an end to an era he loved. My mom, however, liked a good dance beat and was a closet rock and roll fan. She actually bought me my first Beatles album and portable record player when I was a teenager. When I could save a few dollars, I would go to the local record stores and look through their “cutouts” or discount albums to expand my collection. I liked my parents music, and still do, but something about rock and roll felt much different. It was stripped down, raw. Singers played their own instruments. Drums became a driving force. I’d spend many hours listening to the radio, hearing groups like the Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Searchers, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Foreigner - so many. But it was the rawness of Punk music in 1977 that made me start to think that maybe I could do this too.
College Days
While attending college at UNH in the late 1970s, I picked up my first acoustic guitar (Yamaha FG250) and practiced after classes to learn how to play it. For a nice sounding guitar, it was really difficult to play cleanly, and it took me months of sore fingers before I figured out how to play smoothly. There was no internet with instructional videos. To learn chords, I bought a used songbook of popular songs that had chord diagrams above the lyrics. Eventually, I would listen to songs on my turntable or cassette deck and work out the chords by ear, pausing and repeating until it sounded right.
There was a lot of great music happening in the late 70s, and at 19, I was strongly influenced by the latest Punk/New Wave music, especially by bands such as The Clash, Blondie, Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Buzzcocks, The Ramones, and The Cars. My roommate Kevin Guyer was also a budding guitarist, and had access to some used electric guitars/amps from his father, so we borrowed those and started our first band called the Rags with Kevin’s former roommate Paul Dionne on drums. Because I could learn guitar solos by ear, Kevin switched to bass guitar, while I was rhythm and lead guitar. What we lacked in skill, we made up with enthusiasm and energy, playing a mixture of Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Cars, and Ramones songs at a few dorm parties.
Within a year or so, both Kevin and I started to write our own songs. We added a great bassist named Steve Moore, Kevin switched back to guitar, and we played a few local clubs in the Portsmouth NH area as The Briefs (the name coming from the fact that every song was less than two and a half minutes long). After graduation, I moved to PA for work, continuing to write songs and play in my apartment. Kevin and Paul were a year behind me, so added keyboard/vocalist Alex and continued playing out as The Briefs. After they graduated, they played for another year or so before disbanding.
In the mid 1980s, I got tired of rural Pennsylvania and moved back to the Boston area for a new job. I reconnected with my Briefs drummer/friend Paul Dionne who had moved to the area and was thinking of playing the Boston music scene. Advertising around the area, we met up and instantly clicked with ex-Dangerous Bird bassist Margery Meadow and formed a 3 piece band called The Givens. For the next roughly 4 years, The Givens played New Wave original music in the underground clubs of Boston such as The Rat, Chet’s Last Call, and Green St Station, working our way up from midweek nights to Fridays and Saturdays. We also played on some local college radio stations and out-of-town clubs such as Ralphs in Worcester MA and Geno’s in Portland ME. It was a creative and fun time, but difficult to balance work and music. I have to admit that my head was not always in the music game, and I leaned on Paul and Margery to book clubs and studios and hold things together.
Musical Depth
In the late 80s, my wife and I divorced after 3 years of marriage, I lost my job to downsizing, quit The Givens, and decided to transfer to Sunnyvale, CA for work. For a few years, I stopped playing guitar regularly, focusing on work, new friends, and a new relationship. In 1993, I picked up my guitar once again and decided to record some of my original songs from the 80s, as well as some new songs I had started writing. There were lots of recording studios in the Bay Area, but I lucked out finding TRs run by a fantastic drummer/musician named Scotty Smith. With Scotty’s drumming and help, I learned a lot about recording equipment, setup, effects, and sound engineering. both my songwriting and playing improved, as did the overall sound of my music. I also learned bass guitar, keyboards, and harmonica to play on my own songs.
The Rest of the Story
I got remarried in the mid-1990s and my wife and I had boy and girl twins in 1998. Since leaving Boston, I had stopped playing original music live. Although, friends could talk me into playing Beatles to fundraise for Second Harvest Food Bank locally, or playing Neil Young sets for fans who’d gather every year for his Bridge concerts. Throughout the 2000s, I continued to write and record original music, finally releasing a 27 song CD of old/new songs in 2008. Later, I joined Scotty’s new studio, The White Rabbit, as a partner and continue to write and record original music to the present day. At this point, I have written and recorded close to 100 songs and, probably thrown out another 300+ songs that never felt quite right.
It’s hard for me to describe my music, because I have been influenced by so many bands/singers. I don’t think I sound like anyone specifically. Friends and strangers have said they can hear the early Beatles, 60s garage pop, Elvis, The Buzzcocks, Ricky Nelson, The Ventures, even Glen Campbell. I’m just happy they find something to enjoy.
FAQ
A) An unnamed, black acoustic guitar that I found in my grandfather’s attic. It had only 3 old strings, instead of 6. It’s “action”, or playability, was awful. But I was a kid with no money, so I made do, as is, for a while, fixing it up over time.