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Final Warning (2006)
May 22, 2007
Days are flying past my eyes
There’s no disguising how this game will end again
Futures live and futures die,
There’s no more where, there’s no more why,
There’s only when.
I hold you now in both my hands
I can’t believe you understand the truth of what’s behind this game
Another day it’s all the same
Time to run away
Don’t believe a word I say
I’m giving you my final warning
The shadow of what you mean to me is all I see,
There’s nothing real to take away
It’s what I play when I’m alone on a winter’s day
Don’t you see just what I am
A crying shame who can’t pretend to lose a game that can’t be won
I can’t believe you haven’t run
There’s no place to hide
You’d better see what’s here inside
I’m giving you my final warning
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Biography 1958-1978
Mar 24, 2007
I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and lived there until 1987. I began lessons on the organ at around the age of eight. After about a year I took piano lessons for another three years, but owing to laziness stopped playing for a while.
When I was sixteen I became friends with a guitarist and he convinced me to cajole my parents into buying me an electric piano and amp. At the time we were both fans of Black Sabbath; kind of a strange combination, pianist playing heavy metal, but that was the first “band” I played in. In hindsight, it was not so much the heavy metal sound I liked (although I still do like it) as the straightforward, sometimes almost childish melodies used in heavy metal. This has been a feature of nearly all the songs I’ve written.
My senior year in high school I met three musicians who played jazz. They invited me to join them and as I had gotten tired of trying to fit piano into Black Sabbath I decided to make the leap. We actually became a coherent band called the Jebby J Quartet, named after the guitarist, who was inarguably the most talented member of the group. It was during this time that I became acquainted with the music of Return to Forever, Weather Report, and particularly The Mahavishnu Orchestra and King Crimson. We set our goals high, and at one point played the majority of the material on the Orchestra’s album” Birds of Fire.” We only performed live a handful of times, however, and when we did we had to learn material that was more accessible to a typical audience. This was my first experience with what would eventually drive me out of the music “business”: performing material I didn’t really care for in order to make a living. These musicians also introduced me to the wonders of the Rhodes electric piano, and I purchased one. It became my companion for the rest of my semi-professional career.
Our bassist left, and we continued for a bit as a trio, occasionally playing backup to a singer/guitarist who wrote nice, but unimpressive, folk-rock music. During this period the drummer and I formed an unsuccessful rock group with another guitarist and bassist, then returned to playing jazz with our original guitarist. At one point this guitarist and I worked on numerous jazz pieces as a duet, never even considering performing live.
Ultimately the youthful desire for fame led me to leave this duet, which I still look back upon as the best musical experience of my life, to join a rock band created by the guitarist and bassist I had worked with previously. After playing just a few gigs live, we struggled with the same issue: in order to perform we had to play music we didn’t really care for. This band folded as well.
By now my musical tastes had run quite the gamut: heavy metal, jazz, fusion, punk rock. The next guitarist I worked with, however, was a great admirer of Be Bop Deluxe. This band, which was completely the product of Bill Nelson, influenced me greatly. I saw that it was possible to produce a sort of jazz-rock fusion that was not strictly instrumental. Ironically, I discovered Be Bop Deluxe just as Nelson was changing his musical direction. The album “Drastic Plastic” was a major departure from his previous work, incorporating both hard rock and punk elements. Inspired by this music, I began writing my own. I had written a few pieces of music previously, but nothing worth developing.
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Biography 1978-1980
Mar 24, 2007
Owing to my acquaintance with an experienced, and quite talented, guitarist I was invited to join my first relatively successful band, Za Zou Pitts. Within a couple of months we were playing in clubs that were packed, our fans lined up outside the club an hour before we were even scheduled to start. This was the period when The Cars were huge, and we were able to replicate their music quite well. Unfortunately, two problems caused me to become extremely dissatisfied. First, the band refused to play either my original compositions or the music of Be Bop Deluxe (couldn’t dance to either). My songs, while using simple chord progressions and catchy melodies, contained frequent changes in time signature and were comprised of different elements: slow acoustic passages changing rapidly to hard rock, jazzy intros that had no real relation to the rest of the song. Second, and far more importantly, I figured out that the drummer, who owned our PA system, was funneling much of the band’s profits into his own pocket. When I confronted him, he gave me the choice of accepting the status quo or resigning. I resigned. I joined another band, so musically poor that their name is not worth mentioning. However, it was run by a husband/wife team that was extremely business-savvy, and I was able to make a decent living while playing absolutely atrocious arrangements of the blandest of rock music.
After several months of this, I was at a party where I saw an old high school friend performing punk rock with some friends. This guy was short, ugly, and obese, and couldn’t play the guitar worth a damn. However, something struck me about his performance. I talked to him about starting a punk rock band. I convinced the guitarist who had introduced me to Za Zou Pitts to play bass and my old jazz drummer to be play drums. The guitarist’s wife, a cute girl in a very new wave way, became our singer and we took the name The Generics.
I was right. The combination of three talented musicians playing backup for this husband/wife team, and particularly this visually repellent “lead” guitarist, shot us to immediate notoriety in a matter of weeks. More important from a personal perspective was the fact that this band would perform my original pieces. Although I was never a straightforward punk rocker, I wrote several pieces in the vein of new wave, once again drawing inspiration from Bill Nelson’s albums “Sound on Sound” and “Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam,” which I consider to be the two best albums of the early new wave era. Within months we were playing to a full house at the biggest club in Phoenix. I had just written my best song to date, “When Machines,” a mechanical-sounding piece with a keyboard solo that quite literally “screamed” at one point, and we were rehearsing it when the husband and wife announced that they were quitting the band and joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses!!!!!!! Shortly after this announcement, we were offered an entire month at the premier club where we had already performed. The guitarist said he and his wife would like to do this gig, and then disband. The bassist wanted to, but the drummer and I were so angry we steadfastly refused. In hindsight, this was a bad decision. After a month of being in the spotlight, perhaps our frontman would prefer fame to a socially destructive cult. Ah well.
After The Generics folded, I recorded “When Machines” and another song, “Vital Signs” (lyrics by the drummer from The Generics). The recordings consisted of The Generics with the guitarist who turned me on to Bill Nelson singing and playing lead. This was my first exposure to the absurdity of the recording industry. It wasn’t that we couldn’t get anyone to buy the songs, we couldn’t even find anyone who was willing to listen to them. Thoroughly discouraged, I gave up and these two songs languished on the shelf.
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Biography 1980-1985
Mar 24, 2007
The guitarist from these recordings started a new band and they invited me to join. We played progressive rock: Todd Rundgren, Rush, and of course Be Bop Deluxe. We were totally unsuccessful. Even when we started to include accessible music by bands I couldn’t stand (e.g. The Rolling Stones, Lynard Skinnard), we simply couldn’t draw a crowd despite the fact we had one of the best guitarists around. We simply didn’t have any stage presence. I spent quite a bit of time in this group. I continued to write my own music, although once again the band refused to play some of my songs, this time because they were too new wave. Nevertheless, I wrote some of my betters songs of the period: “Out of Control,” a description of how the creative process takes over a writer’s mind and body; “Love by Computers,” a world in which everything is controlled electronically; and many others.
The bassist from The Generics, having returned to the guitar, started a new band with the singer/bassist from Za Zou Pitts and a drummer he had recently met. They invited me to join, and this bassist unilaterally signed us to a gig as “The Chocolate Walrus.” We were less than enthused but it was too late. As it turned out, the name gained some notoriety. It was an up and down venture, and we never achieved the success I saw in Za Zou Pitts or The Generics. I continued to write short, catchy songs and began to explore a new avenue in lyrics: the contemptuous ex-lover. My first composition on this theme, “Break Away,” still in the new wave mood, was quite popular with audiences, and I began to feel that I was maturing as a songwriter. At the same time I began to explore more serious themes. In “Faces in the Mirror” I first described the feeling of being lost in a world that seems completely alien, a subject that continues in many of my more recent compositions. “Terrorism,” on the other hand, was my first overtly political song. Beginning as a near-parody of the terrorist mentality, the song ends with a prediction that unless US policy toward the Middle East changed dramatically the terrorists would eventually strike inside America. Its structure was loosely based on the song “Crash Street Kids” by Mott the Hoople.
Neither of these songs were performed. I showed the band “Faces in the Mirror” and they simply said it couldn’t be arranged in the format of our group. On the one hand I can understand it to a degree; it would have been a difficult arrangement. On the other hand it was the best song I had ever written; our guitarist had commented on this as well. The real complaint they had was that I wanted to sing it, and at the time I was a poor singer. Additionally, we had added a bassist so our singer/bassist could concentrate exclusively on vocals and stage presence. He didn’t like not having anything to do, and he also refused to sing it himself. I never showed the band “Terrorism”: in addition to its incendiary lyrics it was musically complex, and included a plan for a chorus to sing in Arabic while I played a long piano solo. It would have been nearly impossible to perform in The Chocolate Walrus.
More significantly, I was having severe personal problems and had become so unstable that I was no longer capable of performing. When our lead singer resigned I did as well, mainly out of frustration that the band wouldn’t perform “Faces in the Mirror,” although I had also become completely tired of performing cover songs I didn’t like. In hindsight, I can see that they were most likely relieved that I left, as I had become impossible to work with.
After this I worked with the guitarist and drummer from the Jebby J Quartet, and we put together a couple of very good songs. Unfortunately, my personal problems continued to amplify and I became unable to work in even this limited fashion. I sold all my equipment and retired from music in 1985.
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