How I got hooked on music
(for the impatient, click here to skip to the short version)
My father brought home an old upright piano when I was in third grade. We were living in Amherst, Massachusetts at the time. I was signed up for lessons and started the same drill that most kids used to. I don’t remember any of those early piano teachers, and my recollection is that I hated practicing as much as the next kid. But I have a very vivid memory of hearing one of my parents’ friends playing “Heart and Soul”, duet-style with her husband, also like everyone used to. Now I knew how to play it, too, but she played it differently, and even though we were playing the same notes, it wasn’t the same song at all. Listening to her version was like looking through a telescope and seeing the vastness of space and time. See, she was swinging, and I wasn’t. And I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t even begin to utter what the difference was. I tried and tried and tried to play it like her, and one day, magically, it just happened. Like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. And that was it. I was up on two wheels.
A few years later, I started seventh grade at Arvida Junior High in Miami, Florida. One day, early in the year, they crowded us all into the auditorium to introduce Harry Hudson, the new orchestra teacher. He wasn’t an ordinary orchestra teacher. He was a long-haired, beard-down-to-his-chest, Harley-riding hippie just arrived from Boston. He took the stage and demonstrated his skills on bass, cello, violin and viola. He was a cellist by trade, which accounts for the fact that I can’t recall what he did on the other instruments. But I can still see and hear him playing “The Orange Blossom Special” on the cello, every now and then spinning the instrument around on its endpin for visual effect. I signed up right away. And I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t learn “The Orange Blossom Special”, but I did learn how to spin the cello on the endpin as he choreographed our first performance which included Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” and the Animals’ “House of The Rising Sun”. Non-stop double stops!
As if Harry Hudson weren’t cool enough already, one day he announced a new after-school program called the Rock Ensemble. I showed up (along with a half-dozen other kids), and I wet my seventh-grade britches when he plugged the school electric piano into an MXR Phase 90 pedal.
I played two songs for the first and only Rock Ensemble performance. Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” with the whole band, and Lionel Ritchie’s “Three Times A Lady” with my friend Steve Smith singing. I remember borrowing my dad’s cowboy boots and duding up for the performance. I probably should have spent more time practicing and less time primping, though, because Steve and I didn’t make it through “Three Times A Lady” without stopping. It was more like “Five or Six Times A Lady”.
Alas, Harry only lasted a year at Arvida. We were all crushed when he was replaced with your standard-issue, dead-stock, fresh-from-central-casting-in-a-cardigan-with-glasses orchestra teacher. Sure, I kept up with the cello, but only because we sat next to the violas and the new girl with the blond hair and fuzzy sweaters showed up with her viola on the first day of school that year.
And so, undeterred by Harry’s hasty departure, I started saving up my paper route and lawn money to buy my first real instrument, an electric piano and a silver face Fender Princeton to plug it into.
I can still smell that Fender. And I remember those trips up to Ace Music, going gaga over all the shiny toys and longing for the day when the shoebox would finally be full enough of crumpled and sweaty bills to take something home. But eventually they were mine! And what do you do with an electric piano and an amp in ninth grade? You start jamming with your friends in your parents’ garage exactly like every other kid. Except for one big difference. I wasn’t playing the guitar. It’s so easy to see now. If only I’d known then.
But someone has to play keyboards, right? Sure, they’re the fifth-wheel of rock-and-roll, but the world would be poorer without them. And so I dove in deep. It wasn’t long before I got my hands on an alphaSyntauri:
I’d say that fairly screams rock-and-roll, wouldn’t you? But in spite of myself, in spite of sticking with the cello, playing xylophone in marching band and eventually becoming drum major, my band still won the Battle of The Bands senior year.
It’s all pretty much downhill from there (has to be if this going to be a bio and not a memoir…). I went off to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, studied physics, electrical engineering and Russian and stubbornly kept playing music. After graduation and a summer busking in Europe, I went on the road with my band in a doomed attempt to flee the working world. We were armed with liquor and dogeared copies of Jack Kerouac and Ayn Rand. Six months later I wound up in Boulder, Colorado with a day job and began my real musical education in a procession through band after band after band after band. When Boulder became too small (and it quickly did), I lit out for the West Coast and and landed in Seattle.
By that time, I’d finally discovered that keyboards can be plenty cool if you’re sitting behind a Hammond B3. The guy on the right in the photo below helped me figure that out:
That’s Art Neville of the Meters. He actually stands up behind his B3, which I never do, but he also walks on water, which I can’t seem to manage. Dry feet notwithstanding, the B3 took me to some pretty interesting musical places along the way. If you’re willing to show up with one, everyone wants you in their band. So I played in a few, started and stopped a few others and helped lots of friends make records (see disc-ography).
Which brings me to the topic of making records. Somewhere along the line, I got bit by the recording bug. I’m sure it has to do with the fact that it lights up both sides of my brain, the music side and the engineering side (remember Ann Arbor?). Foolishly, I opened a recording studio called Chroma Sound. It was a financial disaster from the get-go, but I learned plenty and met lots of interesting people. And some of those people made some really cool records there (Rusty Willoughby and Llama, the Presidents of the USA, Robyn Hitchcock…). Circumstances and the global economic meltdown shuttered Chroma on Halloween, 2008. RIP.
But the tale doesn’t end there. You may have gathered that I suffer from dilletantism, and so while playing music, running a recording studio and holding down a day job, I decided that what really lit up all three halves of my brain was writing music for film. And so back in 2003, I quit my day job, enrolled in the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program and when I graduated, hung out a shingle. After begging my way into my first few projects, I miraculously found myself employed as Staff Composer at the Film Company, a fledgling film production company that was something of an offshoot of the Northwest Film Forum. The Film Company fancied that it would run in itself in the manner of the old film studios. And, indeed, we brought in directors and, as a staff (with a lot of outside help), produced a handful of very satisfying films (see film-ography). Most satisfying for me was beginning a working relationship with Guy Maddin. My first film with Guy, Brand Upon The Brain!, was invited to film festivals around the world. Unbelievably, the film almost always screened with live music and Foley, and so I conducted performances of the score in Toronto, Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York, Mexico City, San Francisco and Los Angeles (more here). You see, all of that drum major experience really came in handy.
Do I have to explain that I was now fully hooked on writing music for film? There’s nothing more thrilling and terrifying than getting a film without music, a few notes from a director and a deadline. And there’s nothing more satisfying than experiencing the finished film on the big screen, hearing your score locked in a deadly embrace with story and images to create something much bigger than the sum of its parts. It really is the stuff of dreams.
But I haven’t given up on rock-and-roll and the B3 yet. From a brand new studio on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound I continue to record and produce records, write songs and score films. And raise chickens.
I’ve always been interested in music and technology. I began playing piano at eight, took up the cello at twelve, drums and guitar a little later. I started playing in rock bands in junior high, and started exploring computer music in high school. I studied electrical engineering intending to design musical electronics. I ended up going on the road with a band and falling into a dual life of music and technology. I split my time between playing Hammond B-3 and writing software to make ends meet. My interests came together for seven years as owner of Chroma Sound, a music and film post studio in Seattle.
I began to write music for film in 2003–I was drawn to the unique intersection of music, emotion and technology that is film scoring. I hired on as staff composer for The Film Company, a Seattle film production house, and there began working with Canadian director Guy Maddin. My first film with Guy, Brand Upon The Brain!, was invited to film festivals around the world and I conducted live performances in Toronto, Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York, Mexico City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. From a studio on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound I continue to record and produce records, write songs and score films.
