Windshield or Bug?

art by Crystal

Sometimes you're the windshield...

I was playing a gig with Elena, at a local venue we're well established in. We love playing there - the acoustics are great, management is nice, and we have a lot of friends and fans that come out when we play there. But this particular gig was near Christmas and we weren't seeing our usual crowd. The place was packed with company parties and lots of college age people. Both of those kinds of groups are not usually there for the music, and indeed there was a din of noisy chatter but very little attention being paid to us. Eventually the crowd started thinning out and we figured the last set would be slow.

A group of young people emerged from the back of the bar and grabbed a table right in front of us. Then, a miracle occurred. They did not ignore us, did not talk loudly to each other or obsessively tap on their phones. They did not get up every five minutes to make a call or go out and smoke. They did not take pictures of each other making gangsta faces. No, these college kids actually listened to us. Even more amazing, they knew every song we played and were ecstatic about our mostly classic rock songlist. They sang. They cheered for every darned song. They raised their lighters.  And - bonus - they tipped. And when it was over, they demanded an encore.

Wow, what can I say. My faith in the younger generation was renewed!

art by Crystal

Sometimes you're the bug...

Whenever I have a great gig and feel a little excessive self-esteem creeping in, I know it must be about time for an ego smackdown in the form of a gig I regularly do at another Baltimore area venue. I can be fairly sure of what will happen when I do this gig, and the very next night after the previously described miracle, I was not disappointed. I was presented with a young college and professional crowd, all quite dedicated to ignoring me, talking loudly, texting on their phones, taking pictures of each other and constantly hopping up to go out and talk on the phone and smoke.

But then, someone did notice I was there, and came up to make a request. "Hmm," I thought, "I wonder what it will be?" but I could already feel it coming, and yes, there it was: "can you play Sweet Caroline?"

It's not that they wanted to enjoy my superb rendition of the song. They just wanted to join in on the chorus and go "dut, dut, dah!" and "so good, so good," at the top of their lungs, carrying out a bar ritual that they have surely participated in dozens if not hundreds of times already. I know I have. And even then, they were only good for two choruses. By the third chorus, the moment was gone and before the song is over they had already resumed their talking/drinking/picture-taking/texting/smoking routine. There was no applause. There was no tip. There were no more requests. In less than three minutes I have faded from their awareness, for the rest of the night.

The whole episode is like a pre-ordained moment of musical involvement, imprinted in the minds of young bar-goers after the song was revived in a scene from a movie in which - surprise - a bunch of drunk young people at a bar are singing the song. My audience seems programmed to re-live the scene and then go back to what they were doing.



I have written about this sort of thing before; it is part of the game if you want to be a working musician. Sometimes you love what you do; sometimes you are just earning the money. It's nice if you are enjoying yourself and getting paid, but it doesn't always happen. Would I rather be driving a truck, or working at a bank? Not in a million years. I feel lucky that I do love my work more often than I don't, and blessed that I get to play guitar and sing for a living. So I take the not-so-much fun ones as learning experiences, and try not to take it too seriously. It's counter-productive to have an over-inflated sense of self-importance on a gig, especially the less than ideal ones. You have to be able to laugh at the situation, and at yourself.  Besides, if only three people are there to see me, I have learned that it's always a good idea to play my best for those three people.

And I try to keep smiling.




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The Road to First Light

UPDATED, Feb. 2017:
Twenty years ago I created and released my first CD project, First Light. Following that, I formed a new three piece group which eventually created a followup CD, One Mind. Doing those albums was possibly the most challenging yet satisfying work I have ever done. I think after all these years, it's time for a retrospective. How did those CDs come about? Who were the players? What were my inspirations and influences? All this and more...

It all started in 1985 with a Tascam Porta-Two 4-track cassette recorder. Remember cassettes? Remember anything not digital? Hey, it was the 80's. We still had to do it the old fashioned way. It was good enough for the Beatles (we'd tell ourselves).

Once I had acquired the Tascam, plus a drum machine (a Yamaha RX-15, the best I could afford), and a cheap electric bass, I was in business. I was excited about making demos and creating my own music.

Just recently, I dug out and unpacked boxes and boxes of those old cassettes from the late 80's-early 90's and started listening. I can hear now that I was having a lot of fun, but lacked direction. On the one hand, I was writing instrumental rock pieces in the style of the guitar gods I worshiped, like Steve Morse, Jeff Beck, Joe Satriani, Allan Holdsworth, and many others. The songs were not complete but I figured I would finish them at some point. Several songs that ended up on First Light were started during this time and still exist in demo form. Here's an early version of The Shadow:



On the other hand there were numerous tracks that were clearly intended to have vocals, but almost none of them did. Evidently I wanted very much to write sophisticated pop music. Listening back today, some of those tracks sound like I was trying to do Mr. Mister as if interpreted by Steve Morse. For example:



But the songs never got lyrics, and the instrumentals never got completed. I like to say that life got in the way, but I was simply experiencing a big fat creative block, and didn't know why. It took a lot of soul searching and self-analysis to finally shake loose from layers of self-doubt and self-criticism, insecurity and lots of other mental/emotional baggage. Almost ten years passed before I finally realized what should have been blindingly obvious - that what I really wanted to do was make an all-instrumental album. I simply woke up to the reality that I could do it and I should do it right away. OK!

At that point in the mid-1990's, I was lucky enough to be in a group, XYZ, that was providing me a chance to play my favorite instrumental rock and jazz-fusion covers. We had a regular Thursday night gig at the Ritz in Baltimore for a long time, and we were pretty tight. Angelo Cammarata on bass and Carl Hupp on drums were (and still are) first rate musicians, and we were having a ball. We had started writing, and I anticipated this group would become the vehicle to fulfill my ambition to do a CD. But it was not to be. Angelo and Carl got sidetracked by other personal and professional commitments, and things fell apart. The signs were all pointing to the fact that if I wanted to do a CD, I would simply have to take the leadership role and do it as a solo project. Once I saw that was how it must be, I pushed forward and things started to fall into place.

Enter John Suchy and Such Sound studio. Such and I had already been playing together in Hectic Red. That band was (and still is) very fun and musically satisfying, but I wanted to go in a different direction. Nevertheless, Such was definitely the guy to record my stuff. He had already been in business with his studio for several years and was doing great work recording, mixing and producing for many local artists. We got along really well, and he was incredibly generous about letting me into the studio whenever I had time.

I realized that as a leader, I could ask whoever I wanted to play on the songs. So Carl and Angelo from XYZ could play on some songs; the Hectic Red guys could play on some, and from there I let the door open to meet and work with some other incredible players. It turned into an all-star project, and on top of that, Such was willing and patient as I indulged myself with sometimes massive amounts of overdubbing, as I attempted to recreate the multiple layers and textures I had come up with through endless tinkering in my home studio. We put in many months of intensive work.

And in 1997, ten years after originally coming up with at least half the songs, I finally released First Light.

Continue to the next post: "First Light - Track by Track," which talks about the songwriting, the musicians, the guitars - and everything else that went into making an album at the dawn of the digital age.  

Can You Dig It?

"You are so great, I absolutely love what you do. I've been really paying close attention to your performance, and I really have a great appreciation for your talents....."

What musician wouldn't  enjoy hearing such a compliment? It's so good for the ego, and always nice to find out that someone is paying attention when often it seems like nobody is even listening. And yet...

Hectic Red at 25

Can it really be? Has it really been that long? Well, yes: from 1987 to now is indeed 25 years. And thus it is true - Hectic Red, one of the finest classic rock bands ever to hit the stages of Maryland's music scene, has been together 25 years, with no personnel changes, just the same four guys the whole time - Dan Grim, Rich Filbert, John Suchy and me. I won't bother to attempt a comprehensive chronicle of how it all began, who we are, what we've accomplished - you can get all that on our website, www.hecticred.com. For now, after having delivered one of the best shows of our career at the Recher Theatre on Oct. 13, I am content to simply offer personal thoughts and reflections. Click "read more" and away we go.

Playing For The Kids...Again!

I was delighted to be asked, for the third year in a row, to play a series of classical shows for kids at various branches of the Enoch Pratt Library system in Baltimore. There is an over-arching fairy tale theme for all the events, and the kids, mostly ages 3 to 6, are encouraged to wear costumes. The library staff plans various activities, story time and snacks. Sometimes the music is the center of attention, other times it's just in the background, but I always feel good about being there.

Ichigo Ichie

I originally wrote this in June 2008 , but it hasn't been available on the internet for some time now so I thought I'd re-post. It's a look back at one fairly intense weekend of gigs, and some thoughts and reflections about the relationship between performer and audience. It also connects with my appreciation of the book "Zen Guitar" and its author Phil Sudo. I have written about that in another blog post, click here to read it. And now, into the archives...