A brief history

The first time I tried to teach myself to play guitar, I failed. I was about sixteen, and I just did not have the kind of discipline it takes to learn to play a musical instrument. But, there was a guitar in the house. My first stepfather was a wonderful man named James, and he had a big, nylon-stringed guitar. He was a kind and nurturing man; a dedicated, loving father; and a dearly loved high school teacher, and swim coach, who was tragically killed in a hit and run auto accident in November of 1980.

It was just over a week after that, as we were still deeply grieving, that television brought the news that John Lennon had been shot. John Lennon was my hero. And I'm just thinking of this for the first time right now, but I really only had six or seven great heroes in my life, and in that short period I had lost two of them to terribly tragic, unexpected, untimely deaths. And I can clearly remember sitting in the basement of our house, the same basement where I remember my father telling my brothers and I some eight years earlier that he and my mother were separating; I was sitting in this basement with my close friend Geof, and I felt moved to pledge that I would learn to play the guitar, and that I would not stop until I was able to make a living at it.

Well, it took a long time, and a lot of different, crazy things took place along the way, but before I got my sorry ass out of Los Angeles in 1997, I had gotten to the point where I was making my living solely by performing. Of course, it would be an understatement to say that it wasn't much of a living. My money went from hand to mouth for quite some time. Nevertheless, I did sustain myself only by playing music for several years, so I consider my personal vow satisfied, and I now look on this return to music as a fresh start at an opportunity to have fun, and to produce and record some good songs.

But as for the production of this current CD, "Unlike Anything"… I had moved back to the Midwest in 1997 (I am originally from suburban Chicago), and was shopping for some guitar strings in Dubuque, Iowa in 1998, when I noticed a note left by Tim Giles about a guitar player and a drummer looking for a singer. I went and met Tim and Josh Gerstner at Tim's place in Dubuque. We talked a bit, and they played a little of what they had been working on, and I played them some of what I was interested in doing. We hit it off well, and we became a band.

We called ourselves "Even," and we played a bunch of fun shows in '99 and 2000, including a gig where we shared the stage with Sevendust at Rockford, Illinois' "On The Waterfront" festival. We were sounding good enough to me that I thought we should record some songs. I found Heartland Studios, and in the fall of 1999 we spent a few days recording five songs that we then carelessly and hurriedly mixed, and which we turned into a demo CD entitled "Demonstration." I liked what we did. And compared to anything I had recorded previously, this was the best. But, I didn't stop to spend any time thinking about how to, or even whether to package it. We carried on with rehearsals and performing, and then, in spring of 2000 we went back into Heartland and recorded four more songs. These songs were also hurriedly mixed, and when we were done we felt like we had a really good sounding CD, naïve as we were, or at least as I was, let's say.

We called this, now, nine song effort "Phatter Demonstration." And it did sound pretty phat to us. Still, there was not enough time to try and take seriously what would have been necessary to try and really finish the project. Time went by, and circumstances changed such that we could not stay together as a band. And not long after we'd quit getting together, the opportunity arose for me to return to Los Angeles, and I just had to take it.

Back in L.A. in the fall of 2000, I was performing on the street again, and enjoying it. And one day up on Wilshire Blvd. a man approached me and asked what, generally, I was planning on doing. I said that I would remain open to whatever opportunities might come up, but that in particular I had always thought that apartment management would be a good job for me. Well, didn't he know a friend in a property management company in West L.A.? And if I called and said that he'd sent me, this friend could possibly get me hired at one of their buildings. So, I did this, and for the last three years I have been the resident manager at my firm's 120-unit apartment complex in Los Angeles. And it's been great.

In addition to managing my regular job, I have been able to work a little on my desperately shaky golf game, and been able to go about truly finishing the CD project started with Tim and Josh back in '99. It took some time, some effort and some money; but long story short, in 2002 I was very fortunate to meet BAL, who in early 2004 finally made these songs sound their best. Now, any more details than that will have to wait for some other time when, if there are the interest and the means, we may tell further of our sundry adventures.