Well, I did take piano lessons for more years than all of your ages put together. I double on sax and flute, and after getting out of college and moving to Los Angeles I got to play with people I'd heard of, which was kind of cool.. I had a major life-goal-sort-of-thing, and that was to play with Miles Davis -- a long shot, but his last keyboard player was a 17-year-old white kid, so hey. I worked in France for about a year during the '80s and came home one night, flipped on the TV, and shots of Miles playing were running under the closing credits of the nightly news. I thought "oh fuck, he died," which was the case. But that's OK! I still had my second place major-life-goal-sort-of-thing, and that was playing with Frank Zappa. Zappa always had A #1 whiz kids in his band and the auditions to get in were legendarily hard. Around '90-'92, I was a single gentleman, the ex- and I having finalized the splitup: I maintained my Day Job as a programmer (paychecks are nice) but to Meet Chicks™ and get some walkin' around money I moonlighted as a session player in Hollywood. Pro Tip: do not moonlight as a session player in Hollywood, because the people that hire you to play on their demo tapes rent the cheapest possible studio time, which means you're leaving Hollywood at 2 in the morning and spend a lot of time lying on the pavement saying "no, officer, I was working, not selling/using dope", because attempting to leave Hollywood at 2 AM in your new red convertible is probable cause for whatever they want, apparently. I got to know all the cops (never got busted for anything 'cause I never did anything wrong) so they eventually stopped messing with me, and I learned to keep the horns in the front seat to prop up my alibi -- but I digress. I got a one-half-line write up in the
LA Weekly when they sent someone to report on a band that my band was opening for and the dude called me "the most dangerous doubler in Los Angeles," which was kind of funny and I wish I still had my copy. Their digital archives don't go back that far, so oh, well.
I eventually got to know a few people with connections to Zappa, and they must have talked me up or some shit, because just after starting at Activison I got a phone call from a woman who identified herself as Mr. Zappa's secretary, and would Monday two weeks from now be OK for an audition? Holy farts. I settled into a routine of a) practicing like a mad fish all day, b) programming like madmen do all night, and c) never sleeping nor eating. It was a great relief when she called back and said Mr. Zappa was ill, and the audition would have to be postponed two more weeks. It was not a relief when she called again and it was postponed indefinitely: shortly thereafter, the news of his terminal cancer hit the magazines. He put the fork to my dreams by selfishly dying. No one ever does the slightest little thing to oblige me.
I am not the only member of the CWCki forums to have played Carnegie Hall; Compy did too. However, I've never worked on a project where any other programmer can make that claim.
I have a baffling and esoteric collection of old weird analog synths. I had to sell my 3-cabinet Moog to pay some doctors, hospitals, and other greed-heads who failed to take the big, broad flexible view and wanted money, but in the closet is an Arp 2600, a Sequential Circuits Prophet T-8 (Google that thing, it's ridiculous), a Steiner Synthacon, and some other bizarre stuff. I have an original Steiner EVI (Nyle Steiner licensed his patents to Akai, that's where the Akai EVI and EWI came from) that's a windblown two-oscillator analog trumpet synthesizer, sort of. A trumpet has three valves, and as all of you geeks know, a valve can be up or down (one or zero) so the possible combinations are two to the third power, namely eight -- not enough to make a chromatic scale. Nyle added a fourth "valve" to make up the difference, baffling all the trumpet players who had to learn a different fingering. Not being a trumpet player myself, I had no such disadvantage, and I can make the thing walk and talk. Once my band was warming up for some other band that'd just got a Big Contract and had one of their tunes on a national TV show -- they had horns, and one of the trumpet players was notorious for his skill on the EVI. We opened, and I did my best with it. I waited to see what he could do with his during their set, but he never picked it up. In the bar later, I told him I'd wanted to hear him play and asked why he didn't, and he gave me a disgusted look and told me to fuck off. There was no way he was going to pull his out after I
rolled him up and smoked him -- which I sincerely didn't mean to do and told him so. We ended up buying each other beers and got happily soused.
In my tiny computer room here are (lemme count) a flute, three saxophones, five keyboards, twenty-two channels of sound, two surround-sound systems, a pair of Genelec nearfield monitors that I stole from an outfit that stiffed me for $32,000 of programming I did for them (I found out those monitors are $3000
apiece about five years later, hee hee), two surround-sound rigs, the aforementioned old weird analogs, a couple of MIDI wind controllers, a buttload of microphones and enough cabling to strangle an entire herd of horses. Items kept elsewhere include my baby Steinway and more speakers than I care to imagine. There's some strange percussion crap scattered around too: nothing actually useful, but I have guiros and a vibraslap and some drumsticks that Benny Golson once played on when he came to the LA Jazz Workshop when I was there, plus more ancillary oddities.
I've mixed Guns N' Roses, the Ramones (they were alive at one time, believe it or not), a bunch of LA bands that you may or may not have heard of but it doesn't matter (bang tango, LA Guns, etc.), and did monitors for Stanley Jordan at the Hollywood House Of Blues one night. That dude is
scary, in the "scary amazing" sense.
One of my horns is the absolute Stadivarius of saxophones. I lucked into it, really. I saved all my pennies for two years and sold my bicycle to buy the thing when I had the chance, and paid $512 for it new. The model was already out of production and I got one of the last remaining ones ever made. Subsequent models just didn't hold up in comparison. The Selmer company came to its senses decades later and is now building
replicas of it -- $26,000 per. Ho ho. I will sell that thing the day I die.
Fourteen years after I bought it, a business trip took me to Paris for a couple of weeks. I was doing OK, money-wise, by then, and decided I was in the mood for a soprano sax. I went back to the same store I'd bought the alto in, and walked out with a lovely little thing I call Eterne. Yes, it's totally stupid to name your instruments, I concede the point. Three of my instruments have names: "Stormbringer" (the alto), "Terminus Est" (the tenor) and "Eterne." Everything else is "the flute" or "the Korg" or "that Alesis monster". (As a classically-trained rock n' roll piano person, I prefer the 88-key fully weighted action sort of synth, which is cool here at home but a stone bitch to lug up the narrow stairs to whatever stupid bar you're playing in tonight. Pro Tip: beer, in sufficient quantity, turns otherwise normal people into roadies.)
I could go on (looking at all the blather I just typed, it seems I have), but in sum: Everyone, when in their 20s, thinks they could be the baddest-assed person in the world at what they do, if the cared to take the time. Read
Snow Crash and you'll see what I mean. I met people in LA who were so much better than me it wasn't funny, but I'd have no problem being that good if I played ten hours a day like them. You play that much, you get unbeatable chops in short order. I've done it a couple times, and you hit a point where if you miss a day it takes you two days to get back to where you were. Thing was, yeah, there were these amazing players, but they drove 1968 Oldsmobiles and made a tenth of what the flight simulator job paid me. One of the best bass players in the world told me the thing to do is make your money elsewhere, so you can play. He was totally right.
and I went outside, and smoked myself a J
then I went back in, and blew that room away
What you chase is what athletes call being In The Zone. It's exactly the same for musicians. I've been there twice, and the last time was oh, geez, twenty years ago or something. When you're in it, time stops (it sounds stupid, but it's more true than people realize) and you can pick and choose exactly what to do. Onceuponatime, my band was warming up for some other band that'd just been signed (story of my life) and our closing tune was a sad ballad about what a bitch life was in central Florida (the lead singer's background) and just before it got boring, the line was "gotta get myself up, get myself awaaaaay --
I'M GOING TO LA!"
and we would break into a fast walking-bass jazz progression (a strange thing to do in a rock club) upon which the piano player (me) would pick his flute up off the music stand (where it'd sat unseen by the populace) and begin noodling. That night, it totally startled the crowd (who was there to see another band, remember) and I recall the sound of glasses breaking when they were dropped and everyone jumped to their feet and started cheering until they cried. There's nothing you can do but ride that wave until you hit the beach.
(Then you lug the Rhodes, horns, etc. back to the car and drive to your house in Redondo Beach where the (then) wife is pissed that you weren't home to watch TV with her all night -- but I digress.)
My band of that time got a standing gig at The Central in Hollyweird (long since bought by Johnny Depp and turned into the Viper Room) warming up (story of my life, etc.) for Chuck E. Weiss and the Goddamn Liars. None of you punks remember Nicolette Larsen and her song "Chuck E.'s In Love", a hit from the '80s, and Google is hard, but it was that Chuck E. A dude in his band had an EVI also, and he wouldn't take his out either. Hello, mister!
Ahhh, the bad old days. Fuck all, this is way too long. I'm a left-handed piano player with an unfortunately semi-paralyzed and numb left hand from some fuck-all neural disease that surgery sort of helped but not really, and it's been kind of depressing at times. When it hit, I had the sheet music for a Rachmaninoff piano concerto open on the music stand. I can span a 12th if I try -- that's C to the F an octave above it for you no-play mofos -- so Sergei and I could have jammed up a storm if given a chance. My hands aren't big, really, but I can open 'em up, or I could until this neural-disease thing, and anyway I kept the music open on the music stand for a year, gathering dust, until I thought "fuck it" and put everything in the closet.
Everything is now out of the closet and fiddling around trying to get all this shit to work meant hitting a lot of notes on the keyboard while wondering why I wasn't hearing anything, then hitting more notes when I figured out I was an idiot and hadn't plugged it in right (or MIDI local control was off, or whatever) and without realizing it I started having
fun, which led to still more notes being played and what the fuck, one day it penetrated my pea-sized brain that my hand was stronger than it'd been for years. The Rig is back together, and I'm playing again, and I feel like myself (which I didn't feel like for a long time, and didn't know I didn't, ifyougetmydrift) and, well, hey.
Oh, I left my latest wind controller in the wash with a bunch of blue clothes and it changed color. Kind of like having a shirt turn pink. Herein, find enclose a picture of the blue thing. (Actually a gentleman who makes "skins" for this device turned out to be a fan of a certain computer game, and I got a free skin and you didn't. Hee hee hee.)
You millenial types who think the '90s are ancient history are welcomed to Google for:
Bill Green
Supersax
Rob McConnell
Rick Helzer
Esther Wong
(Some were my teachers, some my employers, sort of.) And while you're at it, Google this name:
Jimmy Page
Has anyone here besides myself jammed with the gentleman? (Ho ho. I didn't think so. Trick question. It merely reinforces my theory that there are two kinds of people in the world: 1) me, and 2) those who wish they were. JUST KIDDING, put down those rocks.)
The rhythm section on that memorable afternoon (ok, that memorable two minutes) were an outfit that called themselves the Black Crowes who made the mistake of launching into "Kashmir" when Page walked into the room. (I begin to detect a pattern -- the Crowes were the warm-up band for Jimmy Page on that tour. Am I forever doomed to be the warm-up act for someone else? Probably.) He started to play along and it got really interesting. At one point there was a thermin than needed playing, and only one person in the room was idle unless you count "sitting on top of the bass amp" as doing something productive.. He pointed at me, and my only thoughts were "no one is ever going to believe this in a million fucking years," but wtf. See above note re: waves, beach.
Another tale I may or may not relate sometime is known as "The Night We Should Have Been Busted #2", involving Jimmy Page's guitar tech Binky, my ex-roomdog Drew, some rat in the next room who didn't like what he smelled, and the Washington, D.C. police. Unlike this extended blather, if I do tell the tale, I'll try to keep it under 300 pages.
Peace, all.
-s
