First off, let me say that when I decided to join Myspace, I had hoped to meet a couple dozen "friends" with similar musical interests. A couple of months later, I am completely astounded at your response and humbled by all the talent "out there". You guys and gals are all GREAT! Thanks to you all for sharing your music, your thoughts and your time with me. Does this ol' heart good...
I picked up the guitar at the ripe old age of 22 in 1964 and cut my teeth on instrumentals by The Ventures and The Shadows, wearing the grooves off vinyl learning such tunes as Apache, Pipeline and Walk Don't Run. Joined a R&R band, "The Sinners", in 1965 as lead guitarist, performing Top 10 material by the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Sonny and Cher, Fontella Bass, The Troggs, Sam the Sham, Wayne Fontana, etc.
Being a fan of The Shadows, it was no surprise that I ended up buying, in 1965, a brand new "Made in London" Burns Nu-Sonic, a guitar which served me well over the years. By the 1980's this guitar was much the worse for wear and tear, abuse and neglect. Finally, a couple of years ago, I started feeling really guilty about that and decided to restore the old Burns. Click on the thumbnails to see the "before" and "after" pix:
Right around that time in the mid 60's, a friend turned me on to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk and other folk/singer/songwriter artists.
And then I discovered B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Lonnie Mack, Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Hammond Jr., and a host of other Blues artists and what with all this great music I was listening to and trying to learn, well, too many directions to go and not enough time so here I are these many years later still trying to get a handle on all that stuff.
I met the woman of my dreams, she who was to become my wife, in 1967. Shortly after that, the band I was in broke up so I had to find a "real job". I became a letter carrier for Canada Post and got married in 1971 and when a couple of sons came along, insisted that my wife be a "stay at home" mom, thus putting my "professional" music carreer on the back burner.
In 1979, I had to give up my day job when an old back injury came back to plague me. I tried launching a canoe-building business but that went south in 1982. What to do? Here I was, 40 years old with a wife and 2 sons and no source of income.
That's when I decided to get back into the music business, playing in various Classic R&R, Country Rock and Country bands in all the bars and honky tonks in the blue-collar Niagara Peninsula, an area which was a real cultural backwater back then. I got my creative rocks off by playing at family and friends' parties and campfires and doodling around on the guitar at home by myself in the wee hours of the night after everybody else had gone to bed. Kinda tough to get creative, though, after playing a lot of thankless, noisy, mind-deadening gigs in those smoky bars. Not to mention the fact that I was now in my 40's and life was quickly passing me by...
I am not a singer, although I can do a pretty good impersonation of a frog with a sore throat, and I'm not an overly talented guitarist either, and on top of that, I broke the index and middle fingers of my left hand when I fell off a porch in the dark at a cottage way up north one stormy rainy night in the early 80's. Couldn't play the guitar for a year so I played (rudimentary, root-5 stuff) bass for a Country band instead.
Meanwhile, my wife went back to work full time in 1985, taking the financial pressure off of me. My sons, Demian and Zack, both took up the piano and completed their Grade 8 with the Royal Conservatory. At the age of 15, Zack taught himself the guitar (following in my footsteps) and can now play circles around me with one hand tied behind his back. They both do me proud! And somewhere sometime in there I managed to work out some "original" stuff on my old 1962 Gibson Southerner Jumbo.
All of the cuts on my "warts and all" cd are improvisations self-recorded in my living-room at various times between 1988 and 1995. I've never had a music studio or any fancy recording equipment at my disposal (couldn't afford them).
(info and pix of my Armbrust slim-line cutaway )
So, armed with a couple of guitars, sometimes an amp, an old TEAC reel-to-reel deck, a casette deck and a single mic, when I got the urge to ego-trip, I set about trying to record some "stuff". Often a comedy, or more accurately, a tragedy, of errors. Get all set up, start playing and realize I'd forgotten to hit the pause button. Or forgot to hit the "monitor" button and all kinds of howling feedback. Or reach over to hit the record button and knock the mic over with my guitar. Or get halfway through a piece and the phone rings. Or often, get most of the way through and flub badly when my fingers trip over each other, a common occurrence.
And then the logistics of trying to lay down a rhythm track on one deck, then feed that into the other deck while trying to record the other track at the same time. Near the end of "A Quiet Place", if you listen closely, you'll hear a dog barking... Well, here I was about 7 minutes into that improv, a piece I hoped to use as the soundtrack for a canoeing video I'd done, playing my venerable old Gibson SJ25 with a RadioScrap lapel mic (I'd foolishly sold my Shure SM57) clipped to the right cuff of my shirt, pointed in the general direction of the soundhole of the guitar, trying to keep my pickin' hand at the right distance so as to keep the recorded sound fairly uniform, when old Shogun, whom I'd let out on a cold winter day, wanted in (can't blame him, it was COLD out there!) and was barking at the door. Almost blew that recording but I did my best to ignore him while keeping on playing the guitar. Could have taken his barking out with this digitizing software I'm now using, but hey, poor old Shogun died a while back and when I listen to this tune, well, it's like he's back here at the door wanting in. He was a good dog...
You can hear LONGER VERSIONS of 4 of these songs HERE .
Still and all, it's been a great ride so far and hopefully I ain't done yet. I'm still torn between playing my acoustics and my electrics and then I also have 2 pianos, an upright and a Yamaha P60 digital which both beckon me at the damndest times.
What's a po' boy to do?
You guitarheads out there can view all the axes I've had over the years by clicking HERE . Use the "next" and "previous" buttons to scroll through all the pix (40 of 'em!). Most of them I've long since sold and a few of those I wish I'd kept... Enough to open a music store. Enjoy:)
(And once upon a time, [1989] I designed and built my own canoe and years later got into kayaking. Click on the picture for a different kind of canoe trip.)
