paulroesslermusic

this site is not checked regularly by paul roessler. if you wish to contact him personally, try his other site: www.myspace.com/paulroessler. if you wish to appreciate his music, then fucking buy it. thanks!I was born in 1958 in New Haven, Connecticut. My dad was head of the computer center at Yale for a while. My mom worked at the Yale Drama School for a brief period. Then they decided to move to the island of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles in 1969 to pursue underwater photography. My father became very successful in that field. In between learning Dutch, a new culture and lots of scuba diving, I started taking piano lessons from a gentle old man from Barbados named Mr. Patrick, who taught my sister Kira and I music theory. By ’70 or ’71, my best friend Barny Mentar and I were writing and recording songs on my parent’s reel to reel tape recorder and playing a few gigs. After three years we moved back to America, to the Bay Area. I played in bands. I got the keys to a church with a pipe organ and wrote a five part suite called “The Black Cloud” based on a sci-fi story by Fred Hoyle. My parents got divorced and my Mom, my sister and I moved to West LA in 1974. I got in an Alice Cooper cover band, but we abandoned that and went prog. I wrote a 55 minute rock opera called “The Arc” for that band that we performed a few times. It was pretty heavily influenced by bands like Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull. That’ll happen if your chops get too advanced. I was going to Uni High school where I met Paul and George, soon to be Darby Crash and Pat Smear of the Germs. Paul sorta saved me from prog rock with a nonstop Bowie diet, although I kept playing in my band for a while. I was also playing jazz, classical, pop cover bands, jam bands. I pretty much did music from wake to sleep. In 1976, rock music seemed to be in its death throes so I decided to study classical music at Cal State Northridge, but within a few months I was down at punk shows in Hollywood seeing bands like the Germs, the Weirdos, the Deadbeats, the Avengers and all the other bands playing the Masque and a few other clubs at the time. My view of music continued to change. I hadn’t even heard the Screamers when I heard they had an opening. I was playing drums in the Controllers and Waxx, but the Screamers sounded perfect for me as they were keyboard based. It took a while to meet them, but at a party for the Sex Pistols in San Francisco I told Tommy Gear: “I’m your new keyboard player.” The Screamers were incredible, I would be in awe standing onstage looking around at what we were doing. There was a lot of theory about what it meant to be a Screamer, marketing, things I had never really thought of as I had been focused mostly on pure music. It was educational. It was a very effective use of musical minimalism….lots of impact from very spare elements. And the Screamers got pretty big quickly; we were doing big shows and weekends in NY, LA and SF that almost no other punk bands could pull off at the time The Screamers drifted out of existence and I started playing with some other bands around town like Nervous Gender, Geza X and the Mommymen, Neighbors Voices, Ugh Ahh Ooh, Primal Tribal. But then I heard that Nina Hagen had been on the Rodney on the Roq show, looking for “Paul Screamer.” When Nina came to meet me we had been having Nervous Gender practice in my living room and the whole place was wall to wall keyboard insanity. That probably impressed her. She asked me to go to New York with her to practice for a European tour. Nina Hagen was a big star in Europe, it was very different from the clubland I had been inhabiting in LA, real rockstar, but controversial: politically, sexually with a voice that could raise the hairs on your neck, an amazing magical pink-dreaded opera she-beast. We toured Europe and America, I wrote a few songs for her; we recorded the Nunsexmonkrock album. When we got ready to tour again, I got Pat Smear in the band. When he left, I decided to leave too. My wife Hellin and I had had two sons, Alex and Adam, and maybe I just wanted to be around more. So I began doing a whole bunch more local stuff. I had what I considered my main band, Twisted Roots; Hellin suggested I start my own band and to my amazement, Pat Smear said yes and we put it together and started doing big shows right away. Darby hadn’t been dead a year; we were all still grieving; and I think we were trying to play ourselves back to happiness. So we hooked up with some really young bratty punk rock kids…Maggie on vocals, Emil on drums and Kira on bass, put Public Image/Beatles influenced music behind them and didn’t listen to the howls from the critics who wanted the Germs to meet the Screamers. They eventually came around though; when we reissued this stuff in 2004, the reviews were pretty much universally rave! I was playing with 45 Grave and a sequel to the Deadbeats called Bent. Later the Deadbeats started up with me on keys. I did background music for a magic and juggling troupe called the Mums. I did sessions: Dead Kennedys, Redd Kross, Celebrity Skin, Josie Cotton. Lawndale, Saccharine Trust, Silver Chalice, Plexi. I started a band with Dez Cadena of Black Flag called DC3, a duo with Mike Watt of the minutemen called Crimony. I recorded an instrumental solo album for SST records called “Abominable,” and another one for CD Presents called “Anemone.” I did a whole bunch of stuff on Pat Smear’s first solo album “Ruthensmear.” I was lucky, I came along at a great time and all those bands did lots of gigs and put out records, unlike the Screamers!! By ’87 the LA scene was influenced a lot by Jane’s Addiction and Guns and Roses; heavier rock bands and I tried my hand at that a bit, singing for Halls of Karma and the Mourning Glorys. In 1990 I met and started playing with Mark Curry, one of the most amazing singer/songwriters I ever heard; we put out two albums for Virgin and toured quite a bit. Through the 90’s I kept getting some pretty cool gigs and tours: Prick on Nothing records was produced by Trent Reznor…I got an education in some of the new musical technologies; Leah Andreone another singer/songwriter that took me all over the world as well as to the Conan O’Brian show! I played with the Joykiller, Jack Grisham’s (from TSOL) band on Epitaph that toured with the Offspring; Duff McKagen’s (from Guns and Roses) solo project, Geza X’s Live Nude Psychics, Mike Watt’s Ballhog or Tugboat project; the great Abby Travis: some soundtrack work, I put out a dance track called “Harder” under the name Saboteur with Geza and Andy Prieboy of Wall of Voodoo…but more and more I was withdrawing into my garage to record my own stuff on a series of 8 track recorders that I kept lucking into. I had always recorded fanatically whenever a four track was around, but now recording became a complete obsession, all else a distraction. For about 10 years I was probably pretty impossible to live with as every spare minute went into writing and recording. I was far away. I recorded about 100 songs, as well as a rap album with an amazing rapper/poet named Quisantro Hart, and an album of Greg Hurley reciting his poetry to my music that he called the Fluttering Bloodclots. Nina Hagen came back into my life and we toured, did another album. There were shows in Europe where we would do four encores and the crowds would still want more. I started working at Geza X’s recording studio, Satellite Park, and with agonizing slowness learned real engineering and production, not the garage kind, for better AND worse. We did tons of projects up there; I came to believe that just about everyone who is driven to write a song has something to say and I tried to help them realize it. Some of the projects were Eric Gales, Elliott Smith, Gene Love Jezebel, Tyler Hilton, Doppelganger, Spooky Pie, Sex with Lurch, the Carter Brothers, Abby Travis, Kelda, Lisbeth, Simon Stokes and a ton of others. I did some of my own stuff, but not like when I was working at my home studio…it was a different environment. I did, however luck into a few projects that I really felt a part of: Burnt Church the Opera, which I wrote and performed with my friend Jeff Parker…another rock opera, 25 years later! And I produced Josie Cotton’s “Movie Disaster Music” another gem and an amazing learning experience. I got to tour Europe in 2005 with Mike Watt on HIS opera based on Dante’s Comedia. I released a compilation of my Garage period called “Curator,” and was overjoyed when Dionysus Records offered to release the original Twisted Roots material! In September of 2005, I got to go to Mississipi for six months to work estimating damage from Hurricane Katrina. I had never been away from music that long, and didn’t really know what awaited me when I returned, but I took up poetry, and when I came back things pretty much picked up where they left off. I’ve done sessions with the Deadbeat Sinatras and the Willowz recently and collaborated with Dub Sinister on music for the opening of a new wing at the Skirball Cultural Center. I wish I had some sort of theory or aesthetic to offer. Mainly when it comes to music I am ruled by my heart; that is called a “romantic” I guess. I love music that demands all my attention and makes me feel intense emotions, I love courage and originality although sometimes the greatest stuff is pretty simple and straightforward, firmly rooted in its antecedents. I love fortuitous accidents and often like music because I can’t comprehend how it came into being. I don’t like music on in the background, I can’t think when I’m listening. I don’t listen to everything that comes out; a lot of times I don’t get excited about something until I feel personally involved somehow. When I love something, I fall in love with it and listen to it over and over. When I play with someone, I feel the music deeply and with my hands and ears and body and mind try to bring out that feeling and deepen it.