Uncle Dave Lewis

A child prodigy born to a midwestern family of modest means, I have been a self-starter ever since childhood - wrote my first story at seven, taught myself musical notation and wrote my first piece of music at nine. At thirteen I bought an 8mm camera and began to make experimental films; sadly, all but one of the forty or so films I made through age 20 are now lost. In adolescence I took up painting and poetry and practically lived residence at the Cincinnati Public Library, where I read and listened voraciously for several years to anything that smacked of the avant-garde. I did my first public poetry readings at 17 and was editing the citywide "Seven Hills Review" for the library - the last issue I edited won a Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana literary award.After sidetrips to New Orleans and San Jose, during the latter playing in a gamelan led by Lou Harrison, I returned to Cincinnati and founded a series of experimental rock groups which I released on my own Hospital records label. Groups included 11,000 Switches, Cointelpro, Rakehell, No Name Maddox, King Kleagle, Manwich and Rasputin Rembrandt. I also turned my attention to researching the lost media history of Cincinnati, publishing historical pieces about party record king Larry Vincent and jazz pioneer Eddie Bennett. In 1985 11,000 Switches guitarist Dan Williams and I founded the experimental radio show "Art Damage," which is still on the air at WAIF-FM and going strong after 20 years.Feeling that I had gone as far as I could go with this experiment, I relocated to San Pedro in 1991 and worked as the entertainment director at Sacred Grounds Coffeehouse, and as an editor at Random Lengths News. When I married and had a daughter I realized I needed a "real" job, and I went to work as a buyer/manager for the classical departments of the Tower Records stores in L.A. and the Virgin Megastore on Sunset.I returned to Ohio in 1998, owing to the illnesses of key family members and the feeling that classical retail was going to suffer in favor of internet marketing, and wanted to somehow get in on "the other side" of my chosen profession. After three years of starving, job retraining and reseach I landed a "dream job" as an editor in the classical department of the All Music Guide in Ann Arbor. I have presented papers on the earliest Cincinnati Jazz, the earliest recordings in Ohio, and on the first stirrings of punk rock in Ohio at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections conferences of 2003 and 2004. I 2004 I traveled to the Reneker Museum in Winona Lake, Indiana on an ARSC grant to study the recordings of Gospel Music pioneer Homer Rodeheaver. I have also written liner notes for various albums ranging from Shake It's AUTO GLAMOUR SOUND reissue to "Insomnimania" by classical pianist Jenny Lin.Documenting my own work is a never ending challenge. So far I have a listing of 494 musical works which are considered "complete" and "publishable," and a second listing about another 200 pieces that are less so. My frequent moving around has disjected a lot of valuable stuff from my archive, but of what remains there are several thousand records, more than 1700 cassette tapes, more than 500 videos and someday I'll get to the miscellaneous scraps of verse, stories, paintings and other things that I've done.