This is the part where I ramble on about being a poor ass musician... I guess it all started with my Dad taking me to see Pink Floyd in 1987 when I was 10 years old. Needless to say, so began a fascination with music. By 1991, I played my 1st show for MTV at the ripe old age of 14 and by age 15 found myself touring up and down the west coast with the likes of the BJM, Dora Flood and whomever could scrape up enough gas money to play at crappy venues from SF To Long Beach. It was the go go 90s and I was underage, naive and looking for a place to hide from reality. My Dad died when I was 15 - and so began many years of a sort of music rather than sorrow approach to life. Ah, but life is good. I love life completely. Ok, so then I continued playing in my little indie shoegaze band called YOUR PRECIOUS YOU with my older brother. We played as often as we could and I basically spent all of my teenage years driving from hometown of San Jose up to San francisco where I would perform in bars and clubs that I otherwise couldn't get into. By 19, this faded away and I went to UC Santa Cruz (big surprise - a hippie school) which seemed to go by way to fast. I spent those years writing and filming short 16mm films and composing soundtracks for them... At 22, I graduated from College and moved directly to San Francsico where it seemed my friends wasted no time asking me to play music with them (so much for a film career).
I came back to the SF music scene and played in a band called the Damsels who were friends from before I went to college. One night and saw an amazing band called smallstone on Bomp Records and it turned out they needed a bass player and so I gladly stepped up and joined. It was now the year 2000. It had been 3 or 4 years since I had seen Anton Newcombe and the BJM guys and it looked as if he'd managed to squander his lineup once again and so he asked me to play bass with him too. This was the same year I made the move to L.A. I did my 1st national touring that year going all over the U.S. and seeing places I'd never seen playing 3-4 hours a night in BJM with smallstone opening. After the tour, I stopped playing with BJM to focus on smallstone, but alas - smallstone split up by 2001. The next 2 years were mired in half-assed attempts to assemble my own band but didn't materialize into anything due to not having the right set of people. I did however, manage to write, produce and record my own solo album SOULFUL REDEMPTION which to this day is a secret relic to the spawning of my band SKY PARADE.
In 2003, I came back to BJM and spent much of the year touring the states and also Europe. At this time, my good friend Jason Anchondo was helping me record the demos which became the 1st official sky parade album FIRE IN THE SKY. We recorded off and on when both of us were home from being on tours (Jason plays drums in the Warlocks). By 2004, I said my goodbyes to the BJM and moved on forming SKY PARADE officially in the Summer of 2004. We continued to record and played our 1st show for LITTLE RADIO just as Dave Conway was getting it together. In 2005, we signed with SO SWEET RECORDS and released our 1st ep. Alas, aside from manufacturing CDs, the label was unable or unwilling to back us propperly and so we decided to self-release our 1st album FIRE IN THE SKY.
Around this time I was hired to play some shows on bass with Mark Morriss of the Bluetones here in the states. We hit it off becoming instant friends and he offered us a support slot for the Fall of 2005 for an upcoming Bluetones Tour in the UK. Before heading out in the Fall, I had begun work on an albums worth of new recordings at our sky parade studio (skylab studio) but later scrapped the whole thing completely when coming up with the LOVE IS FOREVER album concept. In the UK we found ourselves selling tons of CDs and T-shirts and basically going over really well with the Brits. Upon returning home, FIRE IN THE SKY began hitting radio stations across America and over to Europe. Keep in mind, we have just our own label so things happen kind of in their own way. We found songs like "Losing Control" hitting weekly Top 10s and Top 40 Charts. It was amazing really.
In January of 2006, I began work on LOVE IS FOREVER and didn't stop working on it Until January of 2007. It was a long painstaking obsessive process that involved many additional musicians and 3 drummer changes. Dan Allaire, who actually played drums the longest in the band went back to BJM and Jason was putting his time into Spindrift and the Warlocks. If I had not found Joel Patterson, this album may never have been finished! But as fate would have it, we managed to complete the album and are now seeing it receive nice reviews and hitting the airwaves too. It's a good feeling making music. Throughout all of this I've had the opportunity to play, record or otherwise watch the sunrise with the likes of the Lilys, Pete Kember (Spacemen3), Reeves Gabrels (David Bowie), Yo La Tengo, The Seeds, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Mark Gardener (Ride), Spiritualized, Supergrass, the Dandy Warhols, The Ravonettes and a myriad of others who escape me at the moment. Good times. Life is good...
