Welcome to My Space! I am a musician (guitar is a specialty), songwriter, photographer, ex-scuba instructor and an ex-New Yorker with a Maui attitude.
I was born in New York City in 1963. At an early age, I was able to try my hand at many instruments from trumpet to drums to piano until finally settling on guitar at the age of 12. At that time, however, there was no money for lessons, so I taught myself how to play guitar by playing along to records, reading books and trial and error....emphasis ... I played in a few bands in my teens, one of them, a hardcore band called Voltage, landing several gigs at NYC's famous CBGB's and Max's Kansas City nightclubs. At the age of 19, I landed a job in one of the top recording studios in New York at the time, The Power Station. This job consumed all of my time so playing guitar in a band took a back seat. After working for several years at The Power Station, Soundworks Studios and Skyline Studios, I took a full time job as Nile Rodgers audio engineer which I did for almost 5 years. During my engineer and assistant engineering career, I had the pleasure of working with such great artists as Stevie Ray Vaughan, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Steve Winwood, The Stray Cats, David Lee Roth, Lloyd Cole, Peter Gabriel, Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman.
After 12 years of working 70-80 hour work weeks (sometimes over 100), I decided that I needed more out of life than just working, so I moved to Maui in March of 1995 and became a SCUBA Instructor. I came to Maui with 2 suitcases and an acoustic guitar. I had no intentions of returning to playing in a band when I got to Maui, but with my new much less demanding work schedule, I found myself playing a lot more than I had since my teens. In 2004, I started going to Life's a Beach Monday night open mic, hosted by the very talented Adam Bowen, here in Kihei. While playing there one night, I was asked to play guitar in the Maui Onstage production of Hair, which I did in August of 2004. It was my first paying gig in over 20 years. I had the bug again. Shortly after that, I hooked up with Mark Kelley (singer/guitar), Tait Gielow (bass) and Holo Werner (drums) and formed Fragile X, a cover band playing modern rock. After months of rehearsing and honing our sound, we played a few gigs around the island and then the drummer left the band due to musical differences. With Fragile X falling apart (no pun intended), Mark referred me to Ron of the Crunch Pups. We jammed one evening and Ron asked me to join the band. I was ecstatic. With the Crunch Pups, I have been gigging an average 4-5 nights a week since April of 2005. Needless to say, my playing has improved immensely in that time and playing music has been my only "job" since January of 2006. I hope to keep it that way. If you are on Maui, come see us play. You can see the Crunch Pups schedule below or at www.crunchpups.com or our MySpace Page (be sure to add us as a friend).
Oh, and don't forget to check out my music and let me know what you think. I am not set to approve comments, so even if you have something nasty to say about my tunes, they will stay up until I see it and summarily delete it. ;-)
If you are having problems hearing my tunes, try clicking on the standalone player......also, this way, the song will keep playing as you browse around to different pages. :-) Or, you can just click here to go to my website.
Aloha and a hui hou!
Johnny
August 2008
SUNDAY