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WRITTEN IN THE 90'S:There use to be music on this site that I wrote over
38 years ago. Some of it, well maybe most of it, was laughable. That's ok.
Laughing is a good thing. Like my car, if it makes you laugh, your less
apt to blow my head off to steal it, right(?) So laugh, I can take it, I think. Laugh at my psycho-eclecticism and funny phases. They were for the most part, honest attempts at claiming the psychic sound nebuli of my mind heart and soul. When I first started composition
in college I wrote a number of homages to Jimi Hendrix using my favorite themes
and rhythms of his. As I expanded and entered the realms of 'serious art
music' I wrote pieces based on other sonic properties and tonalities, even
12 tone and quartal harmony combined. Most of my early songs were basically diatonic, sticking within a given key and
it's related major or minor.
When I moved out to the hi-desert I found, as you would expect, a pretty
conservative crowd who weren't really interested in the noiseicianship skills
I had developed from my years of living in LA. I did one coffeehouse show
with the Acoustisizer, tape loops, sythns etc. and people
got up and left. ok, so much for Industrial Music (sob sob, one of my faves). People in JT coffeehouses in the early 90's wanted their audio wall-paper simple, slow, low impact. Caffeine injestive friendly. So, I started playing a variety of
Beatle, Jimi Hendrix, Blind Faith, and a host of other's songs for about a year until I couldn't take it any more! finally i started useing the Beatle songs etc. to vent my frustration by rewriting the words, adding a dissonant
factor to the piano accompaniment and emphasizing the primal groove
factor repeated over and over phillip glassingly trance-migrationally a seance of willingly out-a-bodily. The response was so-so. Now a new problem emerged. I had
changed the words to address my environmental concerns mostly and the performance was kinda scarey-over-passionate at times, but worst of all i came off sorta
rubbing stinky doo-doo eco-selfrightiousness in the audience's face. So I added
a humor component and self effacement, and laughed whenever possible at my pathetic self. People started reacting much more favorably. I figured out the balance between serious songs like: My Planets Wasted And I Can't Find My Way
Home (Blind Faith treatment) with My Black Moles Gone (comical Sound Garden Black Hole Sun treatment).
This was kind of a break through for me: humorous PSA songs and songs advertising Great Books and rhinestone kitty collars to scare away the birds.
When I first wrote Destruction Has No Memory I hadn't intended for it to
become a commercial for a great book In The Absence Of The Sacred, but it just
seemed to work. |