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First, let me say that there's music on this site that I wrote over
30 years ago. Some of it, well maybe most of it, is 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.
You'll quickly see I've gone through numerous phases. More than I care to admit but most were, and were for the most part, honest attempts at the psychic sound nebuli somewhere in my mind 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 silly 12 tone and quartal harmony combined. Most of my early songs, for the most part, 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 just got up and left. So much for my industrial music outreach project in the hi-desert. People in JT coffeehouses want their wall paper simple, slow, low impact. Caffeine injestive friendly. So, I started playing a variety of Beatle, Jimi Hendrix, Blind Faith, Al Stewart, and a host of other's songs. I did this for about a year until I couldn't take it any more and then I used the songs to vent my frustration by rewriting the words, adding a dissonant factor to the piano accompaniment and looking for the primal groove factor in the song and emphasizing it. The response was so-so. Now a new problem emerged. I had changed the words to address my environmental concerns and my performance was kinda scarey on top of that which all seemed to rub stinky doo-doo selfrightiousness in the audience's face. So I had to add something again and the component of humor and laughing at my pathetic self seemed to be the perfect thing. 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: PSA's in the form of a humorous song. On the same lines, I also discovered that songs were also good vehicles for advertising things like books. 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. This is sorta where I'm at still. I try to balance serious songs with something humorous. Though I'm thinking about retireng the bulk of my eco-warrioresque material since Al Gore has been on his Inconnvient Truth Tour. I think the human soul can only process and tolerate so much saddness. So I'm moving on and planning to make bogus and semi bogus good news DVDs. Feel good kinds of things! |