Music, the Best Life
Among my pursuits, the most important has been music, remaining a constant in life no matter what else I was doing or where I was living. I grew up in the deep South where new musical forms were emerging mid-century. The South is the cradle where American blues, country, jazz, soul, gospel, and rock were born.
The first music I heard back in the 1950s that instantly caught me, came from my family’s domestic help, Frances Watkins and Gracie Smith who sang gospel as they mopped floors, ironed clothes, and fried chicken in our middle-class home. Yes, social division and economic inequality were sad truths back then. White folks had Black maids.
But as a little kid, I just saw Frances and Gracie as members of our family. Their sweet vocals must have unconsciously seeped into my mind because I found myself wanting to join the church choir, finally making the cut at age eight. Here I learned to sing my first gospel tune, Go Down Moses, an old Negro spiritual in the pentatonic form with call and answer vocals. It defintely lit a fire.
I became a six-stringer (guitar strummer) at age 12, and by age sixteen I was playing electric guitar in the high school stage band. This was my first experience at fronting a full band to big audiences, as we performed for student assemblies, football games, festivals, and even Mardi Gras parades on our flatbed trailer. In our live set, the horns would occasionally take a break and the rhythm section would feature me as a guitar player, taking my first stabs at improvised solos and funky wah-wah rhythms.
After high school I headed to New Orleans to begin college, and here my understanding of music really began to expand. I was not a music major but learned by ear and got lucky enough to jam with some serious players of funk, soul, blues, and roots rock that really swung. I got to know The Meters and other important New Orleans players. It now hit me that music would always be a part of my life. I kept performing through the college years in a funk-rock power trio, playing the fraternity circuit and some gulf coast night spots.
When I moved to the Middle East, I formed a couple of bands that stayed busy pretty much every weekend. We played diplomatic, corporate, and government events, and endless private parties for the wealthy, a lot of them pretty wild.
My band Fool's Goal playing a big shindig at the
President of Aramco's home. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia,1979.
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On a few occasions I got to open for big names like Tina Turner, BB King, and The Fifth Dimension. When I traveled, I was lucky enough to sit in with bands I had gotten to know in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
When I eventually landed in Arizona, my new wife and I created a couple of steady-working blues & soul bands that played the Phoenix nightclub circuit. We also did some light touring into Colorado, California, and way down in Baja California, performing at Sammy Hagar's Cabo Wabo bar in 1992, where I got to play through an amp rig that Eddie Van Halen kept down there. It wasn't loud, it was fuh-king loud.
Me and Eddie at Cabo Wabo, Mexico...different nights of course
I took a break from music as I went in a totally new life direction, teaching philosophy and related subjects for several years. I later returned to the music world in a completely new way, learning to write music for the film/TV industry (see my book Stumbling to Enlightenment). I now have a few hundred songs signed with music publishers and continue to write, though not as intensely these days. I occasionally get placements in shows and have even landed songs in a couple of films. I love the collaborative effort with other songwriters. It keeps my mind and senses alive.
Wish I had more video of my music life, but I did manage to find a few. First, a couple of videos made for album promotion on records I released back in the mid-2000's. They also feature a couple of my classic cars:
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And here is a live clip sitting in with The Herndon Brothers at Handlebar J in Scottsdale. The Herndons are first-call journeymen who are great interpreters of everybody from George Jones and Waylon Jennings to soul bands Tower of Power and Chicago. They are kind enough to let me sit in on occasion...
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Here is a link to my full catalog of music written and co-written with fellow composers from all over the planet: Bandcamp.
Here is a link to some short music jams on YouTube, that I made during the Covid years when we were all stuck inside with cabin fever. These jams feature my various vintage guitars.
I could go on and on about the many tales from a long life in music, but instead I'll just share some random pics, and refer you to my book Stumbling to Enlightenment for the deeper story.
