When my older sister was in 5th grade she started playing clarinet. I was in 2nd grade and thought it was pretty cool. I told her that when I was old enough I was going to play clarinet too. She told me that wasn’t a good idea. Boys don’t play clarinet, girls do. She suggested I play the saxophone instead. During the summer before I started 5th grade I started playing alto saxophone.
So my entire musical existence stems from a little elementary school sexism.
While I was in grade 5 I also heard Rush for the first time… and a lifelong obsession was born.
During my stay in Junior High I was becoming more and more fascinated with the guitar. I was still playing saxophone and loving every second of it, but guitars were just so… awesome. At some point during that time I heard Cream for the first time. Eric Clapton changed me. I went from thinking that playing guitar would be fun to absolutely needing to play guitar. On my 15th birthday my Uncle Johnny gave me a guitar. My whole life changed that day. I took lessons for a while. My lessons mostly consisted of my teacher telling me stories about when he was my age and got to see all of my favorite bands in their heyday. The Who, Yes, Blind Faith, the original Jeff Beck Group. He saw them all and really dug the fact that I was crazy about those bands as well.
Throughout High School I played in a couple of bands. The best was Tempest Fero. A fun band with a god awful name. After graduation I was a music major at UMass Lowell, although it was still called University of Lowell when I started. I was a sax player in school. I think I was a better sax player than guitar player at that time, but I definitely loved guitar more. I wanted to study audio recording and become a producer/engineer and be the next Eddie Kramer, or Terry Brown, or heaven forbid George Martin. I dropped out in my third year. I then went to Northeast Broadcasting school to study audio recording. I graduated with a certificate and got a tiny bit of work here and there before growing up and getting a real job.
I continued to play in various short lived bands along with my good friend Mike the Bass Player. We wrote our own songs and had fun but none of the bands lasted very long until 1997 when we met Maria the Drummer and formed Prime Meridian. That band stayed together for three years and never really worked anywhere but we had a ton of original songs and it was outstanding fun. In 2003 I gave up on my original-music-only pledge and joined my old friend Jeff the Drummer in Break Even. We were a cover band mostly, but we did some original music. We made a CD which stands as my only officially released, bar code and all, recording. We broke up in 2005 and since then I have for the most part been a basement songwriter/demo recorder only. But wait, there’s one more! In 2015 I reunited with Mike the Bassplayer and joined Lizardfish. We’ve amassed quite a few decent cover songs and have been gigging a few times a year. Come and see us!
Before I post anything I want to say that many of these playlists come from my bandcamp.com site. They are all for sale. Bandcamp gives you the option of selling your music or just streaming it. If you just stream there are bandwidth constraints. If you sell, you have unlimited streaming. Because of this, I put my music up for sale. Please, please, please, please, please, whatever you do… DO NOT BUY ANY OF THIS MUSIC. It is not worth the money, I promise. Listen to your hearts content, but don’t buy anything. If you really want to download something, you can get it from my alonetone.com site (there is a link on the Links page). I don’t want your money, I just want to stream my horrible music online. Okay? Got it? Okay.
Inside the Red Head's Head 