I was born in 1960 on Long Island and very early-on moved to New Jersey. I started
taking piano lessons when I was 5, which I think
was way too early (for me, not necessarily for everybody). I moved to Colorado after
second grade. As a teenager I became
interested in playing in a band, and throughout High School I was in a country-rock
band called "Sunrise" that played in and around Denver.
At college in Boulder I met Gary Morrell, and we immediately saw enough similarities in what we liked that we started playing together. He brought his friend Jon Ernst out from Stamford Connecticut, and with the addition of Van Hoisington on bass guitar and trombone, Now was born. It took awhile (and a stolen drum kit!) to find a drummer who would commit, but eventually Barbara Crawford filled those shoes.
It was hard getting gigs in Colorado, so we decided to move West. Van Hoisington decided not to go with us and quit the band a few months before we left for California. During that interrim period we recorded "Everything is Different Now".
Barb came with us to California, but after awhile decided to pursue her education, and Gary and Jon once again reached back to Stamford to bring out their old bandmate Rich Dibennidetto, and he remained Now's drummer through the second two Now albums, "Now What" and "kNOW Reason".
We weren't getting along so well towards the end. I believe it was 1992, and the first Progfest was scheduled, and we were on the list to perform. When ticket sales were lacking the show was scaled back and we got dropped from the list. The night we heard the news was the last night the band played together.
Gary went on to play with Episode; Rich I believe played with a hard rock band; I played with my D20 and waited for the day I could record with my mac. That day came along at about the same time I rejoined Gary and Rich in Ten Ton Chicken, in the unusual position of keyboard bass. Nick Peck from Episode was the keyboardist, and we certainly didn't need two keyboard players.
Eventually enough negative feedback from people accumulated about the bass being played on a keyboard that I was asked to switch to a real bass. I declined, and bowed out of the band. They reorganized and picked up some remarkable new players and have gotten a bit of a name for themselves around the Bay Area and in the "Jam Band" circles.
Through the progressive rock web site Progressive Ears I connected with John Reagan, who was forming a fledgling record company and progressive rock e-commerce site, Big Balloon Music, and he was kind enough to release my first solo effort, The Well, on his label in 1999. This CD contained many songs I had been working on after the breakup of Now, including "The Desert", a piece I had been struggling with for years.
Around that time I got heavily into Buddhism, and started meditating every day. My efforts translated musically into "The Gate", which started out being about enlightenment (the "Gateless Gate" of Buddhism) but ended up being about compassion and acceptance. Of note is the (synthesized) sound of a plane crashing into a building -- this was recorded within a few days of 9/11, and since The Gate was put on written and recorded chronologically, this is exactly where I was in its creation when 9/11 happened. That event changed where the thing headed, and I wrote "Only Us" in response to the terrorists' portrayal of the West as evil, and the West's portrayal of the terrorists and their perspectives as evil. There isn't any evil, there's "Only Us".
Precipitated by increasingly intolerable circumstances at my day job, once The Gate was "in the can" I fell into a pretty bad depression. My next album will be an exploration of this darkness, and I think it's going to be called "The Night". This is fitting because it conforms to previous album titles, refers to St. John of the Cross' "Dark Night of the Soul", and is intended to mirror Spock's Beard's first release "The Light". ("The Light" is itself a pretty dark album, by the way. I highly recommend it and all of Spock's Beard and Neal Morse's output (and Transatlantic too!)) A common criticism of my last albums has been that the synthesized percussion sticks out; my intention is record the bed tracks of "The Night" in the studio with the help of Gary, Barb and Rich (and a to-be-found bass player -- you interested??).
UPDATE, May 2007
The Night ended up recorded almost entirely by me, with some help from Gary and Rich Dibennidetto.
Big Balloon didn't want to print it, but offered to dup it on-demand like The Well. I declined.
You can find some of it up on MySpace. I would have put the
entire thing up here but I couldn't upload all of it; too much data for my little web site.
I'm mostly through doing a duo album with Earl Grinstead aka Sparky aka Norman Famous. They're all his songs, with my arrangements and keys, and we share the lead vocals. He's a great song writer. It isn't prog, though. Maybe that's a good thing.