#so. the first and only time i played this it was for a coffeehouse gig towards the end of my first yr in uni

[sirgiant-blog-blog]

Coffeehouse Mouse

I was the Coffeehouse Mouse.

For many years when I was younger I played acoustic guitar and traveled up and down the east coast playing and singing in bars, lounges, and coffeehouses.

To be clear, a bar and a lounge are not much different. But there IS a difference. A bar is a neighborhood thing. Same clientele nearly every day.

A lounge, however (at least in my experience), is usually part of something else like a hotel or a restaurant or an airport.

Then there was the Rathskeller.

I think in Germany a Rathskeller is similar to what we would call a tavern. You know, it's a bar but, for whatever reason, it is also a meeting place and probably even a restaurant.

Kind of like social media before there WAS social media.

Robin tells me there are a LOT of taverns in Milwaukee. One day I'd like to spend some time in that town.

Colleges, at least in the northeast, had a LOT of Rathskellers. Well, they they did in those days when I was looking to make a buck with my guitar. Maybe they still do. I don't know.

And college Rathskellers were ALWAYS looking for a guy with a guitar who could sing for one night.

Did you catch those last two words? ONE NIGHT!

No residency gigs for the working musician at a college.

So, for a few years, I did a LOT of driving. I would play a college gig in Bridgeport, Connecticut one day and Baltimore, Maryland, the next. I was horrible at planning my gigs. If I was hired, I would go. It was as simple as that.

Coffeehouses were beginning to become popular in colleges at that time. This thing called "Starbucks" was getting a lot of attention on the West Coast and it was definitely influencing the schools I was being hired at.

So, Rathskellers were suddenly re-branding themselves as Coffeehouses.

Ah. Like Cinderella, I finally had a shoe that fit!

Yes. See, as a singer and a songwriter, I didn't REALLY fit in with the bar scene (I wasn't grungy enough), I didn't really fit in with the lounge scene (I wasn't Sammy Davis, Jr. or Frank Sinatra enough), and Rathskellers seemed to be searching for an identity (some were really just beer joints, others were like small cafeterias).

In fact, I remember speaking to the activities director at the University of Bridgeport and when I referred to the "Rathskeller" she informed me that they had changed their name to the Campus Coffeehouse.

Since I had a lot of time to think about stuff while driving hundreds of miles from gig to gig, I toyed with the idea of labeling myself as the "coffeehouse mouse." I'm sure the thought stemmed from the fact that the word "Rathskeller" always sounded like "Rat Cellar" to me.

The coffeehouse scene fit me well. The music that was in demand the most was soft acoustic music. Exactly what I had been playing. Think Cat Stevens, Donovan, Paul Simon, Jim Croce, Harry Chapin.

My song list had titles like, "Moonshadow," by Cat Stevens, "The Boxer," by Paul Simon, "Blossom," by James Taylor. You get the picture.

I had my song list printed out nicely. I had the songs memorized but I needed the song list. The song list told me the title of the song, the artist/writer, and the first chord.

I had my song list with me EVERYWHERE. I was always changing it and always adding to it.

But I was never adding my own songs to it.

Maybe I was shy. Maybe I was insecure. Maybe I felt the other songwriters would go over with the college students better than introducing them to something new written by me.

My song list was always on my clipboard.

Then, one day, in Philadelphia, I stopped at a Denny's before heading to my next college gig (I think it was Villanova University), and I must have left my clipboard on the roof of my car (I only know that because I found the clipboard in the Denny's parking lot after I returned from my gig).

When I got to the school, and it was time for me to play, I panicked! I can still feel the sweat as I type this. I had no play list! And, do you think I could remember ALL the songs on that list? The answer is "no." My show was an hour long. Oh man, I was so stressed.

I remember Carly Simon talking about stage fright and, while I always had a little stage fright before every gig, THAT DAY I was paralyzed with stage fright.

The school was beautiful, by the way. I remember the stage in their coffeehouse had red and blue foot lights, the stage looked like a mini Broadway set, and they even had a curtain! Wow.

And here I was with NO PLAY LIST.

One step at a time.

That's what I told myself.

Maybe if I play one song I'll remember the next, and so on.

I was waiting in the wings (Yes, they even had a BACK STAGE AREA!)

The Activities Director spoke to me for a moment, thanked me for coming, and then she went onto the stage and took the microphone.

After a few announcements, she introduced me.

Oh man.

I'm reliving it right now as I write this. I was SO NERVOUS.

There was a wooden chair waiting for me with two microphones. One for the guitar and one for my voice.

I walked to the microphones (funny, I must have had new sneakers because I remember thinking "my shoes are SO WHITE"), and I sat with my guitar in that wooden chair.

Every eye was on me.

Oh. My. Gosh.

At first I didn't play anything. I just talked. I thought, "I'll just tell them. I'll tell them I lost my play list."

I didn't talk much in my shows before that night. But talking seemed to work for me.

I got a laugh when I asked, "Do my shoes look REALLY REALLY white to you?"

I got a laugh when I said, "I think I left my song list under the maple syrup at Denny's."

Then, one of the students yelled, "Play something you wrote."

Really?

You sure?

I didn't realize they had been playing my record on the campus radio station. But they had.

And these students knew that one song.

Good thing I didn't start with that song, though. Because, as every recording artist knows, you end with your hit.

Not that I actually had a hit. But, at that time, in that place, I had an established audience. And I didn't even realize it!

So I started playing my own stuff. Since I wrote the songs I knew the stories behind them. So I talked a lot between songs.

It was working out so well.

I didn't just talk to the audience. I chatted with them. I did most of the talking but there were times when someone would ask a question or make a comment.

Unlike the hecklers that would often disrupt a set in a bar, these students were attentive, kind, and interested in everything I was doing.

At one time I said, "I'm liking this new coffeehouse thing the schools are doing. How do you like it?"

Ah. I stumbled on another trick of the trade. Ask a question.

Suddenly there was no separation between the stage and the audience. There was no "me" and "them." We were all in the same room, all part of the same experience, all enjoying each other.

That gig changed my shows completely. I began talking more, I began playing more of my own songs, I even made sure to send the schools tapes so they could play them on their campus radio stations as a way to promote my shows.

This was an important time in my life. It was a time when I discovered three things:

1. Be yourself

2. Allow others to get to know you.

3. Never wear white sneakers on a stage.

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Making It In New York: Jeff Buckley

by Jim Testa

May 2, 1993

New Jersey Beat

[This interview was originally published in New Jersey Beat Magazine, 1993.]

A famous father, drop dead good looks, talent up the wazoo, a major label deal after just two years of playing gigs… Some guys have all the luck.

Jeff Buckley certainly seems to have been touched by providence, which may be why he titled his debut album ��Grace”. But life hasn’t been all lollipops and daffodils. Buckley barely knew his father, folksinger Tim Buckley, who died when Jeff was still in grammar school. Jeff Buckley came to New York with an acoustic guitar and a pile of songs he’d written in Los Angeles, and started playing every coffeehouse, open mike, cocktail lounge, and folk club he could find. Barely two years later, he was signed to Columbia Records and releasing his first record, the CD5 Live at Sin-é. Who says you can’t make it in New York? The question is, how? So we asked.

Q: Are you from New York originally? Or were you one of those guys who just showed up at the Port Authority one day carrying your suitcase and guitar?

Jeff Buckley: Well, in my case, it was more like JFK airport. But I was living in California, in Los Angeles, before I came to New York. That was 1990. But I didn’t really start gigging in New York until ’92, maybe late ’91.

Q: And that’s when you started playing at Sin-é?

Jeff: [corrects my pronunciation] Shin-AY. Right. And other places too. First Street Cafe, Cornelia Street Cafe, Bang On, Tramps, the Knitting Factory. Anything I could find, basically. Over and over and over and over again. So I don’t know what I can tell you. The only way to really make it — anywhere — is to put every bit of your being into the thing that only you can provide. The only angle is the art that you choose, that only you can provide. And to do that, you have to be quiet for a long time and find out what you bring forth. You have to know what’s in yourself — all your eccentricities, all your banalities, the full flavor of your woe and your joy. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What makes it different from everybody else’s. It’s totally subjective. You’re just given the task of bringing it up.

It’s like going up to some girl with a guitar and saying, “you are the only one, right now, who can make your music.” Right now. You don’t even know how to play the guitar. You’ll find it, you’ll find that chord, if you express your hear, now. You’ll find that small inner platinum mine, that reservoir. It’s something that’s there, you just have to dig deep and find it. But it’s something you have to do yourself. It’s not something that can be pulled out of you by any teacher, not any that I’ve ever met. None. Close friends can tell you when you’re finding. Other people who are out there doing it, they’re good to talk to. But you have to find it yourself.

Q: The thing you hear all the time from bands is “there’s no place to play in New York.” When, of course, there are lots of places to play in New York, there just aren’t a lot of places where you can play to a decent-sized audience and make any money on a regular basis.

Jeff: There are a thousand places to play in New York.

Q: Your experience would suggest that it doesn’t really matter where you play, it’s the playing itself that counts.

Jeff: That’s it exactly. You can make a very sacred place out of The Speakeasy (a decrepit old Lower East Side bar.) If you put enough heart into it. Or you an turn it into a complete circus. You can do anything you want, anything. I’ve seen it all. You can blame the sound system sometimes. If you’re a band, and the sound system sucks, there’s nothing you can do, you’re fucked. But if the sound system sucks, then you just mix yourselves on the stage, you turn up or turn down until you make it sound okay, and you use what little you have. There are always angles around technology, around managers, around people. But when you put the music forth, when you put the art forth, the performance piece, whatever, the heart of what you do speaks for itself. And that’s what you go with. You lead with that. Each time. Every time. Every second. Sure, you need to be aware of technical things, and take care of them whenever possible, but your salvation lies in what you and your friends together have. What, you’re going to blame the Pyramid for not getting a record deal? Your band broke up because the soundman at CBGB was in a bad mood last week?

The thing is, I never went and pursued a record deal. Ever. It’s too funny to even talk about. It’s like playing craps in Vegas. You know the odds belong to the house. You’ll always lose. If that’s why you’re up there doing it, forget it. You’re already fucked.

Q: Unfortunately, I’ve started seeing that more and more. You find these bands and you talk to them, and the only reason they want to be in a band is because they want to get signed. It’s like they don’t even know why they’re making music.

Jeff: Really? That’s sad. That happens all the time in Los Angeles, so I’m sort of used to that being the standard by which bands are measured – by how ambitious they are about getting a deal.

Q: I think Los Angeles was always more up-front about it being a place where bands would go and play the Strip and get signed. New York never used to have that mentality.

Jeff: That’s true. Although on the upside, even thought they’re a lot farther down in the underground, there are bands in Los Angeles who have nothing left in their lives except their music. But in New York, there’s more of an expectation of hunger – ravenous, and angry – for originality.

Sure, there are always people who are only there because they want to get signed. And in a way, that’s not a bad way to go, because the laws that govern the music business sort of point you in that direction anyway. It’s like everything is set up for the people who want to be most famous. And if that’s the place for you, baby, then go for it. But otherwise, it’s a complete 24 hour a day dilemma. And let me just say that this is a very hard thing to judge from the outside. It’s really difficult to just hang a label on someone and say that they’re only in it to be rich and famous. Because it is a completely confusing universe.

Q: Okay, but let’s take a band that’s in it for all the right reasons. They’re competing with hundreds of other local, unsigned bands who live in that area. And they’re also competing with hundreds of bands from all over the world who come through New York on tour. So it seems almost impossible for any one band to get itself noticed in that total melee. And having watched your career, it seems to me like your approach to that wasn’t any gimmicks, and you just kind of separated yourself from the pack by being good at what you do.

Jeff: Yes, I guess you could say that. And that’s a tremendous compliment. But how do you think those (industry) people got there? It was because of my association with one industry person. Somewhere down the line, even if it’s something you don’t actively pursue, it has to be somebody who knows you. One person, two people. The people who will always be my joy were the people who were there at the beginning. And we’ve had a dialogue since dirt was invented. And that’s my audience. And one of those people happened to be music business people, and once that circuit gets started, it’s like a huge chain reaction, a domino effect, all those clichés. They come either to dispel the rumor that what their friend is seeing is good, or to totally get on it, so they can be a part of it. That’s not real, though. Those aren’t real people. Because that industry thing, that buzz, that can always be taken away. But what real people feel, that’s there. Don’t get me wrong, there are record company people who are real people, who really love music. But the aspect of those people that represents their role in the music business, that can come or go. What’s real is the people who come to see you just because they’re into what you’re doing. And who get into music to experience it, not to judge it. They will always be there, as long as you keep your heart open and strong.

Q: To be honest, I’ve been around the music business for about ten years, and I really do think that the kind of people who are working in the music business now are much more into music, and less into the business end of it, than people in those jobs would have been, say, ten years ago.

Jeff: That’s true. It is a very, very different environment today. I’ve been watching it for a long time, and it is a different place. The people I deal with at Sony are just like me. They’re there because they like the music and they just happen to have a job there. It’s communicating, and agreeing or disagreeing with people, that’s all it comes down to. In the music business, ideas are like cigarettes in prison. People sell them, people steal them, they’re gold. Even if you don’t smoke.

Q: What sort of experiences did you have with the local press before your album came out? One common complaint is that none of the local papers in New York have any interest in writing about the local scene.

Jeff: Good. I think that’s good. Are you kidding? The last thing I want in my neighborhood are a bunch of people who are down there because they think they should be down there. People should come of their own volition, not because some guy in the paper says it’s cool to go.

Q: But doesn’t that just make it that much harder for bands to get noticed, to separate themselves from the throng?

Jeff: I don’t know. New York Newsday said I was stealing from the black man, and I was failing at it whereas Michael Bolton was succeeding. So fuck ’em. The Village Voice…they don’t know what’s going on. The press doesn’t matter unless the people on the staff love you. Then, yeah, they can help your career. People on the staffs of the dailies here don’t love me, so who cares… But anyway, you can’t judge yourself through the eyes of journalists anyway, because they will always be on the outside of the process, and never know anything, deeply, about your art, even though they will continue to make pronouncements about it. If they ask you questions and you tell ’em, then fine, that’s accurate. And yeah, press helps. It does help. But if you’re looking for humanism in it, forget it, it ain’t gonna exist.

[girlactionfigure]

Last of the Red Hot Mamas

The Queen of Jazz

Sophie Tucker was a singer and comedienne whose powerful voice and brassy wit delighted audiences for over six decades.

Sophie’s Jewish parents had to escape from Russia in 1886 after her father had deserted the Russian military, and she was born on the boat to America. The family settled in Hartford, Connecticut where they ran a kosher boarding house and restaurant. Sophie and her three siblings worked hard in the family business, waking up at 3 am every day to peel and chop vegetables before school. After Sophie got home she waited tables and washed dishes.

From almost the moment of birth, Sophie had a huge and magnetic personality. She was confident, sassy, and uninhibited. Jewish vaudeville stars often stayed at her family’s boarding house and she was fascinated by them and their lives. She always knew she was destined for a life in show business. Her parents absolutely forbade her to join the paskudnyaks (rascals) who stayed at their rooming house. Sophie still found a way to perform – she started singing for their guests as she served them. “I would stand up in the narrow space by the door and sing with all the drama I could put into it. At the end of the last chorus, between me and the onions there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.”

Desperate to leave home, she eloped in 1903 with local beer truck driver Louis Tuck. When they returned, her parents organized a traditional Orthodox wedding for them. They had a son, Burt, in 1906, and lived with her family, where she was back to her old role of cooking, cleaning, and serving customers. Meanwhile a frequent guest was Willie Howard, a popular vaudeville comedian and the first to use openly Jewish content in his act. He was impressed by Sophie’s natural talent as an entertainer, and he urged her to move to New York and break into show business. Sophie’s husband Louis did not share her enthusiasm for the stage and after she told him she wanted to move to New York, he took off. Soon, Sophie left Burt with her family, telling them she was going to New Haven for a short vacation. Instead, she moved to New York and never returned. She was 19 years old. Burt was raised by Sophie’s family, and Sophie kept in frequent contact with them over the years.

Sophie arrived in New York with a letter of introduction to a famous composer from Willie Howard, but the composer wasn’t impressed by her singing. She was quickly able to find work singing at coffeehouses and saloons. At the German Village, a popular beer garden, she sang 50-100 songs a night for $15 a week. She was such a hit that she was soon making over $150 a week in pay and tips.

Sophie was generous with her money. She sent most of what she made to her family, and lived in a shabby boarding house where the other residents were prostitutes. A nice Jewish girl from Hartford, Sophie had never encountered this type of woman before, but she wasted no time making friends with her neighbors, and started a longtime practice of giving free women-only concerts in bordellos. Sophie shared her money and belongings with the call girls, and hid the money they made from their pimps. She later said, “Every one of them supported a family back home, or a child somewhere.”

At the time, $150/week was an impressive salary for a single woman, but it wasn’t enough for Sophie, who wanted to get out of the restaurant business once and for all and make it big in vaudeville. She got her first break in 1907: a chance to audition for impresario Chris Brown’s Amateur Night. After her audition she overheard Brown say, “This one’s so big and ugly, the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up.” He told Sophie that she passed the audition and would be featured in the show. However, she had to do it in blackface. Sophie was aghast at the suggestion, but Brown and the other producers insisted that her only chance for a career in show business was in blackface. She agreed to do it.

Sophie’s first vaudeville gig was at Tony Pastor’s on the Bowery where she was booked for a pre-show before the matinee. When she took the stage, the theater was empty. She started singing, but as people entered the room they completely ignored her, chatting noisily as they awaited the main event. She suddenly stopped the show, and started berating the audience for being so rude to her. Sophie had what Jews call chutzpah – audacious self-confidence – and she displayed so much humor and spirit that the audience fell in love with her. Nobody made a peep for the rest of the show, and they demanded three encores.

She was booked onto the New England Vaudeville circuit to sing African-American spirituals, and got rave reviews everywhere she went. It wasn’t just her big voice audiences loved, it was also her big personality, her confident swagger combined with self-deprecating humor. Sophie had a sharp wit and a voice that didn’t need a microphone to fill a room.

Audiences adored Sophie’s minstrel act, but she hated performing in blackface. Finally, at a performance in Boston, she’d had enough. She told the producer that her blackface makeup and costume were lost in transit, and before he could argue she marched onstage as herself. She told the shocked audience, “You-all can see I’m a white girl. Well, I’ll tell you something more: I’m not Southern. I’m a Jewish girl and I just learned this Southern accent doing a blackface act. And now, Mr. Leader, please play my song.” She never performed in blackface again.

Some of Sophie’s songs were bawdy, filled with innuendo and double entendre, while others were sentimental. Her most popular songs included “Some of These Days” and the Jewish favorite, “My Yiddishe Mama.” Initially Sophie only performed “Yiddishe Mama” in front of mostly Jewish audiences since much of the song was in Yiddish, but she soon found that all audiences loved the song. Even if they didn’t understand all of the words, they could appreciate her heartful singing about her devoted mother.

Sophie did a European tour in the 1920’s which was a huge success. When she arrived in England in 1922, she was greeted by fans with a huge sign reading “Welcome Sophie Tucker, America’s Foremost Jewish Actress!” Looking back at her career later in life, she described that sign as her proudest moment. Sophie performed for King George V and Queen Mary at the London Palladium in 1926. She greeted the monarch with a hearty “Hiya King!” The Daily Express described Sophie as “a big fat blond genius, with a dynamic personality and amazing vitality.” Yiddishe Mama became an international hit, and she was asked to perform the song in Berlin by the Berlin Broadcasting Company in 1931. Two years later, when Hitler came to power in 1933, all copies of the recording were destroyed.

Comedy writer Bruce Vilanch saw Sophie Tucker perform when he was a child. He remembered, “She’d make you laugh like crazy. She would belt. She still could blow the roof off the joint. Then she would do something incredibly schmaltzy, she would turn on a dime and make the audience weep… As soon as you were done crying, she would turn around and do some bawdy song… Everything she said was with the force of a judge making a sentence. She didn’t speak, she made policy statements.”

Throughout her career, Sophie chose songs mostly written by black and Jewish songwriters from Tin Pan Alley, including young Irving Berlin. She was close friends with her fellow Vaudeville performer Bill Robinson, known as Bojangles. When Sophie invited Bill to her sister’s wedding in the 1920’s, the doorman wouldn’t let him in, telling him to go through the kitchen. Sophie heard this and immediately pushed the doorman out of the way, closed the front door, and told the guests, “OK everybody goes through the kitchen.”

Despite her act’s raciness, she said “I’ve never sung a single song in my whole life on purpose to shock anyone. My ‘hot numbers’ are all, if you will notice, written about something that is real in the lives of millions of people.” Her songs included, “I May Be Getting Older Every Day (But Younger Every Night),” “I’m The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” “I Ain’t Takin’ Orders From No One,” and “When They Start to Ration my Passion, It’s Gonna Be Tough on Me.” She often made fun of her size, calling herself a “perfect 48.”

She kept improving her act, and after a decade as a solo performer, she created a back-up band of black jazz musicians called the “Kings of Syncopation.” They recorded several albums together, all of which were hits, and toured the country playing to enthusiastic crowds. In Chicago they played 15 weeks at the Palace and then at every other theater in town. Crooner Tony Bennett called Sophie “the most underrated jazz singer that ever lived.”

After a few years as the self-styled “Queen of Jazz,” Sophie re-imagined herself again, as a cabaret performer, accompanied by piano player Ted Shapiro. He became part of her act as they developed a snappy banter. Over the years she did some film, radio and TV work but what she loved most was interacting with a live audience.

Sophie married two more times, but neither husband liked being “Mr. Sophie Tucker” and both marriages failed. She said, “Once you start carrying your own suitcase, paying your own bills, running your own show, you’ve done something to yourself that makes you one of those women men like to call ‘a pal’ and “a good sport,’ the kind of woman they tell their troubles to. But you’ve cut yourself off from the orchids and the diamond bracelets, except those you buy yourself.” Throughout her life, Sophie was known for her generosity, and she gave away much of what she made to a variety of philanthropic causes. She established the Sophie Tucker Foundation in the early 1950’s, and endowed hospitals, synagogues, actors guilds, and several charitable organizations in Israel.

Sophie continued performing until the end of her life, even after getting lung cancer. While undergoing treatment she was still doing two shows a night. Sophie died at age 80 in 1966, during a months-long theater engagement. As she lay on her death bed, she asked the nurse to “bring me my chiffon hanky, bring me my wig” and she did bits from her act until she took her last breath. Thousands of mourners attended her funeral at Emanuel Synagogue Cemetery in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Known as the “Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” Sophie’s act inspired later female performers such as Mae West and Bette Midler.

For entertaining audiences around the world for sixty years and giving generously to others, we honor Sophie Tucker as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Accidental Talmudist

[whereistheonepiece]

So @lesbian-space-ranger​ and I accidentally created a new Zosan AU that we’ve been talking about since last night. A note: half of this is me summarizing, half of it is pulled directly from Discord because Cas (lesbian-space-ranger) has such great ideas.

This is a long post. I don’t feel like putting it under a read more. So. Enjoy. Or keep scrolling. Either works.

So this post happened

These roles just came to me. Didn’t need to give it much thought because Sanji has the appearance and demeanor of a lead singer and I like the idea of him using his skilled hands to play piano at the same time.

I also watched the movie Rocketman earlier in the week. You know, that Elton John biopic. I adored it and it’s been heavy on my mind lately and I liked the idea of Sanji giving a high energy performance from the piano. (Sir Elton John’s music comes into play later.)

And as for Zoro, I find the bass and/or the beat the sexiest part of the music in a song and, naturally, I can see him rocking at either.

So I asked Cas if she had any other headcanons for this AU and this thing is too good to not share.

Yeah, so Zoro and Sanji are in a boy band with Usopp and Luffy. Luffy started the band. Luffy does guitar, Zoro is on bass, Usopp is on drums, and Sanji is on keyboard and vocals.

Nami is their manager. She works them hard and has taken a 40% cut of the profits because of the guys’ naivete and inexperience. But she’s why they took off. She booked their gigs at every venue she could manage, no matter how small.

They got their big break when Nami met Vivi, who’s a talent scout for the record label Baroque Works. Nami insisted that Vivi had to see the boys perform because they’re something else and Vivi’s heard that a thousand times, but she agreed because Nami is cute. Nami and Vivi are dating. Also, re Baroque Works: Crocodile looks like a sleazy music producer, doesn’t he? So does Doflamingo.

So Sanji is the pretty one, Luffy is the funny one, Zoro is the quiet/broody one, and Usopp is the smart one.

Zoro has a lot of deals with fitness brands, but secretly finds the famous life unfulfilling. This comes back later, so keep that in your back pocket.

Robin runs their social media. She’s so good at her job, running all of their accounts and tweeting simultaneously, you’d swear she had four sets of hands. Wink.

Franky does pyrotechnics/lighting.

Brook is their stylist.

Chopper was their first real fan. He and Zoro grew up in the same neighborhood and Chopper just always idolized him. He followed them before anyone knew their names. He was their hype man, saying encouraging things like "I know you guys are gonna be great!" He believed in them even when they didn't believe in themselves.

Usopp set up their recordings before they got signed because he’s savvy. And then Chopper would sell their crappy CDs. At these tiny gigs. Like coffeehouses and stuff.

Sanji can play keyboard because his parents forced him to play piano as a kid. They had this idea that classical music would teach him discipline and make him smarter. This is how he meets Zeff. Zeff’s your typical stern instructor, but he’s the first adult to ask Sanji what he actually wants and likes. Zeff sees Sanji’s not into it so he asks him what music he likes and Sanji tells him he likes pop, so Zeff gives Sanji a more rounded education. This includes Elton John because I say so. It did inspire me to put Sanji on keyboard, after all.

But other than being Sanji’s piano instructor, Zeff becomes the one positive adult figure in young Sanji’s life and he becomes something of a mentor figure for him. Zeff has a garden and he lets Sanji work in it with him. This garden is how Sanji gets his “little eggplant” nickname. Sanji pulls an eggplant out before it’s ready and it’s so small and pitiful and Zeff won’t let him live it down. Like, Sanji keeps in touch with Zeff even into adulthood and after he makes it big and he still calls Sanji little eggplant.

Zoro and Sanji are always doing that, "Kind of flirting, not really” thing on stage.  Sanji is always like walking up to Zoro on stage and acting like he's going to kiss him but pushing him away at the last moment. And it's this huge mystery whether they're actually an item or not. This comes from Nami. Sanji and Zoro have this natural chemistry with each other that leads to speculation and Nami, knowing how boy band fan bases work, saw dollar signs. But it’s not just pragmatism on her part; she knows that one cannot simply go up to Zoro and Sanji and say “You obviously like each other. You should date.” So she makes money and helps her friends find happiness.

Usopp has speculation going on as well. People are always confused as to who he’s dating. Tabloids keep being like "Usopp dumped Nami and is now dating Luffy!" "Luffy Scorned?" "Luffy ditches Usopp and steals his girl!" And they just think the entire thing is hilarious. They collect headlines. The answer is Usopp is dating Luffy and Nami and Luffy and Nami just become really affectionate with each other after dating Usopp long enough. Also Nami is dating Vivi, like I mentioned, and sometimes Nami brings her on as a plus one. 

Sanji and Zoro keep giving conflicting answers about their relationship status. Like they'll tell one person they hate each other and another person they're gonna get married someday. Sanji has to walk this fine line of being "in love" with all of his female fans and also "in love" with Zoro. Or not. Who knows? Like Sanji enjoys the attention but he really really plays shit up for his fangirls. This makes Sanji even more popular. Just picture pages upon pages of Sanji/Reader and “Zanji” fics on Wattpad. Nami is one smart lady. "I am the smartest, prettiest, most clever person alive."

Zosan getting together really is just a bunch of Fake Dating tropes. At first it really is just to get more press for the band. Nami schemes with Usopp and Robin to push them together. Robin's a social media genius and knows how to craft tweets and Instagram posts that fans will overanalyze. 

Meanwhile eventually Zoro and Sanji admit to each other they have actual feelings and one day Usopp finds Sanji sleeping in Zoro's bed, both of them completely tuckered out. But they don’t know Nami crafted this. They just come clean and hope she won't be mad and she's like, "Yes! Finally!" and they're like "What?" and she's like, "I've been waiting for you two to realize you have actual feelings. Did you really think I'd just use you for profit like that?" and they're both like "Yes" "Of course"

Zoro’s mad at her for meddling. Secretly he’s grateful, but he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction and he’s yelling until Sanji grabs his hand and he just calms down.

And to bring Elton John back into the picture, just picture Sanji doing a cover of “Your Song” and uploading it online and thinking about Zoro. Naturally the comments are abuzz with people speculating that he’s singing about Zoro. And like. Onstage Sanji does his rendition and sends these small glances Zoro’s way, partially because he knows it’ll get the band a lot of attention, partially because that song is sweet and beautiful and it’s such a simple way to explain his feelings. (There is a reason why Moulin Rouge included it!!) I imagine this happens before they come clean to each other. Like, Zoro comes to him and is all “I keep thinking about that song you did...” And they go from there.

And eventually the band comes to its natural end. 

Usopp goes solo and flourishes, working as a songwriter and a producer. He wrote the band’s songs and he’s had a drum kit since he was, like, ten and he can make his own beats. He’s not the singing type (though he is good at it and could reach new heights if he came out of his shell), so he’s the kind of artist who makes the beat and then gets super famous pop singers to feature on his tracks. But he also writes songs for other singers and is so good at it and produces other artists’ tracks. I also like the idea that he’s taught himself to play multiple instruments, but he prefers the drums/percussion. He totally played percussion in school and was in marching band. I was in marching band for one year. I loathed every second of it, but I know he’d be phenomenal in drum corps.

Luffy isn’t much in music anymore, but he keeps himself busy. He’s something of an influencer, the kind of celebrity who gets paid to wear fashion brands’ clothing. He’s also Usopp’s trophy husband, living off the money he made off the band. Usopp grew wise to Nami’s antics and made sure he and Luffy would live comfortably for the rest of their lives, even if Usopp were to retire. Luffy also is secretly a Buzzfeed journalist because it’s fun for him to write these hit articles and people not know it’s him because he’s writing on this super bland pseudonym. 

And then there’s Zosan. They have a falling out after the band splits and go their separate ways.

Sanji quits being a professional singer because he’s tired of the prying into his personal life, but he still mentors and/or teaches. He has a string of girlfriends and finds no fulfillment in those relationships because the women are only interested in his celebrity.

And they aren’t Zoro.

Zoro tried branching off into commercials for fitness, but his heart wasn’t in it. He kind of takes up ranching on a whim and learns that he’s really good at it. He likes the physical labor, the quiet, being away from it all, nobody knowing his name. He doesn’t pursue anyone after Sanji because he feels like if it’s meant to be, someone will appear.

And Sanji does.

Sanji finds out where Zoro is through Luffy. So he makes his way to the ranch and finds Zoro and Sanji is all “Come back. I miss you.”

And there’s just a lot of soft Zosan content during Sanji’s visit. Sanji’s always been afraid of horses, but he’s not afraid when he’s with Zoro, and Zoro teaches him they can be gentle creatures, it’s just that you just have to respect them. (Ha. Get it?) Zoro takes Sanji on a ride and they go out and he takes him up the mountain and shows him how beautiful the view is. Sanji's watching the sunset and he's like, "Damn that's the prettiest thing I've ever seen." And Zoro is looking at Sanji and he says, "It sure is." And Sanji's like, "you're not... even looking." And Zoro's like, "No, I'm looking alright. Prettiest thing I've ever seen for sure."

More soft things like Zoro taking off his cowboy hat and putting it on Sanji. Them sitting by the fire, Zoro playing acoustic while Sanji sings. Whenever people see them they’ll ask them if they’re musicians and they share a knowing smile and say “Yeah. Something like that.”

And Zoro convinces Sanji to move out there with him. The others come to visit. Luffy and Chopper are obsessed with the cows and horses and the chickens. Luffy wants, like, eight pet chickens. Usopp is skeptical. Doesn’t believe Lu can look after a pet.

And it kind of ends there. It was us going back and forth, oftentimes out of chronological order, and so here I am putting it all together because it’s too good not to share. But it was a lot of fun.

[zwei-the-penguin-with-a-pen]

‘Celebrity Status’

Superstar fashionista. Pop idol. Professional Huntress. Official badass. Many adjectives and titles could describe the fantastically famous Coco Adel. She was staggeringly successful and wanted for almost nothing. She had her best friends with her most of the time, as Fox and Yatsuhashi played music with her. She had legions of adoring fans who loved her style, her music, and her clothing collections.

A cutie to share all of it with would be the icing on her coffee cake.

She had yet to find such a lady. Not for lack of trying, of course. She always talked to this girl or that girl, but most of them seemed to think she wasn't approachable. She would positively LOVE to throw her latest fashion ideas on a lady friend... and then tear them right back off of her. She had broken many girls' hearts without even trying.

She broke men's hearts as well, but only about as often as she broke their kneecaps. She quite enjoyed breaking their kneecaps.

Coco had dated her fair share of women, but becoming a celebrity had changed the dating scene a lot for her. It was more difficult to meet people when they were terrified of speaking to you. Being on a pedestal was fine with Coco until it came to meeting women. Oh well, one of these days the perfect girl would come along.

These coffeehouse gigs were a fun way to meet fans of her music. The clothes and the fighting were amazing, and fashion was always her strong suit, her music was her passion. She would make a sample with her keyboard synthesizer, and Fox would create sultry sounds with his guitar strings. Yatsuhashi made a beat, Moonstone added a bit on the low end, and a masterpiece was born.

Moonstone wasn't performing with them tonight, and he might not perform with them ever again. He was having some family issues at the moment. A new bassist wouldn't be that tough to find. Another girl in the band would be fantastic, Coco thought.

"What's this place called again?" Coco asked no one in particular. She knew the place was in Vale, near From Dust Til Dawn, but she forgot the name again.

"Jumping Beans, or so the sign says." Yatsu stretched and yawned as he answered. They were traveling low-key for this show, and sleeping in a van was not fun for the extravagantly tall man. He pointed to a sign across the street from their hotel. Coco nodded, tossing her beret off her head and checking her hair in the mirror.

"You look perfect, Coco!" Fox told her. She rolled her brown eyes at him.

"You say that every single time, yet I somehow still don't believe you." She replied, and the two of them laughed. They filed out of the van and entered the hotel, checking in at the counter and retiring to their room for now. They had a few hours before the concert, so they might as well rest up.

\/\/\/\/\/

Coco stood in the backstage area, which was more or less just the back of the coffeehouse, practicing her set in her mind. Her most popular song, 'Coffee' was not on the setlist, but she might perform it for an encore.

She glanced out at the packed coffee shop. Her audience was chomping at the bit for this show and the autograph signing afterward. In the small sea of faces, she locked eyes with a faunus woman holding a camera. Her chocolatey eyes melted Coco instantly. She had the cutest pair of rabbit ears atop her head. Brown hair framed her adorable face and cascaded down to her collarbones.

The woman tried to maneuver her way through the crowd toward Coco, flashing a badge and calling "News Crew" at everyone that stepped in front of her. Coco longed to run toward her and pose for a photo, and even more to chat the gorgeous rabbit girl up, but someone called for Coco to come to the stage. She waved to the photog and pointed at the stage.

Rabbit Ears nodded back, pushing her way toward the small stage.

Coco took the stage in her usual extravagant fashion, smashing a key on her keyboard and kicking outward when it produced an explosion sound. "Welcome to Jumping Beans Coffee Shop! I'm your hostess for the evening, the forever fabulous fashion queen, COCO ADEL!!!" She yelled into her microphone. The crowd roared for her.

She grinned at them all and jumped right into her first song, 'Girl is a Gun'. It was a bit different acoustic, but she still pulled it off with aplomb. She jumped around and danced away as she sang, her fingers effortlessly dancing across her keyboard. Coco kept her eyes on the photog with the rabbit ears.

"Yo, Rabbit Ears! Come closer to the stage! Be sure to get Fox and Yatsu in the pictures, too!" She called out between vocal lines. The photog's eyes turned to stars.

"Did you just talk to me?" She yelled, awestruck.

"Yeah, you're the one with bunny ears and a camera! Come closer! I don't bite! Well, not without permission, at least." She joked. The bunny girl moved right up next to the stage. Coco could hear her singing along to the song they were playing. She reached forward and tickled one of the girl's rabbit ears.

She lost it at that. "OH, MY GODS COCO ADEL JUST TOUCHED ME!!" She shrieked happily.

"You've got a pretty decent voice there, Honey Bunny. You want to come and sing one with us?" Coco offered. Hearts poured out of the girl's eyes at the remark.

"Gods, YES! Could we do 'Coffee' please?" The cutie asked her. Coco was hoping to save that one for later, but who was she to deny her beauty the song she wanted? Coco played the opening sequence on her keys, Fox and Yatsu filed in, and the two women sang into Coco's microphone. Coco took her hand and danced with her after the singing finished, the rabbit girl enjoying herself.

"Meet me after the show and the signing! I'd like to see your photos! Also, sorry for grazing your bum with my hand..." Coco told the photog after the song was over.

"It's fine, really! You're my favorite person in the world, so you can touch my arse all you like!" Rabbity smirked and winked.

A few more songs came and went, and Coco and the crew went on to sign autographs. The whole signing, Coco could hardly take her eyes off that woman on the multicolored couch. She snagged up a crew pass for their upcoming full band show with Weiss Schnee and her band and signed the back, leaving her phone number and a winky face.

"Hey there, Babbity Rabbity!" Coco said with a smirk as she plopped onto the couch, scooching as close to the girl as possible. Bunny blushed at that. "So what's your name, Miss Daily Dust?"

"Velvet Scarlatina..." The girl answered breathlessly. Coco smiled.

"Well, Velvet Scarlatina, can I please see your photographs?" Velvet pulled out her camera and scrolled through the shots from the concert and the signing. "Wow, you must be the best photographer at your newsstand! A regular Peter Parker, I'd say." Coco smiled even wider as Velvet turned ten shades of red. "You should totally take photos at our next show! It'll be a full band affair at the Rooster's Teeth!"

"I tried getting tickets, but it sold out ages ago. I also don't think my boss will send me to a show that size." Velvet frowned.

"Well I'd love to see you again, so take this. It should get you in with no questions. If anyone gives you any attitude, send them to me and I'll tear them apart."  She winked.

"Thank you so much!" Velvet tried to say as she stood, though it came out as a jumble of syllables. Coco smiled and stood up, hugging her new friend.

Velvet let out an 'EEP' as she felt a squeeze at her rear. Coco smirked hard at her as she left the coffeehouse. She could hear Velvet cheering from outside. She must have enjoyed the squeeze, or perhaps the phone number was the cause of her happiness.

Her Scroll lit up with a message from her new favorite girl.

\/\/\/\/\/

\/\/\/\/\/

\/\/\/\/\/

Day 5: Team CFVY Member

Do you guys remember ‘Coffee’? I wrote it ages ago. Well, this is kind of a parallel to that fic. The same concert from Coco’s POV.

[tonys-red-mustang]

Coffeehouse Chic: Tony Padilla x Female Reader

Request:  Can you write a tony fluff with a female reader where she sings and plays piano and he’s just all fluffy and comes to her concerts and stuff. Thank you!!!!! Love you!!!

.

Your hand pulled at your hair roughly and absentmindedly as your elbow rested on the table in front of you. You twirled your pencil around, scratching out words and musical phrases you didn’t like. The words and music flowed perfectly in your head, but you couldn’t seem to make it work on paper. The plastic cup of coffee clicked loudly under your fingernails as you tapped on it with your free hand.

“Thought I might find you here.”

You stared up, eyes burning from looking at the papers too closely for hours. Tony made it halfway across Monet’s, sitting down at your table. He gazed across at all the various noted computer papers and manuscript papers in front of you. 

“Well, yeah,” you mumbled to your boyfriend softly. “I come here all the time to work on this.”

Tony nodded with a soft smile as you stared back down at your papers. “Have anything new?”

You shrugged. You weren’t trying to ignore Tony, you were just more focused on your work- and you also knew the boy wasn’t taking it personally. “Maybe. If I can finish editing the music itself by tomorrow, I might put it in Friday’s setlist.”

“Can I see?” Tony leaned over, knowing with a grin that you never let him look at your new projects. You pulled the paper in your hand back, hitting his leather-clad shoulder lightly with a grin.

“Fuck off,” you gave a soft laugh to him, leaning back. 

Tony leaned back again with a gentle smile, straightening his jacket. “Can I get you another latté?”

You sighed, shaking your head. “I’ve already had four. More coffee is the last thing I need right now.”

When Friday night came, you had arranged your setlist and organized everything you needed. It was a basic and general performance- a regular-sized café, a grande piano in the middle, even a large area around the various tables where people mingled briefly. 

Tony sat next to you at a back table, holding onto your hand gently as you spoke to the owner of the café. The man confirmed how much he was paying you, when, and how he would. He nodded, left the table, then encouraged you to be up on the small stage by eight.

"Will I be hearing your newest project tonight?" Tony leaned against the back of his seat with a small smile.

"First on the setlist," you declared softly back. You leaned towards the Latino boy, gently pressing your lips against his. He kissed you back, then watched you with a gentle smile as you pulled back.

"I should go get ready. I only have ten minutes." You stood from the table, brushing your hand against Tony's arm.

Tony gave a small nod. "I'll see you after, Gatito."

Nearly fifteen minutes later, you were sitting up at the front of the large room, the owner of the live-music-café introducing you. You started off your setlist of songs- all written by you. Your hands flowed gently across a few chords of the piano.

"Throwing my feelings out the window,

I can see no other way.

They've hurt me so bad,

And the glass ain't so far away.

Throwing my feelings out the window,

Send them reeling into space.

Just gotta undo the hatch and feel the breeze in my face."

.

When you came down to meet Tony again, your throat was beginning to get sore and your fingers cramped- a usual happening after your gigs. The short Latino boy met you with a smile, wrapping one arms around your shoulders gently. "You sounded beautiful, Gatito."

You held onto Tony's hand with a small smile. "Thanks. You say that every time," you added with a small laugh.

"Because you do everytime," You turned to face Tony once you were standing outside on the sidewalk with him. You gave a gentle smile before pausing, then he leaned in closer to you. You pulled yourself forward, kissing him back gently.

"Let's go back to my place," Tony decided out loud. "We can... Celebrate there."

You turned your head down in the dark with a quiet laugh. "All right. Let's go."

A/N: I wrote this on my phone in the emergency room ahahaha but those lyrics are from my own song called "Out The Window." It'll be on Spotify, Google, and YouTube on June 11 under the label Oli Katai with the album "Overlay". Until then, you can search up my music for my first published EP called "Basic Bitch" and a single called "Ways To Say I Love You"

[whileiamdying]

Pearl is an extraordinary album for more reasons than meet the eye and ear. It was the last album Janis Joplin made before she left us, too soon, the victim of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 27. To her, this album represented the best music she had made in her life, and Janis was, first and foremost, a dedicated musician, serious about her art. From her earliest appearances on-stage in small bars and coffeehouses in her home state of Texas, her career was a quest, a restless search for the music that could exercise the full range of her voice, demand all the shades of its tone, express all the motions she experienced — the music that would fulfill her and make her whole.

No single style of music could do that, of course — not the country blues or bluegrass, not folk, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll. And so, she had to keep searching, testing each of the established forms until she realized that she would have to decline her own music in her own way.

Her explorations began in earnest when she arrived in San Francisco in 1966 to join Big Brother & The Holding Company, one of the seminal bands that contributed to what became known as the San Francisco Sound. Big Brother’s music probed the outer limits of the known forms in American music; it was spacey, innovative, unfettered, sometimes outrageous, rooted in the blues and powered by the solid backbeat of rock and roll.

With Big Brother, Janis took the San Francisco Sound and made it her own. She became the darling of the local fans and then, suddenly, at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, of a much wider audience. The following year, she and Big Brother toured the L. S. and put out a gold album for Columbia Records, but the abrupt rush of stardom didn’t satisfy Janis questing nature. Instead, it impelled her to test the limits of what she could do on her own.

She left Big Brother and hired a back-up band with horns, to give her more of a soul sound. She toured Europe and triumphed in Paris and Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London, «here she sold out the Royal Albert Hall. The album she recorded with this band, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, reached number five on Billboard’s Top 100 album chart, but this success, like the others before it, only encouraged Janis in her quest. Life on the road with the Kozmic Blues Band was never smooth; there were personal and musical conflicts in the band, and it was a lar cry from the family-band feeling of Big Brother & The Holding Company.

At the end of 1969, Janis disbanded the Kozmic Blues Band. She took some time off. She went to Rio de Janeiro for Carnaval. She backed off from the alcohol and drug use that had sometimes affected her performances with Kozmic Blues. She cleaned up her act. And during those reflective months, her luck changed. In her first year as the leader of her own band, she had learned a lot. Now she was ready to put those lessons to use.

The Kozmic Blues Band had been assembled for her by musical advisers. In putting together her next band, Janis was involved every step of the way. She kept two members of Kozmic Blues — Brad Campbell on bass, and John Till, who had finished up the ‘69 tour on lead guitar. She and her manager, Albert Grossman, went out, listened to musicians, and recruited three more-Clark Pierson on drums, Richard Bell on piano, and Ken Pearson on organ. Before this group played their first gig they were christened with a name that expressed all the hopes Janis had for the new band: Full Tilt Boogie.

I had worked for Janis for two years as her road manager but 1 quit during the last weeks of Kozmic Blues because it wasn’t fun anymore. I came back for the summer tour in 1970, and after two weeks on the road I knew Janis had another winner. From the start, this collection of musicians was a band. The Full Tilt boys liked Janis and she loved them both on-stage and off. She was the leader now, for real, and the boys followed where she led them. Even before the tour began, she was comfortable enough with the band to consult them about a nickname for herself. She wanted a name that would emphasize the aspect of her personality that wore gold hooker pumps and picked up pretty boys in bars. What about “Rose,” or “Ruby,” she offered, or “Pearl”? What “Pearl” became, to her delight, was a name that those closest to her used when they were speaking to her with special love and affection.

The summer tour took us from Miami to Honolulu and Toronto to L.A. Janis sang in Shea Stadium and Harvard Stadium, and the tennis stadium at Forest Hills. I had never seen her so happy in her music. When it was time to record, her good luck held. For the first time, she got the record producer of her dreams. Paul Rothchild had produced the Butterfield Blues Band. He had produced The Doors. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he knew how to talk to musicians, and he could top anybody’s rap. Janis had a pretty good rap of her own and she found that she loved to talk with Paul. They talked in the studio and they talked in the bars after hours. And Janis began to learn from Paul Rothchild something she never expected to learn: how to sing in a new way, without holding back-she would never give a song less than everything she could-but in a way that would allow her to sing for years to come. For Janis, this was a revelation. She had taken it for granted that at some point she’d blow out her voice and retire to run a bar in Marin County. Through working with Paul, her future opened up before her, without limits.

For Paul, every day with Janis was a revelation: “Of all the lead singers that I know, or have worked with, she was the most workable,” he recalled a fess years after those sessions. “She was a producer’s dream, for me. It was a perfect union. I mean there is rarely a week, now, that goes by when I don’t mourn the passing of Janis not just for Janis but for me loo, because it was perfect. To me it was as if my entire career was pointed at working at that record- working on that record and working with Janis.”

Four weeks into the sessions with Pull Tilt Boogie, when the album was three-quarters done, Janis died suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically. She started fooling around with heroin again, thinking she could control it, but her luck turned, and she died. From that moment, there could be no other title for the album but Pearl. And the miracle of Pearl is that it’s not some half-baked collection issued after her death as a sentimental tribute; it’s exactly what Janis and Paul intended it to be from the start — her best album ever. Because Janis had recorded just enough vocal tracks to finish the album.

Paul and the Full Tilt Boogie Band worked for weeks, day and night, constructing entirely new instrumental tracks behind Janis’ existing vocals. Bassist Brad Campbell remembered it as one of the most intense periods of his life. “You’ve got to realize something, from the standpoint of playing to the voice. It was really something. Really something. It’s not like, well, you can do it tomorrow or you can do it the next day. It was just like, ‘This has got to be the one. I can’t really explain it, because it was a super fecling. The voice was the only thing that was entering my head.” Paul Rothchild agreed: “We froze a moment, a mood, a great thing. And we were able to sustain ourselves emotionally based on our previous good time.”

Pearl is a testimonial to Janis and her hand’s mutual admiration and love. Janis’ joy in the Full Tilt boys, in the material, in her life, comes through in every song, even in Nick Gravenites’ “Buried Alive In The Blues, which he wrote for Janis, and which was the only song for which she had not yet recorded a vocal. Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” became a number one single. The album made it to the top spot as well and stayed there for nine weeks. Among the top 100 albums of the years 1955-1996, Pearl ranks number eighty. It is Janis’ most successful album. “I think it is Janis’ best album. I think it is possibly my best at bun. I think it’s one of the great records to come out of the Sixties. I think it’s wonderful.” Paul A. Rothchild

— John Byrne Cooke; a novelist and screenwriter. from 1967-1970 he was Janis Joplin’s Road Manager.

[bringinbackpod]

Interview with Brandon Jenner

We had the pleasure of interviewing Brandon Jenner over Zoom video!  Brandon Jenner’s music feels like a lot of different things—often all at once. In some ways, it’s like your childhood best friend disclosing an important truth by the glow of a beach bonfire. In other ways, it’s like the moment you stop worrying about what other people think and can laugh and smile anywhere without apology. However, the Los Angeles-born singer, songwriter, and producer describes what his music feels like best. “I try to make it feel like a warm, cozy blanket,” he laughs. “I hope I’m able to be that way in life as well!”' Music always gave him this warmth. With a singer-songwriter mom, he went from “being a fly on the wall” in his stepdad’s studio (just Google his stepfather!) to developing his own relationship with music when Ben Harper’s “Forever” got him through his first true breakup. After a pair of EPs and major syncs as one half of Brandon & Leah, he launched his solo career with the independent Burning Ground EP in 2016. The title track amassed over 26.5 million Spotify streams as he claimed coveted real estate on popular playlists such as Your Favorite Coffeehouse, License to Chill, and more. In between touring with the likes of Rachael Yamagata and Joshua Radin, he unveiled the Face The World EP [2018], Plan On Feelings EP [2019], and So Childish EP [2020]. After a whirlwind of gigs around the world, marriage, and the birth of his twin sons, he personally wrote, recorded, and produced his Nettwerk debut EP, Short of Home, in the middle of the Global Pandemic. Coupling life changes with a lifetime devoted to music thus far, he opened up like never before. “I think I’ve gotten better at giving myself the license to be truly vulnerable,” he admits. “It’s about what the songwriter is willing to let the listener in on. I’m not trying to overcompensate for the blessings in my life anymore. I’m writing about the changes in my life. I wanted to go back to what got me to play music in the first place, which is singer-songwriters with songs that make you think and feel deeply. For the first time in a long time, I have a label partner too, and I’m really excited about that.” He introduces Short of Home with “Something About You.” Faintly plucked acoustic guitar wraps around his intimate delivery as he delivers a love letter to his wife. “The lyrics just seemed to roll out like a runaway train,” he says. “It was an overwhelming feeling that brought me to tears. I’m so happy and grateful. It captures my first impression of my wife and my love for her.” Originally penned in some “hipster-y hotel in New York,” slide guitar echoes underneath dusty verses on “There You Are” as his high-register hypnotizes on the hook. “It’s mostly about how society forces us to lose sight of the fact the only thing we have is the present,” he admits. “We spend so much of our time planning for the future—which causes stress—that we spend very little time in the present. It’s a reminder we have lungs that work and hearts that beat. You’ve got to silence the noise of society and be in the moment.” “Give It All You’ve Got” rides along on upbeat guitar towards an affirmation to “live life without filtering yourself through the opinions of others.” Then, there’s “Life For Two.” Written at the request of a dying fan in Denmark, he gives her two children “a song about what their mom went through.” Everything culminates on “Wolves.” A piano-laden rumination, he croons a heartbreaking refrain, “No, you’re not special to me anymore.” “It’s the moment when you’re over someone,” he comments. “It was written with a lot of emotion because it’s what I was going through at the time. It’s honest. I’m not trying to do anything other than express myself. I found myself in an energetic shift that needed to take place.” In the end, Brandon Jenner’s music really feels like home. “In the past, I just wanted people to respect me as a musician,” he leaves off. “With my last name, it was something I was hung up on. I don’t care so much about that anymore. What I really want is for somebody to feel the emotion I did—to feel better, safer, more inspired, and like the world has meaning. I went through so many challenges and changes and found relief. If you do as well, it’s all worth it.” We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com. www.BringinitBackwards.com #podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #BrandonJenner #Jenner #zoom #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetwork Listen & Subscribe to BiB Follow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter!  source https://www.spreaker.com/user/14706194/interview-with-brandon-jenner

[northcountryprimitive]

“Up Close and Personal - That’s What Sharing Music is All About.” An Interview with Dennis Taylor

An Interview With Dennis Taylor, North Country Primitive, 20th April 2015

New age music is a much maligned beast. By and large, it has still to receive the critical reappraisal given to other styles and genres that developed in the 1970s. Maybe this is because its peak followed the year zero swagger of punk, and its expansive, meditative soundscape was the diametric opposite of punk’s short, sharp shock; or maybe because it was seen as the final swansong of the old hippies and baby boomers – mellow music for mellow people; or maybe because at its most soporific, it always contained within it the risk of moving a little too close to elevator music. Of course, such sweeping statements are patently unfair – the new age movement contained within its ranks many questing, exploratory musicians who were willing to incorporate the influences of Indian and world music, folk and minimalist composition into their sonic palettes. And by the early 80s, the new age movement was the natural home – in many ways, the only home - for fingerstyle guitarists influenced by Fahey, Kottke, Basho and the Takoma school of players.

Whilst John Fahey noisily denounced any attempts to include him as part of the new age movement, Robbie Basho found a home on Windham Hill, the leading new age label. The label’s founder, William Ackerman, was a fingerstyle guitarist whose debut album, In Search of the Turtle’s Navel, slyly acknowledges Fahey’s influence in its title. By the early 80s, American Primitive guitar was part of the new age pantheon, even if, as another Takoma alumnus, Peter Lang, has observed, the style was too folk for new age and too new age for folk. In any case, you only need to listen to the 2008 Numero Group compilation, Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli, where many of the featured artist were associated with or influenced by Windham Hill, to understand that the new age movement, or at the very least the acoustic guitar aspect of it, is ripe for re-evaluation.

All of which brings us to Dennis Taylor, whose sole album, 1983’s Dayspring, was released on CD for the first time earlier this year by Grass Top Recording, who have also brought us new editions of two of Robbie Basho’s later albums, as well as showcasing contemporary players with their roots in the American Primitive tradition. Dennis is unabashedly a graduate of the new age movement and over the years his music has incorporated many of the diverse strands that make up the new age sound, which is, after all, less a genre and more a statement of intent – he has incorporated fingerstyle guitar, wind synths, looping, Indian classical music and world fusion into his oeuvre. Dayspring, however, is a solo acoustic guitar album, and although it is clearly at one with the new age, it is also steeped in the Takoma tradition Dennis had been drawn to at the start of the 70s.

Dennis’s musical journey began in typical fashion for many young Americans growing up in the late 50s and early 60s, even in such far-flung corners of the States as small town Nebraska. “Like a lot of kids my age,” he recalls, “I first became aware of the guitar through the singing cowboys on TV and the early rock ‘n’ rollers. The Everly Brothers, with their twin acoustics, come to mind. I also saw Johnny Cash at my first big time concert when I was 8 years old. I think it was about that time that I asked my folks for a guitar and lessons.” By the time he was entering his teenage years, The Beach Boys and The Beatles were riding high, and he was caught up in the swell of excitement they generated. He adds, “I also had a love of pop guitar instrumentals, which meant The Ventures and surf guitar music were big for me. My friend and I taught ourselves to play with the help of a record and book set, Play Guitar with The Ventures. We learned the popular surf guitar tunes and moved on from there to starting a band and learning the rock songs of the era. I was also taking drum lessons, so I started in the band on drums, but then switched to rhythm guitar when we got a drummer with a full drum set. My main function throughout most of the eight years we had the band was lead vocalist. Instrumentally, I switched between guitar and bass, as members came and went.”

By the time Dennis was starting college, he was developing what was to become an enduring interest in acoustic guitar. “I became aware of the acoustic side of artists like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Crosby, Stills and Nash and the newer artists like James Taylor and Cat Stevens. So by now, I was splitting my time between playing electric music with the rock band and acoustic rock with my trio or sometimes solo.”

A pivotal moment came when he became involved in sing-a-longs at a local church youth group. He remembers, “It was there that an older friend taught me the basic ‘Travis-picking’ that got me started on fingerstyle guitar, although at this stage it was still as an accompaniment to vocals. I also had started listening to the acoustic guitar soloists I had discovered at a local record store, the Takoma guitarists - John Fahey, Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho. I learned a couple of their instrumental songs and started writing my own first guitar instrumental, the song that evolved into Reflection of the Dayspring. But mostly I was still writing singer-songwriter acoustic music with vocals.”

His rock band, The People, had folded by the time Dennis finished college. By now, he was married and had a child on the way. In order make enough of a living to support his new family, he began to seek restaurant gigs as a solo singer and guitarist, whilst playing in Top 40 club bands and teaching guitar at a local music store. “As it was, the only real steady money to be made was by going on the road with a band every weekend. I ended up doing that full time for the next few years. At the same time, I continued to pursue my acoustic music on the side and did occasional park and downtown outdoor concerts, keeping a hand in on the acoustic side, both solo and with a couple of friends.”

Life on the road became increasingly incompatible with family life. ”I quit the road band business in the mid-late 70s to be able to stay at home. I tried to do this by taking on guitar students at home and also teaching and working at music store. By now, I was seriously writing solo guitar instrumentals and I was starting to get enough original guitar pieces to perform solo at a few coffeehouses and concerts.”

Around this time, Dennis and his family moved out of the city for a quieter life in a small Nebraskan town, where he continued to teach guitar and work in a music store. It was whilst living in this community that several of the pieces that found their way onto Dayspring first emerged. “We had a small artist’s community,” Dennis recalls, “And I lived right across the street from a good friend, Ernie Ochsner, who was a visual artist. He was painting giant murals for a local museum and other landscape pieces, as he was getting pretty well known across the country through art shows and such. Ernie and I would hang out every day in his studio on the third floor of a downtown building in the town square - he would paint, while I would play the guitar. Many of the early Dayspring pieces evolved from those sessions. Before I moved back to Lincoln, I played my first official solo guitar concerts at the local art museum and the following year, I played my guitar pieces live on the radio for the first time.”

By 1979, following a spell developing his fretless bass chops with a jazz-rock band and by now living back in Lincoln and still working at a music store, Dennis joined The Spencer Ward Quintet, a band playing a hybrid of jazz fusion, world music, folk and semi-classical music. “It was all original music, written primarily by the leader, who was a nylon-string guitarist. The band consisted of classical guitar, vibes, flute, violin and drums. I sat in with them on fretless bass and convinced them that it would really fill out the sound of the music. At the same time, I was still pursuing my now all-instrumental solo guitar music, doing solo guitar gigs in many of the same clubs in Lincoln where the band would play. I was also still doing park concerts and outdoor downtown lunchtime concerts as a solo guitarist.”

The bandleader had visited Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, where some of the local musicians convinced him that their acoustic/electric fusion would find an appreciative audience. As they had already built a large and loyal following in Lincoln, the move seemed like the next logical step in the band’s evolution. “The band moved to Oregon in the spring of 1980. A couple of months later, in the summer, I joined them out there, but I was uncomfortable with the big city aspect. The other members all had day jobs, but so far, gigs were not happening. I made a quick decision to move down to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town that was more the size of city I was used to. As it turned out, there were a lot good musicians in Eugene, but work was very scarce, both musically and even for day jobs. Within a few months, my money had run out and I was not even close to gaining any kind of musical foothold. So, I packed up and headed back to Lincoln, a place where I had already established my self as a solo guitarist through clubs concerts and doing live radio at a local station. I came home to Nebraska determined to not get distracted musically again from my solo guitar work and to make a record of my solo guitar music before I turned 30 years old.”

“I started putting the music of Dayspring together, started teaching guitar at a music store again, played my solo gigs and also took the opportunity to put a jazz piano trio together with two friends, with me on fretless bass, working a lot of the same clubs and concerts I was playing as an acoustic guitarist.”

Encouraged by Terry Moore, the owner of Dirt Cheap Records, the foremost independent record store in Lincoln, Dennis went into the studio to record Dayspring. “Terry was an alternative icon in Lincoln,” he recalls. “He had also helped to start and mostly funded our local whole food co-op store and KZUM, our listener-owned, volunteer programmed radio station. He so loved and believed in the music I was doing for Dayspring, that after it was recorded and I had got to the point where I’d decided to release it independently, he offered to pay for a small pressing of LPs himself, which I would repay through sales. As it turned out, I was able to pay for the records on my own, but he helped promote Dayspring through his record shop and in fact had me do a release debut by playing live all afternoon in the front window of the store - a truly fun event for everyone!”

Spectrum, the studio Dennis used, turned out to be owned by musicians he knew from his garage band days, one of whom, his childhood friend Tommy Alesio, engineered the recordings. “They’d just opened the studio and because they were competing with the older established studios, their rates were very reasonable. I believe it was something like $30 an hour for recording, mixing and master tapes. Since I was doing a fairly simple project recording-wise and I was totally ready by the time I got into the studio, we were able to do the whole record in one session, mostly first takes. Once the session was set up, I had rehearsed and polished the songs at home non-stop for weeks, using my home cassette recorder to make sure the songs were ready to record, with the arrangements and song orders pretty much planned out. In the studio, we basically set up the mikes and let the tape roll. It was a long day, but we got the songs down in just one long afternoon session. The total cost was $150 and I had ready to press quarter-inch master tapes.”

Initially, Dennis attempted to get his music out by following the tried and tested route of sending a demo to the record company he felt was most likely to want to produce the album; in this case, William Ackerman’s Windham Hill, which by this time was the pre-eminent record label for new age and solo acoustic guitar releases. However, as he recalls, “It took several months for Windham to receive the tape, then it was lost for a while, then it was found, then it was listened to. I wasn’t that patient or that hopeful after reading about the glut of demos they had been receiving – up to 200 a month.”

Dennis decided the way forward was to put the album out himself in a limited local edition, with the help of How to Make and Sell Your Own Record, an illustrated step-by-step guide from Guitar Player Magazine. “I got so impatient, not getting a response on my demo tape, that by the time I finally got a ‘thanks, but no thanks and good luck’ letter back from Windham Hill, it was August of 1983, my own pressing had arrived five months earlier and was already selling in the local record stores and playing on local radio. I’m glad I didn’t wait to hear back before I went ahead on my own!”

Dennis called upon the talents of his friends in Lincoln to bring the album to fruition. The photos for the album cover were shot at a local park concert by his friend Lisa Paulsen, who was a photographer for the University newspaper. Another friend, Lauren Weisberg-Norris, worked as a commercial artist and took Dennis’s basic layout ideas for the cover and made them camera ready. He also took note of the experience of local musician friends who had pressed records of their bands. “I looked into the cost of using the same standard national pressing plants they had used. I was not happy with what I saw. Most of those plants were very expensive, wanted at least a thousand copies to get a decent price and the vinyl they were using was that cheap, thin, floppy vinyl: snap, crackle and pop. This was not at all what I wanted. I had audiophile pressings from Germany and Japan in my own record collection and I knew what good, quiet, heavy vinyl sounded like.”

Poring through the small ads in the back of music magazines, he came across a tiny advert for a small pressing plant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Rocky Mt. Recording. “I thought, what the heck and I gave them a call. They were really nice people and they were really excited about the idea. Even better, their prices were half what the nationals wanted, with a very small minimum of 300 records. So I said sure, send me some samples. The album cover artwork sample was a little antiquated and hokey looking, but the cardboard quality was good. My artwork was camera ready, so no worries there. The music they sent was local country bands and not all that impressive musically, but the quality of the vinyl… heavy, virgin vinyl, like I hadn’t seen since the sixties. It seemed about three times the weight of what the other pressing plants were putting out and it was quiet, like a good audiophile pressing. Their little pressing machines were from the sixties. I had found my answer. The whole ticket for the 300 records, covers and even cardboard mailers and shipping was going to be $794.75. I would be bringing the whole project in for around $950.”

“The couple that ran the pressing plant loved my high quality masters and the artwork,” Dennis continues. “They said, ‘The tapes sounded so good, we didn’t have to do anything with them!’ They were used to local country bands in Cheyenne bringing cassette tapes, usually recorded live at a bar and then wanting the Rocky Mt. folks to make hit sounding records out of them.”

He reflects: “Comparatively, it’s a breeze to put out your own music these days, but of course there are also many more people with that easy access, so it’s a flooded market. A guy playing solo acoustic guitar, while there were quite a few of us, at least nationwide, was still a fairly unique entity in the recording world back in the early 80s. You just had to somehow get that music out there to the people who loved it. And for me that was on a local level, without huge life changing investments and with lots of immediate feedback from the fans of the music. For me, that was a better way to go.”

The local reaction to Dayspring led to an unexpected new venture for Dennis. “Shortly after it was released, I walked into a Radio Shack to buy a part for a speaker. As I was writing the cheque, the cashier’s eyes got big and he asked me, ‘Are you the Dennis Taylor? The guitar player?’ 'Uh, yeah. I guess so.’ 'Wow! I play your record on my radio show all the time!’ He then asked me to come and play live on the show, Green Fields, which featured new age and jazz-fusion music. After I played, my new friend, Clyde Adams, who was also a drummer and like me was into Indian classical and fusion music, asked me if I wanted to come back and co-host the weekly program. I ended up doing this for the next six years. We were the only program in Lincoln at the time playing those kinds of music and the show was very well received.”

Around the same time, Dennis was also working on a local public access TV talk show, for which he had provided the theme music. The director, Doug Boyd, invited him to play some live performances of the Dayspring music for public access viewing. “I said sure, so using our same crew, we created two half hour programmes, Dennis Taylor Guitar Solos I & II. At the time, these were the only public access programs that were all music and no talk, the opposite of most of what was on the air on that channel. The shows were so popular, that they ran almost daily from 1984 to 1988. All of these things, along with downtown gigs, my yearly park concerts, various appearances at the University of Nebraska and sales at local record stores helped the original pressing of Dayspring to sell out locally in just the first few years. I couldn’t afford to repress the album, so essentially it became a limited edition. I was one of only two solo acoustic guitarists in the Lincoln and Omaha area that I know of, along with my friend Chris Griffith, who was pretty strictly a non-writer and a Leo Kottke 12-string disciple. It was pretty much me if you wanted that kind of music either for your club or park concert or wedding or whatever.”

The reception to Dayspring locally and the steady rise in stock of new age music nationally left Dennis with high hopes. “Being invited to the steady onslaught of Windham Hill and other new age artists coming to perform in Lincoln and Omaha, it seemed like the golden era for our kind of music had come. In our small group of musician, DJs, store owners and so on, we started to feel like we were definitely the happening thing in music. We thought that with the flood of national recognition, with major labels jumping on the bandwagon and signing new age artists and the emergence of the new age Grammy and even our local rock and oldies station, KLMS, switching to a new age and smooth jazz format, our time had come. That we were about to become the new rock 'n’ roll - the mainstream pop music. I became the go-to guy for downtown outdoor concerts, park concerts, the new separate quiet new age and folk area at annual Holmes Lake 4th of July event…a safe distance away from the main stage, where the classic rock acts were playing.”

As early as 1984, Dennis had intended to make a follow up to Dayspring. His idea was to expand the scope of the music – 6 & 12 string guitar pieces with the addition of fretless bass and tabla and percussion. He even started demoing new material, but the project never came to fruition. In the late 80s, he started working on a solo guitar album made up of a few new pieces and some of the Dayspring material slowed down to a meditative level. This project was abandoned when he concluded he didn’t really like the results of changing the mood of the Dayspring pieces.

Meanwhile, by the mid 80s, in order to make ends meet Dennis returned to playing in top 40 house bands churning out the classic rock anthems of the day, despite not being particularly attached to what was happening in the rock and pop worlds. In terms of his own musical interests, he had dived head-first into the new age. He explains, “I had already made my personal leap from popular music to what I liked to call un-pop music by the mid 70s.  On the electric side, jazz-fusion… Takoma and Indian and world-based acoustic fusion on the acoustic side. When the 80s hit, I discovered labels like Windham Hill, Narada and  Private Music and I jumped into the new age movement with both feet. I’d found the music that I most resonated with of all the genres I had been involved in or listened to up to then, whilst also maintaining a kinship with the funkier and less experimental end of jazz-fusion. I was in a world where new age was really starting to happen on a local level, with myself and a friend doing a new age and jazz fusion weekly radio program and my old rock band mate and childhood friend, opening a new age record and bookstore and doing a Hearts of Space type radio show on our local NPR affiliated University radio station.”

The high watermark of the new age began to recede by the start of the 90s. The major labels had oversold the movement: they had come to realise that the new age artists were generally not going to sell at the levels of major pop acts and had started dropping those artists from their labels. What remained, however, was a solid niche audience, both nationally and locally, which for a while kept Dennis and his musical fellow travellers working a few times a year at local concerts. He recalls, “In the end, the park and downtown concerts started to drop off. By a stroke of luck for my tabla playing musical partner, Dave Novak and myself, we came across the owners of the two Indian restaurants, one in Lincoln and then a second one that opened a couple years later in Omaha. Those owners loved the new age world fusion music Dave and I were doing and felt it was exactly right for the ambience of their 'classy’ dining  establishments. It ended up that we were playing every Sunday in one restaurant or the other from 1992 until the Omaha restaurant changed hands and ended live music in 2003. Then it went back to once a month at the one in Lincoln until they ended live music at the end of 2013.”

He continues: “I actually did some live recordings at the restaurant, although these were not concise album-type pieces. Our job there was to stretch out and jam for three hours and many of the pieces stretched to ten, fifteen or twenty minutes each. Also whenever it was with Dave, he was miked, which allowed all the restaurant noise to come into the recordings. We joked about Kenny the Bartender doing his famous ice dump solo at the exact moment when the music got very quiet and meditative. Or the inevitable singing baby who would go on and on and never stop!”

From the mid 90s, Dennis began pursuing a new direction in his writing and instrumentation, acquiring a keyboard synthesizer/sequencer workstation, electronic hand drums, a midi-bass guitar synth controller and an electronic wind synth. The result of this new palette of sounds was a short series of concerts of pre-programmed synthesizer pieces around 1996-1997, where he used the bass synth controller for the melody and improvised element of the performances. When an inheritance from his parents meant he was finally able to give up the top 40 house band gig at the turn of the century, Dennis began to focus on melding his older acoustic guitar and tabla based approach with the newer electronic sounds he had been experimenting with. This in turn led him into the writing of new songs, using the acoustic guitar as the centre-point, but augmented with electronics and fretless bass, using live looping and on some pieces, Dave Novak’s tablas and percussion.

In 2006, the same Doug Boyd who had directed Dennis Taylor Guitar Solos I & II was asked to produce a feature length documentary of a five year Lincoln Arts Council programme he had been filming. He turned to Dennis to write and perform the soundtrack for the film, which was premiered at Lincoln University Movie Theatre in January 2007. Stories of Home paired twelve families in Lincoln with twelve visual artists, who created artworks based on each family’s story.  Denis explains: “It involved families who had come to Lincoln from Africa, Vietnam and Mexico; a Native American family; a woman who had grown up in cattle country and was now marketing vegetarian desserts; a lesbian couple and a family that had escaped Iraq. All of them were families with a background story different to the usual home-grown families in Lincoln. I did the soundtrack with acoustic guitar, wind synth and electronic hand drum and recorded it in my home studio. The project was intended to be a model for other city’s arts councils, bringing diverse peoples together by sharing there personal stories of home and getting to know each other on a one to one basis, through art and music. It was a project I am incredibly proud to have been a part of.”

Dennis admits he was getting ready to call time on the more complex approach he had been taking to music making. “Around 2011-2012, I got the strong urge to quit doing the new set up. There was always a lot of preparation involved. I constantly felt like mission control - time to push this button, time to step on this pedal, time to switch to this instrument. I decided to just go back to where I started – live acoustic guitar, with or without Dave on tabla and percussion, as the occasion required. It was so relaxing, after all that experimentation and brain work, to just be able to float away in the sound of the acoustic guitar for the evening. And although people liked the new music, some of the fans and friends from the Dayspring era used to say 'That’s really nice, but do you still play the guitar?’ Or in the guitar and looping era, 'Do you still play any of the old guitar songs?’ Don’t get me wrong. A lot of people loved the combination of the guitar and looped instruments - it was not all that electronic. The wind synth was mainly used for melodies and improvisations, with very close to real sounding flute, sax, oboe and cello samples and the electronic hand drums were mainly used to get ethnic drum and percussion sounds. The Handsonic drum pads - essentially advanced steering wheel tapping - gave me access to nearly 600 wind and drums samples, without having to spend the many years Dave had spent learning real tabla technique. With all the sounds I wanted, several lifetimes of learning would have been needed to learn the real instrumental techniques for each instrument. Anyway, I eventually put those aside, except for the rare occasion, and went back to the simplicity of getting lost in the sound of the acoustic guitar.”

With Dennis rediscovering his solo guitar approach of thirty years before, the series of fortunate events leading to the reissue of Dayspring were as serendipitous as any new age musician worth his salt could desire. Record collector Michael Klausman found an old vinyl copy of the album in a record store in Denver and loved it. Dennis takes up the story: “I had no idea Dayspring had travelled out of state, other than to friends and family. Michael contacted me via Facebook for permission to post about it and use some of the Soundcloud clips I’d put up the previous year for the 30th Anniversary of its release. He told some friends about the album, who told some more friends, who brought it the attention of Kyle Fosburgh, guitarist and owner of Grass-Tops Recording in Minneapolis. Just two days after Michael posted about the record, Kyle contacted me wanting to know if I would be interested in having him release the album on CD. That happened the last week in July 2014 and it has now been reissued in a new deluxe package, remastered from the 1981 master tapes in high-resolution digital for CD and download. The tapes had been stored in my closet, sealed in vinyl bags, since 1981! The album was released on March 3rd this year. It really is a miracle rediscovery for me and my music.”

He continues, “Coincidently, my friend Benjy, from Lincoln group The Millions, messaged me that his nephew in Brooklyn was a big fan of my record and he knew someone there who would be interested in reissuing it! What a weekend! I had already started negotiations with Kyle at Grass-Tops and was very happy with what we were working out, so I had to say to Benjy, 'Man, had you told me this a few days ago, I would been on my knees bowing to you for such incredible news, but as it is, I’m already in negotiations to do just that with a company in Minneapolis, so I’m going to have go with that offer.’ Benjy was cool with that and very happy for me.”

It seems the relationship with Grass-Tops is far from over. “Nothing is set in stone, but Kyle and I have discussed the possibility of making a new record. At the time it we discussed it, we were both pretty excited about doing the simplest thing first - a solo guitar follow-up to Dayspring. It would focus more on the quieter, newer pieces I’ve written since then, and would tentatively be entitled Nightfall. Dayspring was a brighter, daytime type of record – Nightfall would be its late evening companion. There are no solid plans as yet, but what swayed me towards a solo guitar album, after all these years of promising a new record, was a combination of my recent rediscovery of the joys of the solo guitar as a complete entity in itself and the chance to give the fans what I’ve been promising them since Dayspring came out - more of the same thing they came for in the first place.”

He adds, “We’ve also had lots of requests from our vinyl-oriented fans for a new vinyl edition of Dayspring. There is also the possibly a DVD of my two half-hour solo guitar concerts that I taped for access television back in 1983-84, Dennis Taylor - Guitar Solos I & II: Music from the Dayspring Album. Kyle has copies of those shows, which I transferred to DVD from the old, almost gone, big videotape masters 10 years ago with great fragile babying of the old tapes. With weeks of meticulous work the shows were saved pretty much intact, with good quality video and decent quality sound. Anyway, these are all tentative future plans at this time.”

Dennis has given some thought to the place where Dayspring sits in his musical journey. “It’s an odd time trip for me, listening to this record by this 28 year old guy, thirty some years ago.  I’ve noticed that my writing style hasn’t really changed that much over the years – melodically and harmonically, at least. I’ve changed more rhythmically - away from the 4/4 double-thumbing style of Fahey and Kottke and more towards the 6/8 ambient, floating style of classical North Indian music or the softer, jazzier styles of Ralph Towner, Pat Metheny and the European ECM jazz guys. The Windham Hill/new age guitar styles of Will Ackerman, Alex de Grassi and Michael Hedges had an impact on me, too. Dayspring was actually sort of a transitional record for me. The older songs were more in that traditional, folky style and the new songs were more influenced by Windham Hill guitarists, acoustic fusion like Oregon, Shakti and Ancient Future and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.”

Reflecting back on his life in music so far, Dennis is contented with how things have turned out. “I never really tried for the big time with the record or with my career. From my road band days, I didn’t particularly like endless driving and staying in big cities. I was much more comfortable at home, working on a local level where I actually knew the people who loved and appreciated the music and were happy to come see me play and buy my record at a coffeehouse or a restaurant or a park concert. I really don’t think it gets any better than that. The artist and the listener on a real person, one-to-one basis. That’s really what the music is all about to me - that one-to-one communication. I’ve said before, but music cuts through all the crap and brings people together in a meaningful way. And it’s so much easier and enjoyable for all involved when you can do that on a small, personal level.”

He emphasises his perspective with an example. “In 1973, at our local auditorium, opening for Fleetwood Mac and Wishbone Ash, I sat on that big stage, the stage where I had seen most of my heroes perform, the stage that was my childhood dream to play a big-time concert on. I sat on that stage and when the lights went down, all I could see of the 3,000 people out there were the few that were hanging on the stage and all I could hear was the sound of my own voice and guitar whooshing through the huge auditorium. It was the most isolated sensation I had ever felt in my life, as if I was on some faraway planet playing into an empty void in space. It was a once in a lifetime experience that I’ll always remember fondly and a childhood dream come true, but give me the small audience and the personal sharing of the music every time. I knew that after that first night - and I was only twenty years old then. Forty years have gone by and I’ve never regretted not trying to go big-time once. Up close and personal - that’s what sharing music is all about.”

A big thank you to Dennis Taylor for the time, energy and enthusiasm he put into this interview. Dayspring is available now from Grass-Tops Recording.

[toddrundgren-interactive]

Nothing/Anything: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren

From Here to Utopia

by David Fricke for Trouser Press, July 1978

Todd Rundgren lies comfortably against a pillow on the living room floor of his Bearsville, New York retreat, located just off a winding, ill-paved driver’s challenge called Mink Hollow Road. Against one knee-high landing is a row of records encroaching its way across the room. The first one, front and center, is a copy of Rundgren’s first solo album, Runt, no doubt the result of a quiet stroll down memory lane.

“Actually, I just produced a punk album by Jean-Yves Labat – M. Frog – the original synthesizer player in Utopia. One of the tunes is a re-working of a song from that album called ‘I’m in the Clique.’ His new album is called Froggy Goes A’Punkin’.” Right there, in barely over 25 words, is the gist of Todd Rundgren’s stormy ten-year career as one of American rock’s most prodigious and, at times, petulant geniuses. 

Alternately a defiantly individualistic solo artist, a much-sought-after producer of hits for other occasionally less-talented folk, and the democratically inclined lead guitarist for a band and ideology called Utopia, Todd Rundgren is all things to only a few understanding people. His records with and without Utopia since 1973’s A Wizard, A True Star have sold at a modest but discouragingly fixed rate of approximately 200,000 a pop – enough to keep his commercial momentum at a respectable pace, but not enough to keep him from languishing in the shadowed obscurity that is the scourge of all cult figures. But Rundgren would seem totally unaffected by his inability to make a large-scale artistic impact on an audience he feels is brainwashed by the false promises of 70s pop and the insensitive record industry prophets that make them. Much like the Number 6 character portrayed by Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, Todd Rundgren writes for himself the role of a man who consistently defies the powers-that-be who, in this case, would emasculate the creative potential of any single musical project he might care to name. He will cite such scurrilous activity as going back as far as his celebrated late ’60s stint with Nazz and then detail the problems he claims he faces in pursuing a musical career, either on his lonesome or in the company of fellow Utopians. Take, for example, his solo recording contract with Bearsville Records. “I deliver albums on approval. I’m not obligated to deliver any albums to them, but I can’t take an album to another label either. I just sort of do what I feel like doing and they have the option of putting them out or not putting them out. The way they behave when I deliver them, I don’t understand why they bother. You’ll have to ask them.”

I did just that, calling Bearsville’s California office to ask company head and long-time Rundgren confidante Paul Fishkin about Rundgren’s business circumstances and the company’s attitudes toward the music Rundgren says they have no commercial faith in.

“There is a certain level,” Fishkin replies, “on which Todd likes to think of himself as independent. He’s also a very – what’s the word? – mercurial personality and much to his credit he’s never wanted to be categorized. That’s what makes him so unique. But that also makes it very frustrating for us because we would like to sell more records.”

So would Todd, but for him, that’s not the bottom line.

“That’s another argument I have with the record company. They feel that selling 150,000 albums in this day and age makes you irrelevant, that it has to be a million and a half albums to be worth anything. Their whole attitude is like world conquest or manifest destiny where you’re just supposed to expand and expand and expand in the same way the economy does until you hit your recession and your economy collapses.

“I don’t particularly feel that way. I feel that it seeks its own level. I can’t force it any greater. I’m not attempting to be anyplace, underground or overground. I’m just attempting to do what I feel I should do in terms of making records.”

Fishkin, a week later and 3000 miles away, makes Todd’s point for him.

“He makes the music in his head at a given moment. And that music is the story of his life at that moment.”

Raz-A-Ma-Nazz

The fourth largest music market in the country, Philadelphia nevertheless endures a perennially bad rock’n’roll reputation. The East Coast industry focus makes an occasional stop there, paying due respects to the bastard children of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand – that South Philly brigade of acne-free faces like Frankie Avalon and the imminently forgettable Fabian – with more recent tributes paid the R&B factory run by Philadelphia International’s Gamble and Huff.

As a result, the city’s young white rockers still fight an uphill battle trying to make even their own local audience aware of the talent developing there, only to find their fortune in a two-hour drive to the north. The psychedelic joyride we now know as the late ’60s found many of Philly’s aspiring rock bands coming about as close as they ever would. Mandrake Memorial, Edison Electric Band, Elizabeth, Sweet Stavin Chain, High Treason – they all snagged fleeting moments of recognition with albums of fair to excellent quality. But by 1968, there was no question about who reigned supreme, even if they didn’t gig with the same regularity and took a casual pass on hippie ethics. Nazz – generally through the services of the still-18-year-old Todd Rundgren – were unanimously, if begrudgingly, voted most likely to succeed. That, in the end, Nazz dissolved in a flurry of infighting and managerial mishaps, Rundgren attributes more to the times than the place.

“Nazz was certainly out of context in the sense that it wasn’t typical of what was happening at the time.”

Rundgren has been talking about his own musical tendencies at any given time vis a vis those considered in vogue at that given time. It is a theme he sounds throughout the conversation and Nazz is just another case in point.

“It wasn’t exactly out of context,” he submits, “because we were the premiere local band at the time. We did have a large following. But the Nazz was considered out of context because the music that was happening was not at all like ours.

“First of all, everybody was taking a lot of drugs. The whole thing was that late ’60s music evolved out of this street-level thing, like San Francisco and so on. Like, ‘hey, blues.’ Except I’d already gone through the blues trip with Woody’s Truck Stop.”

Actually, Rundgren had been through that and more by 1967 when Nazz first reared its Anglo-foppish head. He could count to his credit the usual Beatle-copy and Britrock cover bands like Money (the same heard at the start of side four of Something/Anything). As a young, impressionable lad growing up in the depressingly nondescript Philly suburb of Upper Darby, he ignored Elvis Presley (“A lot of people who emulated him were machismo-greaser-killer types who were always out to kill me.”), opting for what he describes as the “art school personality” personified by the Beatles, “wanting to be a little different and strange and still have people like you.”

Come 1966 and Rundgren fancied himself a budding white bluesman, heading for center city Philadelphia and joining forces with an early hippie configuration, Woody’s Truck Stop, which held forth at the bohemian Walnut Street hangout called the Artist’s Hut. Paul Fishkin, who managed the Truck Stop for a time, describes the group as “sort of the Grateful Dead of Philadelphia.” However, their few claims to fame were Todd, a marginally excitable album on Smash (post-Todd), and a guitar player by the name of Alan Miller who raised a court ruckus when his high school suspended him for not cutting his hair to a regimental length. Such were the times and the times were not with Todd because he was (depending on whom you believe) either tossed out of the Truck Stop for not taking drugs (Fishkin’s story) or because he didn’t like the band’s drug scene (Todd, natch).

His next stop was what he calls “high concept,” a very Beatle-y trip to include singer-organist Stewkey (from the group Elizabeth), bass guitarist, occasional songwriter, and old friend Carson Van Osten, and ex-Munchkins drummer Thom Mooney. Stewkey remembers that it was Todd and Carson who formulated the idea for Nazz, then recruited him and Mooney to complete the band. As Nazz, they eventually released the first so-called progressive rock record out of Philadelphia (“Open My Eyes” b/w “Hello It’s Me”) and, with the debut album Nazz, defined an entirely new 1967 sound that could be described in today’s terminology as “power pop.”

“Nazz was a high concept band,” reiterates Rundgren. “We emulated a lot of English bands like the Who and Small Faces and really wanted to be as big as the Beatles, so we conceptualized everything on that level. The music was designed to have more of a common denominator, play more of an eclectic thing – a lot more vocals than what was happening at the time. At the time, everything was endless guitar solos. We had long conceptual songs, but even those were a high level of composition, as opposed to dropping acid and jamming.”

But was it just guitar solos and acid? Few of the bands, local or otherwise, who played Philly’s psychedelic showplaces like the Trauma, the Electric Factory, and the Second Fret coffeehouse even dented the charts with their extended paeans to the new consciousness. A glance at any one of the Top 100 lists of the late ’60s would reveal the Beatles at the height of their power, the Who slipping in every once in a while, and American groups like the Grass Roots, the Union Gap, and Paul Revere and the Raiders taking their turns with alarming regularity. If anything, Nazz’s neo-Whoish energy wedded with Rundgren’s gift for writing inescapable melodic hooks should have made them prime contenders.

“Well, Nazz wasn’t really counter to things that were happening,” he’ll say, implying that maybe it was more the creative atmosphere which was at fault.

“As I recall, a lot of my influences at the time were popular, but in other aspects. Like Jimmy Webb and the type of things he was doing influenced me to write ‘A Beautiful Song’ (the extended orchestral opus on Nazz Nazz). It’s just that we were joining a lot of disparate influences in the Nazz and it was a combination that wasn’t necessarily accessible.

“It’s also conceivable that the Nazz could have been more successful if our management had been a little more realistic. If we had played around more consistently and had a chance to develop our performance to the extent that we were developing our recording, then things might have happened differently. But our manager had this theory that if we had played around too much, we would establish ourselves as having a ‘low’ price tag. He was very money-oriented, mostly because he spent money at an incredible rate.”

So even with the first album, Nazz were left to their own devises. Despite production credits for Chicago producer Bill Traut (Shadows of Knight, etc.) and, on “Open My Eyes” and “Hello It’s Me,” Michael Friedman, Rundgren says that Nazz went the whole thing alone. “He (Traut) just sat there and read the trades while we were working. Then he mixed the album and a couple of hours later flew back to Chicago. We wound up remixing the whole album anyway. Michael Friedman was the partner of our manager at the time and he just wanted to have his name on the record somewhere. But all he did was sit around…”

…and read the trades, no doubt. But the end result soon obscured any of the shit flying around in the managerial arena. Nazz was and still is a refreshing, uplifting experience, totally lacking in artistic pretension. The rock (“Open My Eyes,” “Lemming Song,” “When I Get My Plane”) is raw at the core with a distinctive and imaginative polish to complement the gentility of ballads like “If That’s the Way You Feel” and “Hello It’s Me” (still an undeniable classic reflecting the urban soul colorings of Rundgren’s musical upbringing). Only “Crowded” bears compositional credits other than Todd’s (“Wildwood Song” is a group effort), in this case Stewkey and Thom Mooney. So while Nazz was not totally a Rundgren showcase, it set an auspicious example for the future.

Somebody then had the ingenious notion of sending Nazz to London in the fall of ’68 for recording purposes, sheer brilliance when you consider the wealth of English influences displayed on Nazz (the opening chords from “Open My Eyes” are straight out of the Who’s “I Can’t Explain”). Work permits being what they are, Nazz finished only one track in their two weeks there – a Carson Van Osten song called “Christopher Columbus” that later showed up in re-recorded form on Nazz III. (The original version of “Christopher Columbus” along with a different studio take of “Open My Eyes” can be heard on The Todd Rundgren Radio Show, a 1972 Bearsville promotional issue.) Nazz then headed for California’s sunny climes to do the second album and there the problems began in earnest.

“The Nazz always had internal problems, personality conflicts. For instance, the lead singer, Stewkey, was not inspired to do a lot except sing. Originally he was supposed to be an organ player, but he never practiced organ. I had been playing piano in the meantime and subsequently, by the time we got to the second record, I ended up doing most of the keyboard work.

“The drummer, Thom, and I had constant conflicts of an ego nature that had nothing to do with the professional direction of the band. We would get in the studio and if I were to say ‘play it this way,’ he would purposely play it another way, just to keep things going. By the time we got to the second album, we were just stomping in and out of the studio, fights all the time and shit like that. It was not the best set-up internally.”

Stewkey takes some exception to Todd’s criticisms, concurring that, yes, there were internal problems but Todd was just as much a part of the proceedings. As for his own role as organ player, “Todd knew that I didn’t play well. I never took piano lessons or anything. I just started to play as a music fill-in at the time. And I proceeded to get into the singing aspect of it. I never thought I was meant to be a virtuoso.” He does, however, play all of the ivories heard on Nazz.

When queried about Todd’s domineering role as composer, arranger, and de facto producer, Stewkey claims that ‘Todd always felt like he was the only one anyway. It got to a point where we weren’t even important anymore. On the second album, for instance, there are some tunes that I’d never heard before I even got into the studio. He would be off by himself and we didn’t even know what he was doing. A lot of hassles went down with the band and he just separated himself from them.”

For Rundgren, though, the breaking point came with a controversy involving the group’s second album, released in 1969 as Nazz Nazz. As he explains it, all of the material found on both Nazz Nazz and Nazz III came from the same 1968 Hollywood sessions, done after Nazz returned from London. Together they would comprise a double album – at least, he thought so – entitled Fungo Bat. (“We were really getting out there…” – Todd.) But the real bone of contention for Todd was the fact that on most of the Nazz III tracks he, not Stewkey, had originally sung lead vocals.

“I wanted that record to be a double album, including all the material. In fact, we had a whole double album mix. Somewhere around here” – Rundgren gestures casually across his living room – “I have the lacquers or the master tapes of it.

“But they (meaning a combination of band members and record company higher-ups) decided to make it a single album and on the songs I sang removed my voice from the master tapes and put Stewkey on instead. That became Nazz III.”

Yet Stewkey was just as surprised to see Nazz III in a record store in Madison, Wisconsin almost two years later. Regarding the erasure of Todd’s voice from the tapes he comments, “They just didn’t sound good as far as I was concerned.” “First of all, I didn’t want a double album. I thought it was bad timing – we had a hard enough time selling a single one. And a lot of that material on Nazz III shouldn’t have come out.”

If that was the case, why bother to overdub the new vocals? “They – the record company and the people involved in it – wanted me to.”

While Rundgren claims that was only one of the points of dispute within Nazz, the Nazz Nazz controversy was his last. He and Carson Van Osten took their leave almost simultaneously. “Carson was a pretty mellow, easy-going guy and just didn’t like the situation,” says Todd. “I split shortly after that.”

Stewkey and Thom Mooney kept a version of Nazz alive until mid-1970, when Mooney split for California (only to resurface briefly on albums by the Curtis Brothers and Tattoo with ex-Raspberry Wally Bryson). Carson retired to a promising career as an animation artist, Stewkey eventually hooked up with Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen for a couple of short-lived projects, and Todd set his sights on production work. With hardly more than two years and three mildly successful records to show for them, Nazz dissolved without a whimper. Easily years ahead of their time, they swam upstream in a river of sonic psychodaisical jive that, with their Marshall stacks and tie-dyed shirts, had no time for classic pop melodies. Today, the rock’n’roll pundits would call it power pop and “Open My Eyes” would be a Top 10 charter all over again. Or would it?

Stewkey: “We went too fast. I think if we had played around and functioned like any band that takes two or three years to get up the ladder, we would have hit really big.”

Todd: “If Nazz were together now, it would be really sick!”

Promise ‘Em Something, Promise ‘Em Anything, But Give ‘Em the Hits

Ironic, isn’t it? Todd Rundgren’s latest solo opus, Hermit of Mink Hollow, currently garners more airplay and public attention within a month of release than most of his recorded output since the puzzling Wizard. Both the solo and Utopian Rundgrens have been making undeniably curious if not totally accessible music for nigh on those ensuing five years and while even Todd admits to certain flaws in the flow, he won’t even recognize criticisms of his refusal to follow the pop path laid out by the gold record success of 1972’s Something/Anything. Add to that a prestigious track record of hits produced for other folks and you wonder where one – Todd, Runt, Utopia, etc. – ends and the other begins. They all, in fact, begin in 1969.

More interested in “developing a musical style without having to deal with someone’s reaction to it,” Rundgren passed on both forming a band and going solo in order to acquaint himself with the wonders of the studio. It would be fair enough, then, to say that Rundgren’s decision to head straight off for the console instead of the microphone has colored his solo and group activity since. Although his voice has become almost immediately recognizable, all Rundgren records possess a studio gleam, a definitive “sound” that can only be his, and the same goes for, among others, the Hall and Oates, Grand Funk, and Meatloaf records he has produced with variable success. Whatever the content, however recorded, they all literally scream “Rundgren.”

About his “sound” Todd says, “It’s very hard for me to describe it in words, but I know the difference between the way I produce and the way other producers work. For instance, my main area is in terms of the sound and the arrangements can vary very broadly. For example, I probably do the widest variety of types of production of almost any producer – country, blues, jazz-rock, straight-ahead rock’n’roll, nearly MOR, and then my own albums. That’s opposed to, say, Richard Perry who only does a certain MOR-type of album. He uses the same musicians, exact same drum sound – it sounds like a Richard Perry record with a different lead singer on it.”

Todd describes his first production assignment, a Philly band called the American Dream, as a “chance to learn certain basics” which proved beneficial in more ways than one. With the 1969 job came the opportunity to christen the just-opened Record Plant in New York. A brand new console and similarly shiny new equipment presented considerable deterrents for the three or four engineers who tried their hands at the Dream album. Finally, Todd took the matter into his own eager hands, working the board and subsequently learning the most advantageous thing you could possibly know as a budding young producer – how to engineer.

That ability allows him maximum control when recording himself or Utopia. Still, he insists that recording all by your lonesome – instruments, vocals, the works – is no big deal if you know your way around the limitations. Most of the instrumental and vocal work on his first two solo works, Runt (1970) and The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (1971), were his own with only rhythmic help from the Sales brothers (Hunt and Tony), some guys from the Band, and on one Runt track, from the American Dream.

In fact, Runt was recorded on speculation by Todd after Bearsville Records, for whom he was staff producer, gave him a budget (“as a concession”) and told him, literally, to go make an album. Prior to this, Todd had done some writing, little outside playing, and a lot of session-engineering, including the Band’s Stage Fright. Apparently Bearsville expected nothing much above the ordinary because, as Todd tells it, “when I brought back Runt, they were more or less shocked that I had actually done it and that it displayed a certain amount of originality. So they signed me up after the album was finished.” Nine months later, Bearsville figured they had some hot property. Through the good promotional offices of the aforementioned Paul Fishkin, “We Gotta Get You a Woman” (written for and about Fishkin) went Top 10 and everybody waited with baited breath for the follow-up. But The Ballad Of… spawned no hits, even if the stuff of which they are made was there in spades, and went on to an all-time sales dive for Todd. “That was my least successful album in terms of sales, although people say it is the most coherent in terms of songwriting and nowadays could be one of your across-the-board MOR-type records. But at the time it wasn’t fashionable. Nothing I do is fashionable at the time I do it.”

But if The Ballad of Todd Rundgren is an album Billy Joel would kill to call his own, then Something/Anything is the best album Paul McCartney never made and, in retrospect, it is easy to see how S/A can be singled out by (generally former) fans as the quintessential Todd, the absolute height of his melodic and lyrical powers. Here was a four-sided, 24-song declaration of independent genius, further set aside from the mainstream by two common denominator hits, the extraordinary “I Saw the Light” and a re-recording of “Hello It’s Me,” and, as Todd calls it in the liner notes for side one, “a bouquet of ear-catching melodies.” Besides, recording it was a cinch.

“I originally planned to do Something/ Anything all myself because on the previous albums I did everything except the bass and drums – the bass just being sort of a big guitar and the drums I had sort of fooled around with to some extent.

“The only challenge in doing that was playing the drums. Since everything was so highly arranged, it didn’t amount to a lot of complexity. It was essentially just arrangements, which was no problem for me. Y’know, sit down, take a half hour, and work out the part. After that, it was easy. “You usually start with the drums and it’s hard to play the drums to nothing, the reason being that halfway between the song you forget where you are. It’s hard going through the song, trying to sing it all to yourself, the whole arrangement, and keep it in your head without getting lost. And a lot of times, I would have to use an edit or two to get through the song. I’d forget and stop, but the first part would be so good that I couldn’t do it over again. I’d start in the middle, edit it together, and overdub everything from there.

“Since then, I’ve been influenced by a lot of R&B drum players, so the style’s a little different, a little more syncopated, more complicated turn-arounds and things like that. On Something/Anything, for the most part, I was playing rhythm, whereas on my new album, I’m playing, to some degree, what they call “melodic rhythm.”

“The operetta (‘Baby Needs a New Pair of Snakeskin Boots’) only took a day or so to do – three songs in one session and the rest in another. The other three sides only took like three weeks to do. I would essentially do a track a day, working on some stuff at home on the 8-track. I did ‘Breathless’ and ‘One More Day’ at home.

“I can’t remember, but I think Something/Anything was conceived as a single album and just turned into a double. I was writing material so fast that it became a double album. That was one reason why I changed my style so radically on the next album – because it just became too simple to write songs like that, almost mechanical. I would sit down at the piano and there would just be standard changes and combinations and lyrically it was the same subject matter. I had to break out of that rut. I didn’t feel I was doing myself creative justice.”

Ooops! Wrong Rundgren!

“In terms of cycles, I guess my apogee is their perigee and vice versa. I’m just cyclically 180-degree off from whatever else is happening. But it’s a big world and there’s a lot of people in the same boat as me and somebody’s gotta appeal to them.”

If only by default, that somebody is Rundgren, a rationalization that accounts for the continued release of records bearing his name, even if the general public and press corps eye each waxen item with the suspicion that there is something on that record they want little or no part of. To some, it’s the frantic instrumental deluge marking “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire,” a 30-minute epic from Initiation which Todd admits will appeal “to very few people that aren’t musicians. It appeals to musicians who want to hear something different as well as on a technical level, particularly people who are more or less removed from the mainstream of pop music.”

To others, the idealistic sociology coloring his Utopian lyrics should have nothing to do with the business of making popular music, a criticism that Todd vehemently denies. In again referring to the roundly panned Initiation, he insists that, like with any record or song, “I was determined to write lyrics entirely about something I believed in, rather than something I simply speculated about or had idle thought about.” The success and subsequent constant critical referrals to Something/Anything drained him, at least temporarily, of the urge to write love songs of the moon-June-spoon variety. A Wizard, A True Star and Utopia were the almost disastrous result.

“After doing Something/Anything, I had become deeply involved with production and sound. From that, I conceptualized this whole recording studio and built it from scratch. That was Secret Sound in New York and Wizard was the first album done there. The studio was designed to be able to produce all these sonic illusions and the whole Wizard album was an attempt to do that.”

A collection of songlets ranging from the fluid electronic backdrop of “International Feel” to the hard pull of those Philly-soul roots in the “Cool Jerk/Smokey Robinson/Curtis Mayfield medley, Wizard was certainly, as Rundgren indulges in characteristic understatement, “the most radical departure that I’d made up to that point.” His follow-up to Something/Anything, it could not help but alienate his substantial singles-buying audience. And the album scarfers had a time of it, too, something for which the aborted first Utopia tour can be properly blamed.

Undertaken in the spring of ’73 and lasting no more than three gigs, the first Utopia tour was an unmitigated bomb. Even in his hometown, Rundgren found few believers and while he admits that not a lot of folks had yet made the transition from S/A to Wizard, he feels it might have worked if his manager at the time, Albert Grossman (Dylan, Band, etc.) had shown a little more faith in financing the stage extravaganza. Still, survivors of the Philadelphia show opened appropriately by King Crimson can only babble about lengthy Mahavishnu-like jams, a large dome under which M. Frog conducted extensive business on synthesizer, and the black outfits offset by shocks of white fur on top of each and every head. It was trouble enough telling Rundgren from Moogy Klingman, much less sitting back and trying to catch a few bonafide songs.

Since then, Utopia – now a streamlined four-piece with Todd the only original left, in the company of Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and John Wilcox – has developed a stage show so high on P.T. Barnum showmanship that it’s no small wonder that Utopia’s tours are underwritten by record advances and royalties. Despite that, Rundgren says that all the Utopia records have been performance-inspired. “In all cases, the material was either performed live first or was designed to highlight the stage show, as with the Ra album and the sphinx and pyramid staging that went with it.”

But for every Utopia album, there is a solo Rundgren issue, a pattern to which he has no explanation. “Actually, Faithful preceded Ra by a considerable stretch of time and then after Ra, there was Ooops! Wrong Planet! which was another Utopia album. You see, I’d been pretty much totally involved with the Utopia road concept and, as a result, didn’t record a Todd Rundgren record in something like two years. We’ve been touring extensively, so our records have reflected our touring experience, whereas my solo albums are more or less closed environment things.”

The latest in the lengthening line of Rundgren solo projects, Hermit of Mink Hollow takes that assessment to its logical conclusion. Where Todd, Initiation, and Faithful were all recorded with a variety of Utopians and sympathetic outsiders, Hermit takes Something/Anything that final step further – it was produced, arranged, written, played, and sung by Todd R. with the unsolicited help of absolutely no one. What that has to do with the fact that it is his most immediately accessible album since S/A is anybody’s guess. Even Todd’s.

“In my solo albums, except for a few instances, I have always dealt in song styles. Initiation had at least one side of songs. Todd was very song-related, too, although it incorporated the instrumental stuff that came to a head on Initiation. Wizard was more like songlets, an attempt to break certain restrictions in songwriting. Faithful was all songs as well. In fact, Faithful was the penultimate song album in a way because I took archetypal songs of the ’60s like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and reviewed those with a ’70s approach. Then on the ‘original’ side, I did my interpretation of those ’60s influences. So, for me, that was the ultimate song album, totally self-conscious song stylizations.

“As for the recent album, I wrote songs as an opportunity for me to sing as opposed to playing, which is what I mostly do with Utopia. It is a chance to do a number of different styles of singing and essentially highlight my voice.”

Case in point is the opening track, “All the Children Sing,” a light, harmonic exercise of vocal expertise overlaying a rhythm track of guitars, basic bottom, and harpsichord. The choral break in the middle, though, is a classic example of Rundgren’s studio methodology. You think you hear about a dozen little Rundgren’s ooh-aahing in the background when, in fact, Todd has overdubbed himself maybe three times to achieve the effect. And the same goes for the lead vocal harmonies. “When I do vocals, I essentially have a lead voice and three background .voices. The way that they are arranged is what gives you the impression that there are more or less. Essentially, it’s studio dressing. I used to double each voice in the background vocals. Now I just do them all with one voice. So there are actually less voices than there have been on previous albums. But the point is that I have different vocal control now and there is different technology for creating sound…” Here he pauses, as if to think of a way to summarize the recorded effect, “…sound-picture sound.” Technology not withstanding, Hermit of Mink Hollow literally glows with melodic light, a vivid aurora borealis of lyrical changes, high harmonies, and instrumental gloss. “Hurting For You,” “Bag Lady,” “Bread,” and “Fade Away” are all living testament, not only to Todd’s wizardly control of the mixer, but also to write songs that, despite possessing the obvious hooks upon which commercial success is hung, are head and shoulders above the AM and FM wallpaper against which Rundgren incessantly rails.

“Any record company executive now will tell you that people don’t listen to music and that’s what music now is designed to be — not listened to. It’s essentially wallpaper and people don’t want to hear music that puts them through an emotional trip, some kind of spectrum of feelings.”

On that account, notice the legend appearing on each side of your copy of Hermit. Side one is tagged “The Easy Side,” side two “The Difficult Side.” Be not dismayed because Todd assures you that this is merely a clever “in” joke. He explains that when he first delivered the album to Bearsville for release, the twelve songs were in an entirely different order. However, the company felt that demographic theories on such matters made a difference in his case (“These different theories on such matters made a difference in his case (“These different theories about listener response are supposed to override whatever it is you intended, the mood you want to create.”). Bearsville prexy Paul Fishkin feels that Rundgren “could make those changes and not affect the album as a whole, but he considers it meddling.”

In any case, Bearsville presented Todd with a list of songs they felt would program better together on one side (“Those tunes acceptable on the MOR crossover theorem…”) with the ones they figured were too challenging – in other words, annoying and grating” on the other. Hence, “Easy” and “Difficult.”

“The funny thing is that it makes no difference to me whatever. The only reason I did it was because, in that particular instance, it made no difference to me. I don’t know what the fuck they were talking about. So I did it, figuring it was their particular wank and they can think what they want.

“You see, record companies just sell the record, so they say it can be done. But it’s not their obligation to play it and then live with it once they do. That’s what is so hypocritical about the business. The artist has to live with what he creates. In that way, most things that record company people say to me goes in one ear and out the other.”

Todd’s relationship with Bearsville and the industry at large cannot be all that bad since he still makes records and at least gets them on the street, which is more than a lot of other die-hard idealists can say. And Fishkin admits to an undying respect for Todd’s independent stance. Still, respect doesn’t count in the $7.98 retail race.

“I guess,” he says in conclusion, “I’ll always be a revolutionary because I don’t want to be part of the establishment. I don’t care who the establishment is, either. I just want the option to be exactly who I am and, as a result, I will always be on the outside.”

Meanwhile, Back in Philly…

What, I’m sure you’re all asking, happened to that post-Rundgren Nazz that went to Dallas and eventually went the way of all has-beens? And what does Cheap Trick have to do with it?

Yes, these are questions to which you no doubt want the answers and ex-Nazz lead singer Stewkey was more than happy to oblige.

“After Todd and Carson quit the band, Thom Mooney and I went to Dallas bringing two people with us from Philly, a bass player named Greg Simpler and a guitar player named Craig Bolan, who used to play with Thom a long time ago in the Munchkins. As the Nazz, we played around the Southwest. We tried to hook up with some management people out there, but that didn’t work out. So we finally disbanded the group after about six or seven months. That was in mid-1970.

“Thom went to California, while I stayed in Texas. Maybe a year or so later, I got a phone call from Rick Nielsen. He wanted to know if I wanted to come to Illinois to sing with his band. So I went up there and sang with his band – it was called Fuse at the time.”

This version of Fuse came together after their lone Epic album (of which Nielsen has little good to say), was recorded. According to Stewkey, Thom Mooney played with Fuse for a time in Illinois, but left again, and eventually Fuse headed to Philadelphia and were rechristened Sick Man of Europe. The personnel changed with some regularity, with the band including at times Nielsen, Stewkey, Tom Petersson (also of Cheap Trick), and Philadelphians Hank Ransome (longtime Philly drummer) and Cotton Kent (jazz-rocker and Sigma Sound session regular). As Sick Man of Europe, they recorded a number of demos which have since turned up on a bootleg album, Retrospective Foresight, as a collection of Nazz out-takes, although most of the tracks actually aren’t. It actually features Nazz III tracks, a live take of “Open My Eyes” that Stewkey thinks might be the Texan Nazz, and rough takes of “Lemming Song” and “Train Kept a ‘Rollin’.” The Sick Man of Europe tunes on the record are “I Ain’t Got You” (a Stewkey original), “He Was” (another Stewkey comp), and Nielsen’s “So Good to See You” (billed there as “Ready I Am”).

In any case, Sick Man eventually brought in a drummer from Illinois (not Bun E. Carlos) whose name Stewkey can’t remember. And then…

“I don’t know. I left again. Actually, I got fired. I just had bad luck with two bands.”

Stewkey is now living in Philadelphia, doing sporadic writing and, for awhile, was gigging acoustically in a duo. When asked about his personal relationship with Todd during the Nazz period, he refers back to Todd’s aversion to drugs.

“When I was playing with Todd when Nazz was first together, I’d like to go out and get high. And he didn’t like that. I thought Todd really got impossible after awhile. If we weren’t working and I wanted to go out and see a chick or get high with a couple of friends, he’d really get upset about that. Which I didn’t understand. Y’know, people like to have fun, Todd.”

[mythandritual]

"Up Close and Personal - That's What Sharing Music is All About.” An Interview with Dennis Taylor

An Interview With Dennis Taylor, North Country Primitive, 20th April 2015

New age music is a much maligned beast. By and large, it has still to receive the critical reappraisal given to other styles and genres that developed in the 1970s. Maybe this is because its peak followed the year zero swagger of punk, and its expansive, meditative soundscape was the diametric opposite of punk’s short, sharp shock; or maybe because it was seen as the final swansong of the old hippies and baby boomers – mellow music for mellow people; or maybe because at its most soporific, it always contained within it the risk of moving a little too close to elevator music. Of course, such sweeping statements are patently unfair – the new age movement contained within its ranks many questing, exploratory musicians who were willing to incorporate the influences of Indian and world music, folk and minimalist composition into their sonic palettes. And by the early 80s, the new age movement was the natural home – in many ways, the only home - for fingerstyle guitarists influenced by Fahey, Kottke, Basho and the Takoma school of players.

Whilst John Fahey noisily denounced any attempts to include him as part of the new age movement, Robbie Basho found a home on Windham Hill, the leading new age label. The label’s founder, William Ackerman, was a fingerstyle guitarist whose debut album, In Search of the Turtle’s Navel, slyly acknowledges Fahey’s influence in its title. By the early 80s, American Primitive guitar was part of the new age pantheon, even if, as another Takoma alumnus, Peter Lang, has observed, the style was too folk for new age and too new age for folk. In any case, you only need to listen to the 2008 Numero Group compilation, Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli, where many of the featured artist were associated with or influenced by Windham Hill, to understand that the new age movement, or at the very least the acoustic guitar aspect of it, is ripe for re-evaluation.

All of which brings us to Dennis Taylor, whose sole album, 1983’s Dayspring, was released on CD for the first time earlier this year by Grass Top Recording, who have also brought us new editions of two of Robbie Basho’s later albums, as well as showcasing contemporary players with their roots in the American Primitive tradition. Dennis is unabashedly a graduate of the new age movement and over the years his music has incorporated many of the diverse strands that make up the new age sound, which is, after all, less a genre and more a statement of intent – he has incorporated fingerstyle guitar, wind synths, looping, Indian classical music and world fusion into his oeuvre. Dayspring, however, is a solo acoustic guitar album, and although it is clearly at one with the new age, it is also steeped in the Takoma tradition Dennis had been drawn to at the start of the 70s.

Dennis’s musical journey began in typical fashion for many young Americans growing up in the late 50s and early 60s, even in such far-flung corners of the States as small town Nebraska. “Like a lot of kids my age,” he recalls, “I first became aware of the guitar through the singing cowboys on TV and the early rock ‘n’ rollers. The Everly Brothers, with their twin acoustics, come to mind. I also saw Johnny Cash at my first big time concert when I was 8 years old. I think it was about that time that I asked my folks for a guitar and lessons.” By the time he was entering his teenage years, The Beach Boys and The Beatles were riding high, and he was caught up in the swell of excitement they generated. He adds, “I also had a love of pop guitar instrumentals, which meant The Ventures and surf guitar music were big for me. My friend and I taught ourselves to play with the help of a record and book set, Play Guitar with The Ventures. We learned the popular surf guitar tunes and moved on from there to starting a band and learning the rock songs of the era. I was also taking drum lessons, so I started in the band on drums, but then switched to rhythm guitar when we got a drummer with a full drum set. My main function throughout most of the eight years we had the band was lead vocalist. Instrumentally, I switched between guitar and bass, as members came and went.”

By the time Dennis was starting college, he was developing what was to become an enduring interest in acoustic guitar. “I became aware of the acoustic side of artists like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Crosby, Stills and Nash and the newer artists like James Taylor and Cat Stevens. So by now, I was splitting my time between playing electric music with the rock band and acoustic rock with my trio or sometimes solo.”

A pivotal moment came when he became involved in sing-a-longs at a local church youth group. He remembers, “It was there that an older friend taught me the basic ‘Travis-picking’ that got me started on fingerstyle guitar, although at this stage it was still as an accompaniment to vocals. I also had started listening to the acoustic guitar soloists I had discovered at a local record store, the Takoma guitarists - John Fahey, Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho. I learned a couple of their instrumental songs and started writing my own first guitar instrumental, the song that evolved into Reflection of the Dayspring. But mostly I was still writing singer-songwriter acoustic music with vocals.”

His rock band, The People, had folded by the time Dennis finished college. By now, he was married and had a child on the way. In order make enough of a living to support his new family, he began to seek restaurant gigs as a solo singer and guitarist, whilst playing in Top 40 club bands and teaching guitar at a local music store. “As it was, the only real steady money to be made was by going on the road with a band every weekend. I ended up doing that full time for the next few years. At the same time, I continued to pursue my acoustic music on the side and did occasional park and downtown outdoor concerts, keeping a hand in on the acoustic side, both solo and with a couple of friends.”

Life on the road became increasingly incompatible with family life. ”I quit the road band business in the mid-late 70s to be able to stay at home. I tried to do this by taking on guitar students at home and also teaching and working at music store. By now, I was seriously writing solo guitar instrumentals and I was starting to get enough original guitar pieces to perform solo at a few coffeehouses and concerts.”

Around this time, Dennis and his family moved out of the city for a quieter life in a small Nebraskan town, where he continued to teach guitar and work in a music store. It was whilst living in this community that several of the pieces that found their way onto Dayspring first emerged. “We had a small artist’s community,” Dennis recalls, “And I lived right across the street from a good friend, Ernie Ochsner, who was a visual artist. He was painting giant murals for a local museum and other landscape pieces, as he was getting pretty well known across the country through art shows and such. Ernie and I would hang out every day in his studio on the third floor of a downtown building in the town square - he would paint, while I would play the guitar. Many of the early Dayspring pieces evolved from those sessions. Before I moved back to Lincoln, I played my first official solo guitar concerts at the local art museum and the following year, I played my guitar pieces live on the radio for the first time.”

By 1979, following a spell developing his fretless bass chops with a jazz-rock band and by now living back in Lincoln and still working at a music store, Dennis joined The Spencer Ward Quintet, a band playing a hybrid of jazz fusion, world music, folk and semi-classical music. “It was all original music, written primarily by the leader, who was a nylon-string guitarist. The band consisted of classical guitar, vibes, flute, violin and drums. I sat in with them on fretless bass and convinced them that it would really fill out the sound of the music. At the same time, I was still pursuing my now all-instrumental solo guitar music, doing solo guitar gigs in many of the same clubs in Lincoln where the band would play. I was also still doing park concerts and outdoor downtown lunchtime concerts as a solo guitarist.”

The bandleader had visited Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, where some of the local musicians convinced him that their acoustic/electric fusion would find an appreciative audience. As they had already built a large and loyal following in Lincoln, the move seemed like the next logical step in the band’s evolution. “The band moved to Oregon in the spring of 1980. A couple of months later, in the summer, I joined them out there, but I was uncomfortable with the big city aspect. The other members all had day jobs, but so far, gigs were not happening. I made a quick decision to move down to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town that was more the size of city I was used to. As it turned out, there were a lot good musicians in Eugene, but work was very scarce, both musically and even for day jobs. Within a few months, my money had run out and I was not even close to gaining any kind of musical foothold. So, I packed up and headed back to Lincoln, a place where I had already established my self as a solo guitarist through clubs concerts and doing live radio at a local station. I came home to Nebraska determined to not get distracted musically again from my solo guitar work and to make a record of my solo guitar music before I turned 30 years old.”

“I started putting the music of Dayspring together, started teaching guitar at a music store again, played my solo gigs and also took the opportunity to put a jazz piano trio together with two friends, with me on fretless bass, working a lot of the same clubs and concerts I was playing as an acoustic guitarist.”

Encouraged by Terry Moore, the owner of Dirt Cheap Records, the foremost independent record store in Lincoln, Dennis went into the studio to record Dayspring. “Terry was an alternative icon in Lincoln,” he recalls. “He had also helped to start and mostly funded our local whole food co-op store and KZUM, our listener-owned, volunteer programmed radio station. He so loved and believed in the music I was doing for Dayspring, that after it was recorded and I had got to the point where I’d decided to release it independently, he offered to pay for a small pressing of LPs himself, which I would repay through sales. As it turned out, I was able to pay for the records on my own, but he helped promote Dayspring through his record shop and in fact had me do a release debut by playing live all afternoon in the front window of the store - a truly fun event for everyone!”

Spectrum, the studio Dennis used, turned out to be owned by musicians he knew from his garage band days, one of whom, his childhood friend Tommy Alesio, engineered the recordings. “They’d just opened the studio and because they were competing with the older established studios, their rates were very reasonable. I believe it was something like $30 an hour for recording, mixing and master tapes. Since I was doing a fairly simple project recording-wise and I was totally ready by the time I got into the studio, we were able to do the whole record in one session, mostly first takes. Once the session was set up, I had rehearsed and polished the songs at home non-stop for weeks, using my home cassette recorder to make sure the songs were ready to record, with the arrangements and song orders pretty much planned out. In the studio, we basically set up the mikes and let the tape roll. It was a long day, but we got the songs down in just one long afternoon session. The total cost was $150 and I had ready to press quarter-inch master tapes.”

Initially, Dennis attempted to get his music out by following the tried and tested route of sending a demo to the record company he felt was most likely to want to produce the album; in this case, William Ackerman’s Windham Hill, which by this time was the pre-eminent record label for new age and solo acoustic guitar releases. However, as he recalls, “It took several months for Windham to receive the tape, then it was lost for a while, then it was found, then it was listened to. I wasn’t that patient or that hopeful after reading about the glut of demos they had been receiving – up to 200 a month.”

Dennis decided the way forward was to put the album out himself in a limited local edition, with the help of How to Make and Sell Your Own Record, an illustrated step-by-step guide from Guitar Player Magazine. “I got so impatient, not getting a response on my demo tape, that by the time I finally got a ‘thanks, but no thanks and good luck’ letter back from Windham Hill, it was August of 1983, my own pressing had arrived five months earlier and was already selling in the local record stores and playing on local radio. I’m glad I didn’t wait to hear back before I went ahead on my own!”

Dennis called upon the talents of his friends in Lincoln to bring the album to fruition. The photos for the album cover were shot at a local park concert by his friend Lisa Paulsen, who was a photographer for the University newspaper. Another friend, Lauren Weisberg-Norris, worked as a commercial artist and took Dennis’s basic layout ideas for the cover and made them camera ready. He also took note of the experience of local musician friends who had pressed records of their bands. “I looked into the cost of using the same standard national pressing plants they had used. I was not happy with what I saw. Most of those plants were very expensive, wanted at least a thousand copies to get a decent price and the vinyl they were using was that cheap, thin, floppy vinyl: snap, crackle and pop. This was not at all what I wanted. I had audiophile pressings from Germany and Japan in my own record collection and I knew what good, quiet, heavy vinyl sounded like.”

Poring through the small ads in the back of music magazines, he came across a tiny advert for a small pressing plant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Rocky Mt. Recording. “I thought, what the heck and I gave them a call. They were really nice people and they were really excited about the idea. Even better, their prices were half what the nationals wanted, with a very small minimum of 300 records. So I said sure, send me some samples. The album cover artwork sample was a little antiquated and hokey looking, but the cardboard quality was good. My artwork was camera ready, so no worries there. The music they sent was local country bands and not all that impressive musically, but the quality of the vinyl… heavy, virgin vinyl, like I hadn’t seen since the sixties. It seemed about three times the weight of what the other pressing plants were putting out and it was quiet, like a good audiophile pressing. Their little pressing machines were from the sixties. I had found my answer. The whole ticket for the 300 records, covers and even cardboard mailers and shipping was going to be $794.75. I would be bringing the whole project in for around $950.”

“The couple that ran the pressing plant loved my high quality masters and the artwork,” Dennis continues. “They said, ‘The tapes sounded so good, we didn’t have to do anything with them!’ They were used to local country bands in Cheyenne bringing cassette tapes, usually recorded live at a bar and then wanting the Rocky Mt. folks to make hit sounding records out of them.”

He reflects: “Comparatively, it’s a breeze to put out your own music these days, but of course there are also many more people with that easy access, so it’s a flooded market. A guy playing solo acoustic guitar, while there were quite a few of us, at least nationwide, was still a fairly unique entity in the recording world back in the early 80s. You just had to somehow get that music out there to the people who loved it. And for me that was on a local level, without huge life changing investments and with lots of immediate feedback from the fans of the music. For me, that was a better way to go.”

The local reaction to Dayspring led to an unexpected new venture for Dennis. “Shortly after it was released, I walked into a Radio Shack to buy a part for a speaker. As I was writing the cheque, the cashier’s eyes got big and he asked me, 'Are you the Dennis Taylor? The guitar player?’ 'Uh, yeah. I guess so.’ 'Wow! I play your record on my radio show all the time!’ He then asked me to come and play live on the show, Green Fields, which featured new age and jazz-fusion music. After I played, my new friend, Clyde Adams, who was also a drummer and like me was into Indian classical and fusion music, asked me if I wanted to come back and co-host the weekly program. I ended up doing this for the next six years. We were the only program in Lincoln at the time playing those kinds of music and the show was very well received.”

Around the same time, Dennis was also working on a local public access TV talk show, for which he had provided the theme music. The director, Doug Boyd, invited him to play some live performances of the Dayspring music for public access viewing. “I said sure, so using our same crew, we created two half hour programmes, Dennis Taylor Guitar Solos I & II. At the time, these were the only public access programs that were all music and no talk, the opposite of most of what was on the air on that channel. The shows were so popular, that they ran almost daily from 1984 to 1988. All of these things, along with downtown gigs, my yearly park concerts, various appearances at the University of Nebraska and sales at local record stores helped the original pressing of Dayspring to sell out locally in just the first few years. I couldn’t afford to repress the album, so essentially it became a limited edition. I was one of only two solo acoustic guitarists in the Lincoln and Omaha area that I know of, along with my friend Chris Griffith, who was pretty strictly a non-writer and a Leo Kottke 12-string disciple. It was pretty much me if you wanted that kind of music either for your club or park concert or wedding or whatever.”

The reception to Dayspring locally and the steady rise in stock of new age music nationally left Dennis with high hopes. “Being invited to the steady onslaught of Windham Hill and other new age artists coming to perform in Lincoln and Omaha, it seemed like the golden era for our kind of music had come. In our small group of musician, DJs, store owners and so on, we started to feel like we were definitely the happening thing in music. We thought that with the flood of national recognition, with major labels jumping on the bandwagon and signing new age artists and the emergence of the new age Grammy and even our local rock and oldies station, KLMS, switching to a new age and smooth jazz format, our time had come. That we were about to become the new rock 'n’ roll - the mainstream pop music. I became the go-to guy for downtown outdoor concerts, park concerts, the new separate quiet new age and folk area at annual Holmes Lake 4th of July event…a safe distance away from the main stage, where the classic rock acts were playing.”

As early as 1984, Dennis had intended to make a follow up to Dayspring. His idea was to expand the scope of the music – 6 & 12 string guitar pieces with the addition of fretless bass and tabla and percussion. He even started demoing new material, but the project never came to fruition. In the late 80s, he started working on a solo guitar album made up of a few new pieces and some of the Dayspring material slowed down to a meditative level. This project was abandoned when he concluded he didn’t really like the results of changing the mood of the Dayspring pieces.

Meanwhile, by the mid 80s, in order to make ends meet Dennis returned to playing in top 40 house bands churning out the classic rock anthems of the day, despite not being particularly attached to what was happening in the rock and pop worlds. In terms of his own musical interests, he had dived head-first into the new age. He explains, “I had already made my personal leap from popular music to what I liked to call un-pop music by the mid 70s.  On the electric side, jazz-fusion… Takoma and Indian and world-based acoustic fusion on the acoustic side. When the 80s hit, I discovered labels like Windham Hill, Narada and  Private Music and I jumped into the new age movement with both feet. I’d found the music that I most resonated with of all the genres I had been involved in or listened to up to then, whilst also maintaining a kinship with the funkier and less experimental end of jazz-fusion. I was in a world where new age was really starting to happen on a local level, with myself and a friend doing a new age and jazz fusion weekly radio program and my old rock band mate and childhood friend, opening a new age record and bookstore and doing a Hearts of Space type radio show on our local NPR affiliated University radio station.”

The high watermark of the new age began to recede by the start of the 90s. The major labels had oversold the movement: they had come to realise that the new age artists were generally not going to sell at the levels of major pop acts and had started dropping those artists from their labels. What remained, however, was a solid niche audience, both nationally and locally, which for a while kept Dennis and his musical fellow travellers working a few times a year at local concerts. He recalls, “In the end, the park and downtown concerts started to drop off. By a stroke of luck for my tabla playing musical partner, Dave Novak and myself, we came across the owners of the two Indian restaurants, one in Lincoln and then a second one that opened a couple years later in Omaha. Those owners loved the new age world fusion music Dave and I were doing and felt it was exactly right for the ambience of their 'classy’ dining  establishments. It ended up that we were playing every Sunday in one restaurant or the other from 1992 until the Omaha restaurant changed hands and ended live music in 2003. Then it went back to once a month at the one in Lincoln until they ended live music at the end of 2013.”

He continues: “I actually did some live recordings at the restaurant, although these were not concise album-type pieces. Our job there was to stretch out and jam for three hours and many of the pieces stretched to ten, fifteen or twenty minutes each. Also whenever it was with Dave, he was miked, which allowed all the restaurant noise to come into the recordings. We joked about Kenny the Bartender doing his famous ice dump solo at the exact moment when the music got very quiet and meditative. Or the inevitable singing baby who would go on and on and never stop!”

From the mid 90s, Dennis began pursuing a new direction in his writing and instrumentation, acquiring a keyboard synthesizer/sequencer workstation, electronic hand drums, a midi-bass guitar synth controller and an electronic wind synth. The result of this new palette of sounds was a short series of concerts of pre-programmed synthesizer pieces around 1996-1997, where he used the bass synth controller for the melody and improvised element of the performances. When an inheritance from his parents meant he was finally able to give up the top 40 house band gig at the turn of the century, Dennis began to focus on melding his older acoustic guitar and tabla based approach with the newer electronic sounds he had been experimenting with. This in turn led him into the writing of new songs, using the acoustic guitar as the centre-point, but augmented with electronics and fretless bass, using live looping and on some pieces, Dave Novak’s tablas and percussion.

In 2006, the same Doug Boyd who had directed Dennis Taylor Guitar Solos I & II was asked to produce a feature length documentary of a five year Lincoln Arts Council programme he had been filming. He turned to Dennis to write and perform the soundtrack for the film, which was premiered at Lincoln University Movie Theatre in January 2007. Stories of Home paired twelve families in Lincoln with twelve visual artists, who created artworks based on each family’s story.  Denis explains: “It involved families who had come to Lincoln from Africa, Vietnam and Mexico; a Native American family; a woman who had grown up in cattle country and was now marketing vegetarian desserts; a lesbian couple and a family that had escaped Iraq. All of them were families with a background story different to the usual home-grown families in Lincoln. I did the soundtrack with acoustic guitar, wind synth and electronic hand drum and recorded it in my home studio. The project was intended to be a model for other city’s arts councils, bringing diverse peoples together by sharing there personal stories of home and getting to know each other on a one to one basis, through art and music. It was a project I am incredibly proud to have been a part of.”

Dennis admits he was getting ready to call time on the more complex approach he had been taking to music making. “Around 2011-2012, I got the strong urge to quit doing the new set up. There was always a lot of preparation involved. I constantly felt like mission control - time to push this button, time to step on this pedal, time to switch to this instrument. I decided to just go back to where I started – live acoustic guitar, with or without Dave on tabla and percussion, as the occasion required. It was so relaxing, after all that experimentation and brain work, to just be able to float away in the sound of the acoustic guitar for the evening. And although people liked the new music, some of the fans and friends from the Dayspring era used to say 'That’s really nice, but do you still play the guitar?’ Or in the guitar and looping era, 'Do you still play any of the old guitar songs?’ Don’t get me wrong. A lot of people loved the combination of the guitar and looped instruments - it was not all that electronic. The wind synth was mainly used for melodies and improvisations, with very close to real sounding flute, sax, oboe and cello samples and the electronic hand drums were mainly used to get ethnic drum and percussion sounds. The Handsonic drum pads - essentially advanced steering wheel tapping - gave me access to nearly 600 wind and drums samples, without having to spend the many years Dave had spent learning real tabla technique. With all the sounds I wanted, several lifetimes of learning would have been needed to learn the real instrumental techniques for each instrument. Anyway, I eventually put those aside, except for the rare occasion, and went back to the simplicity of getting lost in the sound of the acoustic guitar.”

With Dennis rediscovering his solo guitar approach of thirty years before, the series of fortunate events leading to the reissue of Dayspring were as serendipitous as any new age musician worth his salt could desire. Record collector Michael Klausman found an old vinyl copy of the album in a record store in Denver and loved it. Dennis takes up the story: “I had no idea Dayspring had travelled out of state, other than to friends and family. Michael contacted me via Facebook for permission to post about it and use some of the Soundcloud clips I’d put up the previous year for the 30th Anniversary of its release. He told some friends about the album, who told some more friends, who brought it the attention of Kyle Fosburgh, guitarist and owner of Grass-Tops Recording in Minneapolis. Just two days after Michael posted about the record, Kyle contacted me wanting to know if I would be interested in having him release the album on CD. That happened the last week in July 2014 and it has now been reissued in a new deluxe package, remastered from the 1981 master tapes in high-resolution digital for CD and download. The tapes had been stored in my closet, sealed in vinyl bags, since 1981! The album was released on March 3rd this year. It really is a miracle rediscovery for me and my music.”

He continues, “Coincidently, my friend Benjy, from Lincoln group The Millions, messaged me that his nephew in Brooklyn was a big fan of my record and he knew someone there who would be interested in reissuing it! What a weekend! I had already started negotiations with Kyle at Grass-Tops and was very happy with what we were working out, so I had to say to Benjy, 'Man, had you told me this a few days ago, I would been on my knees bowing to you for such incredible news, but as it is, I’m already in negotiations to do just that with a company in Minneapolis, so I’m going to have go with that offer.’ Benjy was cool with that and very happy for me.”

It seems the relationship with Grass-Tops is far from over. “Nothing is set in stone, but Kyle and I have discussed the possibility of making a new record. At the time it we discussed it, we were both pretty excited about doing the simplest thing first - a solo guitar follow-up to Dayspring. It would focus more on the quieter, newer pieces I’ve written since then, and would tentatively be entitled Nightfall. Dayspring was a brighter, daytime type of record – Nightfall would be its late evening companion. There are no solid plans as yet, but what swayed me towards a solo guitar album, after all these years of promising a new record, was a combination of my recent rediscovery of the joys of the solo guitar as a complete entity in itself and the chance to give the fans what I’ve been promising them since Dayspring came out - more of the same thing they came for in the first place.”

He adds, “We’ve also had lots of requests from our vinyl-oriented fans for a new vinyl edition of Dayspring. There is also the possibly a DVD of my two half-hour solo guitar concerts that I taped for access television back in 1983-84, Dennis Taylor - Guitar Solos I & II: Music from the Dayspring Album. Kyle has copies of those shows, which I transferred to DVD from the old, almost gone, big videotape masters 10 years ago with great fragile babying of the old tapes. With weeks of meticulous work the shows were saved pretty much intact, with good quality video and decent quality sound. Anyway, these are all tentative future plans at this time.”

Dennis has given some thought to the place where Dayspring sits in his musical journey. “It’s an odd time trip for me, listening to this record by this 28 year old guy, thirty some years ago.  I’ve noticed that my writing style hasn’t really changed that much over the years – melodically and harmonically, at least. I’ve changed more rhythmically - away from the 4/4 double-thumbing style of Fahey and Kottke and more towards the 6/8 ambient, floating style of classical North Indian music or the softer, jazzier styles of Ralph Towner, Pat Metheny and the European ECM jazz guys. The Windham Hill/new age guitar styles of Will Ackerman, Alex de Grassi and Michael Hedges had an impact on me, too. Dayspring was actually sort of a transitional record for me. The older songs were more in that traditional, folky style and the new songs were more influenced by Windham Hill guitarists, acoustic fusion like Oregon, Shakti and Ancient Future and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.”

Reflecting back on his life in music so far, Dennis is contented with how things have turned out. “I never really tried for the big time with the record or with my career. From my road band days, I didn’t particularly like endless driving and staying in big cities. I was much more comfortable at home, working on a local level where I actually knew the people who loved and appreciated the music and were happy to come see me play and buy my record at a coffeehouse or a restaurant or a park concert. I really don’t think it gets any better than that. The artist and the listener on a real person, one-to-one basis. That’s really what the music is all about to me - that one-to-one communication. I’ve said before, but music cuts through all the crap and brings people together in a meaningful way. And it’s so much easier and enjoyable for all involved when you can do that on a small, personal level.”

He emphasises his perspective with an example. “In 1973, at our local auditorium, opening for Fleetwood Mac and Wishbone Ash, I sat on that big stage, the stage where I had seen most of my heroes perform, the stage that was my childhood dream to play a big-time concert on. I sat on that stage and when the lights went down, all I could see of the 3,000 people out there were the few that were hanging on the stage and all I could hear was the sound of my own voice and guitar whooshing through the huge auditorium. It was the most isolated sensation I had ever felt in my life, as if I was on some faraway planet playing into an empty void in space. It was a once in a lifetime experience that I���ll always remember fondly and a childhood dream come true, but give me the small audience and the personal sharing of the music every time. I knew that after that first night - and I was only twenty years old then. Forty years have gone by and I’ve never regretted not trying to go big-time once. Up close and personal - that’s what sharing music is all about.”

A big thank you to Dennis Taylor for the time, energy and enthusiasm he put into this interview. Dayspring is available now from Grass-Tops Recording.

[zwei-the-penguin-with-a-pen]

‘Hohoemi No Bakudan (Smile Bomb)’

Sun was beyond excited for this audition. His drumming had improved by volumes, and his singing voice wasn't the worst. Maybe he would make it and this band would be the biggest sound in Mistral. Scarlet was a pretty great singer and Sage's guitar playing was incredible.

The audition was tomorrow, and Sun wanted to make certain he would ace it. He bashed away at his drums, kicking and snapping in time with the music pouring out of his earpiece.

"SUN!!!" His roommate Blake yelled, startling him. He stopped his beat and paused his music. "I know your audition is tomorrow, but I seriously need sleep. I hope you get it." She encouraged. Blake sure did look cute in her pajamas.

"Sure. Sorry, I know it's loud."

"It's fine, dude." Sun smiled softly at her remark. He really liked Blake, but he wasn't sure if he liked her romantically. He knew she preferred women, but the two of them had shared some snuggles here and there. Could snuggles be platonic? Sun figured they could be.

Besides, as cute as Blake was, Sun liked guys a bit more than he liked girls. There was this beautiful boy with bright blue hair that Sun had met at a coffeehouse, and Sun was in love with him. If he got the spot in the band, he would ask the boy out.

"So, did you ever work up the nerve to ask that boy out? What was his name again... Jupiter?" Blake asked, smirking at her roommate. He whipped his yellow tail around as he blushed brightly.

"Neptune, according to his nametag. And no, but when I get this spot in the band I'm totally gonna impress him! He'll be falling all over himself to date me!" Sun cheered, Blake laughing in his face. "You'll see! Man, I hope he's a bottom..."

"He's got pretty loud bottom energy, but who knows?" Blake mused. Sun made a curious face at her.

"What do you know about 'bottom energy'? Aren't you a top?"

"I usually do the pegging, yeah, but I'm a verse. I will bottom for certain women. Like, AZ could definitely peg me."

"AZ is the most famous model in Remnant. She will probably never know you exist." Sun rolled his eyes at Blake. She scoffed at him.

"She would love me so hard! You don't even know!" She retorted. Sun could only laugh at her.

"Aren't you going to sleep?" He jabbed with a smirk. He stood up to hug Blake goodnight.

"Good luck tomorrow. Hopefully, you'll come back with a band AND a man!" She joked, quickly hopping away before he crushed her with his huge abs.

\/\/\/\/\/

He walked up to Scarlet's door and knocked loudly, as he could hear guitar and bass noises through the wall. Hauling his drums up a flight of stairs was a pain, but he didn't have that many drums. He kept a small setup so he could be ready quickly. The door opened, and a gigantic dude with green hair and killer abs appeared.

"Hey, Sage! Am I the last one to show up?"

"Well, we've already turned down two other drummers, and a couple of the others canceled. So yeah, looks like you're our last audition. Scarlet ran to the corner store for a soda or something." Sage answered, his thick baritone ringing through the place. "Set up wherever you like. We'll get right to it when he gets back." At that, Sun began setting up his drums. He tuned them with the knobs sprawled across the shells, testing the heads' tuning by hitting them.

"Sure wish Scarlet would hurry up. I have... things... to do..." A new voice spoke, trailing off just before Sun looked up. There in front of him was the boy of his dreams. "Can you drum with your tail?" The beautiful boy with the blue hair asked him. Sun made a slow beat and slowly increased his speed, all the while tapping a cymbal with his tail. "That's so incredible!" Neptune said. Sun could see stars in his eyes.

"Man, I was gonna try and impress you when I got this gig! I didn't know you were in the band too!" He told Neptune. The other boy blushed at the comment.

"Well, your drumming impressed me. Maybe we should have coffee sometime? Just... NOT where I work. Their coffee is trash." Neptune suggested. There were stars in Sun's eyes now.

"I'd really love that!" He replied, almost in a cheer.

"Aww, that's so cute it's stupid!" Scarlet announced as he appeared through the door. He planted a soft kiss on Sage's chest, too short to reach his face right this second. "So you say you've got drums and a good voice. Let's hear it, shall we?"

Sun thought for a second before making a beat. He crafted some variations over it, and Sage jumped in with his guitar. Neptune's bass came next, and Scarlet did a bit of vocalizing. Sun grinned at how they played together.

"Yep, definitely some good drums. How about those pipes?" Scarlet asked again. Sun took a deep breath and sang the first lyric that came to his mind.

You say I would make a better liar

And never face the music when it's dire

And I breathe disaster, ever after

Don't pull away from me now!

Don't you move! Yeah, just stay where you are, just for now

I could be your perfect disaster!

You could be my ever after!

Sun finished singing and took a big breath. He looked at the members of the band, and the three of them stared at him with their jaws open wide.

"The spot is yours if you want it." Scarlet and Sage told him. "And we'll even let you keep Neptune if you like." They joked. Sun nodded excitedly.

"I definitely want the gig, and I wouldn't mind the dude either..." Sun said with a cheeky grin. Neptune's eyes turned to hearts at that.

"So yeah, how about that coffee?" Neptune mused.

\/\/\/\/\/

 After their coffee and a dinner date, Sun and Neptune made it official. The band got along pretty well, but Sage wanted to find another guitarist. Sun recommended his roommate Blake, and she fit in perfectly with their sound.

When they finally decided on a name, the band was called 'Smile Bomb', after one of Sage's most favorite songs.

\/\/\/\/\/

\/\/\/\/\/

\/\/\/\/\/

Day 4: Team SSSN Member

I figured I’d write a fic about the forming of the band Smile Bomb. Plus I haven’t written a shippy fic about Sun since... too long ago.

The song Sun sings is Ever After by Marianas Trench and it jams. 

[ineedrelationshipadvice]

I have a crush on him!

Hello. I have a crush on this guy, but it’s sort of complicated, and it’s gonna need a bit a background. He is 21-22 (I’m not quite sure) and I am just under 16 (female). About a month ago, I was in a musical for my highschool, and he played in the pit as a guitarist (he was only there for one rehearsal and the three performances). The first day, I didn’t say anything to him. The second day, the same thing, except ‘thanks’ when he held the door open for me. The third day, after the performance, I went up to him and said he did a good job. He said that I did well too. Then I ran away. Later, when we were all packing up, he came up to me again and said I did great. That might have been because he didn’t think I heard him the first time. Anyways, the last day, I introduced myself, complemented his guitar playing skills, and ran away again. The cast party was right after we cleaned up a bit, and I assumed he left, so I was talking to one of my friends about him, and then he walked by. Being the idiot I am, I really awkwardly tried to act casual. Maybe ten minutes later, when I was sure he was actually gone, I went out to help one of the directors take down signs off the front doors, and since I am close friends with them, started to tell them about him. What do you know, he walks through the doors. He didn’t seem to notice, which was good. Finally, once the cast party started, he actually left. But wait, he didn’t, and he sat at the table directly across from me, facing me. I did my best not to look at him, but one of my friends who was sitting next to me said that he kept looking at me. However, I didn’t say anything to him. A few days after, I found him on instagram and followed him. He followed me back. He doesn’t like any of my posts unless its just me in the picture/video. I really do want to talk to him, but I don’t know if I should. Should I just wait and see if our paths ever cross again? I know he is in a band, and sometimes has gigs, and apparently he has played in a coffeehouse I frequent often. I know since there is a 5-6 year age gap, I should probably get over him, but I don’t really want to. I like the way thinking about him makes me feel. What should I do?

I hate to be that guy, but it’s time to be that guy. Yes, you should probably move on from this one. 

The reason I say that is not because of anything that has occurred in this little meeting with him so far. It’s just the hard facts of age. Because as a 16 year old, the likelihood that a relationship with this individual would be illegal is immensely high. So I have to do my duty and insist that you should research the laws wherever you may be, and if this relationship is not illegal, you just let this go as a nice crush. 

You guys definitely seem to get along, and ending up at the same places frequently, sharing interests, and connecting via social media, these are all generally positive signs. I can’t say that your crush is even going anywhere though, because neither of you have really talked to each other in any meaningful way, and it’s entirely possible that he’s a huge toolbag and you just don’t realize it yet because of lack of communication. 

But I can’t really go any further with this advice, unfortunately. You’re welcome to write back in with more specific questions. But my hard advice has to be that until you are of the age of consent in the place where you live, your best choice that you can make is to wait. Maybe after you age up, you can reconsider this crush and try to get in contact with him in an intimate way. But now is just unfortunately not the time. 

[kylekenehanphoto]

Leonard Patton’s attempt at a World Record!

Hi Friends!

My good friend Leonard Patton (Far Right) and his small gang of SoCal musicians got together in early May 2017 in attempt to obliterate the Guinness World Record with 70 performances in 24-hours! The current world record is 65 in a 24-hour period.

In the days leading up to Leonard’s attempt, I helped him and his wife, Jerusha, contact venues and set up the schedule of performances. I also volunteered to photograph and witness the final 4 hours, from 6AM to 10AM Wednesday, May 3. These are those pictures.

I met up with LP and the guys just after 6AM in front of the Museum of Art in historic Balboa Park. During performances, and sometimes in between, Leonard would update his social media sites with his location, so that people could come catch a show. At 6AM not many people showed up to this spot.

LP & Friends took advantage of the space in Balboa Park to catch up on venue locations and performance numbers. 

This was in front of the Botanical Garden building, on the bridge over the Reflection Pond.

The third and final spot in Balboa Park was on the Prado. At this point, several joggers started making laps. 

Leonard had already been featured on several local news channels the night prior, as well as the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune, so a few joggers running by recognized him and took some pictures of the band as they played. 

The runners who didn't recognize him got to enjoy some free entertainment as they exercised. 

The next few stops for the guys were coffee shops around the La Mesa, San Diego, CA area. Here is Public Square Coffee House. 7:00 AM and I am finally getting some coffee inside me!

The band met up with some friends here who came to enjoy the music and, maybe, some Music History!

Next on the tour of local coffee houses was Bugsy’s Brew Coffee in La Mesa. Awesome spot to play, they had a bookshelf full of books, a guitar waiting to be played and, on this morning, LIVE music!

People are starting to wake up and watch the shows. As time is winding down on their 24-hours, the excitement begins to build in the gut of my stomach!

Leonard is a pro in Audience participation!

Although there were only a few people in the shop that morning, LP got them up for an energetic rendition of “You Are my Sunshine”!

“You Are My Sunshine” was the highlight of my quick 4 hour stint with the quartet. 

Next on the Coffee House Tour: Brew Coffee Spot!

At Each spot, a friend of the musicians’ was filming video. I think he’s planning to create a video promotional for the guys!

^ Matt “The Doctor” Smith on percussion

This was the most populated venue yet -- Finally! A Real Audience!

As Time dwindled down, the second to last performance was at Kaffee Meister Coffeehouse in Santee! In this shot, Ed Kornhouser plays with Leonard Patton.

The first spot and Last spot was an important choice for this event, the brainchild of Leonard Patton. For his final performance, LP and his band played the Off Broadway LIVE stage in Santee! Leonard has been a part of a number of the theatre’s productions, including currently, “The Road to Woodstock”!

News 8 sent a reporter and cameraman to film some of the band’s final performance of the 24-hour run.

The band was quite sleepy, but still played with all their hearts!

The darkened venue allowed me the chance to play around creatively with slow shutter speeds and my 18-70mm zoom lens.

At the end of the gig, Leonard got interviewed by CBS News 8 for a local story. His goal was 70 in 24-hours, and he walked away with 55. The Guinness World Record was 65, The boys came up 10 short. 

L-R: Ed Kornhauser, Matt Smith, Mackenzie Leighton, Leonard Patton

They may not have succeeded this time, but Leonard’s determination will not be shaken. He is already thinking and planning attempt #2 in six months with all that this “Practice run” has taught him. Plus he achieved another goal through this trial run, which was to bring attention to and raise funds for, a non-profit organization to provide music education to Schools.

To read the U-T’s article on Leonard, click HERE

For the Video Reports from News Channels click HERE

Also Right HERE

More on Leonard’s Non-Profit HERE

[theo-ramsay]

theo

BASIC STATISTICS

FULL NAME: Mateo Olivier Ramsay NAME ORIGIN: Ask my mom, bruh...oh wait. NAME MEANING: “gift from God” NICKNAMES: Theo, it’s what I go by. Almost no one knows that it’s short for Mateo. NICKNAME ORIGINS: A neighbor, actually. I came home from the hospital and she couldn’t remember my name so she just kept calling me Theo. SEX: Male AGE: 24 BIRTHDAY: March 26th, 1990 PLACE OF BIRTH: Seattle, Washington ETHNICITY/NATIONALITY: Caucasian SEXUALITY: Bi, preference is men. RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single and definitely mingling. POLITICAL ALLEGIANCE: Liberal CRIMINAL RECORD: I once was hauled in for vandalism when i was but a teenager. spent one night in jail then my mom came and got him

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

HEIGHT: 6′0″ WEIGHT: 190 lbs EYE COLOR: Blue NEED GLASSES/CONTACTS? Yes HAIR COLOR: Blonde DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Jaw SCARS: I has one on my back from falling on a skateboard and a couple on my arm from a hospital visit after a terrible terrible IV experience. TATTOOS: ‘my oh my’ written on his back in a mariners logo, I has a couple others I’ve designed for Barry and Alex.  WHO DOES S/HE TAKE AFTER?: I'd like to think my mom but I got my hair color and jawline from my dad. LEFT OR RIGHT-HANDED?: Right

EVERYDAY BEHAVIORS/HABITS

ADDICTIONS: Erm. Adrenaline maybe. MORNING ROUTINE: I wake up at 5, showers and primps for the day, goes into the shop to assist his baristas during peak, does the order and calls in any mechanical problems AFTERNOON: eats lunch, paperwork mostly and other behind-the-scenes things he has to do for the shop EVENING ROUTINE: gets the evening crew set up, goes home to Barry SLEEP HABITS: I cuddle anything within arm’s reach when I’m sleeping DOES THIS CHARACTER SNORE? surprisingly, no. ANY SPECIAL TALENTS OR SKILLS? I'm an artist over a few mediums but my favorite is definitely visual. painting, spray-paint, shit like that. WHAT IS S/HE PARTICULARLY UNSKILLED AT? Math HOBBIES: I fucking love baseball and i’ll pick up his guitar every now and again when i finds time

LIFE

CURRENT ADDRESS: Manhatten, New York DOES S/HE RENT OR OWN? Rent DOES S/HE LIVE WITH ANYONE? IF SO, WHO? Barry, Alex, Boo BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF HOME: Tiny and packed with everyone’s things, it’s a   jungle in there WHAT IS THEIR BEDROOM LIKE? I share one with Barry and the bed takes most of the room. DOES S/HE DRIVE? IF SO, WHAT CAR? i’ve never learned how to drive. SPOUSE/PARTNER: ....Barry CHILDREN: None. WHAT IS THIS CHARACTER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS/HER CHILD(REN)? N/A PETS: does the toddler count? OCCUPATION: Owner of the Mudhouse which right now kind of feels like a glorified barista JOB SATISFACTION: It’s...very hard owning a small business right now. You gotta want it and god damn it, you gotta work around the clock for it. INCOME: Enough to get by. GENERAL HEALTH: I have diabetes but don’t worry ya’ll, I still have all my toes and shit, PAST HEALTH PROBLEMS, IF ANY: other than problems managing my diabetes when I was younger? not really much.

FAMILY OF ORIGIN

FATHER: Anthony Burke FATHER’S OCCUPATION: Lawyer? Accountant? I dunno man, he wears a suit I think? Whatever, go ask him. MOTHER: Cassidy Burke MOTHER’S OCCUPATION: She was an art teacher. DID THE CHARACTER’S PARENTS RAISE HIM/HER? IF NOT, WHY? My mom raised me. Why? Uh, because my dad’s a coward? ARE THE CHARACTER’S PARENTS STILL TOGETHER? IF NOT, WHY? No, because he’s a dick and she’s dead. DOES THE CHARACTER LIVE WITH HIS/HER PARENTS? No DOES THE CHARACTER HAVE SIBLINGS? No HOW HAS THIS CHARACTER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR SIBLINGS CHANGED SINCE CHILDHOOD? N/A DESCRIBE HIS/HER FAMILY LIFE AND DYNAMIC WHILE GROWING UP: I remember it being pretty fun but real tough sometimes when money got tight, my mom had me when she was 17 and essentially raised me alone but she never really let me know we were in any trouble when I was really young.  I spent a lot of it just kind of running around Seattle causing trouble with neighborhood kids. My dad sometimes would pop in and out if he was feeling guilty about leaving but surprise, he’d always leave again.

THE PAST

HOMETOWN: Seattle, WA DESCRIBE HIS/HER CHILDHOOD: I’d say it was pretty fun. EARLIEST MEMORY: I remember the opening for a news broadcast when I was toddler-age. HAPPIEST MEMORY: Not sure I have one. Not that my life is sad or anything but I think that the best is coming so I don’t wanna commit. SADDEST MEMORY: When my mom died, I would never wish that 48 hours on my worst enemy. MOST EMBARRASSING MEMORY: I bought the Mudhouse when I was off my face and I straight-up forgot for like, a week. MOST IMPORTANT EVENT IN THE CHARACTER’S LIFE THAT STILL AFFECTS HIM/HER AND WHY/HOW: Once I was on the plane to Florida after my mom’s funeral, I kinda knew that it was like, the start of a new life. It was a very hard 48 hours. my life in Seattle feels so far away now HOW MUCH SCHOOL DID S/HE ATTEND? DOES S/HE LIKE SCHOOL? I, um, got into NYU’s visual art program but I couldn’t afford it...never considered going back. WHAT IS THE WORST THING THIS CHARACTER HAS EVER DONE? I’d rather not say.

EMOTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

MORAL ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral FOUR TEMPERAMENTS: Choleric. SPONTANEOUS OR STRUCTURED? Spontaneous HOW HAS THIS CHARACTER MOST CHANGED FROM YOUTH? A little more focused when it’s time to be and he’s better about being honest about his emotions. HOW HAS THIS CHARACTER REMAINED THE SAME? Still incredibly impulsive and doesn’t always consider consequences. Still kinda reckless.

RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

WHO IS HIS/HER BEST FRIEND? Barry and Alex ANY SECRET ATTRACTIONS/CRUSHES: None FIRST CRUSH/ROMANTIC LOVE: Can’t remember CURRENT GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND/SPOUSE: ....BARRY! PEOPLE S/HE DISLIKES: No one, really? I don’t know man, it’s hard holding a grudge. HAS S/HE LOST TOUCH WITH ANYONE SIGNIFICANT IN HIS/HER LIFE? IF SO, WHY? People move, people change. HOW MANY PEOPLE HAS S/HE DATED? DESCRIBE EACH RELATIONSHIP. Okay, FIRST OFF, we’re absolutely not doing this because I would literally be talking all fucking day. I’ve slept around a bit.

SEX/ROMANTIC LIFE

WHAT DO THEY CONSIDER TO BE A ROMANTIC DATE? Art gallery showing or a gig. Anytime I open up my art. HOW DOES A NORMAL DATE GO FOR THIS CHARACTER? Normally I just goes with someone to a bar and then fall into bed with them. Not really a dater. HOW WOULD THEY LIKE TO PROPOSE OR BE PROPOSED TO? I’d make a huge fucking deal out of it. I can be a little, as the kids say, dramatic. VIRGIN? hahahahahaha no. DESCRIBE HIS/HER SEX LIFE: Man, the man is non-stop. HOW OFTEN DOES THIS CHARACTER HAVE SEX? Once every couple of days at the absolute least. HOW LONG CAN S/HE GO WITHOUT SEX? Like a week. Or else I get cranky. HOW DOES THIS CHARACTER FEEL EMOTIONALLY AFTER SEX? Normally I try to slip out after sex but most of the time I’m just relaxed. DOES SEX PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN HIS/HER RELATIONSHIP? Not as much as I thought. TOP OR BOTTOM? Flexible. Most times I’m with dudes I like being a bottom. DOMINANT OR SUBMISSIVE? I find myself being more submissive lately. WHAT WAS HIS/HER FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE? IS IT A POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE MEMORY? It was painfully average. HAVE THEY EVER IMPREGNATED SOMEONE, OR BEEN IMPREGNATED? Not that I...know of. HAVE THEY EVER HAD INTERCOURSE OR A SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE SEX IN WHICH THEY ARE NOT ATTRACTED? No.

MENTAL ATTITUDES/PERSONAL BELIEFS

MYERS BRIGGS PERSONALITY TYPE: ENFP ANY PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES?  ENNEAGRAM: #7 - The Enthusiast KNOWN LANGUAGES: English SELF-CONFIDENCE: I’m the hottest piece of ass in any room and I damn well know it. OPTIMIST OR PESSIMIST? Can be a little pessimistic...is there a word for kinda both? EXTROVERT OR INTROVERT? Extrovert. EMOTIONAL OR LOGICAL? Very emotional. PATIENT OR IMPATIENT? Impatient. COMPASSIONATE OR SELF-INVOLVED? Self-involved. WHAT DOES S/HE LIKE MOST ABOUT HIM/HERSELF? Confidence. WHAT DOES S/HE LIKE LEAST ABOUT HIM/HERSELF? Recklessness. WHOM DOES S/HE REALLY LOVE BEST? Barry and Alex. WHAT IS HIS/HER GREATEST FEAR? Becoming nothing. CHARACTER’S GREATEST STRENGTH: My confidence and ability to handle situations as they come. CHARACTER’S GREATEST FLAW/WEAKNESS: I’m so all-systems-go and charging forward that I don’t...consider consequences. My recklessness is my worst flaw. SEVEN VIRTUES: Diligence SEVEN SINS: Slut? BIGGEST VULNERABILITY (NONPHYSICAL): It’s very easy to get me to do things if you rile me up enough. BIGGEST REGRET: Ooh, maybe not going to college? BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Getting accepted into NYU. WHAT IS/ARE THE CHARACTER’S BIGGEST, DARKEST SECRETS? (He sometimes has suicide ideation and it’s stronger than he’d like to admit) WHO ELSE KNOWS, IF ANYONE? No one. SHORT TERM GOALS: Pay rent. LONG TERM GOALS: Have the Mudhouse survive in the economy and become something to the neighborhood. WHAT EVENT OR OCCURRENCE DOES S/HE MOST DREAD OR FEAR? Losing everything on this stupid coffeehouse. WHAT DOES S/HE ACTIVELY WORK TO GAIN, KEEP, OR PROTECT? That stupid coffeehouse. WHAT IS THIS CHARACTER’S DREAM JOB? I always wanted to be like, a real artist. But this is a cool second. RELIGION: Agnostic DOES THE CHARACTER BELIEVE IN A GOD OR GODDESS? No IS RELIGION OR SPIRITUALITY AN IMPORTANT PART OF THIS CHARACTER’S LIFE? Nah SUPERSTITION: None CHINESE ZODIAC: Horse ASTROLOGICAL ZODIAC: Aries ELEMENT: Fire

LIKES AND DISLIKES

COLOR: Royal blue FOOD: Crab DRINK: Black-eye BOOK: Ha. I don’t read. THEME SONG: I will rock out to that Orange is the New Black song for my entire life. MUSIC GENRE: Alternative PLACE: Seattle PERSON: Barry MOVIE: Trainspotters TV SHOW: Parks and Rec SUBJECT IN SCHOOL: Art ANIMAL: Cat LEAST FAVORITE ANIMAL: Goose WHERE DOES THIS CHARACTER LIKE TO HANG OUT? A blues bar by where we live. WHERE IS THIS CHARACTER’S DREAM PLACE TO LIVE? Moving back to Seattle but only if Barry and Alex can come with. WHAT SORTS OF BOOKS ARE MOST LIKELY TO BE FOUND ON THEIR SHELVES? Ha. MODE OF TRANSPORTATION: Transit. SEASON: Fall. HOLIDAY: That month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is cool. FLOWER: Erm. Ones that smell nice? POSSESSION: I still have a baseball jersey that belonged to my mom and it’s literally the last thing I have of her.