I was born in New Haven, Connecticut and was first really exposed to Music at the age of 3 when I portrayed a jultamte (pronounced "YULE-tahm-teh": a mischievous Scandinavian Christmas elf) and performed a song in Swedish (learned phonetically, no doubt: I have often joked that I was learning to sing Swedish phonetically at just about the same time I was learning to speak English much the same way!) during
Luciafest (commemorating St. Lucia's Day: 13 December: "kinda like what St. Nicholas Day [6 December] is to Christmas? only closer!") at the Bethesda Lutheran Church in that city. This launched my vaunted career as a child singer/actor in various church and school pageants, a career which culminated in my playing the role of which I sang in the classic "Mr. Tick-Tock" (to the tune of the Christmas Carol "Deck the Halls") during the Christmas assembly at P.S. 35 on Staten Island (the most forgotten of the four? no, wait- there are FIVE!?Boroughs of New York City) while I was in the 2nd grade.
Feeling that the musical theatre could take me no further than the lofty heights which I had already summited at the tender age of 7, I turned to performing instrumental music when I was forced against my will? excuse me, enticed? into the taking of private lessons on the Clarinet in the Fall of 1965, continuing said lessons in the public school system of Madison, New Jersey- a Metro New York/Tri State suburb to which my parents brought me against my will just before my 10th birthday (it is said the paint which often peeled from my failure to achieve even a halfway-decent embouchre has still not been replaced in the three Madison schools I attended while noodling around on?one must hesitate to call it "playing"? this venerable Woodwind instrument). I reached the pinnacle of my pre-pubescent musicianship by accepting the dubious honor of being informally named "last chair Clarinet" in the highly acclaimed Madison Junior School Concert Band of the late (very late? which I, more often than not, WAS to rehearsals and concerts) 1960's, where I was compelled to take on the difficult challenge of playing 4th B-flat Clarinet in a musical aggregation where there were never more than three Clarinet parts.
I would come to pretty much hate the Clarinet (feeling that this instrument was merely a white bread and mayonnaise version of the way cooler- nay, "phat"er- Saxophones): I would have settled for playing the ultra-hip Bass Clarinet but there was already a guy playing Bass Clarinet in the MJS Band and, besides, he had an important musical skill I sadly lacked at the time: that of actually being able to play his instrument. Faced with the choice of always being left to play parts scored for Clarinet from John Cage's 4' 33" or quitting the MJS Band, I quite gleefully? pardon me, rather reluctantly? chose the latter course; after a departure in which I was required to buy everyone else "good luck and farewell" presents for their having to have put up with my presence among all the others in the Concert Band who were actually MUSICIANS, I figured I had basically cooled my deal with Music for good!
After a tortured and short-lived career as a part-time actor in a local stock company (after all, I had- by now- ruined the reputation of music alone as well as the musical theatre: why not go for the "hat trick"?!), in which I got to play such challenging roles as "BOY who forgets his lines while alone onstage", "BOY who walks into a Scene several lines too early and ends up just standing around as bewildered as his fellow actors onstage" and the extremely exciting, if not actually death-defying, part of "BOY who, with regularity, would often lose track of what he was told to do during Blocking rehearsal,
thereby causing grave consternation among the rest of the cast and crew", I figured my career in the Performing Arts was basically "toast": and I was not yet even 14 at the time! Despite this, I turned to performing rudimentary sketch comedy, regularly joining my fellow juvenile delinquents in the making of several (hopefully, by now!) long-lost cassette tapes consisting of rather sophomoric humor, assorted bathroom jokes and other such garbage cleverly disguised as humor: tapes which were recorded in basements and garages, the sewers and gutters all over our tiny suburban hamlet (actually, when one thinks about it, all good prep for the real life of an itinerant stand-up comic of my generation today!!).
In the course of these rather mind-numbing and questionable- if not bordering on the illegal- activities (all mixed up within a stint attempting to operate a pirate ShortWave radio station), I was to make a number of such comedy tapes- largely made up of parodies of long form radio programming- with a classmate of mine at Madison High School who happened to also be leading a double life as a sort of neighborhood guitar god. On one such tape, I was supposed to be playing a smarmy radio personality interviewing a rock star (played by the guitar god himself: preparing for a hoped-for future vocation, perhaps?) and I was trying to get my scene partner to "wail out" on his electric guitar when, instead, he sarcastically picked up an acoustic guitar and began playing a series of rather cheesy "cowboy chords"; not wanting just endless guitar strumming over changes as lame as these, I jumped in- singing whatever lyrics happened to come into my head. I found that I could still sing (well? sort of!) and, after we then both decided to collaborate on two musically oriented comedy tapes, a local songwriting duo legend was born!!
The local guitar god and I would end up recording 5 musical cassette tapes together in 10 months and, while it was often difficult to discern just where the comedy ended and the music really began, we soon were writing more and more serious lyrics against more and more advanced harmonic structures inside more and more complicated song forms with more and more overdubbing of tracks (or whatever would pass as "tracks" when all one can do is try as best as one can to coordinate stuff being replayed via 2 or 3 cheap cassette recorders while one is [or, in this case, two are] performing "live" in the local guitar god's bedroom [which he shared with an annoying little brother] atop the muddled sound that barely passed for backing). Within a short time, I was writing my own music (banging out simple triads and basic seventh chords on woefully out of tune pianos at the homes of various friends) to my own lyrics (now created from scratch rather than simply being recycled poetry which had once been rejected for publication in the Madison Junior School newspaper or- even worse yet- totally adlibbed, as in our first collaboration); these "rather lame excuses for Rock songs" of my high school days were, Lord only knows how, to become the fertile germs of a rekindled interest in Music.
Even a failed attempt at becoming a front man for a Rock band (in which my erstwhile guitar god partner was to have been the lead guitarist: the only way I would have ever been considered for THAT assignment in those days would have been through just such a connection!) did not deter me from searching for my muse. Discovering, completely by accident, that Madison High School actually offered a course in Music Theory while, at the same time (my Senior year) and even more by accident, taking up the Blues Harmonica (after failed attempts to learn both Guitar and Bass) through which, while beginning to compose and arrange my own Blues compositions (though admittedly pedantic and formulaic ones at first), I began to seriously contemplate (to the even yet continuing horror of my parents) the possibility of my studying Music as my major in college.
In the Spring going into the Summer of 1974, those halcyon months leading up to my matriculation at Boston University, something snapped inside me and I suddenly began to write deep, plaintive and intense Blues material that scared even myself!: I had now finally discovered my muse and, while I have since dabbled- as I continue to do at present- in almost every other musical genre, I remain- first and foremost- a Bluesman to this very day!! Almost four years after first setting foot on the B.U. campus- and well after my mother had fully awakened from that coma my pronunciamento that I would be studying Music while attending college had first put her in- I received my bachelor's degree in Music (cum laude) from B.U.'s College of Liberal Arts (now the College of Arts and Sciences) and prepared to take my rightful yet anonymous place among the teeming millions who were, along with me that Summer of 1978, first entering the lowest echelons of a great service economy. The rest of my story as musician, composer, arranger and overall joie de vivre can be found elsewhere via the links on this website: start, for example, with these MUSIC SELECTIONS or read MY REAL BIOGRAPHICAL INFO.