HISTORY

Since I was eight, I had been begging my parents for a guitar. My dad played his all the time, and I couldn't wait to learn how to play like him. But the only answer I would receive when I asked was, "Wait until you're 12". It was a long wait. I did eventually reach the age of 12, and my big present was indeed a guitar, an 6-string acoustic Odessa. Having rarely even held dad's guitar, a hand-made Gibson Southern Jumbo (circa. 1967), I didn't have the first clue what to do with it. So I began learning, and even took lessons from a guy named Tom Tussing, a 20 year-old who taught me a lot of great songs that I had never heard. I believe the first real song I ever learned how to play was "Sweet Home Alabama". Along the way I picked up "Aqualung", "Stairway to Heaven", and a lot more. The funny thing about "Stairway" is that I had never heard of Led Zeppelin, and had no way of knowing how much they would end up influencing my later guitar playing.

As I honed my skills on guitar, I started listening to music on my own. The oldies stations held a lot of appeal for me for some reason. A lot of '50's and early '60's acts, most of which I don't even remember now. It was pretty light stuff, "bubble gum" even. By the time I was 13, though, I had been exposed to Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. The one particular song from The Who I remember hearing is "Can't Explain". I loved the sharpness of the chords, how clean the sound was. But this was all radio, and as my tastes were changing, I needed a more direct way of discovering new things. My parents' record collection was the obvious choice. They have a great collection of music, still mostly intact, even after CDs have taken over the industry. I began sifting through all their albums, picking out anything that looked somewhat interesting.

It was a day during the summer of 1988 when I discovered The Who's "Tommy". I remember picking it out because I recognized the name of the group, and was still infatuated with "Can't Explain". Interestingly, even though this was to be the most influential album of my teenage years, I ended up skipping over most of it. I was looking for a quick fix, a couple really good songs that I could record on cassette and listen to over and over. The songs that provided that for me were "Tommy Can You Hear Me", "Pinball Wizard", and "I'm Free". It was around this time that I had started teaching myself how to play along to music I liked. My lessons had ended in early '88 (and to be honest, I was quite a brat. I rarely listened to poor Mr. Tussing, and would often go into giggling spasms for no reason.) He had taught me some basic sheet music, but it didn't stay with me. Instead, I found it was much easier to simply listen to what was being played, and work it out on the guitar. Early on, I only new major and minor chords, so I probably didn't get a lot of tunes exactly as they were being played. But that skill would develop as much as my playing over the years, and is still the best way I can learn a new song.

When I entered high school, I met James Drake, who would become a very good friend. He dabbled in music himself, and was really quite good at lead guitar and piano. In a way, he indirectly influenced my lean towards playing mostly rythym guitar. He would do some nice fretwork that I simply couldn't match. I would try, but really only half-heartedly. I would play some of my things ("Pinball Wizard" was becoming my favorite to play), and he wouldn't be able to match the rythym of it. It was quickly becoming apparent to me that I was more naturally skilled at rythym playing, and indeed, simply enjoyed it more. I ended up buying an electric guitar from another friend that year, a cheap Harmony which wouldn't stay in tune. James gave me a bass amp to plug it into, and for the next four years or so, I would start playing and listening to more power-driven music. That hit its' peak in 10th grade, when I bought my very first record, AC/DC's "For Those About To Rock". To me, that was the ultimate in what hard rock should be (this was STILL before I had had very much exposure to Zeppelin); hard-driving guitar riffs, screaming vocals, and clean, pounding drums. Soon after, I finally started hearing more of Led Zeppelin, as well as Ozzy Osbourne.

In 1990, I was in the Ensemble Jazz program at school. There, I met a couple other guitarists who would end up recruiting me into their electric band called Hubcaps of Desire. We practiced a few times and played one gig at a middle school dance where the kids couldn't have been less interested. It was fun to play guitar with other people, even though at one time there were four electric guitars, all drowning out each other. Some played well, others terribly, and it only lasted a few months.

By 1991, I had become a decent guitar player. Not great by any means, but I was doing fairly faithful renditions of my favorite bands on both electric and acoustic. It was, however, still just a pastime. Art was still my main passion, what I wanted to do with my life. That summer, however, things would happen that would have an impact on me for many years. My best friend John, whom I had known since 3rd grade, lived nearby and we visited each other often. He had begun writing a lot of poetry, and one day during the summer, I had brought my Casio SK-1 keyboard over to mess around. Somehow or other, between recording our belches and playing them back in different keys, we must have actually played something that sounded interesting, because the next thing I knew, i was over at his house with my guitar. He had a stack of papers full of his poetry, and we more or less started leafing through them while I played various nonsense. Fortunately, we had the early insight to record this and most of the other sessions we did. I still have most of them, and the content ranges from insightful glimpses into how a song develops to spontaneous guitar-vocal melodies and downright lunacy that I still can barely believe we were capable of at that age.

On that very first day with my guitar, we wrote a tune called "Justin Climbed A Tree". All bar chords, a 3-minute verse-chorus tune. Functional only as a listening device, but it was enough to inspire us to do more. It may have been that same day, or the next visit when we wrote "Storybook Life". Borrowing the first couple notes from the Beatles' "Blackbird", I turned out a fairly well-developed tune, and it's still a favorite to this day. Through the rest of 1991, we would write more songs, recording occasionally, still unsure of what exactly we were going to do with any of it.

The answer came in 1992. John was infinitely more ambitious than I was, and in the spring he arranged for us to record a few of our songs as an actual demo. We met with a guy who had professional recording equipment and made a tape of some of our best songs. My playing and his vocals still weren't very refined, and it's much more evident on the clear recording we got. But it was cool to listen to it and it definitely gave John more ideas. We went to a place called Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck (they've since chopped off the 'weck') in the campus area of Ohio State University and asked if we could play during their open stage hour. They had no objections, so we did it. Our families came along, and we played to them and about 30 other people. Since we had been doing comic books together for seven years as J.R. Comics, we decided to keep using the name for our act. John's stage presence was more advanced than mine. I always have been quite shy, and it would take a few more of these type of events to get me to loosen up. But we played well, and would do a few more over the next few months.

The big event came in August 1992. We had played an open stage at Stache's (now Little Brother's), also a campus establishment, and had been well-received enough for John to ask the manager if we could have a billable gig there. Here we were, 17, not yet high school seniors, trying to get paid to play to college-age and older folks. For whatever reason, he said yes, and we were booked. But even that wasn't enough for John. He decided we needed more promotion, so he got us an interview at a local radio station that was actually housed in a building on my high school campus. The interview was taped, then played back a few days before the gig. We basically told our life story, played a few songs, and that was it. We even got an opening act (I can't remember for the life of me how that happened), a guy named Quinn Needham. Between his and our gang, there were about 50 people there. I'm not sure how many people there were outside of our own crowds, but that didn't matter. They actually payed to listen to us, and that was cool. After Needham was done, we played for about 45 minutes or so, running through around 15 numbers. My dad was cool enough to have someone videotape it for us, and it's always fun to look back on it. Overall, it was a great success, and would ultimately be the highlight of our playing together.

(for as good as John was at promoting us, he wasn't as good with numbers. We made somewhere around $130 that night, and after he gave a percentage to Needham, then split the rest between the two of us, each of us had made less than our opening act!)

Our senior year of high school was a good one musically. We developed some really interesting sounds, a few terrific songs, and were playing and recording all the time. We played at parties, an open stage at his high school, and a few other miscellaneous events. Unfortunately, upon graduating high school, I moved to Dayton, and other than playing together off and on when we had a chance to see each other, we haven't done much professionally. In fact, 1993 would be the last time I would do anything remotely serious with music until 2001. Through the years, I still played quite a bit, always writing a various tune here and there and recording it, but it had become just a pastime again. My family was first, and faced with more grownup things (marriage, babies, etc) at 19, there was simply not much room for developing my music. John, however, got together with various people and kept performing, staying active in what he obviously enjoyed. He's continued that today, and his Donner Farms site is a good example of the interesting things he's doing.

My level of interest in my own playing remained pedestrian until mid-2001, when I started playing more. With more playing naturally came more song ideas, and I began recording. I decided to record directly into my computer from an old microphone. It worked, but the sound was terrible. I didn't really like listening to it afterwards, but I was at least getting my ideas down somewhere before I forgot them. Still, I felt I was coming up with interesting things, and felt I needed to focus on it more. I received a 12-string electric/acoustic Fender for my birthday that year, and couldn't have been more thrilled. If I had needed any more to get my interest going again, that did it. Subsequently, I got a 4-track digital recorder for Christmas. The difference in recording quality was astounding, and I immediately realized there were some great possibilities. I began working feverently on my writing, finally taking the initiative to write lyrics, which I had never done much of with John. After a few months, I had enough to fill a CD, and that's what I did. I put together a 19-track compilation of songs that I had written, mostly instrumentals. I titled it "The Second Ten", because I saw it as the beginning of my second decade of creating serious music.

The album was experimental, as I had to play my regular guitar and tune it down 12 octaves in order to get a bass sound. Sometimes it worked, but I realized that if I wanted to continue being serious about this, I would need a real bass guitar. For my birthday that year, I got it. Within another 5 months, I had completed my second album, "Take It Away". The music on this album was much more refined and thoroughly developed. This time, I had written lyrics for most of the songs, and while my singing voice wasn't great, it was a good step in the right direction.

My albums mostly got playing time between family members and friends, but the encouragement I received from everyone was inspiring in itself. Especially when, in late 2002, I checked the message board on my web site, and there was a message from an unknown person, something which hadn't happened before. She had listened to my music on the site and told me how much she liked it. On top of that, she was ready to purchase a copy. I rushed it out to her, and we began talking. First about music, then about everything else. The fact that she was in North Carolina seemed cool to me because my music had reached an audience that far away.

About a year later, after meeting in person and developing our relationship, Tamara decided to move to Columbus so we could be together. It would take another two years, until the winter of 2005, for her to get here, but it was worth the wait. Incredibly, my music was the start of our relationship, and it inspires me to take this even further.

In late 2003, I received a Gibson electric guitar and an amplifier for my birthday and Christmas, respectively. With a nearly full arsenal of equipment, I was all set to begin a new album. Unfortunately, I had to take a second job for a while, so things got sidetracked. Toward the end of that mess, Kelli and I recorded our first cover album, "How Ya BOOIN'?". While we didnn't quite hit every genre, we did explore the sounds of Roger Miller, Alanis Morrisette, Dion, and Michael Jackson. There are some great moments to be found, and we were pleased with how well our first official musical collaboration went.

I finished my third solo album in January, 2005. "Under My Radar" was a lyrical contrast to "Take It Away", with biting lyrics such as, "I'm gonna tell everybody something nice but it ain't gonna be about you". Leaving the straightforward "love" songs behind (for the most part), a lot of attention was spent on more realistic situations. I also started using vocal harmonies for the first time.

I was on a roll, and didn't want to stop. Kelli and I started a second cover album, and it going great until we found ourselves discussing a new original idea. This idea had so much promise that we truncated our covers into a 6-song quickie. In fact, we changed the title from "Speakie No Talkie" to "Lost Interest". We had higher hopes for this than "How Ya BOOIN'?", but were still able to mimic The Monkees and The Who.

Work on our album was slow. It is slow. There are no estimates at any kind of release date, but it did occupy much of my time for a while. As a result, 2006 would yield no new album, after four straight years of releases. I set things back in order in early 2007 with a Who cover album called "A Quick One While You're Here". Starting from their first hit, "I Can't Explain", and finishing with "We Got A Hit", from their 2006 album. As a lifelong Who fan, this kind of project was always a given.

Immediately following its' release, work began on an update of "The Second Ten". While it had been fun to put all of my music together for the first time, it was mostly experimental. There are mistakes everywhere, and a general lack of professionalism. The result was not terrible all the time, but once I had all of my instruments and better production skills, I was dying to right what was wrong. For the next seven months, I overhauled every song. Most of them got rearranged or recorded in a different key. The result was "The Second Fifteen".

2008 may not be a very productive year. I have vowed to pay more attention to art this year, and hope to complete several serious pieces. I will record some, maybe a cover here and there, and if mine and Kelli's album gets back on track, that is worth sacrificing the art for. But we'll see.....