The first song I ever learned was Major Tom by David Bowie, which I probably couldn’t play today with a gun at my temple. Not a very hard song to learn, but not real easy. Subsequently I went through a Dylan Phase (don’t all Midwesterners with an acoustic guitar?), followed by a Minneapolis Rock phase (this was the height of Husker Du and the Replacements), followed by various other phases I forget.

The Blues Years

It’s early 1989, I’m taking a year off after my first year in college, living in Minneapolis and working in the city’s only kosher bakery. With my meager funds I get enough money together to see Buddy Guy in an unlikely venue, the Walker Art Center. Guy was probably in his fifth or sixth career resurrection, the last one before Damn Right I Got the Blues and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s patronage forever ended the need for resurrections. I’d seen LOTS of blues players before, but nobody before or since has played a show quite like that one. Guy can be lazy now that he’s famous (a ubiquitous ailment for blues royalty, but an easy one to forgive--you try playing the same song 200 nights per year for a few decades and then get cranked up for every gig), but on that particular night he was transcendent. There was no “blues guy” artifice, I still remember that he wore a pastel striped shirt, slightly baggy white pants, and Addidas kicks. Nary a bolo tie or corny hat to be found, he was just a guy from Chicago who happened to be playing blues for a living. And my word could he play. I was only moderately familiar with the blues cannon at that point, and most of my favorite players were acoustic guys like Mississippi John Hurt. Buddy Guy at that point in his career played an amazing combination of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, and Megadeth. The dynamics of the show were amazing, Guy would build up a song until his Marshall was positively roaring and then, with a wave of his hand everything stopped on a dime and his tapping foot could be heard.

Having had one of those “I want to do THAT” moments, I became much more serious about my guitar playing. The practice time and gigging peaked during a year living in Vienna, where I played and sang for a blues band called Mr. Blue. Their original singer, a Brit, had skipped town leaving them with gigs but without a singer. I met them at an open mic night at Papa’s Tapas, a blues club located within convenient stumbling distance to and from my apartment. Monday nights at Papa’s Tapas was blues jam night, they had this thing called “musiker bier” which was a half liter bottle of beer for 10 shillings, which at the time was about a dollar. The beer was pretty good too, and dollar beers for musicians are kind of like that chum slick that nature programs use when they want to film sharks--put it out and you won’t have to wait long for your quarry. In any case, one Monday at Papa’s Tapas I met the drummer for Mr. Blue, a Parisian named Thierry, apparently before too many musiker biers tripped down my gullet because he asked me to join their band. Our bassist was a drug addled Austrian named Georg who insisted in brining to small club gigs a bass rig large enough to play Giants Stadium without micing the cabs. The keyboardist was a cocktail lounge player from Hungary named George. My German was OK. Thierry spoke very good English, German, and of course French. Georg was strictly German, or something approaching it depending on his chemical intake. George spoke Hungarian and good English. Needless to say, most of our communication was in English, and George the Hungarian lounge player left pretty quickly, leaving us as a merely bilingual trio.

Including open mics and shows were I filled in or sat in, I’d guess I played 150 nights that year. Most nights I wasn’t playing we were practicing, and by the end of the year were a pretty respectable little Euro blues outfit. The last gig we played was with a borrowed bass player (Georg’s drug intake had just a teensy bit to do with that), and was an outdoor gig downtown. It was well attended and I was offered a job as a studio guitarist, two days before I was flying back to the states. How about that for timing?

DJ Food

All of those blues gigs pretty much satisfied my desire to play blues seriously ever again. I’ll still take a gig here and there to this day, but that’s mostly just to make sure my gear still works and that I can cop a decent Albert King impersonation. After Vienna, I was really drifting away from music entirely until (sorry Dad!) my girlfriend’s brother gave me a CD called Trip Hop for Jazz Junkies. I’ve always loved funk and R&B, the Meters, Isaac Hayes, the Bar-Kays, Booker T and the MGs (viva Memphis!) and such. The THFJJ CD was mostly Nimja Tune cats, DJ Food, the Sharpshooters, and so on. It was one particular track, though, by DJ Food, that blew my mind. It was called Dark Wheel and I can hum it to this day. Hearing that track was probably the second I Want To Do That musical moment in my life, right up there with Buddy Guy.

These many years later, almost seven I’d guess, I’m still pursuing musical trails that started when my love of live funk/jazz/blues met up with electronics and samplers. You can hear some of what has happened in other parts of this web site. I also started writing about computers and music, but that’s a story for another page . . .