Bio

I was born to the tough streets of Chicago's South Side. While my parents did their best to keep my nose clean, I nevertheless did some foolish things, some childish things. Eventually, the folks decided to seek a fresh start in the West, so they loaded up me and my sisters and set out for Colorado. I was just one year old at the time, but legend has it that I walked most of the way, a big feat for little feet.

Colorado Springs, with its mountain vistas and peaceful neighborhoods, at first seemed a bit sedate to a street-wise city kid like me, but the fine teachers in the Cheyenne Mountain school system succeeded in settling me down and teaching me something about the three R's, of which, I soon discovered while studying the reading part, only one actually started with an R. The roots of the rest of my life took hold during my school years: I wrote my first short stories (most of which, thankfully, didn't survive), I experimented with my first photography, and I put down my first multi-track recordings, which made up in originality what they lacked in sound quality. I was a lonely, cynical, bitter lad, for reasons which are hard to recall now, other than the usual youthful woes, mostly centering around girlfriends, real and imaginary. I survived those years mostly through two qualities which have served me in good stead ever since: a durable if biting sense of humor and an inexplicable willingness to perservere in the face of blatant absurdity.

Having been part of an award-winning percussion ensemble in the high school concert band, I got my first taste of life as a professional musician when the band for which I drummed, called Active Transport, played at a local dive (long since gone) called the 119 Tap Room. The place had a sign over the door that read, in large letters, "The Ugliest Girls, The Warmest Beer, And The Lousiest Music In Town," which took truth-in-advertising to a startlingly honest new level. We certainly did our part in providing the lousiest music, but no one threw anything at us harder than a request for "The Tennessee Waltz," and we got out of the place not much richer or wiser, but alive.

The band didn't survive the transition to college, however. I relocated to Boulder, Colorado, but when I discovered that I once again would have to lug a drum around during halftime at the football games, I dropped the music major and joined the spectators. I spent my first couple of years at C. U. searching for direction, maintaining my student deferment, and pursuing an informal major in Counterculture Studies. Music didn't disappear, of course. One of my Active Transport buddies and I recorded a very strange soundtrack for a very strange student film starring disrobed and dismembered mannikins. I also learned my first rudimentary guitar chords and started writing songs, along with epic poem diatribes against all the injustices of the world. Not all of my anger and bitterness was posturing, however: during this time I lost my kid brother in a climbing accident, an event that, considerably transformed, eventually worked its way into my first novel.

In my junior year my student deferment became irrelevant with the advent of the draft lottery. In a rare stroke of good fortune, my number came up a large one. I seriously considered dropping out of college, but decided to finish what I had started. With my motivation now to succeed, rather than simply to get by, I began to excel at my studies, settling on a major in biology (since I wanted to learn as much as I could about life) and a minor in English Literature (since I wanted to tell others what I had learned). I graduated with honors in 1972.

The end of my formal education didn't immediately answer the question of what to do with the rest of my life. I made a brief, unsuccessful foray into the music scene in San Francisco, but quickly decided to try to become a real person with a real job. I moved back to Colorado Springs, got a job as a landscaper, and married my girlfriend of long standing. But part of the profits from the landscaping went into my first multi-track tape recorder, an old Teac two-track reel-to-reel, and my first guitar, a semi-hollow-body Hagstrom. Those first recordings of original material didn't sound like much, but I was hooked. When I got an offer through my father, himself a professional musician, for a steady house gig at a local restaurant, playing standards and pop songs, I jumped at the chance, getting rid of, in quick succession, the landscaping business I had started, my old VW bus, and my marriage.

The gig didn't last long, of course, but it led me to an offer to drum for a local Top-40/Rock band called Tight Squeeze. I soon found myself not only drumming and singing, but also fronting the band, doing the promo, and even charting out the new songs. The band went through the usual changes in direction and personnel before finally disintegrating a couple of years later, but I had proven to myself I could earn a living (of sorts) playing music. The sudden upsurge of country music in the early 1980s led me to join another house band, this one called Colorado Gold. I became not only the principal front man and a multi-instrumentalist, I even became entertainment director for the nightclub. But the band eventually went the way of all bands, so, after a brief stint with another country band, I set out as a solo act.

At first, I thought I would just do a sit-on-a-stool-and-strum-my-guitar act, but people kept requesting rock songs and dance material that required some sort of rhythm section. Too broke to buy a drum machine, I decided to record actual drum parts and overdub bass parts, playing along with the tapes on stage. With the purchase of a versatile keyboard, I found myself becoming an entire band. I upgraded to four- and then eight-track recording and even converted to a drum machine. After traveling quite a bit, I relocated to Seattle, where I thought there would be plenty of local gigs to keep me busy while I continued to work in the studio.

My years in Seattle didn't prove as financially successful as I had hoped, but I brought to fruition some of the seeds I'd planted over the years in music, photography, and writing. For the first time, I had my own full-sized studio in which to set up my gear, enabling me to record drum parts (and rerecord drum machine parts), as well as overlay many different tracks of instruments and vocals. I also began a collaboration that continues to this day with a world-renowned educator from the University of Washington named Carol Cummings, setting her educational children's books to music. I also upgraded to a 35mm SLR camera and began taking better pictures during my various road trips. And I not only continued to write, finishing several short stories and even a novellette, I also completed a writing course with Long Ridge Writer's Group.

But the lack of financial success and personal involvement in Seattle finally prompted me to return to Colorado, enabling me to lower my living expenses while continuing to pursue what some refer to as my "three-headed monster." I've finished two more children's books for Carol Cummings, as well as collecting and packaging three CDs of my own original songs and arrangements. I've done promotional photography, graphic design, and website creation for a Colorado Springs duo called The Mitguards. I've completed two novels, revised and reprinted my short stories, and acquired new, much more powerful computer and digital photography equipment. I've had several of my photographs published in a recent edition of the BSCS Biology textbook, used by schools around the world. The development of this Sonuvabish website will undoubtedly bring new and interesting challenges as well. Who knows where the road leads from here?