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My Story
It all started in The Church Of St. Margaret of Scotland in Queens, NY – a few blocks away from Shea Stadium and the site of the ’64 World’s Fair. The first music I remember hearing was my mother playing organ in the Episcopal Church, and lot of the chord progressions I use come from the hymnal, not by a conscious choice, just by accident. Most of this stuff happens by accident, that’s the beauty of it. The incense they used in the church was hell, but in kindergarten I was blown away by the organ, which had a bunch of keyboards stacked on top of each other. You can see this fixation I have with multiple keyboards in the videos from Jiggs’ Corner Music Saloon – I gotta have 2 of them. You don’t really need them with today’s synthesizer technology, but Bach used them and I played a lot of Bach on church organs. Plus, I’m Noah, I like 2 of everything, for security. The show must go on.
We moved to Montclair, NJ, and my big brother Joe (who wound up in the Eagles by way of the James Gang and Barnstorm) came home from high school to dinner one night and explained that we could see where his life was going. It was down at the Wellmont Theatre in a movie called A Hard Day’s night. So thanks to my mom and my big brother I wound up in a theatre on Bloomfield Avenue at 9PM, a place I would not normally have been at the age of 8. It changed my life. Changed a lot of lives.
Later on Joe had a band in high school, and they played at the New York World’s Fair, a few blocks from where the used to live. The New Jersey Pavilion was a series of decks connected by walkways over water. The group started playing at sunset, there were ten people there including the family, and by the time they stopped playing it was dark and there were people around us as far as the eye could see. I checked this with Joe last time we ate dinner together with the family in the city, and I wanted to know whether I made it up, and he said yeah, it did happen that way. When I saw it happen in '64, I decided I wanted to do that some day. Sometimes I pull it off, now.
I took 5 years of classical piano, memorized Beethoven Sonatas, and figured out all of Elton John’s stuff by ear. My mother could listen to it once and play it, so there was no getting around the fact that it could be done. She played at night, and we heard it and picked it up by osmosis, my two brothers and I. Reading music helped me sight-read The Beatles Complete from the sheet music, which was interesting when later on my son started playing bass and Joe advised him at dinner one night “Play every Beatles song ever written. Start there.”
I wasn’t too sure if I was any good, but one night somewhere in the 70's I had a few beers and talked my way past the security at Avery Fisher Music Hall in Lincoln Center in New York, and wound up playing on the Steinway upright in the dressing room backstage with Dan Fogelberg. Joe had just produced his album Souvenirs, and I figured he was humoring me when he said “Play a song.” But then he played one of his, pointing out the part he ripped off from Edvard Grieg, and then asked me for another one. We alternated songs for about an hour until he had to go onstage, and he said “You should be opening for me.” Whenever I had doubts, that memory was always there.
Through my ex-wife Susan I met Bob Gonzo in 1994, who finally got me on stage. He heard a tape I played him and said “What are you doing January 20th?” I said that night was free, but I could use a guitar player. He said James O’Malley was free that night, so I sent Pancakes (as he’s called) a tape. I offered to rehearse, but he said he knew the stuff from the tape. Turned out we were in front of 250 people that night, on live cable with 3 cameras in 3 states, and we still have the videotape. Pancakes was amazing, and he’s on the video that’s on the website. He’s also on the album, there's a sample cut of his heavy-metal work on the Music page. I’m interviewed on Gonzo’s comedy show, and we all hang regularly.
My son David bought me Protools, I put the live sound we used in the bar on the hard drive, and the album’s almost done. Joe was able to add guitar to the digital tracks I'd done at home and mail me CD’s of the stuff he’s done, so we met in Cyberspace without anybody having to fly across the country. The thing speaks for itself. I spent a lot of time raising my son David (who shot the video and programmed the website and taught me Protools after he learned it) and playing minimal amounts of rock and roll for quite a while there, but a couple of years ago I started playing out.
That night at the Wellmont Theare seeing the Beatles, and that night at the ’64 World’s Fair seeing my brother’s high school band turned into a song called Blues For Don Juan, which will probably make it onto the second album. It’s about my uncle, who for years did as a philosophy teacher what we’ve managed to do with music…
And if we sit on the front porch long enough
In the silence filled with sound
We will reach out and touch something way deep down
And the people will gather round
And we’ll lay it all out there on the line
That turns into a figure eight
We’ll have something to say as well as something to show
And we’ll surrender to our fate
There will be nothing left but the truth and the love
And the sun shining through the dawn
For a moment and the moment will be enough
When I break out my axe
And sing the blues for Don Juan
It’s that way every time we play. It never fails, in a world where the bottom usually drops out right after the roof falls in. Rock and roll is guaranteed.
More later,