My mother had a viola – I’ll start there.
At the San Gregorio General Store
She played piano a little haltingly, reading sonatas. She had arthritic fingers and a solid octave plus reach. She never touched the viola. Dad could play a symphony on the keyboard, all by ear. He’d fidget and fluster his way through and invented the transitions to get back to the theme. Heavier stuff, like Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner. But his love was mid-20th century avant-garde: Luciano Berio, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Roger Sessions.
Sessions once said,
But I digress. I learned mom and dad made recordings with found instruments and God knows what else at an NYC apartment. This was the late ‘50s, and I admired them. By 1960, my nighttime nanny was WQXR.
I resolved to play Mom’s viola, but I was too small. I went to Rahway Conservatory when I was about 4 and took music theory. I’m not sure for how long. I took up piano at some point but was antsy. Dad winging the symphonies by ear seemed a lot more fun than going over and over on the scales.
By 4th grade I was able to take violin lessons – not viola. I had to play the violin until the following year then finally got to lug out mom’s prize, the 16” heavy wood German viola I still have today. I am one of the many that never really applied myself. I was content to play well enough to get the notes through junior and into senior high school. But there was an inspiring band leader (Mr. Toland) that teamed with a prima donna choral director (Mr. Phinney) to put on the high school musical every year. I did pit orchestra on viola for three or four years in the early 70’s and it was a gas, from first rehearsal all the way through the last cast party! I was “good enough” then to qualify for the regional Lexington Youth Orchestra where we played the Egmont Overture. I was not “good enough” for District or All-State.
Gradually I begin to aspire to the youth culture of the day. Frank Zappa began sounding like Dad’s freaky twelve-tone stuff (he liked Zappa – but he couldn’t tolerate the formularized neo-romantic “schlock” that dominated the airwaves … I think we met half-way with the Beatles). Friends from band and orchestra begin picking up guitars and raising a ruckus.
My first band was called Link, and it cemented around a particularly talented family of musicians, the Bryans, plus my friend Vern Ellis on bass and some others. My instrument was … the oscilloscope! With my help, Dad had fashioned something from tubes with an audio generator and a potentiometer. It was plugged into a speaker and was very hard to control. But it sounded great on “Robbie’s Rocket Roll”, Jamie Bryan’s piece. I have a recording of it, somewhere. Other friends, older kids mainly, were writing folk songs and boy did I look up to them! This was 1973, 1974. We had a venue called Coffeehouse at the Baptist Church where we tried to stay clear of the youth leader so as to enjoy ourselves. In this milieu, I pounded out “Astroplane” on the keyboard. And picked up a guitar for the first time.
Soon after, I had my only guitar lesson. Lyle Shaeffer was my sister’s guitar teacher (his mom Eva was my viola teacher) One day Amy was sick, and Mom asked Lyle if I could have the lesson instead. Nothing special there, but he gave me charts of “Season of the Sun” and “Ode to Billy Joe” and the stuff I didn’t care for. But at least I had a lesson.
Now its 1975 and I am armed with both viola and a guitar, well, one for each arm. and off to college! It seemed to me in college you did music if you were serious about it and otherwise did other stuff. I had not gotten into Oberlin. I wasn’t going to do music at Antioch. But I met some people that played Earl Scruggs music and I learned to jam with the viola a little. Other guitar players were better, so I didn’t play that much. I made friends with some in the Antioch Chorus but never joined myself. I didn’t rub shoulders much with the orchestral types – maybe there weren’t any at Antioch?
I don’t remember much about my music during the next few years, although some of my experiences sure sparked songs down the line, particularly while on Antioch Co-op. I spent some time in a geodesic dome-home in the Catskill Mountains of New York; I worked for the State Tax Board in California.
My Astroplane is falling, I’ve used up all my gas.
I left Antioch for UC at Santa Cruz. A lot happened musically. A dorm mate Rick couldn’t play anything but wanted to conduct, so I bought the full 3rd Brandenburg score, and he conducted a rag tag bunch of players we assembled for the occasion – at half speed. I met Ronald Kaplan, a singer-guitar player friend of my roommate Greg Otero’s. Both are lifelong friends. We jammed and played the Renaissance Café in Santa Cruz. Songs filled the air. By then I had written a few.
I returned to Boston in 1978 for the summer and that’s when I partnered with my good friend Al Brodie to produce my first album “Colour” – my only album of the 20th century. A full 13 songs, recorded with a 4-track reel-to-reel machine with guitars, piano, drums, various percussion, sound effects, bass, and flute. “Astroplane” featured planes we recorded at Logan airport, “Song For South Africa” the quintessential protest song. There was a tribute to my idol David Byrne, “Blacklight”, a retrospect for my first college girl Betsy, “Lady in White”. And more. I was inspired to codify the songs to staves and add some more tunes in a songwriting class that fall at Santa Cruz. Graduation was lurking.
Ronald and I joined Greg in Los Angeles where we “did our ‘60s in the ‘80s” and assembled ourselves briefly into “O and the Aviators” and out came, “LA Reggae” and another allegory about our life in Encino. Ronald and I polished up our act and played several places – including in the pool at the Valley Country Club Apartments. We got paid to play at the Café 4 Oaks in Beverly Glen; some Hollywood types meanwhile breakfasted. I wrote “Who Knows What to Do”, and “Dying in Space”.
There was angst in the air. Reaching out I answered an ad for a viola player in the newspaper, maybe the LA Weekly. He lived way out on Vermont Ave at the time, and his name was Lou Ragland, of Hot Chocolate, an associate of Edwin Starr. Evidently, he liked what he heard as I joined the “Lou Ragland Band,” and we played his tunes for a while as the house band at the club Memory Lane in South Central Los Angeles. Lou passed in 2020.
I met Jingles, the troubadour of Santa Monica and joined a small combo in San Pedro. But Los Angeles was smog infested in 1982, and I left north. Thus began an interminable musical dry spell. I focused on my day job and launching a family.
In the 1990s, I crept back into the music, playing viola for the “Coastside Community Orchestra” under Kay Raney for one or two seasons. I played better at the pops because it was not too technically demanding.
Although I got through a couple seasons, I found myself dropping out more than once as I was not playing well enough for myself. My time went more towards career and family than practice. And there were no new songs.
The early 2000s saw pain and strain in the family and music took a back seat once again. When dad passed in 2005, we assembled a quartet of brother Carl, sister Amy, cellist Nathan Kimball and I to perform John Cage’s 4’33” at the hometown memorial in Bedford, MA. You know, where the score instructs the performers not to play their instruments.
Meanwhile I was making friends with local musicians. Julie Jones and Tom Sullivan hosted sing-alongs, and I met and jammed with Jack Sparks, John Hall, and others. I had met Eric Shackleford at the Unitarian Church of San Francisco and joined a Folk Orchestra and played some Sundays.
Eric led me to the Union Bugs, an offshoot from the SF Labor Chorus. From 2014 on until COVID, the Union Bugs played gigs all over: benefits for Rocket Dog Rescue, at Bird & Becket Books, at Labor Fest, at the Castro Theater welcoming Emmy Lou Harris.
Meanwhile, there were periodic pickup bands, “Jack and Friends”, and we had a home venue – the Chit Chat Café. But I still did not write. And somewhere along the way I switched to the lighter (and easier to lug around) violin, for the most part.
I attended the SF Folk Fest, I believe, in 2014 and chanced to meet a Mr. Thomas Radwick with whom I had lunch. But he turned up again in 2015 at the perpetual jam next door that had been going on at Frank’s house for most of forever. Thom (never Tom) wore a hat, ostensibly to cover his balding head. He was different from the other jammers in ways I can’t explain. He wanted to do his own stuff. We hadn’t followed up on the Folk Fest connection, but we cemented a relationship then and there. Before 2016, we became “The Imperfectionists”.
Somehow, even though I was working full time at other things, I managed to also pursue a connection through a neighborly friend Ken Sailors with Michael Torrey, aka Bum Wagler. Bum is an incredible songwriter in the cowboy tradition. And we performed at Farley’s in SF for months and months. Let’s say in 2017.
Oh, but the Imperfectionists! A friend of my daughters, Ian, recorded a few songs for us in 2016. My stuff at least, was reprise from the ’78 album Colour. Ian left to pursue other things. We found Erik Walker, a pianist/composer/recording engineer who we contracted to finish the album at his studio WackoWorld Music.
I broke my ankle November 2016, while my second marriage ending. Late December I experienced a life-threatening embolism and was nearly done for. In January I started writing tunes to fill out “The Imperfectionists” debut album. I wrote “Homeland”, about the 2016 election; and “Joy for Living” to acknowledge my brush with death. Thom and I were always equitable – half the songs his, half mine. It was released on Bandcamp and we pressed CDs.
We began to gig and busk randomly on the street. We played Open Mic at Café International in the lower Haight and Bazaar Café in the Richmond. But we wanted a fuller sound. Craigslist delivered the fantastic Bill Cole on accordion and melodica, and I took up harmonica along the way. We composed the album “Don’t Get Owned” for a 2018 release, which got me “Fragile Frazzle” about the Trump era, “Please Don’t Sue Me” about a car accident, and some more new stuff and reprises from the wayback machine. “Don’t Get Owned” had a full studio band for some numbers, and Thom and I were rocking. More Bandcamp; more CDs.
We blasted right in to “Universal Consent”, 2019, which had all new material for the both of us. The title track was about giving up privacy for the sake of internet connectedness; “See One World” a plea for getting along. This was our third and final print CD, and we posted the album to Bandcamp in association with Bottomfeeder records. We gigged at the Donkey and Goat winery, multiple times at Simple Pleasures on Balboa in SF, elsewhere, the beloved Chit Chat, and finally at the Monkey House in Berkeley. Usage rights to “River of Love” were leased to a podcast for use as a theme song; two other tunes were incorporated into podcasts for “mentions” and “kudos”.
We were working on “These Are The Days” for release in 2020 when the pandemic hit. We finished a “short” release of nine songs July 2020 on Bandcamp, but Thom was ready to put the band on hold. It felt like a final thing and indeed it was since he left for Pennsylvania after that. Right here I have to say I too felt that some of the material was getting stale, but I cherished the way we combined our creative energy, sometimes writing songs right on the spot. He just didn’t feel the music anymore and what could I do?
In parallel I had been playing with “Ocean Shore Railroad” back at Farley’s. With Kevin Patrick McGee and Ken Sailors, mainly Kevin’s tunes and covers. We had a gig February 2020 in Pacifica, a benefit for the Ocean Shore Railroad restoration activities. It was the last gig for over a year: pandemic.
Angela Luis and I co-wrote our allegorical “Buddy and the Chickens” (2019) and our “Sunshine for the Shut-ins” (pre-pandemic 2020) and kept each other company musically and otherwise through unprecedented times. Harmonies!
A friend of mine, Alzara Getz, introduced me to the band, “Stray Muse”, who wanted a violin player. Such was a time of masked and socially distanced rehearsals. We played the Chit Chat, outdoors, plus an outdoor show and the Sunset Farmer’s Market and one at the beloved New Farm in Bayview San Francisco. Call it creative differences or maybe a longing for the Imperfectionists, but after a year or so I was done. I wanted to compose and record, ideally with a partner or group that would support my development as songwriter. And I’ve been writing, ever since the collaboration with Thomas really got me started.
Which gets me to near present times: Some Pacifica songwriter friends, and I decided we needed a forum for songwriters to present their craft. It seemed especially timely since we’d all been pent up with pandemic angst for too long. In November 2021 we launched Songwriter’s Showcase in Pacifica at the Chit Chat Café, and we are still going strong. Since I’ve got the time, I am the organizer and Showcase producer. I am grateful for the three other co-founder singer songwriters: Jack Sparks, Scott Hill, and Kevin Patrick McGee. We now have a roster of more than 30 songwriters who rotate through performance and grace the community with music of all styles.
Besides Showcase, I’m re-learning violin, trying to up my chops. I thank Ben Barnes who helped me get started with lessons in 2022. Since then, I’ve been taking violin class at Skyline College with Elizabeth Ingber and in 2023, adding voice class with Michelle Hawkins. Skyline College music is happening!
I’m continuing to put new music into the can with engineer/producer Erik Walker, including instrumentals and pieces with unusual time signatures, like 5/4 and even 7/4. Some of that music is right here in Bandcamp!
And I’m still on the lookout for a magical musical partnership that feeds the both of us, like the time with Thomas and the Imperfectionists. In the meantime, I’m writing, playing, recording, and producing the Showcase with the goal of bringing musicians to people. And vice-versa.