Around the age of twelve I began hearing music on the radio that was very different from the direction my music teachers had been taking me.
I wanted to make the same sort of sounds, but had no electric guitar, so I hooked-up the microphone that came with our home stereo to my old acoustic guitar and started to play. Suddenly I was a star! Well — at least in my Mom's living room.
By my 16th birthday I'd earned enough money working odd-jobs to order a shiny new Silvertone electric guitar from the Sears mail order catalog. It was a vast improvement.
My Mom, thinking it better that I learn how to play an electric guitar properly, also got me a new teacher. His name was Mike Smith. He performed regularly at Fairmont Hot Springs, a local alpine resort. During my first lesson, he introduced me to barre chords and a Beatles riff from Day Tripper. I was forever changed.
Unfortunately, my lessons with Mike didn't last long. I'm fairly certain my Mom, being a fan of classical and opera, felt I was learning to make more noise instead of less. But it was too late. The musical influences from the mid-1970s were too powerful and transformative to ignore.
They included Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, CCR, Elton John, Deep Purple, Wishbone Ash, Fleetwood Mac, Doobie Brothers, Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Status Quo, Nazareth, Supertramp, ZZ Top ... and the list goes on. It was classic rock at its best, and to learn it I had to unlearn almost everything about music I had accumulated up to that point.
During the late 70s I moved to Calgary where I attended university, and met Pamela Nolan. She was a beautiful young singer, and in 1981 we had our son Nigel.
It was a rocky relationship that fell apart around 1987. By the end of that phase in my life, I had been in and out of more music projects than I care to remember, most of which collapsed due to players taking on regular jobs and relatively normal lives.
My last live project was an underground alt-rock trio called 9-DAZE. It magically materialized over the course of nine days during 1988 to play a gig at a place called The Westward Club, one of the few venues at the time to feature local original artists.
Other magical things also happened there, such as meeting my last life-partner, Patricia Robertson, a master colorist and hair stylist who opened my eyes to the wonders of the beauty industry.
After 9-DAZE imploded in 1992, I dropped out of the music scene. Patricia and I opened a hair salon and withdrew to a clean quiet home life. I augmented the income from our salon with a series of temporary and part-time jobs including sales, website creation, personal computing, and mobile guitar lessons. I also became active in the field of ufology. Much of that can be found on my ufology website at ufopages.com.
One day while sitting in the living room listening to music, something rather unexpected happened. Instead of processing it all down into its various elements in order to see how it had been constructed, I just listened, and enjoyed it. For the first time in years I was reminded of what had gotten me into music in the first place. So I began assembling a very modest home studio.
Then Patricia came down with cancer, and everything else went on hold. We were unable to beat the disease, a story that includes the medical community's suppression of powerful scientifically developed treatments other than chemotherapy and radiation. Had Patricia been given the treatment we wanted, I believe she would still be alive today.
During 2016, Mark Braaten, a song writer and friend from the local '90s music scene moved back to Calgary and got in touch with me. We experimented with his Zoom recorder for a few weeks trying to spark something. It worked, but we needed more time to develop the project than he was prepared for, so he retreated to his family life, and I resumed the task of putting my home studio together.
In June 2019, I created my first YouTube music video for the song Earth Abides, a post apocalyptic piece I wrote during 1988 and performed live with 9-DAZE during the late '80s and early '90s. Using my experience with website design I also created this website. For the geeks out there, it's all hand-coded, no CMS dependency here.
In August 2019 I released No Time To Run and in October released The Good Road. In November all three were distributed as a Mini-EP called Renewable 1. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
I'll be adding more information about the way the pandemic affected me in the near future. In the meantime, I want to state for the record that I was opposed to the lockdowns, mandates, and other repressive measures imposed by Governments, institutions, and employers. The shaming and discrimination against the non-vaxxed that was voiced by celebrities and much of the general public was also a disgrace — all fueled by mainstream media misinformation.
I'm presently a 100% independent artist. I have no label and no publishing or management relationship. If you happen to represent one of those areas of the industry and think you can make any of my tracks earn us both some revenue, please contact me to discuss the details.
