To all the musicians and friends I have made and lost contact with, all I got to say is...
Bet you thought I fell off the mountain, living in the shadows of my mind, and maybe so. But the light brings you into the open and that is what this site is about and I’m not hiding! Ever since the growl of the banjo took a hold of my imagination and kicked me in the gut I have been working on mastering this instrument.
When I was 13 years old I got it in my head that I could play banjo. I think the original inspiration was hearing Dueling Banjoes on the radio. While riding with my brother in his '66 Caddy, my brother was telling me about the scene from the movie Deliverance. The scene in my imagination seemed magical, as if the song was an event of original creation before for my eyes. Later that day I was playing with some friends at the “Big Tree”, and with this sense of illumination still fresh in my mind, a thought came to me. What if I understood everything? Just thinking this made me feel smarter. This was a kid’s point of view and not really arrogant, but beyond just being curious. It is funny that to be bold enough to think “I know” seems sacrilege to most of us. As we become adults we tend to believe the curious idea that pessimistic doubt is a form of wisdom. “The more I know the more I don’t know” is a rather popular philosophy that we take comfort in, but we really have access to greater knowledge.
I got my first banjo for Christmas of '77 and began taking lessons soon after. It took awhile for my hands to catch up with my head. My first teacher was a fellow named D.D. Yokeley and he showed me the basic chords and the double thumb style. Matter of fact, he double thumbed everything and played no rolls. He would say somewhat defiantly, “I played in 8/8 time not that 4/4 roll stuff like Scruggs.” It took some time to figure out that he was really playing in 2/4 like the rest of us. I played in his style for a year but became dissatisfied that I did not sound like the records I was listening to until I found another teacher in town named Warren Ankerberg, who straightened me out about Scruggs and introduced me to melodic style and a sprinkling of Reno style.
I started learning on my own by slowing down my albums to half-speed. My hifi had a 16rpm setting, which is an octave lower than 33rpm and it made ‘Ole Earl sound like he was throwing boulders off a cliff into the Snake River.
I played in my first band, Bardstown Junction, in high school. Jason Jennings the bass player and I became fast friends and he is still like a brother. The band started my checkered career as a professional musician. After High School I went off to Banjo College (South Plains College Levelland, Texas) and went through their program in Bluegrass and Country Music. There I met some great people and didn’t feel like such a geek following my bliss, blah blah blah. Tim McCasland was the banjo instructor. Now I believe Alan Munde is teaching there. I don’t know how much I learned about banjo technique but my putting (golf) was improved by his tutelage. Tim had a great ear for knowing how banjo players articulate a solo. He was an advocate for letting out the monster or what I would call playing through the spirit. The first day at the school was big because that was the first time I heard Flexibility from Bela Fleck’s Natural Bridge album. I just thought that’s it I want to play like that.
After college I bounced around from Florida, Missouri, and Austin Texas, drifting, trying to make sense out of what I learned in college, writing tunes and wood shedding. In Austin I met Tony Trishka and I had a lesson with him. He was into playing tunes in different keys without a capo. This is a great exercise. The band (Skyline) was staying down the street from my roommate Todd Collins and me. The Skyline folks where hanging out watching the debut of the “We are the World” video (Ah the eighties). The night before, the band played at a club and the band was great. However, what I remember best about that performance was when Tony was in the middle of a solo and a girl in the front row actually freaked out and had some kind of seizure. Oh my God the flat out fury of Tony’s playing!
About this time I met Bela in Dog Patch Arkansas USA. “Yeah chromatic ‘til you puke” were the first great words I heard him speak to someone next to me. I told him I really liked his playing and I wanted to take some lessons. So I moved to Nashville. I was living across the street from Stuart Duncan and Mike Compton of the Nashville Bluegrass Band. I started playing in the band The Nu Acoustic Unit and doing gigs around town and few pick-up gigs at the Opryland Hotel. I did finally take a couple lessons from the Master. And what we went over was really very basic and fundamental but the difference was his insistence on just doing things so right and so well that it carries through everything you play.
The three main ideas I gleamed out of that experience are:
That was the high point of my Nashville adventure. The low point was struggling financially and moving back to Florida. My dad soon developed a blood cancer type disease and for a short time I was my parent’s sole support. I took a waiting job and the banjo went under the bed for a good three months. However I’m glad I had that year with my dad.
After his death I moved to Orlando and started a jug band called the Porch Dogs. I then started a new project called Alien Sharecropper, which gave me my first opportunity to play my own original music on stage. The line up was on bass Ray Ward, on drums Stacy Currie, on sax clarinet, flute, and keys Larry Sigler, and yours truly. As the main writer I was pretty jazzed that these guys were into the music. We were playing rock clubs doing very eclectic music with banjo lead... crazy. The band was actually doing well and getting some notice. We were voted best jazz band in Florida in '94 competing with such luminaries as the Sam River’s Band. We didn’t even know we were a jazz band. The band didn’t break through to the next level, lost momentum and we parted ways. I went back to school for audio engineering at Full Sail recording school.
I had some exposure to the studio back in my South Plains College days, who also have a great recording program, and in Nashville doing some recording with a friend, Dave Sinco (his credits: Acoustic Alchemy, Sam Bush, Bela, Edger Meyer, YoYo Ma etc.), from The Nu Acoustic Unit. I completed the Full Sail program and started doing live sound and interning at a local studio (Ice Box Productions). I was doing OK but it was a rather saw-toothed way of making a living. I was hanging out at the school with my nephew who was taking the Digital Media Program at F.S. and I ran into Bill Smith, the head of the audio department. One thing lead to another and I was hired as a teacher. Shoo... six blinding years later and here I am. I’m currently playing in the Bluegrass band Code Blu and putting together a new original album project with a retro/romantic vibe.
The Beginning...
