My apologies for not keeping this diary up to date. I've been very busy working and being married. I set my studio up in my bedroom (my wife isn't thrilled about this!) a few weeks ago and am now immersed in a new project. I'm not going to talk about it much because I don't want to jinx it. But I can say it won't be a Magus release.
I've been listening to a lot of music lately. I'm in a BIG Depeche Mode phase right now. I do wish they would come out with a new CD soon! The David Gahan solo CD "Paper Monsters" is one of my current favorites and I'd love to hear another from the voice of Depeche Mode.
I watched a really intense David Cronenburgh movie called "Spider". Raplh Fieness is amazing as a mentally ill man revisiting his past. I highly recommend it, though maybe not as a date film ;-)
talk to you soon
The struggle continues: the guitarist for my band Circus quit out of the blue today. We were supposed to rehearse and he left a phone message saying he was "resigning". I had just booked numerous gigs and I'm not very happy about it. But we will survive.
The gig last friday with Circus went well and we packed the place during the 2nd set. At that particular venue we don't get to do a sound check so it's a little stressful at first trying to get a good sound. Usually a few musician friends in the audience let us know what needs adjusting. There were only 2 obvious mistakes all night and I'm sure once we play more gigs(this was only our 2nd) they'll be less than that. The Mole's Eye staff liked the band so much that they booked us on a 5 week rotation through to 2005!
This morning I stopped at a store to buy a calling card to call Imelda. While driving from the residential home where I work to my school job and a kind gentleman informed me that I had a flat tire. It was missing the cap, apparently someone had unscrewed it during the night and the air must have slowly leaked out. Luckily, there was an air machine right there and I filled it up and made it to work on time. My father was kind enough to stop by and put a new one on.
I hope to relax tonight and play some bass and guitar. I just found out that an advertising agency in Venezuela wants to use my song "Illuninati" (from the GREEN EARTH CD) in a TV ad. They agreed to pay me $2000 which is great! Hopefully I will actually get the money. I've learned not to get too excited about these things after several past disappointments. but I do try to remain optimistic...
I just finished a delicious home-cooked meal at my parents' house and I'll be rehearsing with the drummer from CIRCUS for our gig friday. Our guitarists was ill with the flu yesterday and canceled reahearsal at the last minute. This was a crucial rehearsal, being right before the gig, so the remaiming 3 of us soldiered on and played. We're used to it after playing that way for a year and a half while searching for a guitarist. My voice has pretty much recovered from my lung cold except for a few minor bouts of coughing between vocal lines last night.
Robert Palmer has always been one of my heroes and coincidentally we had learned one of his songs about 3 weeks before he passed away. It will be a nice tribute to play it for the crowd friday night. It feels great to perform in a group again even if it is covers.
The children at work were very wild today and I had to take them outside in small groups and jog them around the block. We also had them do exercises to try to get them to chill out a bit. I think it helped a bit.
Imelda's parents arrived in the Phillipines yesterday to attend a wedding. They will be staying for about a month. They have 14 children(!!!), all of whom graduated from college. I look forward to meeting them soon.
Welcome to my online diary! I'll try to post a few entries a week and I plan on being very candid and to give an inside view on the life of a "struggling" artist. I've really enjoyed reading Bill Nelson's online diary and he is my inspiration to start this one.
My life has been in transition for most of the year. I'm in the process of selling my property and I also will be getting married in the near future. On top of that, I now work 47 hours a week as well as 4 overnight shifts(I get to sleep about 6-7 hours on these) at the place I've been working at for last 15 years, Community House. It's a private non-profit residential home and school for children in crisis. Most of the children are there for about 3 months. But through it all, music is still my #1 passion.
I regularly play at open mic forums to keep my live performance together and I also am now performing with my cover band CIRCUS. The drummer, Peter Nichols, I've played with on and off since my mid teens. Tony Speranza is the keyboardist. In 1980, at the tender age of 18, I met Tony when I auditioned to play bass in his version of the rock opera "Tommy". It was a brilliant production written and directed by Tony and featuring a large cast of singers, dancers, and actors. This was long before the Broadway production. It was brilliant and I'd love to do it again. Tony, Pete, and I began rehearsing as CIRCUS in the autumn of 2001 and immediatly started searching for a suitable guitartist. This proved difficult due to the complexity of some of the material we were covering such as "Yours Is No Disgrace", "Karn Evel #9", and such. All of the first 6 or 7 to audition showed up completely unprepared or simply couldn't cut it. by the Spring of 2003 things were getting desperate! Then Chris Devine dropped out of the sky. Chris had recently toured Europe and eastern Europe with Ritchie Blackmore's band "Blackmore's Night". He plays guitar, electric violin, flute, and sax and could play "Yours Is No Disgrace"!
We did our first gig on August 16th of this year and it was a sucess. It felt good to perform live again with a band. We're playing our next gig this Friday, October 10th at the Mole's Eye Cafe in Barattleboro, VT(my hometown). I would love to get a performing MAGUS back together, but it's hard to get musicians to commit to original music without paying them big bucks, which I don't have.
Tonight I'm going out to see some live music and hang out with friends. I really miss my fiancee Imelda who's still in the Phillipines waiting for her visa. But we'll be together soon...