There are so many websites out there. According to information I found in the internet (which, I have heard, is never wrong), there are currently over 1.98 billion websites world wide. Or 1.13 billion. Or 1.76 billion. But no matter which source you are going to believe, there really are a LOT of websites out there. So thank you for finding mine.
This will be about me, music I have done over the years, things I do now and who knows what else. Thanks for stopping in.
I was born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1958. We moved around for a few years, until we settled in Houston Texas, where I grew up…… and did that stuff that goes along with growing up. Until I ended up in Munich Germany, where I now live.
A lot has happened in between, which I will talk a bit about in this website.
I have been involved with some type of musical instrument since I was around 6 years old, when my parent thought I should take piano lessons. I remember this as not a lot of fun, but that was because of the teaching method back then, which did not include a lot of empathetic interaction. I then played saxophone for 7 years in the school band, but in Texas in the early 70s, music in school looked a lot different. I was lucky enough to sneak into a midnight movie when I was 12 (for those of you who remember the days when you could sneak into a movie theater…-) and saw Woodstock, and that changed my musical life.
How I ended up here started with a postcard I got from a friend of mine in 1978, who had taken a year to travel and discover Europe. He said “I am in Paris, just came from Spain, and I am on my way to Holland to see my girlfriend”. I became determined to write this postcard!
So I set out for a 4 month vacation in 1979. I brought a guitar with me, because my postcard also mentioned “If you come, bring your guitar, A great way to meet people”. So I brought a guitar (on a backpacking trip, but oh well…), and that led to me jamming with some musicians I met in a hotel, which changed my life. And here I still am. Jammin…………..
A lot has happened over the years, and I will shed more light about this here. This is my website, and my journey.
I played street music for almost three years, where I met my good friend Trevor Morriss. We had a great bluegrass trio that performed mainly as a street act. This eventually brought both of us to Munich. Around this time, I spent a year playing every night in a hotel bar in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, and eventually I joined a Bluegrass band in Munich called Kentucky Bluefield. I was on my way through town and my plan was to move back to the US and settle in Austin, Texas. But as fate would have it, that band was looking for a new guitarist and singer, and I got the gig. Trevor Morriss was also in the band, which made it eve better. I played with Kentucky Bluefield for quite a while, touring through Germany on the festival circuit and club circuit.
There was always too much time between gigs, so I worked part time as a local crew roadie for Mama Concerts. As Jackson Browne said it “The first to come and the last to leave, working for that minimum wage”. But most of the crew were all musicians so it was a blast, and this was the early 80s in rock and roll. Work was also a party. We worked all the big names, ZZ Top, Eurythmics, Hall and Oats, Frank Zappa, Dio, Deep Purple and the list goes on and on. It was a great life for an aspiring musician, but not really where I wanted to stay.
During the next 8 years or so I played with multiple bands, was a regular fill in guy if someone needed a body on stage at short notice. This was a great way to cut my teeth on playing as you needed to know more when NOT to play. I got very good at turning my volume control off when I was not sure what was about to happen.So if I was not sure what was coming, I just smiled, moved, and mimed it… And that gave me a reputation of not making a lot of mistakes….. 🙂 In these years I played in many band, such as with my good friends Mark n Simon. We had a rock band for a few years and also paid our dues on the club scene. Other local bands I was in that were getting quite integrated in the local Munich scene in the mid 80s such as the Jailbirds, and The Junior White Band – with my good friend Faron Kelf. After a while I formed the rock trio Hattrick with Eberhard Wilhelm and Bernhard Seidl, doing mainly original material, very rock/blues oriented music. We released one album and were making our way pretty well along the club circuit.
At the same time, I was working with Jimmy Patrick, a very talented guitarist and singer as well as songwriter, doing an acoustic duo. I was also playing and touring with the classical quartet “Quartetto,” doing string quartet arrangements with electric guitars and bass. About this time, an offer come through about a new concept in Germany. A top entertainer, Thomas Gottschalk, was planning to couple with one of the leading TV stations, RTL, and release a Late Night Show format a la Johnny Carson et al. Auditions being held, myself and a group of friends got together and formed the first German Late Night Show Television band. My life turned around in a heartbeat. Things I could not afford last year is now free as long as I use it on television. I still played with Hattrick, but my schedule was obviously full and this led to Eberhard and Bernhard to look elsewhere. A shame cause I think the band could have been great if given time to mature. But wish in one hand, as the say…….
After failing ratings among other disasters, the format of the show changed, and we were out. That did not help and the show went off the air. German television was not so accepting of the US late night T.V. format. But everyone who was anyone promoting a product came through the show, so I was seen by many bigger named German musicians who needed side players for tours, so after the show was over I went on tour with Wolf Maahn on his Direkt ins Blut “so-called” unplugged tour. I say so-called, cause we had loud electric guitars on most numbers. It was a blast and real rock and roll life on the road.
Around this time, I met my wife, started a family. Being on the road a lot was start was more of an issuze when I now wanted to be home more. My friend Jimmy Patrick had a studio and production company with a partner. One day, that partner suddenly just up and left literally from one day to another, due to a disagreement. That can happen, but he owned half of the studio equipment, and Jimmy and I were in the middle of a production when the guy decided to leave. So when we came in one morning, half of the studio was missing. So this lead to Jimmy and I teaming up. We put J&J Productions together, and started our own acoustic (almost) trio, “Play It Again, Sam” with Bernhard Seidl of Hattrick fame.
Jimmy and I did our live gigs, but for a while our main gig was doing film and advertising music, often for Bayerischer Rundfunk, a major TV and Radio station. We started out with Tascam muti-track tape machines, and did the entire journey from digital tape all the way to hard disk recording. The the technical revolution put smaller studios out of business, and ours was sadly one of these. But the run up until then was great. This is when Jimmy went to live in Thailand, and I teamed up with Erin Perry, a great singer form the US. We had a dance band and a great hippie live show, and kind of Woodstcok Revival type thing, with great musicians. Tommy Eberhard on drums, Francesco Mangiaracina on keyboards and Kevin Moore on Bass. A real fun band, but sadly a very narrow market, so our main gig were dance related. I went from being a late night television personality to a wedding singer, and one day I decided I will NEVER play YMCA again…..
That is when I got into tour guiding. But that is another long story…
I now work pretty much full time as a tour guide, but I have the great pleasure to play with The Munich Clouds, a Munich rock band from the 60s. We play regularly in many local clubs and festivals, and this enables me to play the music I love and not worry about making a wedding party next Friday :-). It is funny the way things go around. The drummer of the Clouds is the same drummer that was in Hattrick from the 80s.
For more about the Clouds (in German
