Bob's Musical Evolution: A Timeline
September 28, 1954: I was plunged into this world at 5:03 PM, EST. My sonic curiosity was immediately awakened by the first sound I hear: my own screaming.
1956: My family left New Jersey and moved to Florida. Growing up in the South will have a profound effect on my musical development.
Late '50s/early '60s: I caught little glimpses that kindled my curiosity--Elvis seemed kind of cool; I remember sneaking out of bed really late on night to watch the Beach Boys on The Tonight Show. I was already acquiring a musical ear and could pick out even the most intricate and subtle details of a song.
February 9, 1964: The Beatles make their first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show". While I was too young to comprehend what was happening, 30 seconds into "All My Loving" I had experienced a profound and irreversible change in my consciousness. For the first time in my life I felt a calling, a reason to be. Perhaps the single most important moment of my life. Everything I have done in my life since then ties in with this experience.
The next few years: Lots of time spent listening to the radio. One aspect of growing up in the south was that radio programmers tended to go for the widest audience possible. Black folks' money was as green to them as white folks' money and the segregation that existed in so many other institutions in the south, was largely absent from radio. You could hear The Beatles, James Brown, and Johnny Cash, one right after the other, without switching to another station. How could a deep listener such as myself not be influenced and inspired by such a variety of sounds and musics?
I was into a lot of the normal stuff--The Monkees, Paul Revere and The Raiders (my first concert!) and such. But I was also developing an ear for some of the more out there stuff--The Yardbirds (Jeff Beck era), Jimi Hendrix, anything with twisted, distorted guitar tones. By the time I was 12 I already had both feet squarely planted on the road to psychedelia.
Summer, 1967: A big summer indeed! My older sister, a major influence on me, went to visit a pen pal of hers in San Francisco. She came back from the trip completely changed and it quickly rubbed off on me. For the rest of the summer Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane was a daily part of my musical diet--a few more steps down that psychedelic path.
September 28, 1967: My 13th birthday. For years I had been after my parents to get me a guitar. This was the year they finally did. It was a cheap acoustic, bought at a discount department store. It was hard to play and it hurt my fingers, but I was too determined to give up. My sister's boyfriend showed me how to tune it, taught me three or four chords and I was off! My goal had always been to write my own songs, so I set about doing so right away. I really don't remember much about the songs I wrote back then--this is probably a good thing!
At about the same time I signed up to play bass violin in the junior high orchestra. I loved being in the band room and soon discovered that I could coax at least quasi musical sounds out of just about any instrument in there. Also, I immediately found similarities between the stand-up bass and the guitar. I think that learning a fretted and a fretless instrument at the same time played a significant role in developing my intonation. In short, I was beginning to see the oneness, the interconnectedness of ALL music. It was all beginning to make sense to me.
December 25, 1967: My first electric guitar! I started my first band the very next day--myself, another kid who had an acoustic guitar, two twin brothers, one of whom played tambourine, the other a snare drum and cymbal, and a kid who played on of those Magnus Chord Organs. I'm sure it was an almighty noise and we drove our parents and neighbors up the wall. We played a couple of cover songs, but everything else consisted of songs that I had written. We were called The Next In Line, after a song by The Kinks. Our only live performance was at my little sister's 7th birthday party. Talk about dorky!
Summer, 1968: Our family moved to Statesboro, Georgia. Although we were only there for three years, it was a time when some of the biggest changes in my life took place, a very formative time.
'68 to '71: As soon as we got to Statesboro I began looking for musical collaborators. They were hard to find. This was not exactly a place brimming over with cultural enlightenment. Most of the other kids were into country music and I didn't want to do that. I finally found a couple of guys, John Collins who played bass and Lawton Tyson, a drummer. Together we formed a band called Dogfeat (hey, is was an age of psychedelia and weird band names!). We played a few school dances and were regular performers at a church run coffee house (if they had scrutinized us a bit more I don't think they'd have let us play there). I pretty much appointed myself leader of the band and was quite a jerk. I'd throw tantrums when the other guys didn't do exactly what told them, I was rude and abusive--it is a testament to their patience and forgiveness that these two stayed with me for as long as they did.
It was also during this time that I met some college guys that had a band called Backstreet Society. They were quite successful on a local basis and played out in various towns every weekend. They hired me as their roadie. I was a pretty obnoxious loudmouth and I'm sure I must have ruffled their feathers time and again. But one guy in particular, Jimmy Vining, who played guitar, was like a big brother to me. He was always patient with me, no matter how stupid I acted. He taught me a lot about playing guitar and, even more importantly, about carving out one's own unique musical path. He exposed me to a lot of really great music and did much to encourage me. I will always be grateful to Jimmy and I consider him one of the most important and influential people I have ever met.
Another important event during this period was that I got my first good guitar, a 1956 Fender Telecaster. I remember the first time I plugged it into an amp--what a loud sound! I had never had a guitar with good pickups, nor one that had good action. It was a giant step in my musicianship.
Summer, 1971: My family moved back to Florida. I immediately set out in search of people to play music with. I found a band called Captain Rush who needed a guitarist, so I invited myself along. We played a few parties, even went to Statesboro to play at the aforementioned church coffee house. This band had the distinction of being the first band I played in that did exclusively original material. I think we were a pretty good band, but very few people ever heard us.
Spring, 1972: Another giant leap forward in my musical evolution--the acquisition of my first synthesizer. It was a Moog Sonic 5. All those knobs and switches and sliders! And those spacey, other-worldly sounds--now this was psychedelia!
'72 to '77: I played a lot during these years and continued to write songs. I kept trying to get a band going but mostly the bands I started in this period never got out of the garage. I think one problem was my ever shifting focus. It seemed like every other week I was getting the urge to go off in yet another new musical direction. I never really settled on one "type" of music that I wanted to play. Also, my ideas about tonality and aesthetics were just getting weirder and weirder and a lot of people thought my stuff was too crazy to play--"maniac music" as one of my collaborators put it (just before informing me that he didn't want to play with me anymore).
The music I was listening to during these years was also playing a big role in my development. Mostly I was listening to fairly (or sometimes very) obscure European progressive music; bands like King Crimson, Genesis (Peter Gabriel era), Gentle Giant, Magma, Van Der Graaf Generator, Curved Air, Pink Floyd (pre-Dark Side...) and a host of others. I know that a few of these bands are now household names, but in the early '70s this stuff was quite a way off the beaten path. People thought I was some kind of weirdo nut job because I didn't listen to The Rolling Stones or The Doobie Brothers. By that time I had acquired one of the core tenets of my musical philosophy: Normal music sucks! I had pretty much lost all interest in boring, predictable boogie-blues music and was constantly on the lookout for sounds that would challenge me and take me to new, uncharted places. I short, I was burrowing quite deeply underground.
1975-77: I took violin lessons for two years. I had an incredible teacher, an old Lithuanian man name Professor Dubas. He had started playing in 1915 and was probably the most talented and accomplished musician I have ever known personally. I never got very good at the violin--I took it up too late in life--but I learned a lot about music and intonation from these lessons. I also think it made me a better guitarist. It also led me to my next big step in...
April, 1977: I finally escaped the south and moved to Vermont. I was "like really into music, man, and I like want to go to college man, and like major in music man, 'cause it would be like cool to know more about it man...". So I applied to and was accepted into Johnson State College as a music major. At first I enjoyed it, but the reality of the situation soon caught up to me. I was a fish out of water. All the other students had solid backgrounds in either classical or jazz. If you didn't fit into one of these categories you were not taken seriously. I was quite the oddball, considering my advocacy of such radical ideas as the tape recorder as a musical instrument (by now I was interested in using non-musical sounds as part of a larger soundscape). Also, it was at this time that the punk rock movement was exploding onto the scene and my rather outspoken advocacy for this bastard child of rock and roll excess made me something of a pariah in certain circles. It's hard to believe that there are people in the world so narrow minded, so intellectually and spiritually atrophied, that they would hate a person for the music he/she listens to. But I didn't really mind too much--I hated them too!
1978: I met a guy named Peter Moreland, a phenomenal guitarist. He and I began playing together and formed a band called Spring. it was mostly original material, about half his songs and half mine. He wrote these incredibly intricate songs that had constantly changing meters and keys--it would take us 3 or four rehearsals to learn just one of his tunes. It was quite challenging and I will always give Peter credit for making a better musician out of me.
Unfortunately, Peter had an agenda. He was a born-again Christian and his primary interest in me was as a soul to save (I think they get brownie points from their god for this). I like to refer to this period as the time when I "experimented" with Christianity. But I quickly found the fundamentalist, "born again" form of Christianity to be a belief system completely devoid of anything I was seeking in life. I got quite tired of Bible thumpers telling me that I was going to hell because I was vegetarian (?!), that I was a horrible sinner for simply mentioning that I found a particular woman rather attractive, that my daily Yoga stretches were, in fact, a form of Satanism. I support people's right to believe whatever they choose, but this was clearly not a path that I wished to follow.
Anyway, the long and the short of it was that Peter and I had a big falling out, which culminated in his physically assaulting me. So much for turning the other cheek. The stranges thing about this event was that he was arguing with other people--I was sitting there saying nothing, when he suddenly exploded and luged at me. I have often observed that many people who claim to be the most full of love and peace are really quite full of hate and anger and rage. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the history of Western "civilization".
It was also during this time that I was discovering punk rock. This was an exciting revelation/revolution for me. Like so many others, I had grown weary of the excesses of commercial rock. Bands that I had once so thoroughly enjoyed were now becoming big corporate pop stars and settling into ruts, abandoning the spirit of exploration and experimentation that had made their early years so wonderful to witness. Bands such as Genesis and Pink Floyd, who had once been such a big part of my underground world were now getting played on top-40 radio. Punk seemed like a perfect reaction to this. I quit studying music, changed my major to theater (much more suitable to punk rock), then dropped out of school altogether. I continued to work at the college food service, where things began to bubble over one summer day in....
1979: I was sweeping the floor of the serving area after lunch one day. Thinking I was alone I began singing "Problem" by the Sex Pistols. Suddenly a voice from around the corner said, "Hey, I have that record!" it was Dennis Richards. He was a fellow employee at the food service, but we had never gotten to know each other. In that one small moment we had changed each other's lives. We quickly struck up a tight friendship--in a small village in northern Vermont it was quite a treat to run into somebody of similar musical interests. Dennis was a budding guitarist--not too good yet, but certainly showing a lot of promise. I had had enough of playing with whiz kids and it seemed like the punk thing to do to start a band with Dennis. At first Dennis and I played guitar, a kid named Mark played bass and our drummer was a drunken idiot named Mike, who kept trying to get us to play Grateful Dead songs (ugh!). This lineup quickly changed--Mark left, Dennis switched to bass and we added another Dennis (Lamphere) as our drummer.
The chemistry was perfect, the sparks flew and we crated one hell of a band. We were called NRG. For the next couple of years we would play music that had never been heard in this part of Vermont. To this day I am fairly certain that we were the first punk band ever to exist in that state. We were certainly a few steps removed from any other bands that were playing in the area--everyone else was either Dead cover band or a Van Halen cover band. We played an eclectic and enormous selection of songs. We played stuff by such current faves as The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Jam and Talking Heads. But our real strength was our original material. Dennis R. was definitely the more prolific songwriter of the two of us. He had a perfect ear for how a song should sound, and his stuff always perfectly combined simplicity with intelligence, as well as a good dose of humor. I loved playing his songs. I didn't have the output that Dennis had, didn't write as many songs as he did, but the stuff I did write was the first really good music I ever created. At our peak, we had a repertoire of about 75 songs, around half of them original.
What a time to be alive! We were new and different and quickly became all the rage at the college. People who wouldn't have even talked to us before were suddenly inviting us to their parties and wanting to hang out with us. Everyone loved us and we played out quite often, even made a little money from time to time. But it was too good to last.
To find out what happened next, click here.