JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

How I spent my Friday afternoon…

Thought I didn’t have the files for these albums but surprise surprise! Thank goodness for Dropbox, which I had forgotten about (oops!)

Since I had no plans today, why not play these songs that I’d not heard nor performed in years, and remind myself of how overly ambitious I was back then. My playing improved since then, but wow I sounded like Slopmaster General on some tracks. And I thought I was good? Sheesh.

Hey, sometimes the enthusiasm outshines the talent.

Both of these were an interesting trip down memory lane. GO BERZERK! was recorded at Bennett Studios (RIP) with a trio; LAYERS OF TIME was basically me being like Prince and doing everything except one keyboard part at the producer’s home studio. Either way, the music got to the public.

GO BERZERK! was the first cd to sell really fast. This was when Facebook was still heating up, as well as MySpace really on fire. So the idea of an artist or band pushing new music was a big deal and people ate it up. Now, forget it. Anyway, I remember going through three boxes of cds with this one. Even got to play Starland Ballroom for the first time opening for Uli Roth and Leslie West. Life seemed good!

LAYERS was a bitch to get off the ground for reasons I won’t get into. But the producer at the time said “Do it yourself, you wrote the songs!” So he helped me get EZ Drummer and off I went, programming drum parts, copying/pasting, sitting on the laptop feeling like THIS WILL NEVER END! I played all the guitars and bass, and he did one keyboard part of the title track. And with this cd, I got to do some big gigs, opening for Joe Lynn Turner, Lita Ford and King’s X. Not bad.

But the album didn’t sell as fast as its predecessor. By this time, MySpace was dead, and Facebook was making it tough for musicians to promote unless they were willing to pay for ads. Both albums saw nice articles written about me in The South Bergenite, a newspaper from my old hometown. So that’s always a plus.

At the time, having large gaps in between albums made me feel like I was lazy. Not so. For most acts, the first two or three albums are spit out rather quickly, like there’s not enough hours in a day to record. I was hoping to subscribe to the Motorhead/Black Flag ethos of “If you ain’t doing an album a year, you ain’t workin’.” I unintentionally fell into the Boston/Def Leppard camp with having wide spaces in between releases. Not what I planned but whatever.

Remastering these albums was a lot of fun. The ONLY change I made was to the song “Surfing To Venus” from GO. I sped the original track up 10% to match the speed of how I’d do it live (much like “Quicker Than The Devil”). Aside from that, everything else is original. Added some reverb, delay, whatever to breathe new life into these tracks. These are NOT remixes at all.

Hearing these songs definitely brought me back to that aforementioned place of being ambitious and undaunted. Not every song is a winner, but I am proud of what’s written. (“Chomp” is the only song not written by me, BTW. That credit goes to the bassist Joe DeMott.) I can look back and think one thing…

WHAT HAPPENED TO MY AMBITION?!

Both of these are on my Bandcamp page and will soon be on various streaming sits via Distrokid. I am going to completely re-do the WHAT’S IN STORE page, as I have been directing people to Bandcamp. I have no hard copies of anything anyway, so why bother?

I hope you enjoy the remasters, as much as I enjoyed tweaking things.

One day the fire will return…