Over the next month or two, I’ll be posting about my first full-length album, Cerebellum Blues Playlists One and Two. I’ll cover how I got into music and songwriting, the songs themselves and the players who helped me. Here are the posts so far:

1989 was the year The Sharper Image hired me as a copywriter. After I accepted the offer, I remember driving home and grinning the whole way and listening to loud music and thinking about how my life had finally, fundamentally changed for the better. I felt so good about myself and my future.

At the time, I was in a band called Germano Warfare and as I settled into TSI, I made up my mind to finally stop pursuing music. Given all my doubts about my musical abilities, my fear that I would never amount to much as a rock star, my infinite insecurities about anything and everything, I should have felt nothing but relief, but leaving Warfare was hard. First, the band was founded by one of my best friends, Toby Germano, and I felt I was betraying him, even though I also knew that my presence in the band was holding things back. (In music, you are either all-in or not, there is no in-between, you can’t hedge and I was always hedging in the back of my mind, sometimes even the front.) Second, we were good. Toby wrote great songs with interesting chords, words, melodies and grooves and delivered them with real showmanship over the pounding beats of Derek and Troy. Third, I liked the band. It was the first band I’d ever been in that I thought had something special. We looked pretty good, we played loud, we kept it simple. Last, but not least, being in the band made me feel like less of a looser, important when you’ve graduated from college and gone precisely nowhere in life.

But my mind was made up and so I told Toby I was leaving. I have vague memories of how it all ended but one is reasonably clear: I was standing outside our rehearsal space in Redwood City and I was talking with Troy and Toby, the sun was down, I was tired, a bit sad, but I was sure of my decision, and I think it was Troy who asked what I would be doing with my life and I remember answering with some vague thoughts on getting into advertising, he nodded and said he thought I would be good at that.

About a year later, the ‘80s crashed to an end, and The Sharper Image, a true symbol of ‘80s excess, let me go. Poof, just like that, my new life ended and once again I was in limbo. But it was different this time. The job at The Sharper Image had upped my self confidence and I was reasonably sure I could find something new. Even more important, I had met a girl. She was from Germany and right about the time I got let go, her visa ran out and I decided to follow her back to Munich. On my departure from the States, I considered whether to pack a guitar but opted not to. In fact, I left it all at home: the guitars, the amps, the recording decks, the microphones, everything. I had been toting it all around for years and I was tired of it and wanted to be free of it, free of the way it reminded me of my shortcomings and failures, free of the way it taunted and tempted me to try one more time, free of the guilt of having spent so much time and money and producing so little of worth. As I flew out of SFO and up and over the Rockies and into the mid-country, I remember looking out of the window the plane and seeing dark ahead while behind the sun was setting. A new day awaited and I was more ready than I had ever been for something different.

What I thought might be a few months became four years.

Over the next month or two, I’ll be posting about my first full-length album, Cerebellum Blues Playlists One and Two. I’ll cover how I got into music and songwriting, the songs themselves and the players who helped me. Here are the posts so far:

By 1989, I was about four years out of college and two out of music school and it was time to, pardon the pun, face the music. Truth be told, despite all my effort — years of practice, a pricey guitar school in L.A., stints with multiple bands — in my opinion I was still not good enough to be a success, not as a performer and not as a songwriter. Was it just insecurity getting the best of me? I don’t think so. Regardless, my mind was made up and now there was one question above all others I needed to answer: what to do, what to do, what to do.

How do people decide what to do in life? I really have no idea, save for this: you chase an interest and if you love it, have a talent for it, work hard and get lucky you ultimately go pro. Failing that, you can also simply end up somewhere, for better or for worse. I did not want to just end up somewhere. But with music off the table, what was left? For me, the answer seemed to be writing. Ever since I won a short story contest in the 3rd grade I have fancied myself a writer, and over the years I have tried my hand at short fiction, poems, lyrics, a whole lot of letters, blogs. I’ve taken classes and read countless books on writing. I’ve also read Hemingway, lots of Hemingway, and once found it encouraging that he was morose and liked to be alone, just like me (depressingly, I later learned that this was not true at all).

Though my decision to pursue writing instead of music was made sometime in 1989, I had already started the process a few years before. I remember I was in my West Hollywood apartment and writing a letter to my sister and before I got very far along I realized I really couldn’t write worth a damn. Oh, I could put words on the page, compose complete sentences, even spell most articles and prepositions correctly, but write? Hell no. This was sad. I had an English degree from a good school, I had written countless papers and poems and lyrics and other stuff, but as I sat there pen in hand and unable to express in words what was on my mind, I finally understood how I had been simply going through the motions for eons, probably ever since third grade, and had never truly thought about writing and how to do it well. I put my letter to my sister on hold and headed off to a bookstore to find guidance. The book I bought has been my favorite book on writing ever since. It’s called The Writer’s Art and it changed my life. I read it cover to cover, read it again, and have referred to it way too many times to remember ever since that fateful day I first opened it.

So there I was, a year or so out of guitar school, a few years out of college, lessons of The Writer’s Art fresh in my head, my musical dreams fading as I played in bars with The Distractions, my job in a stereo store now in the past, my job selling books door-to-door no more, my job selling timeshares mercifully cut short when I just got up and walked out. Either I could get yet another meaningless job to support my music, or I finally, for the first time in my life, try to get a job I actually wanted and that would lead to even better jobs. Given that writing was my only interest besides music, I began to scan the Sunday paper for opportunities. After several thank-you-but-no-thank-thank-you letters, I finally got an interview.

The job was a weird one. I was interviewing to be an Indexer. “A what?” you ask. Well, back in the days before the Internet, all content had to be indexed so it could be looked up using keywords, etc. and I was to be among the legions doing it. Basically, it was a slight step up from data entry, but I actually liked the work because mostly what I did all day long was read magazines and newspapers. After about a year of this, I was promoted to write abstracts of articles about the computer industry. I loved writing abstracts because I felt very Hemingway as I stripped things to their essence. I also liked learning about all the stuff that was going on —  Apple, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, DEC, Compaq — and for awhile there I could recite from memory the complete product lines of tech’s leaders and what was good about them and bad. But... the burnout factor came fast and hard; besides, I knew writing abstracts was hardly what I had in mind for a career.

I can’t recall how I became aware of copywriting as a profession, but after about a year of writing abstracts, I started taking copywriting classes at the UC Berkeley Extension in SF. I can’t say I showed tons of promise, but neither did anyone else in my classes, so I figured my chances were okay. After completing my second class, I began religiously reading the Sunday classifieds for copywriting jobs that looked to be not only within my reach, but also at least a little bit fun sounding. There wasn’t much, but one day, there was an ad from The Sharper Image (TSI).

I had been reading The Sharper Image catalog for years and genuinely liked it and believed I could write good stuff for it. I also loved gadgets. But while my hopes were high, my expectations were not. After all, I was simply answering a newspaper ad, an ad I later learned had also been answered by about 100 other people, and I had no personal connections with TSI and not much in the way of writing samples. Still, I wrote the best letter I could, finessed my resume, printed both on carefully selected linen paper and mailed them off. When I got the letter requesting that I come in for an interview, I was more stunned than thrilled. Me? Are you sure? The whole interview process was grueling and took three months, complete with copy tests, as TSI narrowed the pool. When they finally offered me the job, I could not believe it. I still can’t.

Maybe I had found my calling, maybe writing was it, maybe all those years of fantasizing about being like Hemingway were indicative of an innate talent, something to believe in about myself. I could not say, still can’t, but what was my choice? Possible vs. impossible? Pretty much. And the practical North Dakota blood in me wanted possible hands down.

I accepted the job.

Over the next month or two, I’ll be posting about my first full-length album, Cerebellum Blues Playlists One and Two. I’ll cover how I got into music and songwriting, the songs themselves and the players who helped me. In case you missed any here are the posts so far: Beginnings; From High School to LA and Back; The Talent Question. Hope to hear from you in the comments section or via email! As always, thank you for reading.

When I rolled back into the Bay Area from L.A. sometime in 1987, I moved in with my parents and set my cat, Jake (photo is here but you have to scroll down), on real grass for the first time in his life. He sat there frozen, completely unsure of what to do, much like I would do for the next few years.

Unlike Jake, who became supremely comfortable in his new environment, at least from my perspective, I never really found my footing. Truth be told, I had been in this somewhat suspended state since leaving college and even well before. I just really had no idea what I truly, deep down wanted to do in life besides music and I did not believe in myself as a musician so I was forever at a crossroads. It was a conundrum that haunts me to this day. But in life, sometimes the only thing to do is to try to keep moving, to hope you can either discover the right path or have it be revealed to you. So that’s what I did.

Over the next few years I was in three different bands: The Paupers (photos), The Distractions (photos) and Germano Warfare (photos). I wish I could say I was serious about all three but I was not. Sure, I learned the songs, practiced hard, did my best to look cool on stage but through it all The Doubt gnawed at me, this deeply etched belief in my being that I was not and never would be much of musical force. And so my real quest became to find a career I could live with.

In the end, while I did not exactly find a career, I did find a job I really liked and that I can honestly say changed my life more than anything else had up to that point. What was that job and what happened next? Stay tuned.

Before I move on to the next phase of my music life, there’s a topic I have to address: talent. I could try to define talent, but why should I when Merriam Webster’s has done it so well:

4a : a special often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude

Yup, I agree with that, to me talent is potential you’re born with that hard work can bring out and hone. I have talent for some things, but playing in time, locking into a groove, is not one of them.

Many, if not most, people I talk to about talent tell me it’s a myth (there’s even a book called The Talent Myth, read it, bored), that we can all be great at anything. Bull. Even after subjecting myself to the reality distortion field of the mighty Malcolm Gladwell by reading his book Outliers, I remain unconvinced. Gladwell’s 10,000-hours rule has become de facto fact but I don’t buy it, or I am the exception to his rule. Once upon a time I might have believed that if worked hard enough — and truly practiced with intent — I could become a really good guitar player. But then I went to G.I.T.

When I started at G.I.T. in mid 1985, I had been playing guitar for about seven years and despite much woodshedding remained a fatally flawed musician. No matter how hard I tried — and I tried goddamn hard — I still really struggled to play in time, forget grooving. But as I read about  G.I.T.’s curriculum, its instructors, its guest lecturers and took in the gushing quotes from satisfied G.I.T. students and considered the school’s location, which was in the heart of Hollywood and just down the road from Capitol Records, I concluded that G.I.T. held the answer to my rhythm woes.

The early days of G.I.T. were all about scales and learned them all: major, minor, lydian, mixolydian, dorian, whatever. G.I.T. also placed emphasis on shapes, which really helped me navigate the neck of the guitar with more fluidity and to understand why certain things worked and others did not. Most important, for me, G.I.T. believed in timing, as in in playing on the beat. I bought an electronic metronome and I practiced everything to it. I practiced for hours and when I wasn’t playing to the metronome I was recording to my drum machine. It all helped, I got better, but better is not good and because good takes talent.

When I finished G.I.T. I knew a lot more about the guitar than when I started and this extra knowledge has served me well ever since. I was also a better guitar player. In fact, I was so much better than when I had started, I was still thinking about a career in music and after school had ended and I was driving back up to the Bay Area, I was plotting the formation of a band. But you can convince yourself of almost anything when driving at night on I5 and drinking a few too many cokes to stay awake.

Be sure to visit the photo gallery! I'm adding stuff all the time.

Over the next month or two, I’ll be posting about my first full-length album, Cerebellum Blues Playlists One and Two. I’ll cover how I got into music and songwriting, the songs themselves and the players who helped me. In case you missed the first post, Beginnings, it’s here. Hope to hear from you in the comments section or via email! As always, thank you for reading.

I think I joined my first band early in high school. I don’t remember what we were called, although I’m sure it was something pretentious and embarrassing, but I do remember the people in it: Tim Dunn on drums, Lee Wilson on vocals, John Rossetti on bass and me on guitar. We rehearsed in Tim Dunn’s basement, played a few parties and then broke up. More bands followed throughout high school, most of which featured my friend Toby Germano on vocals (see photo above) but despite a few shards of hope, I don’t recall ever truly thinking I was in a band that would go anywhere. (Check out the photo gallery to see some shots of my high school musical career.)

Near the end of high school, I was still undiscovered and I started to get into songwriting and recording (if I couldn’t be a star of the stage, maybe I could be some sort of behind the scenes phenom). My parents bought me a bass, a Drumulator drum machine and a Fostex 250 cassette multitracker. My early attempts at songwriting were laughable, but for some unfathomable reason I believed in myself just a little and stuck with it. Mid-way through college I upgraded my Fostex to a Tascam 38 8-track reel-to-reel and traded in my Drumulator for a Linn Drum. My songs were getting better, they were sounding better, I was encouraged. By graduation, one of the many things I had learned in college was that I did not want a 9-5 job, and so, to stave off the real world just a bit longer and to chase the dream that I might be able to avoid it altogether, I headed for a guitar school in Hollywood.

Hollywood back then, as I’m sure it is now, was full of people who claimed to have connections. These mystical, connected beings could help you make it, just like that, and one of them said he could do it for me. With my appointment scheduled, I remember walking up to a run down building, probably on Hollywood Boulevard or Sunset, that had a sign on top with the word “world” in it. It did not look big time, exactly, but that’s okay, I was good with starting small. Inside, a few brief hellos were exchanged and I handed over my cassette. Play, fast forward, play, fast forward, play... fast forward, eject. “I hate this kind of music.” I kid you not, those were the words he said to me. We talked a bit about my guitar playing, the guy thought maybe I had a future there, and he sent me back out into the paved dessert.

The exchange did not break me completely, I knew enough that rejection was part of the deal, but it certainly rattled me. A guitar player, me? No way, I KNEW I was not good enough and probably never would be to make it on my chops alone. Besides, by this time I had really gotten it in my head that I could be a pro songwriter. Later in those LA years of 1985-87, I was able to get one of my songs in front of Kenny Loggins. He was more encouraging, but did not offer me a contract of any sort.

Finally, as 1988 loomed in the near distance, I left L.A. Guitar school was done, I did not want to stay in SoCal, I needed to get back home and re-think things a bit. I loaded up my car, tranquilized my cat, Jake, so he could tolerate the drive to S.F. and hit the road. I will always remember that drive out of L.A. It was a smoggy day and as I headed out of the basin on I-5, I drove through a series of valleys, each higher than the last and with a sky just a little closer to blue. It seemed to be a perfect way to leave L.A., out of murk and into clarity. I finally crested Tejon Pass and headed down The Grapevine into the San Joaquin Valley. There were pure blue skies above, the smog of LA held back the the Tehachapi mountains, and I settled in for a fast drive home. Then I hit the tule fog. Visibility dropped from miles to feet, I slowed down, moved into the left line and used the white line to guide me.

That fog was metaphorical and would not lift for a few years.