Bagus

I mean I had taken organ lessons for about 3 years when I was 10-13, but had very little musical taste and was much more into playing baseball and football. I missed most of my lessons. By the time I was 15, I was totally into listening to The Who and old Pink Floyd and Yes and all the classic rock, and I saw my first Grateful Dead concerts, so music became a much more important part of my life, but I didn't really take up playing again until I was about 21.

Then for the next 12 years, I learned a bunch of Dead and other tunes and played along with my brothers who had decided to pick up guitar. But I didn't really study it. Back in about 92 when I was living out east, I had a guitar on me and some time on my own to kill, so I really learned a lot of lyrics and chords to a ton of Dead and classic rock songs, so I could do my own little shows on guitar even tho no one in my family can really sing. That was fun, but when I got back with my brothers, they'd expect me to play the keys. I sounded ok as long as there was lots of backing, but I couldn't play solo piano at all. I had no left hand whatsoever.

In '98, I was playing in a band called the Ambulance Chasers out in SF with my brother Dan on bass and a few other new friends. We played a mix of rock and Dead and blues and some originals that we had written. I'd be sitting on stage and trying to solo over these 5 chord Dead tunes and really I didn't have any technique and didn't know what to do. I'd be thinking so hard and I'd be sweating it and nervous and really started to not enjoy it. I really can't listen to the recordings from back then. It's way too painful. I didn't know any real technique, I just knew chords and a scale or two, but no rhythem or blues fills or funky riffs or lead techniques or anything. I couldn't help but tell how much better all the touring keyboardists were and felt that I had no business being on a stage.

Right around then, my brother Tom broke his frickin back and became paralyzed from the waist down out riding his bike. Tom had been the State Champion diver back in Wisconsin and one crazy globetrottin muthah fuckah along with being my best friend. It was hugely devestating to our family, but what could we do? Keep playin music was the answer, so I couldn't give up, but I couldn't continue to suck either.

People have really really high expectations of keyboard players. They pretty much expect them to be the piano man playing any of hundreds of tunes. They expect them to know four parts: bass, melody (uh, in 3 part harmony please), rhythem, and leads and to be able to play them pretty much all at the same time. Then they expect them to know how to lay off of each of those parts when someone else comes into the mix and to then throw in a fifth 'comping' part. Playing the piano can be a huge work out and it's hard. I needed to go a long way towards being able to do that.

Kurt the Chaser's guitar player taught us "Cissy Strut" by the Meters. I also then got to see Galactic for the first time. When a good friend from out east moved to New Orleans and invited me down for the Jazz Fest, I found a whole new world of music. Where the rest of the world had 'moved on' to this "Phishy" singer songwriter flavor of rock and roll, New Orleans stayed right back there with the hard hitting funk and r&b and jazz and piano blues and zydeco.

So my tastes started to change and I had some new equipment. The band disbanded when my brother went off to India to work with the Dalai Lama. I decided to woodshed until I learned how to play. The first thing I wanted to be able to do was to be able to play a rhythem. Piano is supposed to be in the rhythem section, right? Something... anything.. that I could play over and over and that might sound good. So I picked up this book on Funk theory by Gail Johnson and started learning some cool riffs.

Then the dot com thang came crashing down and I moved down to New Orleans. I spent the next year learning from these Professor Longhair transcriptions. The Fess is the patron saint of everything music in New Orleans. His most famous tune, Tipitina, is the name of the most famous music club in the city. His style of down home ragtime/creole/southern blues was fairly easy to pick up on. That's just what I needed. Just the facts please. Something to make it so I could play thru a bunch of 12 bar blues stanzas and sound good.

So now I really knew some cool basic blues riffs and some funky beats and riffs. When I'm in my comfort area, I don't have to think so hard when I'm playing and I really enjoy myself. I started to play with some folks again and feel I'm no longer the worst keyboard player in the world! Lots of what I play now sounds pretty fine.

Craigslist New Orleans is not what it is here since very few people down there own computers or use email or know what Craigslist even is. I of course met Craig back in the day in San Francisco and used to have him over for dinner every week. I was stunned that there weren't more musicians down there that wanted to play the funk and that had equipment and cars, etc, but as you can imagine, down in New Orleans, every one isn't all that together. The ones that were already had some fabulous bands, but most folks just went out to party.

The friend who first invited me down there is a trombone player, but musically we really couldn't hit it off. He kept wanting me to play Jazz, and I really felt I wasn't ready for it. I could follow the fake books, but I didn't know any jazz techniques and felt like I did trying to guess thru Grateful Dead tunes, and so musically we just didn't get along.

The first band I was in down there was called "Swamp Wiggle". We were a mix of a magician on guitar, a drunk on drums, a rock based bass player and me. We played lots of things, but a year later just fractured as we couldn't agree on how to play songs and ran out of welcome at the rehearsal house and the drunk was just too frickin loud and didn't have equipment or a car.

Then the bassist and I went over to this cover band and that fell apart when the singer and the drummer couldn't get along. Then the bassist brought me into a rock band and for various reasons... mostly that I would clash with the rocker guitar player, I got the boot. I guess I wanted some freedom to jam and they wanted to keep it tight. At one point, I hooked up with this local band called Funkin Horns and played a gig with them at the Maple Leaf. I thought I sounded great with them, but they just really talented local kids and weren't really ready to settle down with me.

In New Orleans, you see a lot of the best players are that way cuz they really have nothing else in their lives to rely on for a living. I have a day job that I like. I'm not the best out there by any stretch cuz there are some serious music freaks that play keys. I have a lack of experience in bands that have actually made it somewhere, but I now at least know what I know. I know I love the New Orleans funk and know lots of the theory behind it. I know that it's a lot easier for me to fit into music that I wrote than it is to sound exactly right on a cover that doesn't have keys in it in the first place.

So I started writing my own funk groove tunes and played more on my own. I learned the actual sheet music for a bunch of rock and funk tunes for the fun of it and so I could play them solo with the real left hand bass lines going. I worked up a couple shows where it'd be me and my drum machine going thru a bunch of Neil Young, Van Morrison, CCR, Cream, and then the Fess and Brick House and Look Ka Py Py and Play that Funky Music white boy and my original funk grooves. I'd sing and was able to play it all without having to think too much. That was all fun and good practice, but I'd rather be in a band kickin out high powered funk like Galactic.

I then met up with this guy Scooter who was the real deal. He had an awesome voice and for a year plus, we rehearsed a bunch of r&b and funk and went thru a string of guitar players. Some of it sounded real sweet and I was looking forward to it being a great band, but Scooter ended up doing 4 part vocal harmony stuff with some friends in the French Quarter and never made getting the band a gig a priority. He was making good enough money on his own. Finally I had to quit saying I'd be back if he got us a gig. He never did.

So that was the lack of status when Katrina came and forced my honey and I out to Denver.

I spent the 2 months of our hurrication learning a dozen disco tunes out of this 'big book of disco and funk' just for the fun of it. I don't really expect to play much disco, but it's good to pick up a new genre. I mean that is the way music in New Orleans worked.

There aren't any 'rock cover bands' in New Orleans. There are bands that play stuff other than funk and blues. They'll do a 'Reggae night' or a 'Mod Rock night' or a 'surf night' The whole night will have three bands that all cover surf music for the night. So now if I find myself in a situation where someone wants a disco night, I can whip up a whole show in two rehearsals. If you want a Neil Young show, I got one of those too. If you want a Van Morrison show, let's do it. But to just play half Stones, half Reggae, half jazz and half the Temptations, forget it. It just doesn't work like that. It overflows. So many bands just can't focus.

Anyways, now in Denver, I want to be playing out again. I have been auditioning with bands that I meet thru Craigslist and have been trying to start a band on my own too. I've also been looking for work and starting a new job and my partner is about to have our baby. Two heavy metal bands, two singer songwriter bands, and two cover bands later, I haven't found the right fit out here. I just auditioned with a pretty great funk band. I thought I sounded ok, but I didn't even get an email back saying 'no thanks.'

I feel like I learned enough about playing to be able to shepherd a band along towards having lots of fun and playing some cool funky music. So since the beginning of the year at least, I've had weekly rehearsals at my place. The bass player from the cover band I was in saw that I should probably be playing funk instead of Aerosmith, so we started doing it together. We went thru two drummers and a guitar player. The guitar player had the right funky vision, but we had different approaches to getting there, and I'm sure he felt like my originals weren't quite there yet. He left after like 4 rehearsals. Then a week later, the drummer quit saying he had life issues.

I think a few of my originals are great the way they are. The others really need a full band to explore and to finish. You know if you've got some cool people around all committed to doing collaborative compositions, you should be able to invent things and work things out as a group. If you come to my band expecting to not have to think and help, it probably won't work out.

I asked the bass player to chill while I worked in some new guitar players. I had put out another ad and reeled in two guitar players. One a frooty loops raver player and the other more a rocker. I ended up working with them individually 3 times each and thought together they'd sound fabulous. I worked them from their roots into the funky groove and both were finally sounding great, but I never could get them in the same room at the same time. Then bass player finally quit. So close. The raver guy finally said he was going to move on right when I finally lined up another bass player and drummer. Then after one great rehearsal with the new unit, the rocker guy said he was going to have to go back and play some heavier stuff.

So then I found yet another guitar player, who's real young and comes from a more classic guitar background and is still with us. I mean the basics of playing funk really aren't too hard. I feel I can work with just about anyone and have them up to speed in just a few weeks. We're keeping things really simple in the pocket. Most stuff is pure blues pentatonics with very simple changes.

The new drummer sees the funky future and is pickin it up quick. The bass player who came on is fabulous. He's new to funk but sees the importance of picking your genre and sticking with it. He comes from playing Klezmer and wants another outlet. So at least the rhythem section sees the vision. The classic guitarist guy is coming along nicely but I wanted to have someone coming in and hitting it hard right away.

So along came the next in the string. This guy could definitely rock and knew how to take some leads in a number of styles. 3 rehearsals later with him he knew most of my tunes and we were really sounding great. From my point of view, we needed to record one rehearsal with everyone there and we'd have some fine material to land gigs with. But then he quit too. So frickin close.

I'm not sure if he just wasn't comfortable playing funky music all the time.. .kept saying he wanted to play Allman Brothers. I mean I love the Allmans, but could we please have that be a separate band? It just doesn't go all that well with a New Orleans Funk and Blues show. Maybe he didn't like that I want to get out and gig with stuff the way it is instead of us woodshedding for another 6 months.

I really would rather get paid a bit to play and get a few free beers out of it and be having good parties instead of playin in my spare bedroom.

I know that so far I don't work too well with the singer songwriter/rock and roll genre, most of which doesn't have a lot of room for keys or really doesn't need them. Most music only has 4 parts. If you've got bass, rhythem, lead and vocals already, you don't need that much more. Most rock bands can get away with an occasional keyboard riff that one of the guitar players plays or using a studio player to sit in at a recording session to fill something out. When they play Red Rocks or something, sure, bring in a ringer. I ain't at that level. I didn't go to music school or even play high school band, but I'm now committed to continual learning and exploring new genres.

So anyways, I'm looking for players. All this experience I just wrote about is part of life. It can be frustrating, but whatever. No one said it was going to be easy, especially when you've moved from Midwest to East coast to West Coast to South Coast to the Mountains and don't have the network. What can one do but keep on pluggin.

With the loss of yet another guitar player, I feel I'm not much more than losing a bass player from starting from scratch again, but on the other hand, I feel that with a drummer, bass player and guitarist that we have a lot of momentum. We have more than two sets already. I'm trying out a new hip hop/funky vocalist this week. At the moment we're playing mostly my originals, but I am more than willing to pick and choose covers from Galactic and the Meters and Greyboys, etc. We will be doing more of that for sure.. once we get a solidified lineup.

I'm lookin for fun and adventure on the high seas of the groove.

I'm pretty much expecting to get no replies from this ad. I just needed to write it since it is a Craigslist story.

I'd love to hear from some horn players who want to play their chops but who won't be too upset if this isn't the best band they've ever heard in their lives... yet. After trolling Craigslist for a few months, I'm pretty sure such a thing does not exist in this city.

I'd love to meet a new guitar player who can crank out the leads but can leave the heavy metal and rock behind... at least in this band.

I'm looking for people who like to compose funky music and invent changes and breaks. I'm looking for people who communicate, have cars and equipment, write emails to the band to say what is on their mind. I'm looking for people who play well with others. I'm looking for people who live in the Denver metro area. I'm looking for people who might have been to New Orleans Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras and have heard of Galactic, The Funky Meters, Professor Longhair, Medeski Martin and Wood, the Greyboy Allstars, or Parliment Funkadelic. I'm looking for people who wouldn't mind learning a bunch of my tunes and who would suggest us to play James Brown before Pink Floyd. I'm lookin for gigs. Mostly I'm looking for new friends in Denver who want to give something new a chance and grow together as mucisians and people.

When I put it that way, I'm not suprised at all that I haven't found all of the right playahs yet. That's a lot to ask for, but when you go to the festivals, it does seem like that is what the crowds are asking for. I am willing to settle for less... as long as it's fun and funky.

The gig is in mid July, so there's fun playin in front of people in the near future.