I was never one to not try something new, so I thought I’d break ground with musical accompaniment. I’ve always been a fan of Tchaikovsky (the sometimes gay, substance-abusing madman genius that he was. I can relate to the madman/genius part because our Swiss ancestry has a periodic history of insanity being diluted over time with marriage to more sane Germans like my mom to mere eccentricity).

I own an authentic replica of a live-fire twelve-pound Napoleon civil war black powder firing field cannon. The live performance of the 1812 Overture calls for a battery of artillery pieces firing on cue from the maestro to be fired at precisely the right moment in the piece to fill out the performance (see what I’m talking about from 14:48 on in the attached link). Well I fired this cannon at a celebration we had every year at our house on the Fourth of July.Well I fired this cannon every ½ hour and except for one communist bastard who would call the cops because of the noise ( I threatened to but a real ball in it since we fired powder only for the effect and noise and drop it the ¼  mile away onto the roof of his house, but I digress).  Anyway, everyone else in the nearby neighborhood loved it. 

One-year, the local HOA was having a salute to the Vets for Veterans day and asked if I would bring my cannon over and fire it.  Of course, for a guy to fire something big like a cannon, I jumped at the opportunity. But to take it one step further, I had an idea.  They informed me that they had a scaled-down traveling version of the Brevard Symphony Orchestra coming to perform, among other things, the Overture of 1812.  This idea was to make my canon an instrument that day and fire it on cue from the director throughout the performance.  As I stated earlier, the full-blown performance calls for a battery of artillery firing on cue.  I had one, so we improvised. My assistant and I could get a shot off every 30 to 40 seconds if we hurried. This process involved firing with a lanyard and a friction primer and inserting a pigtail to clean out the residue from the shot swab down the barrel.  A rammer soaked in water from a nearby bucket to ensure that any reside powder would not prematurely explode, taking off an arm or other extremity while loading a new charge.  Ram in the new charge, puncture the new charge through the firing whole, insert the friction charge hook up the lanyard in the eye of the friction primer, look at the conductor, wait for a cue and fire and reload in about 30 seconds. We missed a couple of shots but managed to get six rounds off on cue during the finale saving one for the end as a final.  That was the strangest instrument and performance of my musical career but undoubtedly the most fun.  Just watching the expressions on people’s faces and the vets about to scream “INCOMING” was a priceless memory. Nowadays, for the last two years, the gun remains silent but still sits proudly on its rampart in front of our house to remind us of glory days past.  But then again, I still got 20 pounds of black powder left, and that old communist bastard over the way will never know when this crazy old bastard will load up in my dying days pull that lanyard and let fly. lol

Well, for all of you who do read my posts, you know that I wander a lot in my topics and often have the urge to write about my experiences in music.  Here as of late, while I’m dealing with our struggling site work business, trying to figure out how to carry large insurance payments, heavy equipment payments, health insurance, and a myriad of other fixed costs in addition to costs of materials, fuel, and payroll. We went from about ten employees to four and are still trying to do 1/2 million dollars in work with proper social distancing. We applied for the government giveaways. Still, I guess all the businesses with nearly 500 employees (which I can’t fathom how they are “small businesses” have sucked up the two trillion and ran the system dry in less than a month and left us real small business’s hung out to dry. Businesses in our class and industry are used to us fixing the infrastructure in this country, and the truckers who haul everything being taken for granted. Right now, the truckers are heroes, have low fuel costs, and vast amounts of freight to haul and are finally getting a break, but the rest of us get screwed.  Sooner or later, when that water main breaks and all the sheltered in folks can’t flush their toilets or get clean water, being short on toilet paper will be the least of their worries while our industry implodes.  We were already near collapse because, in this full-employment country, we can’t find anyone to work in the trades.  Even if we pay competitive wages to the student loan, buried college grads who didn’t learn anything marketable and lecture the rest of us how stupid and backward we are.  It is in this backdrop, I write this morning to escape this world and into my passion for music, which in the song by the Doobie Brothers says, “Music Is the Doctor.”

The band I formed back in 1976, fresh out of college. It has had many alumni, each with their own story to tell, kind of like the books of the New Testament. Each version of the band with a version of music and a life of its own. With music in its God-given way acting as its earthly representation of the Savior.

We were always a family and were bound together by the music we played, mostly cover songs of other bands, but we did record four originals that are linked in the blog. A couple of nights ago, as usual, I couldn’t sleep away my depression, so I surfed the tv and ended up on the AXS channel. They had a run a tribute to one of my all-time favorite bands, Chicago. I listened and wept with sadness as well, as “tears of joy” when I heard their hit “Make Me Smile.” I grew up in high school and college, listening to their music and played it live in bands from then on.

Topaz started out with six guys; Leigh played bass and doubled on Trombone when the keyboard picked up the bass line either on low-end keys or foot pedals on a Hammond B-3; Louie (the token Cuban) played trumpet. I played sax and doubled on vocals, and I covered Donna Summer because I had a falsetto that sounded like her since we had no chicks in the band then. Earth, Wind, and Fire “Fantasy,” which was reserved for the second set so I could warm up and not blow my chops beyond what an emergency shot of Drambuie chased by a beer could not cure! Matt played the B-3, the real and heavy deal with a full Leslie, ARP string ensemble, and Fender Rhodes piano. RIP Matt; he passed away a few years back. Jack on guitar played massively loud through a tube Fender twin, who sang lead and Mike on drums (who on one occasion brought in dual Tympani kettle drums, so we had the right sound for a disco version of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Everyone sang except Matt, who was a New York Italian, that sounded like Marlin Brando doing his Godfather thing. These were the guys in the first edition of Topaz.

The next edition continued with the nightclub thing but recorded some originals. We recorded these in a little eight-track studio in Orlando in 1979. Me, Leigh, and the Guitar player, all worked during the day at the mining operation, my family owned. My dad passed away in 1978, leaving me at 26 to take over the business with my mom, sister and brother. So we all had day jobs and played clubs at night sometimes six nights a week until 2:00 AM, and then it was back to work at 7:00 AM. Out of this environment, we got off work one Friday night and headed to Orlando to start a recording session at 7:00 PM and broke up after the final mixdown of the four tunes at 5:00 AM when we were done, physically, mentally and out of money to pay for any more studio time. The quality of this take was not derived from the original master but from a second generation cassette. In order to keep the “tape hiss” down, I encoded it with dolby noise reduction and goofed up and played back and transferred to the last version using DBX noise reduction. Since these were two different technologies they didn’t have the same compression or noise gate properties (for all you ancient technology geeks) and the songs fade in and out a bit with the noise reduction not able to compensate for the tape hiss in the same way. Sort of like speaking French and English at the same time.

As an aside, The song by Chicago “25 or 6 to 4”, was titled when recorded because someone in the band looked up at the clock when asked what time it was and someone said “about 25 or 6 to 4 AM and thus the title of the song was the born-true story.

Every song ever written has a story behind it, so I’ll tell you a quick story behind

the inspiration to these four songs. Can’t Dance Alone – Keith, our guitarist at the time, wrote this song as our hopefully break out single (not). He was from Birmingham England and was very gifted and had a knack for song “hooks” The horn parts were made up on the spot and never written out just played from memory.

Keith also wrote the next tune “Christy” this one was about an old flame of his that he somehow could never make into a lasting relationship.

Still, the yearning never left him Leigh wrote the “Music Of You” about his wife at the time.  I played, unfortunately, a very flat soprano sax on this tune (not one of my finer moments) We overdubbed the horn parts with Leigh back on Bone. Throughout the tunes, the ARP string ensemble (state of the art analog synthesizer, at the time) was used to supply the string parts, Leigh, and I divorced our wives later on in life, another whole story, but they were childhood sweethearts that just grew apart.

I Remember You – was written by me in the Chicago/Blood Sweat and Tears/Tower of Power genre.  It was about a dear friend that was probably my soulmate.  In my high school days, we were never intimate beyond passionate petting, but we talked for hours on end and cared for each other. Time went on she moved away we kept in touch over the years but lament what could have been with no regrets about where we are I lost track of her years ago, and I think she has passed on. She was instrumental in bringing me back to Christ by giving me Oswald Chambers “My Utmost for Your Highest” daily devotional.  I have kept it by my side ever since.  What a strange journey we traveled even for just a little while.

I sang the last tune; in retrospect, I should have subbed the vocal out to someone who had a more talented voice, but I gave it my best shot.  Also, being in a little eight-track studio and given the analog/tape technology of the time, the double-tracked vocals had to be done by physically overdubbing by singing along with the original track (no digital one takes to add a perfectly delayed and in tune overdub effect). Try doing that some time and sing something the same way with yourself with the exact same inflections and intonation and timing. It isn’t as easy as it sounds, but that’s the way it was done in the ’70s.

Here is the manuscript to the last song that I wrote “I Remember You” that had a big Chicago style horn soli in it, but we ran out of time, and horn chops, so Keith created a killer Guitar solo on the spur of the moment to fill in the hole.

Up until a couple of years ago, when I had my stroke, the band played together in clubs, and on Sunday mornings, pieces of the band showed up at church on Sunday morning to play in praise bands and lead worship.  This morning as I sat on my front porch listening on my phone ITUNES, Mercy Me’s, “Word of God Speak,” When I was a worship leader and we did this tune, I would play my EWI (electronic wind instrument that fingered like a sax and produced synthesizer sounds) that produced the strings so that our keyboardist could devote both hands to the piano.  Then to add a twist that most of the time took the congregation by the surprise of wailing powerful alto sax solo of the chorus to plead to God to Speak in the one way I could cry out so much from the heart.

 I remember Gary, our last drummer, and gifted vocalist would sing this on Sunday morning after playing the night before with me in the last version of Topaz.  Turning on a dime to go into praise and worship with an even greater passion than “eagles,” Mustang Sally” and Chicago just performed a few hours before. But no matter what Topaz, when taking the stage, always discretely prayed before the downbeat. 

Topaz was unique because  of the fact that not only was it loaded with talent (me being the least talent), but I could keep peace among the varying strong personalities, keep the stage presence on cue, call the right tunes at the right time, measure the emotional flow of the audience and handle the business side and run sound from the stage.

Music is as close as it gets for me to express the passion of God.

While I might be considered a street Christian with my coarse language and my track record of not always the most reverent guy in the room with a litany of not so holy moments, I persevere to improve and grow. To illustrate the paradoxes of my life, let me share the following. I would play clubs with my band Topaz, as we got on stage before a crowd of diners, drinkers, and couples out to hear a good band and dance. Before we hit the first note, we lowered our heads in prayer, over the cacophony of clanging plates and loud talk. Sometimes people would look up and wonder what the hell are these guys doing, many would know and first with surprise, and then with a small smile knew that this wasn’t your average band. Though ladies were openly trying to seduce us, we just wanted to engage the audience with music designed to allow couples or impromptu couples to dance the night away, make new memories, rekindle old ones, enjoying a night out. Unfortunately, some of our Christian band members succumbed to temptation. It was rare and met with rebuke by the rest of us. I, among my many sins, never allowed it to become beyond a Jimmy Carter “lusting in my heart” thing, but naughty just the same, worthy of rebuke. Then like so many of us club musicians, we got tired of the drunks and the seamier side of music and turned to praise bands for finding more meaning. It was a pretty good fit since we as a praise band segment of the musicians who had the chops and filled a talent gap that exists/existed. In contrast, we had our roots in secular/commercial music (frequently a band was measured by how many drinks you could sell versus how good you were in management’s eyes and learned this art well.

Let me digress, for a moment, into tales of night club music.  A memorable moment came just before we went on a break.  The crowd was packed on the dance floor, we went into our break song that was the theme to the motion picture Rocky, and a fight broke out between two inebriated patrons, who thought they were in the ring.   We went on to finish the song. The dance floor cleared and left the two drunks missing more punches then they landed.  It was a great soundtrack for the absurd.  The fun was over when the ex-marine bouncer escorted them out, not too gracefully.   Just another full moon evening at the old Merritt Island Casino when the happy drunks turned mean, and the mean ones made fools of themselves.   Just for your information, this same bouncer stood in the middle of State Road 520, pulled his military 45, and shot “warning” shots at a car speeding away with a waitress’s tip money at 2:00 am.   Ah, yes, they don’t make them like that anymore. Only the stupid would mess with a guy who could have been a real-life participant in the Viet Nam saga Apocalypse Now, but he always protected the innocent in a Joshua true old testament way.

Out of this rowdy environment, I and several other of my hooligan comrades were persuaded to form a praise band for my old church. My Pastor’s leadership was trying to move the church into the 21st-century, kicking and screaming, from a liberal but very traditional hymn singing United Church of Christ Midwestern/New England church to two services, one traditional, one contemporary. She was the Pastor, who married my Wife and me. With my Wife’s prodding, Pastor convinced me to jump-start the contemporary service, with ringers from the club band and me as the worship leader, I thought that was a stretch. We rocked the house and started with 15 congregants, within a year, grew to over 120. We rocked the house with good Christian music and secular music that we often changed the words to be more church-like. After a few years, I realized that we were becoming more entertainment instead of worship, as my wonderful Pastor tried to steer me. She left the church and ministry all together for reasons she only knows. But shortly after, the heavy hand of the National UCC Denomination installed an openly gay pastor in our local church and promoted all the open and affirming stuff that split our church and went against the doctrine I knew. Just a sidebar here, I have friends who are gay, and you don’t work in the arts for any length of time without working with, loving, and respecting gay people. Still, I couldn’t handle forcibly having the whole thing foisted upon me in my church (my mom and dad would roll in their graves if they knew what happened to the church they started when we moved to Florida in 1962).

Moving on, I, in addition to performing with the club band, due to economies of scale and we couldn’t afford a sound guy.  I ran sound from the stage, even using a foot pedal to change the effects so that I wouldn’t have to take hands off my sax to change up the sound.  After years of that, I decided to find another church (my last day at my old church that happened after a congregant dropped the F-bomb on my Wife, who produced all the video, one Sunday morning for some petty thing. We ended up at Faith Fellowship Church, and I was quickly recruited, under the tutelage of
D.W., to run sound on a 48-channel analog Mackey board. Here I learned the difference between worship and entertainment.  There are similarities in mechanics and engaging with the listeners. Still, the whole Holy Spirit thing was a revelation to me.  I learned that mixing sound IS worship and that glorifying God is a whole new ball game.  You must be absorbed in the moment. Don’t get me wrong getting cues right, and a little show biz helps. In music, I like extremes and dynamics; when it needs to be loud, shake the rafters and make them feel it their gut with subs.  When it’s soft, make them strain to hear soulful sound and intimacy of a whisper.   Present the Word with clamor and loud like David clanging his Cymbal as he marched ahead of the Ark into Jerusalem.   And yet hear the soft harmony of David playing his harp to soothe the troubled heart of King Saul.  David was referred to as a man after God’s own heart. I’ll bet he wailed on harp!

https://www.faithfellowshipweb.com/post/in-tune-with-the-maestro

My response after reading our church’s daily devotional, link noted above.

Pastor Jeff. The maestro.  I read your devotional Monday 2/3/2020 and related so much to it being a musician myself.  The maestro, in the classic sense of a traditional orchestra with his hands and the baton during a performance, brings to life each note played and is the great high priest of harmony. Through his gestures, he blends and augments the humanity and passion of the individual players. Each one is part of a conversation when masterfully blended marvelously form the harmony. He signals the flutes and strings when to be a little softer and tender and summons the brass to be strong and powerful and blends it all to create a breathtaking experience to the audience conveyed through sight and sound. The audience can see the passion and hear the harmony of a well-tuned orchestra with all its human flaws and beauty.  Today we are in an amplified and sadly too digitized world where humanity becomes lost in the pursuit of mathematical perfection. Sometimes perfect harmony is stale and uninspiring A little dissonance within boundaries is a blessing and individual freedom

The modern-day sound engineer is more and more the true maestro behind the curtain. That person behind what used to be a console in a holy place that should not be subject to distractions from others who want to chat. The maestro is a servant to the worship experience and must always immerse themselves in the act. Total focus on the musicians while they add their part to the conversion picking up on every note and delivery of the sound and timbre of that sound, which is the humanity part. While they will seldom admit that even the most accomplished musician is anxious inside during a performance.  Part of that person behind the curtain through their thoughtful actions, lift them and lets their passion come through, without overpowering the others,  guide them fist like the front stage maestro uses his baton in the form of faders and gestures to guide the musicians. To lift this from simply rearranging ones and zeros, this person must be a musician and know what it’s like to be on stage.  God is the ultimate maestro or sound man, and through Jesus, he knows what it’s like to be on that stage because He wonderfully made us with all our humanity. He knows we will miss a note now on then and be slightly off-key, but because of who He is and who we are when we meet, it’s truly beautiful music.

Rick

I hope not to bore you all with all this old stuff about me, but maybe you’ll get to know me better and know where this drivel originates.  I know some of you older people, like me, remember having to sit through hour upon hour of the family slide show of the same pictures of someone standing in front of the elephant cage at some zoo you visited.  Someone was ridiculously positioned in front of his trunk.  A friend of mine recently sent me a video of a rather well endowed young lady from Australia standing in front of an elephant who had just removed her bikini top with his trunk. I guess he was just looking for peanuts in all the wrong places, but I digress.

I’m attempting to convey some true-life stories about my life with a sort of message, a chuckle, and maybe a tear or two that I am a firsthand witness.  Where I’m the central character, kind of like the Forrest Gump movie, where Forrest, who just shows up, sometimes as an extra, sometimes in a cameo,  and sometimes as the main character in a life’s journey through the 50’s to the 21^st century.  If you just started following me, you were subjected to my first attempt to recall my time in Haiti,  more on this in the future.

This time around, I want to share my early music background, my other passion, with a piece I wrote in 2006.  I wrote this little history to show my appreciation for what my old school did for me in a different era with different values.  Incidentally, in my senior year, in the height of the Vietnam war, the draft was done by lottery.  That year, they put out the numbers for the next year, I was number 88 out of 365, and they called up to number 86.  I literally and figuratively dodged a bullet.  Unfortunately, many of my classmates weren’t so fortunate.  I guess God had a different plan for me, and I’m still trying to figure that our 50 years later.  Pray for me to figure that out sometime.  Join me in my Music Trip…..

2006

My days of playing from high school forward were always memorable times.  My years at Eau Gallie High School were some of the fondest of my memories.  I remember my sophomore year with Nat Baggarly as our director, and we barely stretched across the field in a company font with just 64 kids.  Nat had a way of motivating us and making us a team.  In my junior year, James Moody was our director, and it was sort of a rebuilding year.  My senior year was a great year.  Under Joe Johnson, we learned how to pull together.  The band was about 100.  We played Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qKn5ShUcr4 for the band contest, all the other powerhouses at the time, Merritt Island, Melbourne, etc., didn’t think little old Eau Gallie (a new school at the time) could cut that piece and that we played way over our head.  We got superiors and a standing ovation.

!The Jazz band was pretty good as well.  I played ride tenor and alto sax in the Concert and Marching Bands.  It was cool to go out and do paying gigs with the local band directors.   The leadership and dedication of my teachers in Concert Band, Jazz Band, and Music Theory were to serve me well in my later years, and I owe them so much.   I graduated in 1970 (incidentally, I still think that we had the coolest band uniforms, with the marine jackets and cross belts, and yes Mel Hi marched backward off the field as their big finale to every half time show even back then!)   Here, I would like to say how totally impressed I am at the quality of the music program at Eau Gallie High School and Johnson Middle School. These kids play far better than we could have hoped for, and I believe that this is a direct result of caring, compassionate, no-nonsense, leadership provided by Mr. & Mrs. Singletary. (directors at the time of this writing ) While I would like to think of my generation of band kids were pioneers and on the cutting edge during our time, the quality of character and musicianship of the kids in these schools today is nothing short of awesome!  50 years have passed since I was a proud member of the Eau Gallie High School Commodore Band, and practically everything has changed except for one thing – the love and compassion of the band directors who lead this program.  I guess some things never change.  GO COMMODORES!

I went to Brevard Junior College (BJC now EFSC) on a tuition waiver for music (even though I was an accounting major), played lead alto sax in the jazz band under my old friend Nat Baggarly.  We had a pretty decent jazz band, and one of the greatest moments was doing a joint concert with the late great Stan Kenton and his band.  Our sax section did Opus in Pastels (a piece written by Stan Kenton featuring the sax section) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9KOYv4UHTI as a dedication to Stan.  That was pretty cool.  Many from our group that year went on to become part of the Airmen of Note and other military bands. 

Jim Bishop directs Band at BCC now (aka EFSC), and Kenny G was one of his students when he was an intern at Northwestern. Jim, however, sat second chair behind me at BJC (just had to rub that in Jim!) I went on to finish my accounting degree at the University of Florida (GO GATORS!). Oh, before I go on, I took private lessons while at BJC under Charles Colbert, who was a great teacher and a real taskmaster pushing me to practice hard. The climax of that experience was playing the Paul Creston Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaxNpfT1p9E (which is a complicated piece) at a recital pulling it off without losing my cookies.

On to UF, I played lead alto in the number 1 Jazz band for two years, under the direction ofhm out of North Texas State. The music department at Florida was pretty relaxed, but the jazz band had to pick up the tunes quick and had a heavy concert and tour schedule. We backed up the Temptations on a 3 hour notice one time, they came in with written charts, and we had one rehearsal about 2 hours before the performance, which took place in the old Florida Gym. We played a concert to a captive audience 😊 at Raiford Max Security Prison, where the Notorious Murph the Surf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Roland_Murphy carried my horn cases in for me.

I paid for most of my tuition at UF by playing Frat parties, proms, and clubs while I was there.  The highlight of the UF Jazz band experience for me was when the band was invited to tour Romania for 3 weeks as an Ambassador of Friendship group to help thaw out the cold war with a cultural exchange of American Jazz.  Going behind the Iron Curtain at that time was a pretty big deal, especially for a bunch of “long hairs” from UF.  We were treated like celebrities wherever we played.  One of our not so glamorous moments was on our last night in Romania. They took us to a Biergarten kind of place, we proceeded to get very drunk. The local band made the unwise choice of inviting a very drunk group of American musicians to sit in. After a very poorly played rendition of “Tequila” that seemed to torment the rest of the patrons for hours, we poured onto the plane that would take our very hung-over bodies back to the US of A.   

After I graduated from UF, I sat for the CPA exam and passed it and went to work for my Dad’s mining company in Melbourne. I played clubs, did some recording, and learned the entertainment business while doing my day job.  In 1976, I formed a Band called Topaz, and we have been playing around the stat3e ever since with a long Alumni of varying members.  We opened for the Commodores in the early 2000s, and back in 1986, B.J. Thomas opened for us on the 4^th of July (I was writing the check, so I pulled rank).  I started leading the praise band in the early 2000s, at the church, my family helped start (Crossroads Community Church).  I enjoy music as much as anyone can. 

My latest ambition is to build a 5-story building on the property that I own here in Melbourne and dedicate the bottom two floors to a jazz club, multi-style state of the art performance facility.  In addition to having a resident house, multi-style musician group, the 20,000 square foot facility would have a particular time available for local school groups to perform in a commercial setting to experience the feel of that kind of audience and performance.  With my background in performance, running my own small recording studio supplemented with training from Full Sail Recordings in Orlando, my dream was to make Club Rio a place to come to for a great performance of music and a good time.  My dream of Club Rio never materialized due to funding and the ever-present government red tape.  Oh well, I dream big, most of the time exceeding my pocketbook.