My Life in Music (So Far)

57 years of chasing the dream

My upright piano, which my father-in-law rescued from a whorehouse

My musical journey did not start with great promise. As a six year old growing up in Boulder, Colorado, my parents decided to give me piano lessons. Things seemed to be going fine until my teacher held a Christmas recital for her students. I was too new to play by myself, so she arranged for me to play the right hand (melody) and she would accompany me. I thought I nailed it, but afterwards she wanted to chat. She figured out that I was playing the melody to “O Little Town of Bethlehem” from memory, rather than by sight-reading the sheet music.

Her position was that you became a piano player by learning to play from sheet music. I replied that I didn’t need it…I could already hear in my mind what I wanted to play, and that seemed to work just fine to me. She disagreed, and we parted ways.

At 14, with my first guitar, purchased from Sears.

No longer taking lessons, I had been bitten by the bug. My dad had acquired an old player piano which he stored in our basement. It was a beautiful old thing, with stained glass. I would pound away, discovering things and gradually turning into a passable piano player. When the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” came out when I was 14, I remember arranging the entire album for solo piano, complete with the crescendo on “A Day in the Life” that involved mashing the keys from bottom to top with the sustain pedal floored.

At 15, a high school chum recruited me to be in a band he was forming. It was a Doors tribute band before such things became ubiquitous as they are today. We called ourselves “Hinnj” (in the mid ’60s, weird spellings were almost a requirement for band names) and we learned all the songs off the Doors’ first two albums. We played a few teen dances and such, and what I remember was playing “Light My Fire” as my friend used to replicate Bobby Krieger’s guitar solo note for note, while when it was my turn to solo (on a tinny little Heathkit organ) I would venture off without a destination or directions. It worked anyway.

Found this image online and couldn’t resist using it

Fast forward to junior year of high school. By now I had acquired a Kustom organ with its amp and speakers built in, covered in silver tuck-and-roll upholstery. It had an octave of bass keys with a separate volume control, and I found myself in a power trio with a guitarist and drummer. I was the keyboardist-bassist. We called ourselves the Shadowfax Blues Band. We were fairly popular around Boulder and even won a local battle of the bands. My clearest memory of those days was a dance we played at a local reservoir where we needed to use a gas generator as there was no power. We used to open our shows with “Born To Be Wild.” Someone would fire up the generator, which sounded like a motorcycle, followed by the crashing organ chords that begin the song.

By this time I had also taught myself to play guitar. I parlayed this into becoming the leader of my church choir…this was when the Catholic church was experimenting with modernizing itself with English instead of Latin and more contemporary music. I also would sneak into church before services and go up to the choir loft and play my version of the somber music that usually preceded Mass. No one ever caught on.

A Brief Hiatus

After high school, the band all went in different directions. I went away to a private college on the west coast, not sure in what academic direction I should go. Fortunately, I was in an experimental program at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California that didn’t require declaring a major…we simply received a balanced education in the humanities. I discovered the music conservatory with its tiny practice rooms that had room for a piano, a bench and not much else. I spent most of my free time there, trying various styles out, from ragtime to pseudo-classical (which I would trot out if I sensed anyone was patrolling the hallways). I jammed with a few friends but none of those turned into anything beyond a one-off informal session.

My parents couldn’t afford to send me back to the private college, so I transferred to the University of Colorado, a state school that was way more affordable. For a semester I was able to reunite with my band members and we rented a cabin in the mountains. Again, there were ample conservatory practice rooms where I could bang away in my own world for as long as I wanted to, which was often. The cabin situation fell apart, and I was forced to move back in with my parents. This seemed like the lamest of living situations to me at the time, and for the rest of the school year, I plotted my escape.

A Greyhound Bus to San Francisco

As soon as the school year ended, I parked my car in the garage, packed a suitcase and took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. I found a friend from UOP who had transferred to Berkeley and crashed at his place for several weeks. I landed a temp job with Kelly Girl for the swing shift in Oakland and found an apartment shared by three people looking for a fourth. Fortunately for me, the apartment had a piano, and all the other roommates were in classes all day. I had the apartment, and the piano, all to myself during the day. This was even better than the music conservatory practice rooms…I didn’t have to go anywhere.

Improv Theater with a Future Star

I had been there a month or so when I saw a classified ad in the San Francisco Chronicle that read “Improvisational pianist wanted for improv theater group.” I was invited to come see a show at the Intersection Coffee House in North Beach, followed by an audition the following day. I passed the audition and it began a five-year association with as zany a bunch of characters as one could ask for. They were all older than I…most were late 20s with one guy who was 37. I was 20.

The group was called The Wing, and they had been a workshop group for the Committee, the legendary SF group that, along with Chicago’s Second City, popularized improv theater as a form of nightlife entertainment. Although some groups relied on set pieces for the bulk of their show, with some improvised stuff, we prided ourselves on doing nothing but improv. We would take audience suggestions and run with them. All those hours in conservatory practice rooms prepared myself for this gig…I might be called on to provide appropriate accompaniment to anything from a quiet scene in a park to a full-blown opera.

Soon after I took over, we welcomed a new member who was my age. His name was Robin Williams. He was appearing with us on a trial basis, but it was immediately apparent that he was an unbelievable improvisor. Unfortunately, whenever he was onstage, everyone else was rendered invisible. This prevented the group from making him a permanent member. Soon afterward, he was cast in “Mork and Mindy” so it wasn’t exactly a career setback for him.

We created a following working in North Beach and off nights at the Berkeley Rep Theater, and undertook two tours of colleges. We would pitch them by positioning ourselves as an educational resource, providing improv workshops, as well as entertainment (we would perform). The first tour was in two cars that went all the way to the east coast and back, but only involved two colleges. The second involved a huge rented Winnebago RV that included more colleges as well as a stop in Chicago, where we jammed with Second City and I spent an afternoon at the Museum of Science and Technology with Bill Murray and John Candy.

After five years, it was becoming apparent to the members of The Wing that they weren’t going to become famous in San Francisco, so one by one, they departed for Los Angeles. One member was Joe Spano who became a star on “Hill Street Blues.” Most of the others were at least able to make a living as an actor, which hadn’t been the case locally. It was time for me to find another gig.

Back to Rock & Roll (Sort Of)

Front Street — an ill-fated country disco band. Photo: Ellen Goldstein

At the time, I was living in a dirt-cheap flat in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood with three other musicians. One of them had been playing bass with an acoustic guitarist who did mostly country and sounded a bit like Gordon Lightfoot. He was out in Livermore. We became a trio and started working in the outer East Bay. It was 1975 and disco was starting to emerge as a force in popular music. Club owners welcomed this with a vengeance…it got customers to dance, and made them thirsty. Pretty soon, if you weren’t a dance band, you couldn’t get gigs.

We had acquired a manager who, aware of this trend, suggested we hire a drummer, which we did. I also started doubling on lead guitar…we would do a tune like “Sweet Home Alabama” which I would play keys with the guitar strapped on, a pick sitting on the keyboard, which I would pick up to do the guitar solo, then put the pick down and finish the song on keys. Our sound was a mash-up of folk, country and disco, and it was as problematic as it sounds. We got lots of work, though, although the gigs were mostly an hour away. At some point, our lead singer, who up until then had led a pretty sheltered life, ran off with a bar waitress and blew up his marriage.

My girlfriend at the time heard that local legend Sylvester was looking for a keyboard player. Any gig at this point would have been an upgrade, but this looked like more than that. I auditioned and was hired. I have written about this episode already, so I won’t reprise it here.

A Shot at the Big Time

My ad in the California Talent Guide, right below Chris Isaak

A few years later, I made an attempt to establish myself as a recording artist. I had written a few songs, and made a demo of three of them. I called myself “Ivory Hammer” and sent a tape of the songs out to talent bookers, clubs and small record labels. I also took out a half page ad in a musical artists’ directory. The person who took out the other half of my page was Chris Isaak, who had a bit more success than I did. After Ivory Hammer failed to set the world on fire, I found some improv theater groups to play piano with, most notably Flash Family, with whom I performed for a number of years. By this time, I had acquired a reputation and performed with other groups, including Spaghetti Jam, Bay Area Theater Sports, and one show with an amazing group from Japan, Yellow Man Group. Flash Family had a large group of people who took workshops and once comfortable in stage settings, would perform with the “parent” ensemble. Several people in this group were musicians, and when a cast party was planned, we decided to form a band to perform at it. I had been splitting the Flash Family shows with another keyboard player, Joe Paulino. He asked me if I could play bass, so he could play keys, and we didn’t have a bass player. I agreed and began a journey that lasted two decades with a classic rock group called The Vanilla Extract. We were never a big club draw, but we did lots of private parties, fundraisers and the “music in the park” series that various towns would have. I turned out to be a decent bass player in the process.

The Vanilla Extract. Photo: Ellen Goldstein

After that band ran its course, I fell into a few bands for brief stints. One was a Doors tribute band (coming full circle from my youth) where I played organ. The band lasted for two shows and then blew up. I also played bass with a group called Captain Paisley. One night at a show I blanked out on a Led Zeppelin song and was let go. Another classic rock band I joined blew up before we even did a show.

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I continued to practice at my old upright piano. By this time, my wife had suffered a stroke and developed cancer, so I stuck close to home. One day, messing around, I stumbled on an arrangement of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” which came out sounding a little like the great jazz pianist Bill Evans. This launched me into a deep dive in which I listened to him a lot, and tried to adapt his style to various rock classics….the more challenging, the better. Layla. Kashmir. Eleanor Rigby. Stairway to Heaven. For months, I would wake up at 6 am, make myself some coffee and make phone videos of me impersonating Bill Evans until my wife woke up, at which time I switched to caregiver mode. I made hundreds of videos of dozens of songs, logging them meticulously in a little book. I uploaded a couple of them to YouTube, but most of my efforts were too flawed to share. I eventually came to the conclusion that I didn’t have the talent to pull this ambitious concept off.

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My wife passed away and I moved into an apartment in Pacifica with one of my adult sons, who worked at the San Francisco airport. I also invested in a nice electric keyboard I could play into headphones, as I wasn’t comfortable banging on the upright with shared walls all around me. Here I was, in a new place, and no ongoing music commitments. I decided to do some open mics. I met a singer in Oakland who hired me to play keys on an original song he was recording. He invited me to do an open mic with him in Alameda, so I schlepped my very heavy new keyboard to a tiny club.

I could see that dragging the keyboard to an open mic where I might be playing it for ten minutes didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I enjoyed the open mic experience. I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring an acoustic guitar, since 95% of open mic people do that. I wanted to stand out, and my talents as a singer and guitar player weren’t enough to do that. I had a dobro (a metal, very twangy type of slide guitar commonly used on old blues and country songs) and thought I might give that a go. In a similar fashion to the Bill Evans experiment, I tried it on some songs that were outside the normal dobro repertoire. One of the first songs I tried was the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” changing it to more of a swing tempo. It worked really well, and signaled to me that maybe I was onto something.

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Soon after moving to Pacifica I answered an ad for a local blues band called the Richmond Kings who were looking for a keyboard player. I was impressed by the band and got the gig. Meanwhile, I continued to do open mics with the dobro. My first efforts were somewhat tentative, but as I practiced, my confidence increased and things went better. As with the Bill Evans project, I looked for songs I could challenge myself with, such as the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” and “I Am the Walrus” from the Beatles. I also gave myself the stage name of “Sonny Boy Daniel” and created an outfit of all black with a black suit jacket, dark shades and a bowler hat. I created a sort of wiseass character that landed somewhere between Dr. John and Dan Hicks.

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The blues band caught wind of my dobro project and thought it might be cool to create an unplugged mini-set in the middle of our shows where we would do several old blues songs with me on the dobro. The band was on hiatus as we were missing a couple of members and this gave us something to do. Meanwhile the Sonny Boy Daniel thing was gaining a life of its own. I started a YouTube channel and started writing original songs on the dobro.

At the same time, I had been participating in a kind of acoustic song circle with several members of The Vanilla Extract. This group was intentionally low volume, living room level. No microphones. It was a very comfortable and satisfying experience…we developed some very nice three-part harmonies on many of the songs, which were mostly classic rock and folk. One of our members was able to arrange for us to play a feature slot at an open mic I had been frequenting, meaning we would get a half hour instead of ten minutes. It went very well, and a friend of mine hired us to do an 80th birthday party next month.

Ready For Whatever Is Next

This is where I am at the moment. The blues band has replaced the missing members and is getting the new players up to speed. I’m going out as Sonny Boy Daniel about once a week and writing more songs. It’s nice to have these musical outlets, but if I could indulge myself in daydreaming, I’d like to tour with someone. I love traveling and seeing new places on someone else’s dime. The blues band is a cover band, so they aren’t likely to tour outside of the Bay Area. It’s possible that someone with an established act sees me perform and taps me to go on tour with them. Less likely but still possible is that Sonny Boy Daniel catches on in a big way.

After 57 years at this, I’m still getting enormous satisfaction out of performing music live. I expect that to last as long as I can still sit upright behind a piano or cradle a dobro or bass in my lap. I’m not sure where all this will take me, but I can’t wait to find out.