ABOUT ME

I was born in Pasadena, California the same year Norma Jean Mortenson changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.  Elvis entered the US charts for the first time with his recording of Heartbreak Hotel that year, and Cecil B. DeMille’s released his epic film The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston.  I don’t really feel old, until I stop to think about how different the world was when I first arrived in comparison to what it has become of it in the decades since.

My father was a Kansas farm boy who was part of the 300,000 Dust Bowl refugees who fled to California in the 1930s in search of a better life.  He found it in the form of a lovely girl from Oklahoma, the only daughter in a family of a dozen boys.  Gene and Nina married young, and started a family, and built a home in El Monte, California.  Like so many of his generation, he joined the Army and was sent to the Philippines to fight the Japanese in WWII.  He did not talk much about his experiences overseas, but enough slipped out over the years to make it clear that it was a harrowing experience, complete with many close brushes with death.  It wasn’t any easier for mom, who listened nightly to Gabriel Heater’s broadcast outlining the war efforts.  Heater started his broadcasts with “Good evening, everyone—there is good news tonight” and mom held her young daughter close and prayed for a happy ending.

Fortunately, dad returned home safely and started his own business as a plumbing contractor.   They both worked hard and began to build a life together.  Tragedy struck repeatedly as they tried to have more children.  Mom suffered miscarriage after miscarriage and gave birth to two babies whose birth defects prevented them from living more than a few days.  Mom found solace in reading books and by smothering her young daughter with love and attention.

My sister was 15 when I was born, almost old enough to be my mom.  I had come along as a last-ditch-effort after so many heartbreaking losses.  My family showered me with love from the very beginning.  They protected me, nurtured me, and encouraged me until their last days on earth.  I did not appreciate this fully until much later in life.  I now know, and fully understand what a remarkable gift this was… a gift few children ever receive.  I am incredibly lucky.

I have always been extremely fond of my sister.  She was like a mother to me, babysitting me, playing toy soldiers with me, and exposing me to the world outside my rather sheltered environment at home.  My sister took me to museums, concerts, and plays.  She introduced me to art and music and filled my world with possibilities.  She sat next to me when she took me to see The Nutcracker, the first play I ever saw.  She sat next to me when she took me to see The Who, my first rock concert.  As weird as it sounds, my sister was sitting next to me on the second date I had with my wife… I had an extra ticket to see Stan Ridgway and shared it with my new date. My sister and my best pal Lou were my originally intended guests. There has been no one in my life more influential or wonderful than my sister.

When I was about six years old, my sister met the love of her life, and ended up getting pregnant.  This happy event thew our parents into a hissy fit and caused them to make the stupidest decision of their lives.  They disowned my sister and for many years I was not able to see or visit with her.  This, in my view, was the lowest point in our family history. How two relatively intelligent people could make such an idiotic decision still baffles me to this day.  Fortunately, time healed a lot of this rift, and ironically it was my sister who held both my parents’ hands as they gasped for air in the last moments of their lives.  If the God they intermittently worshiped was really there to greet them on the other side of the thin vail, in the immortal words of Desi Arnaz, they certainly had “some ‘splaining” to do.

During my youth, we moved a few times in and around the San Gabriel Valley area.  First stop after my parents left the home they had built with my grandfather in El Monte, we landed in Glendora in a brand-new tract home. Nestled against the rattlesnake infested foothills, this home was anything but inviting.  I was one of the youngest kids in the neighborhood.  The big kids, and their big brothers constantly harassed me.  I got a few licks back from time to time… including the time two kids on ten speeds came careening down the driveway at the end of the cul-de-sac with intent to knock me off the shiny new bike I got for Christmas.  They laughed hysterically as I picked myself off the pavement as they zoomed by.  I ran back to the house and dropped off my bike and grabbed the old blue scooter, the kind that looks like a skateboard with handlebars as they peddled back up the hill.   As I expected, once I got back into the street with my scooter, down the hill they came again for another strafing run. This time, as the zooming bullies sped by, I stepped off my scooter timing my move so the scooter’s handlebar caught the front wheel of bully #1’s bike and launched him into the air like he was being shot from a cannon.  By the time he hit the ground, I was back home with the front door locked.  This was not the last time we exchanged pleasantries.

In grade school, we moved to Covina, across the street from a huge strawberry field.  It was a smaller home, but nicer in almost every way.  There was a nice young couple with a little girl living next door on one side and a family with a boy about my age on the other.  A memory from this home was the day the little girl began screaming because she was being “attacked” by a wild parrot.  I came to the rescue and was intent on capturing the perpetrator.  It must have been someone’s pet as it seemed to be trying to get closer and interact with us.  When it got down close enough to grab, I snagged it, holding it with both hands as it planted its beak repeatedly into my flesh like a can opener.  With blood dripping down to my elbows, I ran back home screaming.  Mom met me at the door and reached out to try to take the bird.  The bird grabbed her by the tip of the finger and just about bit it off.   I let go and the bird flew into the living room, terrified and exhausted.  Later, after we had all had some time to recuperate, we talked him down with peanuts and put him into a nice enclosure my dad built.  He became a fun, family pet and never spilled any more of our blood.

Just prior to High School, we moved to another home in Covina.  This was, by far, the best one of the lot.  It had enough land for my dad to keep horses and the neighbors were interesting and, for the most part, friendly.  It was at this home that I finally started to become a man.   As with most boys, I became interested in girls in High School.  I was, in fact, not too bright when it came to girls.  Any moron knows that right at the top of things every girl adores is horses.  I had a back yard full of them but was too dim to take advantage of it.  Instead, I got interested in music and grew my hair and beard until I looked like Jesus and behaved like Jim Morrison.  I was the guy every parent did not want their daughter around.  Had I kept my hair trimmed and played the nice kid with “rich” parents who raised horses card, I would have definitely gotten laid a lot more frequently.   I did manage to find a handful of girlfriends whose company I enjoyed.  Perhaps the best of them was Diane, my first real love.  I later wrote a song about her called “Sacred Heart.”

There was a period during which I was seeing a lovely Hispanic girl named Linda.  She moved to Texas for a while and upon her return claimed that she was pregnant with my child.  I never really believed this to be the case, but for a while began making plans to marry her and “do the right thing.”  The longer I pretended that this was something that we could turn into a good thing, the more obvious it became that it could never be.  I broke it off and she maintained that I walked out on my fatherly responsibilities.  Regardless of paternity, I know we were both better off without one another.  As might be expected, we lost touch and the rest remains shrouded in mystery.  I hope she and her daughter found all the happiness they deserve.

It was during High School that I began to take Art classes at the local Adult Education school. I never got to take an art class in High School, but because of my mom’s interest in oil painting, I was exposed to some of these night classes.  As it turned out, one of the guys who taught oil painting, Pat Martin, also taught antique furniture restoration.  He had worked at Hearst Castle and was super skilled.  His teaching style took some getting used to as he would just tell you one step of the process and not tell you the next step until you had finished the previous one to his satisfaction.  Many of his students did not like his Napoleonic style, they thought he was a pretentious prick.   I liked him… got along with him famously.  I think he took a shine to me when I took him aside and told him, “People would like you better if you weren’t such an asshole all the time.”  Sometimes honesty is the best policy.  I restored some antique clocks, and a beautiful Circassian Walnut dresser in his class.  I also took classes from a very nice man named Tom Vecchio.  He taught me how to use a potter’s wheel and made throwing even the most difficult vessels seem easy.  I’m not at all certain I have either of these gentlemen’s names spelled correctly, but I did learn a great deal from each and wanted to call them out and say thanks for their place in my development as an artist and craftsman.

My first apartment was in South Pasadena.   It was a fourplex built not long after the turn of the 20^th Century, like much of South Pasadena.  I called it the Glenarm Hilton.  It was basically two rooms separated by a long shotgun hallway, and a small bathroom.  The front room which doubled as bedroom and living room was separated by a large aquarium that housed one giant fish named Issiah.  The hallway featured a photo montage of my daily antics, and the kitchen dining room featured a little kitchen nook which at one point doubled as a grow house for my cannabis seedlings.   I have very fond memories of this place.   I met my first wife Maureen, while working at JCPenney’s in nearby Arcadia and she moved into the “Hilton” with me afterwards.  We had fun together, but ultimately grew apart as our interests diverged.   We parted amicably and she married one of the guys who helped do sound for my band The Privates.  I’m pleased to say they lived happily ever after, proving that our separation was the right thing for all parties.  I’m happy that she is happy and has found a soulmate in her husband Steve.

Post High-School, I worked mostly with my dad at his plumbing business and focused my attention on my band.  After the break-up with Mo, I moved into the studio I was building in downtown Alhambra.   My dad suffered a heart attack, and I was suddenly forced to decide if I was going to try to take over his plumbing business or pursue my interest in personal computers.  At one point I had two resumes… one to get a plumbing job, the other to get a computer job.   I got lucky (I think) and landed a job at a local computer store called Data Systems West.  I often wonder what would have happened had I gone the other direction.   DSW was good to me, and I enjoyed working there, learning computers, and making new friends.  The very best of these new friends was a 16-year-old kid named Lou.   Lou would turn out to be my best man, in more ways than I can count.  We were both best men for each other’s weddings.  We have known each other for close to a half Century at this point and have played important roles in one another’s lives ever since we first met.   Lou is now senior vice president of sales at the company I’m currently employed by.  He is a terrific guy and I am very lucky to have him as a life-long friend.

While working at DSW in San Gabriel, I finally reached a level of sales proficiency that I was asked to transfer to the Sherman Oaks store.  This was quite a haul for me, but it turned out to be a good thing.  I met a new friend Eric.  Eric is quite the character and was responsible for helping me transcend the retail computer sales world and finally make it into the big league.  Eric’s brother was a local LA DJ, and Eric was a gifted bass player, and had done some house sitting for Hollywood notables including Carol King and David Carradine.  He and I both met at DSW and went on to work for AT&T, Novell, and Sun Microsystems together.

By the time 1990 rolled around, I had moved back to my parent’s house in Covina, and my band had broken up.  The landlord of the Alhambra studio bounced me out, and I was pretty much kayaking down Shit Creek looking for a new paddle.  I answered a personals ad in the LA Weekly that had been written by a woman who said she liked to dance, walk on the beach, and lived in the Valley, some forty miles North.  I don’t know what possessed me.  I don’t dance, never go to the beach, and the last damn thing I needed was a geographically undesirable woman in my life. Despite all this, I drove up to Sherman Oaks for a “blind date” with her.  I knew Caroline was special the moment I laid eyes on her.  She bought me a beer, took me to a Sci-Fi bookstore, and won my heart in the first 45 minutes of meeting her.  I married her exactly one year after the day I met her.  We have been together more than thirty years.

Caroline moved in with me in Covina.  This was not particularly convenient for her as she worked at the Disney Studio in Burbank.  Not terribly long after this, I got laid off from my job as IT Manager and no longer had much of an income.  To her credit, she hung in there with me as I searched for a new gig, and when the opportunity presented itself to move to Utah to work for Novell, she jumped at it.  My buddy Eric had come through with this job offer and we would stay with him at his new house for the Winter and find our own place in the coming Spring.  We were super excited about the new chapter in our lives together.  My new job seemed potentially very promising, and she was ready for a change of scenery.

At first, we enjoyed Utah… and there is much to like about it.  The beautiful scenery is complete with mountains and fresh snow. Salt Lake City is clean and friendly, mostly, and opportunity seemed to abound.  We bought a home in Sandy, the suburb of Salt Lake City featured in the television series Big Love.  I requisitioned the basement as my new home studio and enjoyed recording music with Eric and some other new friends.  Caroline began taking skiing lessons and enjoyed the slopes.  She initially got hired by a video gaming company to do phone support but quickly got into Novell and seemed to thrive in her new job there.

After about three years, I had reached my limit with Utah. I would wake up on Winter mornings to find the LDS Church had snow-plowed everyone’s sidewalks and driveways except for mine since I wasn’t a member.  I over-heard some children telling another small kid they couldn’t play with him anymore because he wasn’t Mormon and would be going to Hell.  There was no Mexican food worth eating, and there were so few black people that when you saw one, it seemed almost like he/she was part of some ethnological collection assembled by the LDS Church while visiting primitive lands in Africa.   Coming from Los Angeles, this got old fast.  I had not realized how much I would miss the cultural diversity and magical mix of people I’d left behind.  I did enjoy the music and food, and the fact that every band or tour always stops at SLC which made it easy to see the shows we liked, but all in all… I was ready to get back to the sights, smells and sounds I’d known as a kid and say goodbye to the Promised Land.

We decided that San Diego was our preferred destination when returning to California so I sifted through the jobs until I was able to land a gig at Technology Integration Group.  They paid for relocation and helped get us relocated.  It did not take long after arrival to ascertain that this was not an ethical company. They were holding employees hostage with training (and relocation) money and sending consultants out to clients that had little or no knowledge about the technologies that were involved.  Now that I was in town, I was in a better position to find a more appropriate employer.  In a little less than a year, I landed a job at Hitachi Data Systems, returned TIG’s blood money and got my career back on track.

When we first got to San Diego, we rented a unique property.  It was a home that had originally been built in 1906 in La Jolla and was sold to a contractor as a historically significant building that had to be relocated intact.  The contractor moved it to a lot in Poway, very near Mount Woodson in what was a very rural area.  It was almost like camping.  The walls were ¾ inch thick, not typical home construction, and the floors had 1/4 inch gaps between the floorboards.  All manner of critters lived nearby.  Everything from mountain lions to tarantulas.   It was very peaceful and serene at night, with a full display of the milky way galaxy since there was very little competing light sources.  It had a lovely Koi pond that hosted every kind of bird you can imagine, each waiting to take their turn for bird baths at the pond.  We fell in love with the Craftsman (Arts & Crafts) style and decided we wanted to buy a lot and do our own design/build on it.  During this period, I rented a corner of a “studio” which was basically a 60×40 metal building in Ramona from a sketchy guy named Spyder just so I could dust my recording gear off after having it in storage from the Utah move.

After some wheeling and dealing, we managed to buy a lot just down the hill.  It was an eight acre plot.  It seemed unbelievable. Eight acres is as large as a city block!  There was, unfortunately, only about one acre of usable plot for buiding, but that was more than enough for what we had in mind.  We began the design process, and started the mind-numbing process of dealing with the City and County for permits, etc.  We paid over $800 for a letter from some environmental scientist just to provide assurances that we weren’t impinging on some endangered wildlife habitat.  Cost for the design kept climbing and the design itself seemed to be suffering from scope creep.  We took a set of the initial drawings to a builder for rough estimate/sanity check and the cost for the windows alone was over $100k.   Ah… nope.  Not something we were going to be able to pull off at our current rate of pay.  We scraped the initial design, scaled it way back and began redesign at a smaller scale.   At some point, we lost the lust to build our own and began frequenting open houses.

We found a cool home in Escondido that was affordably priced and were able to sell our city block of stone at a substantial profit to help pay for it.  It was pretty much what one might call a “fixer-upper” and we began the fixing right away.  We did a full kitchen and bathroom remodel, complete with moving a load bearing wall, a complete exterior redesign with wooden shingles, and a hardwood floor refinish of epic proportion.  I hand built the kitchen cabinets, and much of the architectural woodwork and added two magnificent stained-glass doors and a Koi pond.  When we were done, we had spent more than we should have for a home in that area and were worried we would not be able to recoup our expenses if we were to sell.  I began setting up my “home studio” in my office.  Soon it had spilled out into the living room and beyond with wires running under the house.  It was during this phase that I began working at other studios with producers such as Joe Ongie and Jeff Berkley.

My day job also changed.  Thanks to some of my former HDS pals, I got the opportunity to go to work for Sun Microsystems in San Diego.  I enjoyed Sun.  It had a very different vibe from other places I’ve worked, and there was always room for new ideas and innovation.  At one point, Sun seemed on the brink of extinction with about 10% of the workforce being laid off each year for 8 years straight.  The number of campus building in San Diego dropped from about 8 to one.  I had a nice office in the last remaining building, but after weeks of not running into anyone I worked with directly there, I just decided to work from home… no one told me I could… I just did.  This was typical of the Sun way.  Sun was purchased by Oracle so I switched badges and became an Oracle guy.

My parents passed, and I inherited a small amount of money. It was enough to get me thinking about possibly moving to somewhere in the area that might give me space to have a full studio again.  One weekend, we stopped by an open house for a place whose listing mentioned a “workshop” only to discover the shop was under the house and had ceilings too low for me to stand up in.  On the way back to the car, the real estate lady flagged us down and asked what we were looking for.  I was hesitant to even strike up the conversation, but she seemed nice, so we told her we were looking for a home with a stand-alone building or barn large enough for a recording studio, and something that was unique, perhaps Craftsman or Prairie style and not the cookie-cutter brown stucco with tile roof.   She promised to not bother us unless she had something that met those criteria.   I did not hear a peep from her for probably six months when one day she called and said, “I’ve got something you have to see…”

We drove out to Fallbrook and got our first look at what would become our next home.  It was designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin students… open architecture with tons of glass and high ceilings.  There was a 1500 sq ft ‘out building’ of the same style that the owner was using as a cabinet shop.  The price was higher than we were prepared to pay, but after sleeping on it, I decided we had to at least try.  It was like nothing I’d ever seen.   We negotiated a deal that hinged on selling our Escondido home, and finally managed to get it all done.  It was a wild ride… with so many twists and turns that I almost couldn’t believe we’d pulled it off.  I began thinking about studio design right away.

It took about three years, start to finish to convert the old cabinet shop to recording studio.  I did much of the work myself but did enlist help from some contractors for the rough framing.  I named it Sonic-Rocket.  I wanted to make it more of a commercial endeavor than just a private “home studio” so I began the process of finding a person to help me run it.  I lucked out and found a very nice, and extremely skilled young man named Shea who helped get the rocket off the ground and really contributed to its initial success.  We’ve had lots of fun, and made lots of great music there since.  After the studio was complete, I began earnestly trying to assemble a new band of my own and began working with my good friend John Saccoman.  John has become essential to my music and worked with me on pretty much everything I’ve done since.

In 2019, on the precipice of COVID, Oracle decided to lay me off after almost 20 years of service.  This threw a major monkey wrench into my plans.  I suspected something like this might be coming because Oracle had been systematically down-sizing their management teams and were attempting to bring employees back into “low cost” office locations.   San Diego certainly is not low cost, so I knew I was potentially at risk.   Still, I was surprised when the call came and I was told “today is your last day.”  My performance statistics were some of the best in the company so I thought that would shield me from the proverbial axe.  No such luck.  I found myself unemployed.   By the time I got myself situated and my resume polished up, COVID hit and finding a new job was impossible.

I kept a positive mental attitude and survived by pulling some money out of my 401k fund.  I was confident that after COVID ran its course, I would be able to find a new gig.  I knew my age, and the fact that I don’t have a college degree would work against me, but I thought my work experience would make up for those deficits.  Ultimately, they did but it was another wild ride.  *whew* It took almost two years for me to land another job.  The new gig was a good one, I was hired by ASG Technologies, but no sooner had I started and they were acquired by Rocket Software.  Ironic, no?  Sonic Rocket by night, Rocket Software by day.  I guess I like Rockets!  The folks I’m working with are all very knowledgeable and helpful.  I am beginning to find ways to add value and starting to enjoy the work.  Compensation is fair and generous.  Their corporate vision and culture is refreshing.  I hope to finish off my career here.

That about sums things up.   I’m in a very good place mentally, physically, and financially.  Just the other day I was sitting in our new car, looking at the beautiful new BBQ island that I just finished building, waiting to head over to our accountant to discuss taxes and I felt a wave of gratitude and amazement wash over me.  It was at bit like the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.”  I realized I have everything I could want and much more than I deserve. “How did I get here?”  “Where does this highway lead?”