Well, let me tell you a bit about me and music.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was 12. Started out learning Beatle’s songs. Decided to take lessons a couple of years later, and I found a teacher to teach me some Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton licks, along with some scales. When I was 17 I went to a Rainbow gathering with a friend and I followed a busker from New Orleans around, amazed at how many times pretty girls whisked him into the woods. Wow! I started singing songs and doing a little busking myself after that. In my 20’s, while busking across the street from University of Texas at Austin I got my hands on “Mel Bay’s Book of Jazz Chords Vol. 2” and that changed my repertoire, gave me plenty of gigs, and a charmed five years. I gave up on Austin, probably because I knew deep down in my soul I needed mountains, but I never stopped playing and doing gigs.

Here are some songs from fall of 2022, recorded live for my TikTok family.

Here’s a couple of songs from my CD, “Once I Was a Cowboy,” available on Amazon. I’m playing everything except bass, which is Jon Zalabak.

Here is a 23 minute music file I made with some good old friends, Nick Smiley and James Key, back in Washington D.C. We called ourselves “Martini Red.” This is from 1997 – Nick sent me this recording last year (2022) and I’d forgotten all about it. We were definitely having fun.

Ah, yes, The Jazz Pharaohs. Austin 1992. These guys made me sound so good. “Cool Pops” told me when I first started to learn these old tunes, “don’t ever let anyone tell you to stop!” Jeff took me to the music rooms at UT and had me sing songs I never would have dared to dream of singing. Freddie, who even back then had already forgot more about music than I would ever know, bestowed some of that knowledge on me.

Another Jazz Pharaohs’ tune, an original by yours truly. Funny story here. We played every Thursday at Jazz on Sixth Street in Austin, and every year during SXSW lots of people came in to see us. One year some fans from France returned having loved our tape. But they said that when I sang “quel décolletage” I should have sang “quel décolleté – we all laughed because I meant to say that “the girl in the song was wearing a low-cut dress that revealed a lot of cleavage” but what I said was “he takes his pants off!” Ha ha ha ha ha ha!