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Rick Turner: The Masterpiece Life Of True Renaissance Man

4/18/2022

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Author's Note: Luthier Rick Turner just passed away, I am sad, he was a genius and a friend. In my 15 years of covering the Bay Are misc scene, Rick was a champion of my work. I had the wonderful opportunity to visit with Rick at his shop in Santa Cruz a few years ago, where we talked guitars, wood and creativity.

​Here is my story on him from that interview from 2016.


Santa Cruz based luthier, engineering genius and all around rock star Rick Turner has built his life around music, and perhaps music has built a life around his work.  Rick Turner is someone whose life has taken so many loops, turns and 180 degree backflips, therefore, I am befuddled as to where to begin a story about this man.  Overall, I suppose that there is not so much a beginning and an end to his story, but a continuous narrative of adventures and hard-won luck.
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Photo by Max Mobley (used with permission/RT)

Let us begin with an analogy about the guitar, as guitars have been a central character in the story of Rick's life....
 
Guitars begin as chunks of wood waiting to be transformed into vehicles of artistic expression by caring and talented hands. Each one is uniquely crafted, some even hand-made, comprised of many components that are fused to form one instrument. Every instrument collects the mood and spirit of not only the hands and life of the maker, but the experiences of the musician who will one day hold it in their arms like a cherished lover and make her sing with her own stringed-voice.

We humans are handcrafted in a similar manner. We take on what we have been given by our makers, those who influence our lives, allowing each piece of our life to make us who we are, and eventually we become who we are suppose to be. We are ready to sing the song of our own lives.
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Rick Turner, a mischievous, sparkly-blue-eyed guitar maker, music maker, well-known electronics genius and inventor is just one of those well-crafted humans. He has taken all aspects of his life, every piece of the puzzle of his existence, and he has created a world filled with so many of his life’s own songs.

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Opus 1: The Song of Past Musical Experience:
 
Music has been a part of Rick Turner’s life since he was a wee lad growing up in various New England states where he was part of a household that cherished music. “I don’t remember music NOT being a part of my life.  In the late 1940s and early 50’s, my parents had a nice collection of 78’s and they listened to the radio, usually classical stations.  Then when 45’s and 33 1/3 records came out, my dad started buying a lot of guitar records; jazz, classical, and flamenco.”
 
Rick began to take on music with a more personal focus even before he was a teenager. “I built my first mono hi-fi (from an Eico kit) when I was about 15 and got into folk music. My grandmother bought me a little Stella guitar when I was 11, then some bongo drums and a conga drum.  When I was 15 or so, I found a nice Fairbanks and Cole 5 string banjo in an antique store and taught myself how to restore it.  I bought a Harmony Stella 12 string when I was 16, then a nice little Martin 2-17 that I’d found at a friend’s house, it belonged to his mother and she sold it to me.”
 
In 1962, while at Boston University, Rick met musicians Lowell Levinger, aka Banana, (who later became part of The Youngbloods) and Michael Kane. The men formed a folk trio called Banana & The Bunch and they began performing music in the Cambridge folk scene. With his guitar chops now honed to a fine-tuned level, Rick began to gig regularly in 1965 with the folk duo Ian and Sylvia, who, as a band also utilized the talents of future "Cream" producer & "Mountain" bassist Felix Pappalardi.  Rick toured the Unites States and recorded on two of their albums, “Live at Newport” & “Play One More.”
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Autosalvage's only release, 1968
Rick is top right


Rick’s rock star career began with Autosalvage, the 1960’s avant-garde psychedelic rock band from New York. The band’s first and only record, the self-titled Autosalvage (1968) received a rave review from Rolling Stone magazine, although oddly, the band broke up before that happened. Rick played electric & acoustic guitar along with bass player Skip Boone, drummer Darious LaNoue and guitar and vocalist Thomas Danaher.
 
“Playing with Ian and Sylvia defined my acoustic guitar player phase,” reminisces Rick, “Autosalvage was my introduction into electric music and getting more hands-on both as an electric luthier and also understanding recording studios.”
 
Now with “talented musician” and “rock star” under his belt, and because we must change our song when life starts to get dull, Rick was ready to take a different route with his life.  Rick was going to head west, he was ready for something new.
 
Opus 2: The Song of The Luthier and Electronics Genius:

Some people are born with an aptitude for learning. Sometimes understanding of abstract concepts and unusual ideas are innate. With Rick, that’s sort of how things were for him. 

The electronics of sound and the design of an instrument has been a passion of his since he was little, making crystal radios at 10 years old and he was soldering parts together in Junior High to make transistor radios. “I made an Eico kit hifi unit, an integrated preamp/amplifier, and made what was literally a bookshelf loudspeaker unit at boarding school. It had a small speaker enclosure with a shelf above and a shelf below.  So, that was the beginning”
 
Since his early childhood experiments in electronic engineering, Rick has built an impressive resume. He has worked for Gibson Labs doing product research and development, he has done tech support and done sound mixing for the popular 60’s band The Youngbloods, which led to another gig as a sound engineer for The Grateful Dead, where he eventually became one of the creators of their famed and infamous “Wall Of Sound.”

Rick was instrumental in creating the first ever magnetic pickups, which would, later in his life, help him create the company D-Tar (Duncan-Tuner Acoustic Research). 

“1967 when I was playing electric guitar in New York in Autosalvage, I started to put a pedal board together with effects.  I eventually cobbled together a guitar with “stereo” wiring; two pickups on one channel and the third on the other plus I built in some of the smaller effects, a Vox treble booster (trouble booster!) and an early fuzz tone. So when I moved to the West Coast and decided to start building electric instruments, it was only natural that I’d make the pickups for them.”
 
He began building and designing his own guitars and created the first ever Model One, a specialty guitar in which he replaced the standard neck design with a laminated neck. He also redesigned the standard acoustic guitar body with a cylindrical arch that increased sustain and stability of the notes. 

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He formed Alembic, Inc. with Ron Wickersham which used this newfound way of instrument design and sound engineering to make instruments for such folks as Lindsey Buckingham, Jackson Browne, Jesse Colin Young, members of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and The Band, among other such noted rockers. Many of these musicians are repeat customers to this day, trusting Rick to make instruments of the highest quality and sound.
 
“One of the interesting things about when I became a part of the Grateful Dead scene was that I was considered a musician who just happened to take a turn into the more technical side of the operation; they related to me as a fellow musician.  I think that led to a comfort level that extended and continues to extend to most of the musicians I work with and for.”
 
The Wall Of Sound helped set the standard for acoustic quality in a live concert experience in 1970’s. It was literally a wall of speakers, amps, pickups, microphones and electronics designed specifically for The Grateful Dead that made mixing live music easier and cleaner. At that time it was an engineering feat never accomplished before. 

“We did know it was going to redefine the possibilities of quality live sound; we had no doubts.   It was all built on very solid engineering principals,” remembers Rick, “We knew the limitations of the technology of that particular era, and we made choices to work around them.  Frankly, nothing surprised us about it; it worked as designed.  The only thing that didn’t work quite as we wanted was eliminating the monitor system.  The guys in the band were spread too far apart not to depend on monitors, so adding them back in was the one concession.”

Being at Alembic and designing one-of-a-kind guitars and basses “helped define me as what Premier Guitar Magazine calls, ‘the father of boutique guitar making’”, says Rick. He started Rick Turner Guitars, an umbrella company of Rick’s boutique guitar making companies. Renaissance Guitars makes semi-hollow acoustic-electric instruments; Compass Rose focuses on ukulele’s and acoustic guitars; he makes solid-body basses with the brand Electroline and Turner Guitars tends to cover solid body guitars, mainly the Model 1. Turner Guitars is also used as the brand on the Buddy Holly guitar series, (yes, he rebuilt Buddy Holly’s guitar and now makes the signature-instrument line himself). He also builds guitar bodies for Henman Guitars out of his shop.
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“I’m a woodworker, I’m deeply involved in the production of a wide range of instruments,” says Rick of his current career. His use of wood varies from instrument to instrument and he often mixes types of wood to create unique sounds. “The media (of wood) is interesting because I first look at it and study the engineering qualities (which to me include acoustic properties) and then the aesthetic issues.   I’m not a “soul of the tree” type though I do try for the best use of each piece of wood.   And yes, each instrument has it’s own voice.  I control the overall aspects of it, but there are subtleties that change with each instrument”
 
“For me there’s a process by which I store ideas in my head; they can come from anywhere, be it from reading about carbon fiber bicycles in 1976 which led directly to carbon fiber bass necks and my first patent; or seeing the cathedrals of St. Denis and Notre Dame in Paris and understanding the utility of the flying buttresses supporting the roofs which led to applying that concept inside acoustic guitars. When enough ideas stack up they rearrange themselves in my head and then I have all the elements I need for a new design.”

And of his future, Rick has only these small dreams.

“I’d like to eventually be back in a one-man shop building just what I want to without commercial pressures. I’d like to maybe have a waiting list for undefined instruments,” says Rick. “I’d like to be able to pursue invention ideas more freely. I’d like to be free to pursue more art projects and collaborations with interesting musical and visual artists.   I’d like to be able to spend more time working with my friends at the Museum of Making Music, curating special exhibits.   I’d like to have the time to restore my collection of vintage instruments, too many of which need major work. I guess all of that should keep me busy well into my 90’s.”
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Opus 3: Finale
 
On one hand, Rick’s life has seen many fun adventures and he has made his success look easy. On the other, he has paid his dues and has worked hard to become who he is. Perhaps his greatest asset is his sheer enthusiasm for expressing creativity through the fairly technical trade he has made a career out of.

“You have to have or develop the chops to be a full participant in your scene.  No groupie bullshit.  No being a sycophant.  No bullshitting your way along.   If you can’t deliver the goods, be a partner on equal footing with the other creative people on your scene, you don’t belong.  That means being willing to work your ass off.”

“My life’s been a combination of pure luck along with the instincts to make the most of the luck.  I’ve usually been quite conscious of my good fortune, and I’ve also worked hard to earn my place in it all.  I’ve never felt out of place, and I always felt that I had a lot to offer whatever scene I was a part of.”
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Photo Essay: The Moon, La Lune, La Luna

1/19/2022

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Photos & Artwork Carolyn McCoy©
According to scientific belief, the celestial object we call the moon was, quite possible, created approximately 4.5 billion years ago. But, as scientific ideas often begin with guesswork and intuition, with small clues pointing the way to another idea, we can only hypothesize at the true origin of our beloved satellite. No one will ever fully know how things went down that long ago, but some ideas include its creation from a rogue or displaced planet caught in Earth’s orbit, or quite possibly it was formed with debris from Earth itself after a massive impact from a meteor or comet. Gravitational and magnetic forces that create the magic of physics may have bound the debris together, slowly forming a sphere that has tagged along with Earth on its yearly circumambulations around the sun for eons.
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With blooming technology, it was inevitable that humanity would find a way to get to the moon. That historic visit with the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969 culled a scientific treasure chest of new and massively important information that has helped us bash many an absurd myth about what the moon was. We discovered no spacemen were living there; we found the moon was not made of cheese, and we were enlightened to find that it was not a large cardboard cutout made by a stage crew and hung in the air in a sound studio in LA.
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We have discovered much about the moon since those first non-terestrial steps. As we now know, it is in synchronous rotation with Earth, taking 27 days, 7 hours, and 43.1 minutes to make a revolution around our Big Blue Marble flying at 1.02 kilometers per second. Because of the lack of its own rotation, we always see the same face of the moon, with its dark volcanic landscape interspersed with the brighter ancient crustal highlands and the prominent circular impact craters from meteors of days past. We have also discovered glass beads strewn all over the surface, indicating a past nova of our beloved sun. The moon has “moon quakes”, it has water molecules, and it shows that without an atmosphere, it’s fair game for every type of flying space rock to pummel its surface.

The moon is a powerful force. Without it following our planet we would have a very different world. Lunar power drives our oceanic tides as well as the blood-tides that flow through our veins, as we are water-formed beings. It guides the monthly cycles of fertility with women, hence creating new life.

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Photo Essay: Places I've Made Out With Boys

12/28/2021

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"If you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss"...or so the song goes. But the reality is, that's a lie. We all know kissing, especially a really good kiss, is all about a chemical connection via hormones found in spit.

​The mouth is a sensual place if you ask me. Warm, inviting and chock filled with chemicals in the saliva that will set the heart pattering during a kiss. The mouth and lips contain over 40% of the nerves connected to our face, so the lips respond intensely to every kind of stimuli, which, in turn, triggers a massive response in the brain. During a passionate kiss, our blood vessels dilate; more oxygen is routed to the brain; our breathing quickens and becomes erratic; our cheeks flush; our pulse quickens; our pupils dilate. We are inundated with dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and our adrenaline levels spike, leaving our bodies awash in a chemical bath that is equivalent to an amazing drug high that often leaves us addicted and wanting more.

So, a good kiss really means nothing in the grand scheme of commitment. It doesn't mean he loves you, it doesn't mean he'll stick around, but it does mean there is some seriously good sexual juju that may or may not lead to love. 

​#1: It was just a mild flirtation and I never expected anything to happen. But for only one night it did. I remember the sound of the creek below as my hands wove through his hair. So soft, both the sound of the water and the feel of his hair. He sat on the guardrail before me and we were then face to face. The trees shook in the wind, the night blended the darkness into various shades of light and for a few moments I was oblivious to it all...
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​#2: The wooden footbridge was dark, empty and probably not more than 50 feet long. But when one is lustily distracted by a wild and curly-haired man with a dark soul and a fiery passion, a bridge, even a short bridge such as this one,  can take hours to cross...
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​#3:  As we sat on the bench in the dark, he told me he was emotionally bankrupt and couldn't give me anything, I said that was OK. But when my lips touched the warm, salty skin on his neck I was hit with a desire I hadn't felt in awhile. I knew at that moment that I was lying to him and that eventually I'd want more....
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​#4: The intimacy of my bedroom is rarely shared with anyone. The honor of being in my sacred space is something that is earned, not freely given. But if you find yourself standing next to me near my bed, you can expect that I want more than a kiss.
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Mirabelle's Release - A True Ghost Story

11/1/2021

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When I was in my early 20’s, I was hanging out with a folk band from San Francisco, The Straw Coyotes. Their music was filled with multiple harmonies, lyrics with “thee” and “thou” and they were acoustic in a troubadour kind of way. I was deep in unrequited love with one band member, a lanky songwriter boy with a wandering, gypsy heart. I loved to hang out with the band, party with them, and experience the wonderment of having beautiful songs come to life in my living room (or my bedroom, as the case may be).
 
During the summer of 1992, the band members packed up their vans and cars for an epic road trip. The plan was to jam, write, and make music while communing on the shores and woods of Puget Sound’s gorgeously wild Vashon Island near Seattle. I decided to road trip up to Washington for a few days on my own to visit with the band.
 
I was a lot wilder in those days than I am now, and I was always up for adventures. My favorite road trip ritual was to consume massive amounts of Sudafed and guzzle Snapple Ice Tea.  I would  then leave at night, cracked out of legal uppers and drive till the morning light appeared over the two-lane blacktop. It was so exhilarating to be one of the few drivers on the road at 4:00 in the morning. I could freely drive 90 miles an hour with my mixed tapes blaring, the Sudafed making my scalp tingle, and all the crazy thoughts I had about life flying through my mind.
 
On this particular trip, I made it to Seattle in about 11 hours, stopping only for gas, pee breaks, and more Sudafed. When I disembarked from the ferryboat and headed to where the band was staying, I had been up for over 36 hours. That’s what being 22 years old and a wild child is all about.

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The Magic Of PoisnIvy Circus - 5.29.21

6/2/2021

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A circus is more than a circus, it’s a community. It’s people working together to create something larger than themselves. It’s also a place where we can leave our troubles behind and step into a dream world for a while where the magic happens and reality is blurred by color and music and activity. 

The idea of what a circus should be has changed, a lot! Thanks to organizations such as Cirque Du Soleil and Burning Man, circus arts are making a very cool, very hip, and very grand resurgence into mainstream consciousness. Today’s modern circus model eschews the use of animals and focuses more on the great feats that the human body can dish out. From contortionists to aerials, fire dancing to burlesque, LED light dancing to clown comedy, all wrapped up in chains, ropes & silks, tattoos & piercing and sexual innuendo & bravado. ​
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PoisnIvy: Marisa Gregory, Viva La Glam, Natalie Nelson
With all that said, a new circus has come to town, and it’s here to stay. PoisnIvy, the Bay Area circus troupe that has been wowing folks since 2011, has found a permanent home in Marin County’s tiny hamlet of Forest Knolls, about 40 minutes from San Francisco.  Founding member Marisa Gregory has created a new art and performance hub that will host yoga and martial arts classes, movie nights, live music, theater performances, and the famed circus. 

May 29th was ground zero for the first installment of magic for PoisnIvy in its new space. With an amazing assortment of talented folks culled from the vibrant Bay Area circus arts scene, along with Gregory and co-producers Viva La Glam and Natalie Nelson, PoisnIvy pulled out all the stops and created a visually stunning night of entertainment. The show sold-out and the lucky crowd bore witness to such acts as physical comedian Snatch Adams getting herself inside a large balloon; aerialists Megan Gallagher contorting in a metal cube, Jo Kan elegantly flying on a hoop, and Drago wrapping herself up in chains while suspending herself via a leather strap in her mouth. Slim Chance and Nathan Holguin were caught clowning around more than once while burlesque feather dancers got juicy amid the darkening skies. 
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Album Review: Katie Knipp - The Well

3/14/2021

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Photo credit: Phil Kampel
By now, most of us have a serious case of the Lockdown Blues. But there is hope! Almost like a homeopathic dose of the blues to cure the blues, Bay Area blues darling Katie Knipp’s latest release, The Well, is just the antidote for the overall hell we are experiencing right now. 

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Last year at this time, Knipp was climbing the Billboard Blues charts, in which she shared honored space with other masters like Buddy Guy and Kenny Wayne Shepard. She was also flying high on a nod from the Grammy Association by almost acquiring a nomination for her 2019 release Take It With You, as well as planning this latest release of The Well. But then Covid hit and The Well took a detour of process. 

With no real safe way to rehearse, Knipp rocked it regardless, using today’s technology to distance-share the songs with her band before recording The Well together. “I just gave my band the raw songs (live phone recordings of my playing and singing), told them the vibe I was going for, and I made sure they had the lyrics to get into the story,” states Knipp. “Because they are such great players and people, they showed up for recording and absolutely got it. They nailed the first take, which was ‘The Gospel of Good Intentions’. The fact that we had never played it together, and that what you are hearing on the album was our first live run through...well, I feel like the luckiest gal ever to work with people like that”

“I also went into this knowing I wanted my bass player Zack Proteau to co-produce with me. In the past, I would always go into a project producing myself, but this time I knew better. Dustin Ryan, our engineer, ended up in the co-producer role by the end of it as well. There is no stronger structure than a triangle! Zack was also the producer behind Jackie Greene's Gone Wanderin’ album, so he has been producing quite a while now. The special guests on here, like Mick Martin (harmonica), the Au Bros (horns), and Joan Osborne's Keith Cotton (Hammond) were also people that I didn't need to direct. I knew that if they were being themselves, we would get the right sound.”
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Photo Credit: Phil Kampel

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Album Review: Kyle Stringer's House Plants

1/11/2021

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Here we are, closing in on a whole year since our lives and our global existence have morphed into different beasts, and I have a feeling things might not go back to what we knew of as "normal." But within that, life does go on; the Earth keeps spinning on its wobbly axis, and music is continuing to be made and heard. 
 
The other day I was sad. I was grieving for the old normal and needed to shut off my brain for a little while. I put on my headphones, spread myself onto my bedroom floor, and pushed play on Kyle Stringer's solo project House Plants (which is both the name of the "band" as well as the title for the album.). I cried for the first time in a while. You may think that a weird statement to start an album review, but in my mind, if music evokes strong emotion, it's an excellent album. The crying led to a smile, which led to a laugh, then onto a small boogie-dance session, which ended with thinking many thoughts and feelings about my life. All that and more are encompassed in the various moods of House Plants.
 
Stringer has grown up playing music, starting on Euphonium (a tiny tuba) in elementary school as well as learning guitar. "My love has pretty much always been the bass, though," Stringer says. "I love how it glues music together. It's really the unsung hero of music! Listening to it and playing it is so rewarding." He also works as a music therapist at a Veteran's Home in Napa County, where he uses music to heal. 
 
Up until the life-sucking shutdowns, Stringer was in Oakland-based rock band Milk For The Angry. But because surviving in life is about making the best of bad situations, Stringer felt that now that he wasn't able to gig, he had the chance to record many of his own songs that he had been stockpiling over the last five years. Like most musicians recording in this particular historical period of time, Stringer created this album by recording in his bedroom on his computer while doing most of the vocals and instrumentation himself (including his Squier Strat and Silvertone Archtop plus lots of pedal effect, as well as his trusty Rickenbacker 4003 bass and more). He had friends on board who filled in various musical parts from their own bedrooms across the country with file sharing. Welcome to the Pandemic Age of recording music. 
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Photo: Carolyn McCoy

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Album Review: Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project - Luddite

9/30/2020

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Co-written by Carolyn McCoy & William Wayland
The music of Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project (or PSDSP for short) is complicated. We could easily plop them into the genre of “grunge," but it’s more than that. The trio, guitarist/singer Eli Carlton-Pearson, drummer Michael Pinkham and bassist Brian Wilkerson pull from jazz and psychedelic genres while adding some hardcore ass-kicking punk for kicks. The songs the band creates often eschew the typical “verse/chorus/bridge” construction to create a river of sound that takes you on a sonic journey with intelligent and poetic lyrics that uphold deep imagery to tell a story of both darkness and hope.
 
The band’s songwriting process is definitely a collaborative effort. “I write all the songs, though several come about from jams, or at least evolved within them,” states Carlton-Pearson. “Michael and Brian contribute a lot in the way of arrangement, rhythmic conception, and what's perhaps the most significant thing, how much fire they cook up playing. That then permeates the whole ‘thing’; it changes the way I sing the lyrics I wrote; it gives the song more real-life meaning. {The song} has to be a living thing, and that happens because of the band.
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Photos: Carolyn McCoy
​PSDSP has just released their latest album, Luddite, on vinyl, an old trend that seems to be resurfacing as a common practice among musicians lately. The album culls from new and old songs that have never been recorded before. Inline with the definition of “Luddite” (one who eschews or is mistrustful of technology when creating), the band decided to record in analog, raising funds via a Kickstarter campaign so that they could make the sound they were looking for.

​The band traveled to New Paltz, NY, to work with Tom Deis at Pineapple Room Studio. “I've known Tom for 16 years now. We've been in bands together and worked together a fair bit, but moreover, we're just really good friends,” says Carlton-Pearson. “Tom worked so fucking hard on this record it's ridiculous. He signed up for one of the gnarliest hazings an engineer could go for, going into a 100% analog recording process from a largely digital workflow and buying several pieces of equipment specifically for Luddite. All the technical limitations we experienced just wound up being the magic on the tape at the end, which is why we chose to do the whole thing as we did.”
 
“I wanted to work with Tom basically because I trusted him. I trusted him musically, and I trusted him personally. He gets it. He gets that music is a spiritual entity you access through the physical world. I guess this whole recording was way more intense and vulnerable than I'd like to admit. I trusted his understanding of how to use technology to capture the spirit of things.”
 
When asked why the band decided on analog, “Because it sounds better,” replies Carlton-Pearson, “It just does.“ 

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Album Review: Jeremy D'Antonio - Spinnin' Wheels

9/23/2020

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It’s one of those warm, early autumn evenings here in Northern California; the crickets chirp away, the stars sparkle in the sky, and summer begins to drifts off into the past. In the wake of the vast West Coast fires, we now have a respite from smoke and fear, and I breathe in the fresh night air. As I sit and experience all this, Marin County singer/songwriter Jeremy D’Antonio’s new album Spinnin’ Wheels wafts softly from my room, seemingly in conjunction with the multi-faceted songs of local crickets. It’s a fitting venue, the night, to listen to this fantastic EP.

D’Antonio is most known as part of Marin County’s Americana band, San Geronimo. His first solo record is a refreshing breath of fresh air in a time of fires, lockdown, pandemic hell, economic collapse, and political upheaval, yet has nothing to do with any of that. It’s a journey unto itself that helps one forget the woes of the world for a while. For D’Antonio, Spinnin’ Wheels is a detour from San Geronimo’s sound in many ways, taking a healthy dose of Country and mixing it in with D’Antonio’s hard-hitting songwriting. 

“I never intended to write a country song or have a ‘country vibe’. I actually mostly listen to old soul music,” states D’Antonio. “Only recently have I dug into some of the ’60s and 70’s country classics, mostly because people assume I know all that music and request me to play it live. I think any music that is honest is good; you can immediately hear the difference. I grew up in New Mexico and Colorado, and I guess there is something about that landscape or the blue-collar lifestyle that comes out in what I do.”  

“Lyrics stem from feelings more than physical experiences. A feeling can make you experience a thousand different emotions without ever physically doing anything. I think this allows me to write about scenarios that have happened in my head but not in the physical realm,” D’Antonio states on his songwriting. “I know a lot of people write a story and put down the words first, but I usually start with a feeling. I get so deep that it is hard to be around others, and I am able to dive down pretty far and extract what is most honest about whatever “funk” I am in. From this usually comes a melody and the words follow.”​

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Album Review: Zephaniah OHora - Listening To The Music

9/9/2020

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Cover photo: Jammi York
When a musician channels music and brings it into the corporeal world, sometimes there is no rhyme or reason for what kind of music they create. When Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Zephaniah OHora
started his musical career, it was Country music that somehow manifested itself through his being. I am sure Zephaniah will credit his spiritual upbringing as well as the circuitous circumstance and available opportunities to play music in NYC for maneuvering his career towards traditional Country. But whatever fates drove his train, he is now on the fast track towards becoming a star in the Country world. 

 
“I’ve been influenced by so much music because I listen to quite a variety,” states OHora. “But as far as Country music artists, I’ve spent many hours studying Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Marty Robbins, and more recently Bobby Bare, Don Williams, and Merle Haggard.”
 
OHora has just released his second album, “Listening To The Music”. It upholds classic, old-school Country in the true tradition, but with the flavors of modern New York tossed in for kicks. “Listening To The Music” is a great album not only because of OHora’s songwriting skills, but the album hosts such big-time players as harmonica player Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson) and guitarist Norm Hamlet (Merle Haggard). 

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