| Ok, so here
it is. It was in
H.S. that I bought a very inexpensive guitar which actually had the amp and
speaker built into it; it sounded like crap, but hey I was on my way to
the sold out venues and endless babes... So I started playing and even took a class in
H.S. which I quickly grew bored of (This due to the fact that my own personal
achievements with some Metallica riffs and practicing at home resulted in my being able to master
the classics, "On Top Of Old Smoky" and "Fur Elise," in class with
ease. Thus, the class quickly became unchallenging so, I got my "A" and moved on... College came along soon enough
where I
met a few friends and kept practicing with no real direction, learned new stuff here and
there and kept playing what I could and practicing what people showed me. The results being I
was able to play some chords now and hold a decent rhythm. My dreams of being the next
Eddie Van Halen or Joe Satriani were fading fast however (which was ok, because I was in college
doing what I wanted to do since I was 5 anyway - fly planes!) So the first
for the first two years of college I went home for the summers...
I met up with my buddy
"Lou-Man" during those summers who had, since completion of my first year of college, also picked up
the guitar. (Here I was the 4 year "veteran" guitar player and I'm home
with Lou-Man
who'd been playing for all of 5 1/2 months - he was awesome (to me anyway.) I still
believe Lou slept with his guitar every day and he made it sing. I
mean, here I was with my
$95.00 "built-in amp Toys 'R' Us special" that I couldn't even keep
in tune half the time trying to compare to him...
So I asked
him what every self-respecting guy
at that point would, "Hey Lou, want to start a band? - you be lead
guitar, I'll be
Rhythm!" and thus it was born. We picked up two other
characters for America's next "great rock band" - John D
on drums (at the time the worlds worst stick-ball player - little footnote!?) and Steve
aka. "Grenny" for bass (who also wanted to be a guitar player, but was shifted to bass
because, at the time, I was "Marginally" capital "M," better at the time..) So
anyway... we had our four guys (think Aerosmith, Metallica and Van Halen;
only with less charisma, money and talent!) So we had our dream, and like most garage (or apartment
- NYC) bands absolutely no talent (at the time - well no talent except for Lou who could actually play.)
But we still needed a name - as all great bands do. So, looking through a medical
dictionary, among other places for inspiration, I got the name "AMUSIA" which by definition
means, "the lack of ability to
produce or recognize musical sounds." - PERFECT!
So AMUSIA was our name for
all of a few weeks when we decided during a routine, and routinely harrowing, soda run to
7-11 that we needed a name
with more "rock star" quality and after 3 days of brainstorming, ATOMIC PUPPY was
born (shortened from Lou-Man's original thought - ATOMIC PUPPY BRAINS!?...).
So, the summer
moved on, we had 2 official practices total (although Lou, Steve and I
jammed quite a bit more), about 40 games of stick-ball (john-D still lost
quite a bit) and multiple nights of driving
around talking about the band, but not actually playing a tune. (Practice space in
Bronx, NY was a bit of a dilemma!?...)
So, one day we had a jam session at another guys
house, (John D was working) and we had the home-owner play drums - well, it was his place and
he did have a set handy - and was actually pretty good. So after 4 hours we managed to record (very poorly) a
terrible rendition of Nirvana's - "Smells Like Teen Spirit" complete
with missed notes, high pitched
vocals, off-key and a guitar tuned way down to facilitate the bass we didn't
have But, for one
day... For one day and one sweaty afternoon in this dude's basement, we were on our
way to rock stardom and we actually made music that was identifiable to the original
song!... But alas, as all good things do, the summer ended and off I went back to
college and ATOMIC PUPPY was again put on sabbatical...
My third year in college I get
a hold of some equipment with the ability to record music (a low quality
analog 4 track) and I (as a solo performer now)
make some very poor quality guitar instrumentals with backing synthesized drums and maybe
some keyboards thrown in here and there.
It's not bad but far from studio quality however, I was having fun killing time and
slowly improving my guitar playing. This would be my story for the remainder of my
musical career until about 1999, when due to the booming technological
advances in computers I was able to get some pretty cool music composition
software and a decent computer... (Keep in mind that when Atomic Puppy
formed in 1990, the best computers out there were 386/Pentiums and they
were still pretty big bucks.)
So here we are
- I have
never really improved upon my guitar playing except to play a few things well and
everything else mediocre. However, the multimedia capabilities of my computer
and
my varied taste in music (meaning I was into club and techno and all kinds of other stuff
now) would allow me to take samples, create, manipulate and compose them to create studio
quality instrumentals. I was back in business! The dreams of filling clubs
all over the US began to ensue...
So, since early 2000,
I have managed to compose and create 52 original instrumental compositions on
5 CDs.
Some
of the songs are here on this site with sample tracks to listen too and some are
posted to www.download.com
for anyone to purchase. I had re-instated the name AMUSIA for my band in 2000, but
after an e-mail from MP3.com's legal dept and some research have since discovered the name
was registered/trademarked to a Boston based band in 1997 (Damn I had them by 7
years too!) So anyway, I went back to the name we had in 1990 and ATOMIC PUPPY
lives on in a solo artist format...
Please take a listen and let
me know what you think. I have the guitar out and I'm actually planning on playing a
bit more to incorporate some of the original music I once did with the new editing
software. The plan is to create some decent quality recordings of music
"un-finished" in prior incarnations of Atomic Puppy.
Well, until there's more to
this story, thanks for reading this far, stay tuned and remember, " All the world's a
stage"... at least my office is anyway ... (my dogs love me!) |
