About music and me.

I was born in 1980 in North Shore Hospital, New York. Why did I tell you that? I have no clue. But I thought I should start at the beginning. My mom said she played music at her stomach while she was pregnant with me, and that's why I love music so much. I don't know if I believe her, but it's a nice story. I play Robert by the way.

And Robert plays the guitar.

Even though I was born on the cusp of the digital age I know what a 33 1/3 is. I can also correctly identify a 45 and a 78. As a matter of fact, I had a lot of them growing up. The first band I really got into was "The Monkees". I watched them on MTV and Nickelodeon and soon I was buying all of the Rhino reissued albums at my local music stores "Long Island Sound", "Record World" and "Square Cirlce" (ahh, the good old days). I even dressed up as Mickey Dolenz for a friend's "dress as a rock star" birthday party. While everyone else had moussed hair and spikes, I wore a vest and held maracas. For some reason I didn't realize that the Monkees weren't part of the 80s mis-en-scene.

Despite my love for music I didn't really get serious about playing a musical instrument until my junior year of high school. I borrowed my girlfriend's guitar and Beatles songbooks and taught myself. She had a Takamine, just like every girl who asks for guitar for her 16th birthday only to play folk chords with Ani lyrics. After that I became the guy who draws guitars in his school notebooks. I can do a mean Telecaster.

Anyway, having such a passion for music can bug me sometimes when I step out into the real world. For instance, it's not a great feeling when I ask someone if they know David Bowie and they reply, "Oh, is he the new guy at work?". Or they've never heard "The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle". It's also disheartening to think that for many people, the Rolling Stones catalog starts at "Sticky Fingers". But oh well.

As of now my tastes range from "Louis Armstrong" to "Love" to "Frank Zappa". You can find me at Amoeba when I'm not rehearsing.

1st rehearsal - Chip

We had an awesome 1st rehearsal! We started with a quick publicity shoot and finished with a read through. The music is sounding awesome and I'm so excited to get this show rollin! I'm going to start using my video camera to do video blogs and I'll post those through my channel on Youtube and myspace. Rock it!

Preparation - Chip (Part 1 of Many)

So I was born in 1983... the big year our show starts in. I decided to start at with a little year in review for my first prep work. I want to be familiar with what was going on in Current Events, Pop and Music culture (lots of pop culture references), and any other random things that stick out in history. Speaking of music, I'm already really fired up about one of the songs... I won't tell you which one, but I swear people are going to leave humming it every night.

I spent the afternoon looking at the top hits of '83 and compiled this Pandora.com station based on those artists. I find it interesting how a lot of the bands I've been listening to recently (especially Postal Service) sound like they get a lot of their influences from this period.

Ronald Reagan was the president... also declared 1983 "The Year of The Bible"...(no comment). The Cold War was still in full swing and the Russians actually shot down a passenger liner that accidentally flew into the Soviet Union (Korean Air flight 007 on sept 1st). September wasn't a good month for airlines...Gulf Air Flight 771 Crashed on the 23rd after a bomb went off in its baggage compartment. On the lighter side...hooters opened it's doors in florida in october....

Alright enough random musings

Chip

Hey guys! It's Brandon :-) I figured I'd start this blog so the members of the band in my next musical can post blogs...and if they don't want to I'll just use a lot of run on sentences to fill space :-)