When I was two my parents used to sit and watch me look at records go around for hours at a time. I was always intrigued by music. It always turned me on. I remember I started playing a guitar around eight and I just knew it was what I wanted to do. Matter of fact I thought I would be a rock star by the time I was 14. Didn’t quite make it that soon but it was something besides being an astronaut, it was either that or the guitar. It was always something I wanted to do. I always had a passion for it. The interesting thing I think that Dave put in my bio which I didn’t realize until he redid my bio, was that the first song was a Ventures tune which was an instrumental group and that’s kind of funny that I’ve come full circle and have joined the instrumental guitars group after years and years of doing vocal music. It’s all good.

One of your music instructors was Steven Tyler’s dad.

Yeah, uncle Vic. He was really cool too and not just because he was Steven Tyler’s father. By the time Aerosmith was huge I was a big prog head which was Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Gentle Giant, and Yes. All those classical rock bands. Genesis and Peter Gabriel. He was Steven Tyler’s father and that was cool. He was this older guy, a classical musician and he would bring in really cool prog rock stuff and say “hey, look at what these guys did with this Bach piece.” It was really wild. He was definitely a very cool guy to study with.

When you started out on your road to becoming a rock star, who did you get to work with at first?

There was Tommy Montana who was in sixth grade with me. I guess you mean bigger people than that. It was my sixth grade friends and there were my high school buddies.

They’re just as important.

That’s where I got my start. I guess the first people that were well known were when I got the gig with Drive She Said which was in ‘89. It was a CBS signed band and the main guy was Mark Mangold who had already written hit songs. He wrote “I Found Someone” for Cher and he had worked with Michael Bolton back when Michael Bolton was a rocker.

I happen to have a record that he sang on with Bruce Kulick who was in KISS.

Bob Kulick was also involved, Bruce’s brother.

Yeah, it was a band called Blackjack.

Blackjack, that’s right. And if you look on Blackjack you’ll see Mark Mangold’s name probably on a bunch of cuts as a co-writer. He probably even played keyboards on that. I’m not sure how many records Blackjack did.

I think just one.

They just did one? If you have that one in your stockpile you’ll definitely see Mark. Plus he was in a band called Touch and a band called American Tears which had a lot of accolades over in Europe and England. I hooked up with him and Al Frisch and I was more or less a hired gun and we went over and did the first tour for Drive She Said. I wound up after that hooking up with Paul Di’Anno from Iron Maiden and did a little thing with his group called Killers. We did a live record. It’s hard to find but it does exist. Then I would go on a tour with Ronnie Specter and then back again for Drive She Said’s second record. That was my foray into the name people. Of course most of the other stuff I’ve done since then, a lot of it has been studio work and local stuff. I keep compiling a list. I may have an exclusive for you by the end of this interview. There’s a new project that I just got a call on the other day which nobody knows about. It’s actually very cool. It should be a fun thing. It’s going to be with a collection of guys but it’s backing a comedienne. She’s a singer/songwriter/dirty comedienne I guess. I don’t know if I should mention any names yet because we haven’t signed any papers but it’s a Comedy Net thing and it’s going to be a reality TV show. Putting a band together with a bunch of rockers with this comedy writer and this young girl who is doing these dirty comedy songs.

That’s going to be interesting.

I don’t know what to expect. This is a first even for me. Stuff keeps coming by. I’m doing a lot of writing now for Omni Music. I just sold four songs to them which came out in January and they’re a library more or less of instrumental music for film and TV and commercials. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I did a lot of composing for Playgirl TV in the last year and a half. I composed some music for one of those MTV reality shows. I don’t know which one it is. It’s on my website. Do you know any of those shows?

I really don’t watch MTV that much. I used to love watching it when it was actually a video channel.

Yeah, I’m with you. I haven’t watched it in years and I guess that’s why I don’t know. There’s a promoter who brings in all these Chinese pop stars. Some pretty big names in China as I understand although we’ve never heard them here and they’re western pop. The shows are totally in Chinese. The artists sing in Chinese. The audience is totally Chinese speaking. When they come to the East Coast they use a New York band and basically the music director just happened to see my website and hired me on the spot. We’ve been doing some really cool gigs. They’re usually about a thousand seats to 2,500 seats. We did the House Of Blues and stuff like that. It’s pretty amazing. You have no idea what’s going on. The last gig we did actually at the House Of Blues in Atlantic City, usually they bring a male singer and a female singer. They usually had hits in China back in the ’90s. The guy didn’t get his visa in time. We usually do one rehearsal and we read the charts. Then we go to the venue and we rehearse. The singer didn’t get his visa so right before the gig they sent a different singer. So it’s the day of the show and they told us we had a whole new set to learn. I had to run out and buy new shoes. I don’t think I’ve stood that long with a guitar. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. I do a lot of different stuff. I’ve done plays. I’ve played guitar in plays. It’s all good as long as the music is good.

You get to do a variety of shit so you never get burned out on anything.

There you go. That’s just it. Most people don’t get me because they say “why don’t you just pick one style God damn it and just do a great blues record and then follow it up with a great metal record and then just do a finger style acoustic?” I don’t know. I just do what I like to do. That’s what comes out of me. If there’s a niche for it and if there are people who can appreciate that, hey great. If some guy in a suit is going to tell me no I better do this, well that’s just not me.

That’s what’s so cool about all the shit you’ve done for films and commercials. You get to do different things. I think a lot of people stick to one thing for a long period of time and then they get burned out on it and don’t even want to do it anymore.

Right. You get pigeonholed.

That too. Oh well, this guy is a rock musician and then he turns around and wants to do Spanish flamenco music and then everyone says “well, how can you do that because you are this.”

Right. You’re this and that one fan base doesn’t want to hear it and the other fan base doesn’t believe that you can do it. I had an interesting thing happen to me when I got the Paul Di’Anno gig because this is like how much more heavy metal can it be than Iron Maiden stuff. I actually was concerned because back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I loved the look. I had my hair down to my waist. I had the whole thing going on and everybody thought I was just this metal guy. I was actually afraid that if I took the gig which I did take anyway because how can you pass up that opportunity? I was afraid that I would wind up being everybody’s heavy metal guitar player which didn’t quite work out that way but I was glad. Doing the composition for film and TV has been great because growing up like I said, I was into the prog rock and that stuff used to go a lot of different emotional places in one piece of music. Whereas most pop stuff tends to pick one message, one emotional feeling to portray and then do it in three to four minutes so I learned how to write and go in a lot of different directions and create a lot of different feelings. It’s paid off because with the film stuff you basically can write anything as long as it fits emotionally. Sometimes the genre is important but a lot of times I could be writing a baroque string quartet. One of the pieces I just did for Omni was a New Orleans funeral march with trombones and sousaphones and trumpets. You get to do everything and that’s what I like about it. I can just one minute be writing for orchestra, next minute be writing metal, and then do blues and bluegrass. I’m on a big bluegrass/country kick right now just having fun with all those clean Strat tones and stuff like that.

You started doing some instrumental CDs. What got you interested in embarking on that?

Well, it’s a good question because it picks up right from where I was saying. I started teaching the guitar privately probably around the ‘90s when I realized that doing a tour and then being home for six months wasn’t going to pay the bills. In teaching I started dabbling in a lot more styles and after doing that for a number of years I said you know what, everybody I can do this. They know I do this and they know I do that but they don’t know everything that I can do. I said I’m going to do an instrumental record just where I can start to touch on all the different styles that I like to play. I started doing that I guess around the late ‘90s and Once More…With Feeling was born. That was a simple getting my foot wet. The music I listened to growing up like I said the prog rock had a lot of long instrumental pieces in it. At the time there was also instrumental fusion. At that time fusion jazz was big. I didn’t want to write or record something that’s just a cheesy little melody for 30 seconds and then five minutes of soloing and then recapitulate the cheesy melody. From years of writing for vocalists I wanted to write stuff that had more emotional impact and wasn’t just about the soul but was also a song. So everything was kind of orchestrated in a way even if it was a heavy rock tune or blues. There was actually a melody. There was something for a listener even if they weren’t into instrumental music. There was hopefully something the listeners could hold onto and that’s where I started with that. To showcase what I was doing and the original intent was actually for the business in order to get me more work. Once you finish a record and you put a cover on it, you look at it and you go “that’s pretty cool. Man, everybody’s got to hear this. I got to get it out there, come on!” Then you get bit by that bug. You start trying to promote it and actually the first record I put together a band and actually went out and did the stuff live. It actually did fairly well doing it but it’s a tough sale especially where I am in the northeast near New York City. There’s not really a market for instrumental rock fusion mixed with everything else. I managed to do that but it was a lot of work getting gigs and being able to pay the musicians. I put that on the backburner and then went on to do the next record, Strange World, which was 2001. There were some vocals on that one and I went off and did a bunch of other styles on that. Had the heavy rockers on there. Had some blues stuff on there. A little twisted jazz stuff. Had Steve Morris’ drummer on there, Van Romaine, Miles Davis’ keyboard player played on a couple of tracks, Adam Holzman. Dave Keyes who played for Renaisance and Willy DeVille. He played bass. Ric Mullen played bass from Commander Cody. Did a bigger production record and that was fun to do. Then went after the press and the publicity but didn’t take it out live that one. It was just too much work.

In a lot of ways I think it’s kind of hard to pull that off in a live setting even though I did go cover a show once, I think it was Fireball Ministry. One of their opening acts was a band called Pelican and their stuff was instrumental but they really managed to hold people’s attention.

It’s tough. First off opening acts alone are always tough. That’s a tough slot to fill. I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been a headliner and seen what the opener had to do and then I’ve been a opener. Trying to make a name while you’re an opener, nowadays a lot of the bigger bands of course are bringing around bands almost with as much of a name as they have. It’s like everybody is co-opting the concert tours now because I guess the fan base money is not there like it used be so you need two bands to draw people in rather than just the one. Unless of course you’re U2 or The Rolling Stones or somebody like that. Then we wound up waiting a bunch of years before doing another record and this last record Guitar Noir really came about because once again I had so much material from the film so I said let me go and isolate all the guitar oriented stuff and went through it. Some of it I maybe wrote a guitar melody or added something to make it more appropriate for a guitar record. Once again as you know I went in a lot of different directions out there. Maybe even more so than in the past records.

Boy I’d say. Funk, country, Middle Eastern, Latin.

Yeah, one I was very intent on making the record flow. In my mind it flows as best as you can when you stick that many styles together. Hopefully the listener will enjoy the ride. We’ll see what happens.

That’s what keeps my attention. Somebody else who puts together some really good instrumental records is John 5 who used to play with Marilyn Manson. He does the same thing. He puts all sorts of different styles on his records.

I’m not familiar with his records. I’ll have to check him out.

He’s got two out. One is called Vertigo and the other one is called Songs For Sanity. They are fucking awesome. It’s the same concept. Make the record flow but with so many different styles on it that you keep the listener’s attention the whole way through.

Right. It’s for certain people. I know a lot of people these days want more of the same. For the few that like to mix it up, I love that. I love to be surprised and have things go in different directions. Of course you hope that all of them are good songs and have something to say and somehow move the listener emotionally. Grab them by the arm hairs and give them some goose bumps. That’s all we can hope for.

On Guitar Noir, are all of the songs from stuff that you already did or are some of them stuff you just wrote for the record?

Most of them are from stuff that I had already written in the past and actually written and mostly recorded for film. And a lot of them actually, I hate to let you in on the secret but a lot of them weren’t even written. A bunch of pieces I had in maybe even three days. You know when you’re working in film and TV, somebody calls you up and says “I need a piece. A spaghetti western score from the Clint Eastwood blah, blah, blah.” Okay, fine. It’s 2 A.M. and you have a beer. You turn on your Strat and you just start playing and next thing you know you have this thing recorded and then you put it together. Then two days later you have a finished piece. That piece was as is. That’s overnight created, written, played, mixed, produced in two days from start to finish. There is a bunch of stuff on that which I never actually sat down and wrote and agonized over the detail of the melody and stuff. That just flowed out of me almost like improvisational writing. Then there are a couple of pieces that were written specifically for the record like “Guitar Suicide”. Actually the music was written to have vocals on there. I wrote that for Cody Marks which she came in to finish the lyrics and it turned into “Lone Suicide” and it went in a Black Crowes kind of direction which she wasn’t comfortable with so we just scrapped the whole thing. I thought it was a great rock tune and I wrote the melody for the record on top of that track and the melody is so twisted, it’s kind of like a southern rock and roll song. That’s one of my favorites. “Entwangled” was another one that I wrote for the record and that melody I had laying around for years and always wanted to do something with it and that came together. I was looking for more of the flashier stuff for the real guitarists out there that tend to buy these records and criticize them if you don’t blow their faces off a little bit.

What they should be doing is listening to that stuff and seeing if they can emulate it themselves.

Yeah, guitarists tend to be very competitive. You have to make sure you make your statement. You’re not one of the normal reviewers. Most of the reviewers that review these records are guitar players. They’re guitar players that write for magazines and they’re very quick to let you know that they’re better than you. I’ve had people write me a review and then they go “you have to listen to my stuff.” I’m like I’m just promoting a record here dude but sure, yeah, send it by.

I think that’s fucking rude.

I guess I’ll let you say that. I’m not allowed to say that.

Well, it is rude. You’re supposed to be sitting here talking about your record and what you did and not have someone saying “well, here’s what I did.” Who cares?

Yeah, exactly but there are a lot of I would say people reviewing the guitar stuff who are guitarists themselves. You’re a rarity. You’re one of a kind. I’ve always liked to stand out in the crowd and do stuff a little different. I guess what I do with my records is part of that. I do some session work for a guy who works for Play Tone Records which is Tom Hanks’ label and one of the guys said “you have to do a one genre specific record and just do the best blues record ever done and do the best metal record ever done.” I said there’s already the best. What’s best? Everybody already got their best. That’s not what I do. I’ll do a great blues record with a great blues singer or something like that maybe. It’s been done. There are the best blues records out there. There are the best shred metal records out there. There are the best bluegrass records out there. I’m trying to create a niche where people know me. Even if they just know me as the guy who does too many different things. But at least I’ll have my little place by myself hopefully. Me and the guy from Marilyn Manson I guess. That’s my goal and just like you it’s the same thing. You’re different. Being unique. That’s having your own voice. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Just have my own voice on the instrument.

I think that’s really important. You look around and it’s conformity, conformity, conformity. No way.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

How has the overall reaction been to the record?

Well so far Dave says it’s been good. I guess that’s what he’s paid to do. To tell me it’s good. As far as I know we’re just starting to get feedback and it’s all been good so far. I haven’t gotten anybody saying anything bad yet so it’s been going good but we’re really just starting to scratch the surface. This is really the first month where we’re starting to get feedback from the magazines and the webzines and the interviews and things like that. What am I saying? How can I leave this out? On a whim I sent a copy to Neil Dorfsman who is an engineer and a producer who has been around since the ‘70s. He worked on a Fleetwood Mac record. He’s a Grammy winning guy. He engineered Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and won a Grammy for that. He worked with Paul McCartney and Sting producing and won Grammies as a producer so we’re talking about a major guy here. If you’re into music that’s different and doesn’t sound like anything else and just really great songwriting you might want to pick up this record. It’s by a band called The Blessing and the record is called Prince Of The Deep Water. It was done in the ‘90s and Neil Dorfsman produced it and I had that thing in my car for the whole decade. It’s like a mercenary delta blues rock guy with this thick voice and great songs and really interesting lyrics that weren’t self-explanatory. You really had to dig into the lyrics. Very sensuous and great dark stuff. It was one of the greatest sounding records and had all the top L.A. session guys on there. Just a wonderful record from every aspect. It was great and Neil became one of my favorite producers. I guess maybe three or four years ago I was at an AES show with this engineer Rick Slater and he goes “there’s Neil Dorfsman. I’ve got to go over and say hi.” I said “Neil Dorfsman? You’ve got to introduce me.” Said a quick hello then and in a couple of sentences I said I loved The Blessing record. He said that one went cardboard. Sold nothing. When Guitar Noir was out, it turns out that my business manager and lawyer work for Invasion Group. Invasion Group actually has a management side which manages Neil. I just went to the website and there’s his website. Once again the Internet is a great thing for certain things. I emailed him and told him I had met him and we had two sentences. I told him I’d love to send him my new record and for him to tell me what he thought. So he emails me back and tells me to send it over so I sent it over. Next thing I know he emails me back about a week later and goes “dude, this is a great record. It raises the bar for everybody. I hate guys like you. Are you available to do any session work?” I was like “let me check my schedule. Ah, yeah.” I wound up doing a session for some Japanese rock star with him. Nir Z was on drums who had just finished drumming Chris Cornell’s new solo record and Whynot Jansveld from Gavin DeGraw and the Crash Test Dummies. He was on bass and I was on guitar and we had a rip roaring good time.

You wound up getting some work.

Yeah, which is always my underlying thing. Part of it is to get out there and keep your name out there but it’s more just to get more work. I just love to work. I’m a workaholic.

You have such a fun job too.

Yeah, well it’s fun. It’s a fun job. I do a lot of work. The compositional stuff is me doing it all so actually it gets me a little bit isolated. I can get to feel a little bit isolated at times. Not like when you’re doing a lot of live work or you’re touring, then it’s more of what people think of as fun. Party time. Do a show and then you party and then you get on the bus and you look out the window for six hours and then start over again. But I love what I do so I can’t complain. Whether it’s writing or performing, either way it’s all good.

What other stuff do you have coming up besides the reality show?

I continue to write for Omni and I continue to write for TDM and I’ll play locally with some local bands from time to time just sitting in or going to jam sessions. That more or less keeps me pretty darn busy. Just the compositional stuff and also doing session work for other people. Mostly demos and unknown projects and things like that. Cody Marks has a gig that she just called me about actually. Actually it’s in Austin, Texas but I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be in New York actually today and tomorrow with a distribution deal meeting but that got cancelled so I don’t have the details on this thing. I did her record about a year ago and it’s being mixed by the guy who does all of Hans Zimmer’s engineering. He’s a big movie score guy. He’s done a million movies that you’ve watched. There’s always stuff going on. This here and that there. There’s more Chinese shows coming up.

I can’t wait to see that reality show.

Yeah, I’m curious. I don’t want to give away too much yet in case it doesn’t happen. I don’t want you to go to print with it and then say it didn’t happen. I can always give you a late breaking exclusive on the whole deal. We’re supposed to do the first meet and greet which is supposed to be filmed on the 19th so I should know more about it before the 19th hopefully.

Hopefully.

At least where to go. I’m supposed to show up on the 19th.

I hope that definitely works out because I want to see that.

Yeah, it should be fun. It should be pretty wacky. Sheena Firm is the comedienne’s name. You can find her online at www.comedynet.com and they’re underwriting it. She’s pretty wacky. She writes songs about how she’s a brunette but her bush is blonde. She does a ventriloquist act without a dummy. She sings it. The whole concept is that there are a bunch of seasoned rockers that are going to put her on the road doing her songs live but instead of just acoustically, with a whole band. It’s supposed to culminate in actually a month’s worth of live shows in August. I guess they’re going to film all the rehearsals and all the shenanigans and nonsense. And then go around and film a short tour.

Kind of like Super Group.

Yeah, Super Group without the superness. Super Unknown Group.

Any other thoughts or comments?