It's the Journey, Not the Destination - 4/22/06

You'd HAVE TO be a dreamer to think you want to be a Rock musician when you grow up... A dreamer or clinically insane... Well... that's all I've ever wanted to be.

When I was seven, my mother took my older sister for piano lessons. I wasn't really interested in piano. My mother's father went to Julliard for violin when he was only 16 years old. He was an Italian immigrant prodigy on scholarship. I had no interest in the violin either. Sounded like a dying cat in my incapable little hands.

Fate has a way of guiding events. The guy who taught my sister piano also taught classical guitar. He had a three quarter scale beginner model that he sold to my mother. The next thing you know, I was taking guitar lessons. My first week was a Bach study in the first position and The Beatles song, "And I Love Her." I was hooked.

Two years later, my teacher moved away, and I discovered baseball, boxing and karate. I fell out of intense guitar study for a while and did normal kid things for a few years. When I reached the seventh grade, I had a defining moment. I saw a re-run of a Police concert on MTV or VH-1. I forget which. As soon as I heard Andy Summers, guitarist for the Police, I said to myself, "I need to learn how to do THAT!"

Enter the Professor. Don Regan himself. A buddy of mine was taking guitar lessons with him. I convinced my father to get me a better guitar, and he signed me up for lessons with Don, who was fresh out of The Manhattan School of Music. This was where my education truly began. Don had a funny way of leading you to developing eclectic musical taste. He did the normal guitar teacher thing... transcribing popular songs and teaching you how to play them. He also taught fundamentals: site reading, classical guitar, chord theory, etc. I pretty much tried to do everything he showed me. However, I have to be honest... playing "Message in a Bottle" or "Eruption" was COOL! Drop 2 chords seemed pretty boring to my 12-year-old brain... for a short while.

I took lessons with the Professor every Saturday at 10 AM. About a year into the process, I came into Don's room to find him listening to and transcribing Frank Zappa's "Peaches in Regalia." I had never heard anything like it. I asked him what it was.

"It's Zappa.," he said, laconically.

"Who's Zappa?" I inquired.

"WHO'S ZAPPA!" he responded, incredulous.

He proceeded to school me on who Zappa was. He let me know that Terry Bozzio, Steve Vai, and a host of other musical heroes of mine all fell from the Zappa tree. I was even more intrigued.

"Can I play that?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, "I'll make you a tape and copy the chart for you."

And a door opened. It went from Zappa to Joe Pass... from Joe Pass to Julian Bream... from Bream to Steve Morse... from Morse to Metheny... and so on and so on. Years flew by. The whole time, Don would have these incredible bands that he played in. He was my musical hero. I didn't know what I was going to do with guitar, at the time, but I knew I wanted to be half THAT GOOD at it.

Then, another door opened. I was sixteen, and by now, I had a brand new Gibson Les Paul that I saved to buy. A friend of mine had a young drummer friend who lived in my town named Chris Reardon. He could play drums like a guy twice his age. I was determined to find Chris and ask him to start a band. Chris found me. One summer day, I was walking down my block on the way to play baseball. When I got to the corner, which was bisected by a hill, someone ran me over with his bicycle. It was Chris Reardon. Turns out, our mutual friend, Billy, told him about me, too. I was the "kid who was into Zappa." We compared notes, and Reardon invited me to his basement to jam. The next weekend, I was there with him and a metal head bass player friend of his with hair down to his feet named Jim. The minute we started making noise, I was once again, hooked. It was a rush like no other.

Now, with a new forum for whatever creativity I had, I went back to Professor Don and asked for things to jam with my 'new band.' He obliged, and he did it brilliantly.

"If you want to have the chops to jam Dregs stuff, then you really have to have a handle on this that and the other thing."

So, I learned this, that and the other thing... and on and on.

Now, here's the thing, the whole time I was learning and playing in these 'bands,' I used to have a fantasy that one day I would be so good that Don would have me join one of HIS bands and we would play together. I never told him that, but it's true. This is the important part of this story, so pay attention.

Time passed. By the time I was 18, I was making money playing a party band with a four-piece horn section. We had a 'lead singer' who played 'rhythm guitar.' That meant he was bold enough to try to sing and not a very good guitar player. However, the PA was his, which means, after a while, he took over the band I had started. That's when I learned about corporate politics. He had written some 'originals.' So had I. The band liked mine better... which meant he needed to remove me from the band. So he did. Ostensibly, he wanted to be the lead guitar player. That might have been more successful for him if he knew which end of the guitar made the notes. I had an epiphany. If I didn't want to get thrown out of my own band, then I HAD TO SING LEAD TOO! Right? Oy...

My first year of singing in a band was frankly just not very good. I sounded like Cher and Eddie Vedder had a baby... a tone-deaf baby. I kept at it. Then, someone said, "Well, you took all these guitar lessons to get good. Why don't you take singing lessons?" Eureka! So, I did... and I learned about BREATHING. It's really the same technique as martial arts chi gung breathing. Diaphragmatic. I got a little better at singing.

By the time I was 21, I left Don's tutelage and played in a reasonably successful NYC original band which will remain nameless, to protect the innocent. I had other teachers from that point, including Jazz great, Vic Juris, but none had the influence on the way I think, musically, that Don did. I should have listened to more of Don's music industry stories...

Friday's Child formed in 1996. My lessons with Vic hooked me on playing steel string over the wing wanging chops thing I was doing on my old Les Paul. I thought... "I'll have a loud acoustic band! That'll be cool!"

It was pretty cool for a while. The original incarnation of Friday's Child went from a New York club band to a national touring Indie act. We had record deals from major and Indie labels come and go. We fired bad management team after bad management team. We faced down one of the biggest labels in the world to defend the Friday's Child registered trademark. An on and on and on. Triumph, followed by kicks in the head, followed by another small triumph. That was the road I chose, and it has been a tough road to hoe.

Through this period I came up with some seemingly hair-brained ideas. For example, in late 1997, a buddy of mine was booking a Borders Books and Music store and asked me to come play with the band. They didn't want to play there. "We're a venue band, not a bookstore band!" They maintained. I sort of bullied them into playing. We got "Boy Without a Name," our rather technically imperfect first album, into the Borders system. Ta da! We sold 75 CD's in a two-hour period at that first show. That was outselling the Billboard Top 20 in that location for the week. And a window opened. Two years later we had one of the most comprehensive in-store touring schedules in the country and had sold a boatload of discs. We endorsed companies like Taylor Guitars and Sabian Cymbals, and we had made a name for ourselves.

Was I rich? No. Did I get recognized in the street? Sometimes on the NYC subways, but mostly not. It was a success path I never imagined. It was wrought by hard work and fraught with many disappointments. I can relate 100 stories that helped put the Friday's Child trademark on the underground map, but I won't bore you with that.

Here's the point. The circle has completed in a strange way. Friday's Child reforms with a new lineup in 2004, after almost a year of my reeling over my health issues, my divorce, and the dissolution of the old Friday's Child. Of the three, the third blow was the most crushing to my identity as a person. I had a lot of skin in that band.

Even that can turn around. When Rich Haddad came to this party as the bassist and engineering guru, another door opened. We just work so well together. Then, there is Grosso. What a find!

How does the circle complete, you ask? ... Re-enter The Professor. I decided that the best other guitar player for this band, if I had the luxury of re-forming, was Don Regan. Don joined us in the summer of 2004. The new Friday's Child was born, and my childhood dream of playing in one of Don's bands came true... never how either of us could have predicted... He joined my group, many years after the fact. This reunion has been a continuous source of satisfaction for me musically.

Point... It's the Journey Not the Destination. If you had told me 10 years ago that I'd be where I am, doing what I'm doing, with (and without) the people who are involved with me, then I would have said, "You're completely out of your mind!" I would have been wrong. I'm not sure what the destination is, but the Journey has never failed to be interesting. Pleasant always? No. But never boring.

Thanks for reading.

TW