Category: Actor/Musician

Tis a long and twisty tale. First, some important background.

I have played guitar, keys, and bass for about 42 years. Shut up, I’m old. I played alto saxophone in 6th and 7th grade, I believe. Then I continued to play it on a few songs in bands where I played guitar. I played the solos in “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, “On The Dark Side” by John Cafferty and Beaver Brown Band from the “Eddie and the Cruisers” soundtrack, and “One More Night” by Phil Collins, among others. Again, yes I’m aware that I’m ancient.

At some point, I pawned my saxophone and didn’t play for decades. Maybe something like 30 years, I’m not sure. In 2021 I formed the yacht rock band, Yacht Z, and thought “There sure is some tasty saxophone in some of these songs, maybe I should pick it back up.” Apparently the universe agreed as two generous friends (shout out to Kathy Rose Center and Chris Wilson) gifted me a tenor and an alto saxophone over the years.

Also starting in 2021, the amazing band Skyrocket asked me to be a sub on guitar and keys occasionally when they needed one. My good friend Johnny Goudie from that group has a great podcast called “How Did I Get Here?” which I was honored to be a guest on at one point. Jack Hues from Wang Chung was also a guest, and he and Johnny became friends afterward.

So that’s how it came to be that my friend Darin, Skyrocket’s drummer, called me a few weeks ago and asked me if I would play sax on “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung because Jack Hues was going to sit in (he currently lives in the Austin area). Now keep in mind, I still feel like a total mediocre amateur on Saxophone having only picked it back up in 2021 and I still get really nervous and in my head about it. So a part of my brain thought “Are you sure you are up for this?” but my mouth was already saying “YEAH SURE!” They also wanted me to play on “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS so that was an interesting full circle moment.

So I spend the next few weeks working on those songs. I’m not really an improvisor on saxophone, so I tend to just learn whatever parts are in the actual song. I had one rehearsal with the band (minus Jack) on Wednesday before the show, where I was quite in my head at first. It felt real shaky. But by the end of the night I was having fun, and at least by what I was told, everything was sounding good.

Saturday arrives. Show day. I show up to soundcheck my two songs, and Jack is there as well. Talented, nice, wonderful guy. Wang Chung. Come on. Who doesn’t like Wang Chung? What other band is a VERB? You can’t say “I Beatlesed tonight” but you can absolutely say “I Wang Chunged tonight.” Or would it be “I Wanged Chung” tonight? Hmm, I’m pretty sure it’s “Wang Chunged.” They are part of eternal music culture.

We run though the song once. It goes well and Jack and his wife seem happy and complimentary. Then Jack asks me, “Hey I think it would sound good if you played that up an octave.” Part of me panics. Wants to blurt out a disclaimer about how I’m not very good and I’m not sure if I can make that adjustment at the last moment because, again, I’m not very good…” but my mouth smartly just says “YEAH SURE!” once I clarify that he means just the main riff. The solo at the end I already had to alter because I’m not good enough to play up into the octave where that solo actually begins.

Then he says “Oh and in the third verse, I like to do this thing where between my lines you play something so we go back and forth.” Stage 2 brain panic. “I HAVE NOT REHEASED THAT. I CAN’T IMPROVISE. I’M NOT VERY GOOD.” Again, luckily my mouth is smart enough to simply say “YEAH SURE!”

We try it. It actually goes pretty well. Compliments all around. I feel…good about it! Several people give me specific compliments on how they liked the things I chose to play. They were tasty, soulful, and riffs that said something. In that moment, I realize that the limits of my abilities and my lack of confidence worked in my favor. Because they made me keep it simple but soulful. I knew enough to play something that fit without worrying about being “flashy” or trying to throw in “LOOK WHAT I CAN DO” riffs.

The band finished out the first set with my two songs, the last one being “Dance Hall Days” when they brought Jack out. The sold out place went wild. The energy was amazing. The band was amazing. I was far from perfect but I had a blast and played from the heart. Afterward as I walked back to my car, I had to take a moment to just sit down on a rock bench in downtown Austin and process what had just happened and the crazy life journey that led me there. The temperature was dropping and the brisk night air felt almost as good as the immense gratitude I had for it all. Sometimes, you can do more than you think or know. I say this to you all from the heart, because it’s a good motto. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.

Today John Burgess, founder of The Eggmen announced that November 16 at Backstage at El Mercado would be the last ever Eggmen gig after 32 years, so I thought I’d try to collect my thoughts on my journey to being a small part of that legendary legacy.

The Beatles are the deepest part of my musical being. The most foundational part of my musician DNA. My mother was a huge Beatles fan as a teenager and even got to see them in concert. Growing up, we had all her records in the house. Mostly the Capitol American releases. I wouldn’t learn until quite a few years later that those were kind of haphazard, Frankensteined releases and not the true UK releases as intended.

I had always been impressed with the incredible range of their catalog. Comparing their first album to their last is like two completely different bands. They defined and defied genres. They experimented with recording techniques thought to be outrageous and even taboo to the the studio engineers at the time. Techniques that would go on to become industry standards. They invented technologies that became standard tools in the toolbox. It is important that you realize that when I say “they,” that includes George Martin (the true fifth Beatle in my opinion), Geoff Emerick, Mal Evans, and everyone in their camp who helped them create that music.

They have been with me through so much of my life. Comforted me in difficult times and brought me joy in all times. To this day I somehow continue to discover more and more new things through their music. It’s a neverending source of knowledge and inspiration.

I had heard of The Eggmen, this legendary Austin Beatles tribute band, decades before I lived here. Yet somehow I never actually saw them until they just happened to be playing at Central Market when I was there one day in 2018. In 2021, my friend and bandmate in several bands, Matt Patterson, became their drummer. In 2022, he recommended our mutual friend and bandmate, David Houston when the bass slot opened up. Then later that year when they were doing some shows with some local orchestras and needed a keyboard player to play a lot of that stuff, both of them recommended me. Let me tell you, there is not much I have experienced that is as magical as playing Beatles songs while surrounded by a live orchestra playing those songs with you.

For the next year, they would call me in when they needed a keyboard player for those bigger gigs or when they’d be playing a lot of keyboard dependent stuff. I played alongside many former members as well for the 30th anniversary show which was the one time I got to meet and play with JB’s brother, Tommo who used to play keys with the band before he retired his position. In the Autumn of 2023, they asked me to be a full time member. I was elated and gave an enthusiastic “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!” My first gig with them as a full time member was October 13, 2023. Which turned out to be quite interesting.

I was loading up my car at about 4pm to go load in for the gig when we all got a text than John Burgess had gone to the hospital with some kind of emergency. Quickly assessing our plan of action, the other lads brought up the prospect of me filling in for JB. I said that I absolutely felt up to the task and that, in fact, it felt like I had been training my whole life for this moment. I very quickly went back inside and loaded up lyrics for every song into Band Helper, the app I use for set lists and such. There was no time to rehearse. I drove straight to the gig, set up and quickly assessed our set list for the night, and what I would be doing on each song. Any song with a prominent keyboard part, I would play that, but anything else I would wing it on guitar and hope for the best. I would also sing everything that JB sang which was most of the list. I felt strangely calm about it. I knew these songs in my bones. The chords just found my fingers. The lyrics came out of the mental archive with ease. These songs had been etched into my neural pathways for most of my life.

The gig was amazing. I filled the same role for several other gigs while JB recuperated. When he rejoined the band, he was a little worried about his voice so usually I would still double any vocals, which worked out well as our voices blended well together and a lot of Beatles vocal lines were double-tracked because Lennon hated the sound of his own voice and thought doubling it made it sound better. And now it seems this (not) Long (enough) and Winding Road is coming to “The End.”

My tenure as an Eggman may have been short, but it was filled with life-changing magic. My late friend Val had a “Bucket List” of things she wanted to do in her remaining time here and seeing me perform with The Eggmen was one of them. I was so glad we made that happen. Right up to the end, she would text me about how we should be ending EVERY show with me singing “Hey Jude” because she thought it brought the house down.

And so with today’s announcement that November 16 at Backstage at El Mercado will be the last gig for The Eggmen, the remaining members contemplate our path ahead. Many of us know that we definitely want to continue playing the music of The Beatles in some form, and I’m sure we will. It will be sad to no longer be “The Eggmen” (which we all agree is the BEST name for a Beatles Tribute ever) and to see that legendary legacy set with the sun, but the music is bigger than all of us. People want to hear it, and we want to play it. I personally have some very mixed feelings about it all, and am just trying to take some time to process and contemplate the future. I do know that no words seem sufficient and that I am filled with gratitude and honored that I got to be a part of this amazing group, playing the best music with the best people, even if only for a short time.

I think the best parting words are the words of The Beatles themselves, from the appropriately titled, “The End.”

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

I am the Eggman. They are the Eggmen.

Goo goo g’joob.

To not bury the lede, today I was voted “Best Multi-Instrumentalist” in the first annual Austin Tribute Band Community awards.

As a member of the Beatles tribute group The Eggmen, we also won Best One-Off Show for our show where we played the entire albums of A Hard Day’s Night and Abbey Road, and we were also voted into the Hall Of Fame.

Amusingly, I was not visible in either photo because in one I was behind someone else, and the other was taken before I joined full-time. I say amusingly because there’s a joke among keyboard players that we are never in photos. We always end up getting cropped out, obscured, or otherwise forgotten. It doesn’t actually bother me but I do find it funny and weird how true it often is!

These awards were started because the hugely popular Austin Chronicle music awards made the bad decision (in my opinion) to remove cover and tribute bands from the categories. If you are one of those cover/tribute band snobs, don’t even bother commenting as it will be deleted. It just shows you know nothing. The most talented musicians I’ve ever known throughout my life all play covers as well in addition to whatever other projects they have going. Most make the bulk of their living from cover music and only a very tiny, lucky fraction get to a place where they can make a living from original music. Most big bands like The Beatles started playing mostly covers if not all covers.

First and foremost, let me say how immensely grateful I am to be recognized at all and for everyone who took the time and effort to go fill out the form and vote. It really does mean a lot to me and please don’t let any of what follows undermine that very important point. I say that because I have a very complicated relationship with awards “competitions.” I always have. Not just this one. The main reason being that for every one person who is ultimately lifted up, there are countless people who end up feeling kind of bummed, “less than,” not-enough, unappreciated, or unrecognized and that’s a bummer to me. Being an artist of any sort is a very difficult life and I know how it feels to feel unseen or underappreciated. It probably doesn’t help that a LOT of us (maybe even most of us) suffer from imposter syndrome quite a lot!

Competitions such as this one can be extra frustrating in that they are purely by popular vote. No panel of industry judges, or academy or anything, although the ATBC is looking to remedy that next year with a combination of popular vote and industry experts as well. So it mainly just ends up being who can get the most people to go vote. Who has the largest base? Who is going to campaign and hustle and try to rally them to go vote?

This is where it gets complicated on a more personal level as well for me. I’ve been lucky enough to have a handful of videos go viral on Instagram and Tik Tok. This led to an influx of followers, so unlike most people I had a potential audience of 90K people on IG and 144K on TT (though as most people will tell you, you generally only reach a very infinitesimal fraction of those people). I am also someone who is very active on social media. In a contest where it’s purely about hustling voters to the poll, these things give me an edge. Now, the other side of that is that hopefully these people don’t just go blindly vote for me because I said so, but because they’ve seen all my various videos playing various instruments and singing so it’s not necessarily unearned in any, I just have the luxury of more resources and greater reach. There were many other nominees who I know to be some of the most amazing musicians I’ve ever seen, much less played with. Some of them weren’t even aware of this competition at all. Some of them got nominations but don’t live online all the time of have a huge audience to tell to go vote. I’m bummed for my friends who didn’t win or weren’t even nominated because I’m their biggest fan and think they absolutely deserve the recognition but hey that’s just not possible in awards competitions.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve always said that you absolutely should enjoy any kudos that come your way when they come. Enjoy that moment in the sun. Just don’t let it, or that lack of it define you or your validation. I can 100% guarantee you that there’s many folks out there you’ve never heard of (or maybe even you) who are light years beyond me on every instrument I play. My motto that I’ve repeated many times in life is “Keep your head down and do good work.” Do it for the journey, not the destination. Not the awards, not the praise. I will enjoy this moment in the spotlight, but I also enjoy it because I didn’t do it by myself. It took all of you as well, and I’d go so far as to say, your part in it was way more important than mine. I didn’t think I stood a chance. If you voted for me, I do not take that lightly and I do fully think about and appreciate each and every person who thought enough about me to do that. It’s not for me, it’s for us.

I dropped a new song tonight!

This year was the first year I watched The Oscars in as long as I can remember and I really enjoyed it. I was particularly happy that “What Was I Made For” by Billie Eilish won Best Song as I thought it was the most powerful. It made me want to write something like that. I took a walk that night and the words started coming to me immediately. I knew I wanted something simple with just piano, vocal, and a string quartet.

I was house/pet sitting for a friend so when I got back to the house, I sat down at the piano there which was a bit out of tune and had some dampers that didn’t work. At first “What Was I Made For” was stuck in my head and I was having a hard time getting away from it to write something original, but enough experimenting finally got me there. Interestingly, my last song, New Year was also written while house/pet sitting for a different friend on the keyboard they had at their house.

I knew I wanted to do something simple not only because of the inspiration of Billie’s song, but also because I knew I had a tendency to feel the need to make things more complicated to try and feel more “musically advanced” or original even though there’s plenty of very simpler songs that I love. So the song is largely one repeating motif with a few variations. Of course me being me, I could just keep it to simple regular chords but had to find interesting voicings and changes. Writing 4 parts for the string quartet (which I played using the BBC Symphony Orchestra plugin from Spitfire) keeps lots of motion and variety in it as well.

Another sort of exercise is that I generally write pretty autobiographically and have always admired songwriters who could write purely fictional “story” songs. So while there’s definitely plenty of elements from my life, I also decided to pay homage to a song written by Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney called “That Day Is Done” where it is eventually revealed that the singer is dead and watching his own funeral. So my bridge was written from the perspective of someone who lived a long happy life but ultimately died alone with no real friends or family. I think the last verse manages to finish on a positive note though.

While looking for some past info on my blog last, I stumbled upon this fun collaboration I did with the late Craig Davis. I had first met Craig as a kid when he was friends with my Aunt and Uncle, but then had crossed paths with him as an adult when my band served to be his backup band for a show playing his originals at The Palace Theater in Bryan, TX (I still lived in College Station at the time). WE stayed in touch and started doing some musical collaborations.

Craig actually came to College Station and helped me and my then wife move to Austin. He and I did a lot of really great collaborations where he would send me a demo, and I would add all my touches and fully produce it into a finished song. It is still some of the best work I think I ever did but sadly none of it ever saw the light of day and I’m not aware of any of it existing anywhere anymore. 

So I was thrilled when I stumbled upon an old blog entry where I had posted one such song and the story of how it came to be. And I’ve been earwormed by it all day today. Craig was a great and prolific songwriter. He and I did a duo performance ridiculously early on some news station locally here in Austin. We performed as a duo at the funeral of Tommy Smith, another great guitar player who was my neighbor and a major influence when I was just a kid learning guitar. Craig was a wonderful, eccentric, unique, and talented figure. I hadn’t really been in touch with him for many years when he died in 2021 but I still love so many of his songs.

I made a post today about the SAGAFTRA and WGA strike and why I support it. It’s only noon and I’m exhausted already by the trolls and uninformed idiots with an agenda who have come out of the woodwork like roaches.

I want to make people understand the entertainment industry but also must accept that it is an impossible task. I’m curious as to how anyone with the spoons would have replied to the troll I deleted who laid out average salaries of TV writers and such as if it was ridiculous that they were asking for more. I couldn’t even. I’m tired. I can’t explain to every idiot why our industry is so weird, misunderstood, complex and abnormal. How making $2000 for a day of shooting a commercial may seem like a lot to people not in the industry but is NOT when you consider all things such as cuts that go to agents and such, and how that might be your only payday this month. How residuals are fair compensation and make up for the unsteady nature of our business and yes people do deserve to get paid not just once, but every time something is shown. The naysayers always have some come back like “Well then learn a real trade” or “Get a real job.” I want to make people understand and yet do not have the will. They just see the seemingly high numbers and have no understanding how that breaks down and can not be compared to a salary or hourly wage.

EVERYONE enjoys and consumes art. Needs it to survive. All the creators of it deserve what they get paid. Billions of dollars are made off it and the distribution of that is extremely uneven. Yet so many want to paint us as spoiled children who get paid ridiculous amounts of money for “playing pretend.” I want to make them understand, but I haven’t the spoons. And their minds are probably dense and impenetrable anyway so any attempt would be futile.