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I grew
up in San Diego during the 1960. Inspired by the Beatles, Kinks
and
Rolling Stones, my friends and I formed a band, and I chose to
play
drums. My parents couldn't have known what to
expect when they brought my
first drum kit home, but no matter what kind of horrible noises
my bandmates and I (or my younger brother and his bandmates) made out there in
the garage, Hy and Kay were always
100% supportive, and we will always love them for it.
As my playing improved, I
played in a series of bands, each one
a little more “psychedelic” than the next. By the early
‘70s,
when most local bands were playing Top 40 music or blues based hard
rock, I was playing drums for Horsefeathers,
a popular progressive rock
quintet. Experimenting with odd time signatures and unique sounds
was
par for the course with this group, so no one blinked an eye when I
asked local luthier, Sam Radding, to build me a dulcimer.
Eventually a
friend told me about the African M'bira, or
"kalimba". I saw Taj Mahal play one, and decided I had to have
one of
those, too.
Horsefeathers
opened
shows for the Kinks, Foghat, Mike Bloomfield
and other touring acts. Encouraged by our success on the local
scene, we moved to Los Angeles in 1976, in pursuit of a
record deal.
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We arrived in
LA right as punk
and new
wave music were
kicking in, and no
one
in the
music business was interested in progressive rock. Discouraged,
we soon broke up, although three of
us remained
in LA and made marks for
ourselves. Lead vocalist Mick
Garris
moved into film and TV work, and
today is a producer/director
("Quicksilver Highway," Stephen
King’s "The Stand"). Guitarist Mark
Wittenberg became director of Artist
Relations for Fender
Musical Instruments. I
continued to seek my niche in the music
world while managing the
percussion department for Studio Instrument Rentals, in
Hollywood, where I consulted
with such recording artists as Supertramp, America and Earth, Wind and
Fire.
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HORSEFEATHERS
Bill Manning, Andy Robinson, Mark Wittenberg,
Mick Garris, Bill Birney
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ELTON DUCK
Michael Steel,
Mike Condello, Mike McFadden, Andy Robinson
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By 1980, I was drumming for a new wave-pop
band called Elton Duck.
After
playing the challenging music of
Horsefeathers, I found this return to bashing out singable and
energetic pop tunes pretty refreshing. The band included bassist Michael Steel, who
later rose to stardom as one of the
Bangles. We
played in every imaginable LA dive, and plastered our hard-to-ignore
name on posters all over town. Elton Duck opened for the Knack, the Motels and Phil Seymour, and toured with the Tubes. Clive Davis himself
signed us to Arista Records.
But when Arista ended up leaving our debut
album on the shelf, the Duck disbanded, and I redefined my musical
focus, determined to step out from behind the drums and sing my own
songs.
While
writing for A&M
Records’ publicity
department and for Synapse, a
cutting-edge synthesizer magazine, I
formed Invisible
Zoo,
probably
the only synth-rock band ever to have a
lead singer who played dulcimer and kalimba! I liked the idea
that
synthesizers could create such a variety of sounds, many of them very
unique, but we always had way
too much equipment
onstage –
multiple keyboards, sequencers,
drum
machines, tape machines and a ton of gizmos and
electronic devices. One night, someone backstage tripped on a cord and
accidentally unplugged some of our stuff. He plugged the cord
back in
right away, but our programming was scrambled, and our electronic
rhythm section forced us to do a spontaneous medley of our set list, at
top speed!
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Despite the
challenging equipment situation, Invisible Zoo was signed
to an indie label, and our song, “Nobody’s
Girl,” received regular airplay
on LA’s then-cutting
edge radio station, KROQ.
Personnel changes left the
Zoo more
electric guitar-oriented (and a lot louder) than what I’d originally
envisioned.
After one particularly
ear-splitting rehearsal, I couldn't take it any more and I quit,
determined to find a more satisying setting for my songs.
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INVISIBLE ZOO
Live at the Palace
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I began pouring my energies into acoustic
music, and in the late eighties, a handful of other artists and I
created LA’s “nu-folk” scene. By
producing our own shows and
lobbying
the media to raise public awareness of local acoustic musicians (this
was before MTV's "Unplugged"), our efforts earned us front-page
coverage in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times. At the time,
I had a folk-pop group called Different
World.
Different World released
an album on the Vanguard label
in 1990. Our self-titled CD (I remember
we were disappointed it wasn't coming out on vinyl!) was produced by Earle Mankey
(Concrete Blonde, Sparks, Beach Boys). A song from
the CD, “Dinosaur Tracks,” was
used in the soundtrack for the New Line
Cinema film, Roadside Prophets,
starring X’s John Doe and the
Beastie
Boys’ Adam Horovitz, with
cameos by Arlo Guthrie and Timothy Leary.
Different World toured
California, had some fun, and met with critical acclaim, but eventually
some of the members decided they needed to concentrate on
actually making a little money, so we broke up.
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Pre-DIFFERENT
WORLD group
with Betsy Gerson and Jeff Gregory
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DIFFERENT WORLD
Betsy
Gerson, Michael O'Leary, Andy Robinson, Russell Battelene
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Unfazed, I decided I wanted a more
portable band, and put together an acoustic trio called The
Questionaires. We moved into the coffee house scene, and
found a
lot of like-minded fans. We played some folk festivals, and for
the
first time I actually began hanging around with other dulcimer players.
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THE QUESTIONAIRES
Mike Condello, Andy Robinson, Laura Kass
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In 1994, I
helped to found Southern California
Dulcimer Heritage, a non-profit
organization intended to expose more people to dulcimer music by
holding annual folk festivals. I edited the group's
newsletter. At the
time I was performing solo gigs, teaching dulcimer workshops at various
festivals and giving private lessons through McCabes Guitar Shop, in
Santa Monica.
I did one solo show at a record store called Hyperdisc, in Santa
Monica, where I invited several friends to sit in on various
songs.
Everyone had such a good time that before I knew it, I had a band
again, and a new CD, produced by my brother (this was the first time
Doug and I worked together on a project). The Andy Robinson Band
CD came out great, and performing live with the group was an incredible
experience - we had a chemistry onstage that was impossible to deny,
and, for a folk band, we rocked. But as time went by, our lives
offstage became overly complicated, and it became difficult to
continue. I slowly began to close the book on my LA adventures.
In
2000, I returned home to San Diego, where I began working for Taylor
Guitars. A year later I married Dagmar,
the love of my
life, at
Lumahai Beach, on the spectacular island of Kauai.
So, it's been a long, strange trip, and I've enjoyed every minute of
it. Well, maybe not every minute, but most of 'em. And I've
certainly
learned quite a bit about music and about myself. I'd begun
working on the demos for Exotic
America in my last weeks before leaving
LA, teaching myself to use the digital technology necessary to capture
some musical ideas I’d wanted to try for many years. It was a
great
challenge. I'd always wanted to do an album of instrumental
music, so I
took this opportunity to write some new songs, experiment with some new
instruments, and to put a fresh spin on a few favorite things I'd
written during other times in my life. It was especially
"freeing" not
to write lyrics, and to use instruments other than the human voice to
carry melody lines (althought I did sing, a bit). I enjoy the
results
so much that I'm thinking of doing my next record in the same vein.
Hear clips from the new CD, and then let me know what you think.
I look forward to hearing from
you!
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