I can say one thing for sure, music has consumed me for as long as I can remember. I was lucky,  my Dad had a huge record collection, including a  wealth of late 50's and 60's Irish and American  folk music. Stuff like The Kingston Trio, Johnny Cash, Tommy Makem and The  Clancy Brothers, and Simon  and Garfunkel. Best of all he had an original Buddy Holly  LP. As a kid I loved the stories these musicians told, but most of all I loved a good beat  and by the time I was six, I was a huge Elvis fan. I did the usual forced piano lessons, at the  Limerick School of Music.  I was a terrible student and much preferred writing my own  tunes than learning "Ode To Joy" for the tenth time, so after a two years of re-learning the same stuff  I went to a private teacher.  Mr. Flanagan, my new teacher was completely and delightfully nuts. We became fast friends. He made a deal with me, I passed the grades and he taught me Elvis tunes and encouraged me to come up with my own little tunes. He terrified my parents who were convinced that they had entrusted their child to a wild chain smoking lunatic, (his house was a mess and he refused to dust it because it  might ruin the acoustics). The truth was I loved it. Between lessons he regaled me with bawdy stories that always seemed to involve the local clergy but mostly I learned how to enjoy music. Best of all, he taught me  "Hey Jude" which began a life long love of The Beatles. After playing "Hound Dog" and "Jail House Rock"  to rapturous applause in a school concert at the age of 10, I was completely smitten. I wanted to be a rock star. In return I actually made it to grade 4 on the piano and even passed the theory exams. However the inevitable happened, my parents decided he was far too strange and I ended up going to my sister's piano teacher. She was a crotchety old bag with a horde of rabid ribbon-wrapped terriers, who hated rock and roll. After one lesson where I was accused of "banging" her piano she refused to teach me. I was thrilled.

After some misadventures with a straight laced if well-intentioned English piano teacher mutual agreement was reached between my parents and I that I could forsake the ivory for my new love, my dad's Suzuki guitar. My mother told me I would regret giving up the piano, and she was absolutely right. I bought a piano recently  and have been boning up on music theory. Although I can still play a bit, I really wish I had stuck it out when I was a kid. But teenage girls were much more impressed by guitar players and as a spotty thirteen year old  I needed all the help I could get.

Several guitar lessons from a pompous Jesuit priest and I knew that it was time to strike out alone. I swapped AC/DC riffs and Neil Young tunes with fellow  musically inclined teenage boys and learned every Simon and Garfunkel tune. I played with the school orchestra on the rare occasions they needed a bass player or on the even rarer occasions they needed a guitarist. I convinced the Jesuits that "Stairway To Heaven" was a religious song and played it at school masses until they discovered otherwise. A young vaguely hip priest ended the deceit. I forgave him because he taught me dropped D tuning.

By the time I was sixteen my friend Stephen Imbusch and I were playing in local pubs. Our first gig was the night of Live Aid (June 1984). We donated our earnings at a drunken party back at my folks' house, (they were away on vacation). I have a vivid memory of making a phone pledge while in the background several friends had a séance where they unsuccessfully tried to contact John Lennon. We also got a summer gig in Renvyle House, a beautiful old  hotel on the west coast of Ireland where we learned that entertaining was just as important as musical chops. While our peers worked cheap summer jobs, we pretended we were eighteen so we could drink, got drunk with millionaires, were chatted up by exotic (to us), foreign women. It was sublime and we came back to secondary school with a brand new swagger.

 I was lucky enough that four of the six lads I hung out with were relatively accomplished musicians. We were all avid music fans and record collectors, talking about music, playing records, listening to each others' latest acquisitions, and trading guitar riffs. My tastes had widened to include Dylan, REM, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, Tom Petty, Bob Marley, The Stones, The Pixies, XTC, Bruce Springsteen, The Police and endless others. Over our school years we formed several bands - good, bad, and indifferent. We also busked, i.e. we were street musicians. Every weekend we played on the streets for drunken tips after pubs and night clubs closed.  We occasionally ran afoul of the local constabulary and some ornery drunks,  but generally we had a blast and actually made some decent cash. Halcyon days.

After secondary school, I went to University College Galway  to get my B. Comm. This was more  an accident of fate than any real urge to do a business degree. I floundered a bit my first year trying to find my place. It was still fun and I played in a band call Elmer Fudd, which only played one gig. It was a good show though! Despite the fact that the majority of the tunes were covers, we did three originals two of which were mine. In second year I found my feet and made a bunch of new friends all of who were either big record collectors or played music.  I continued my street music career either solo or often with a loose collective of rotating musicians.  It varied from a solitary guitar to congas, violin, two guitars, a flute, and four part vocal harmonies. We often did acoustic shows in the local pubs, restaurants, college gigs etc. The usual college town stuff. We also had a rock band that changed line up as often as it changed it's moniker. Season Of the Witch, Orange, Petty John Vicar - all  names that describe the group of people playing everything from rock music to covers and traditional Irish music. We often joined forces with my friends back in Limerick  to enter  busking competitions. We won every competition we entered, except for one in a tiny little town where we came third. We later found out that the business that sponsored the competition was owned by the winner.

I finished college and picked up a postgraduate degree along the way. Like many before me, I got stuck in Galway after college. Unemployment in Galway was hovering around twenty two percent in 1991 and most people ended up on the dole for a while. This might seem like a depressing way to end one's education, but it was actually liberating in many ways - every one was in the same boat and it gave us a chance to try new things. I continued playing music and started an alternative club called "Infected" with a few buddies.  I am proud to say we were playing stuff like Nirvana before grunge broke. It was an exciting time, the rave scene was still very underground and as DJs, we got in free to all the clubs.  Despite the freshness of the club scene, my music career  was turning a little stale. I had been writing for years, and although I been playing my own songs in a few bands, none had ever been either serious or steady. Also most of the people I had been playing with had begun to scatter around the globe. The club which had, at best, made enough money to keep us in new CDs folded, any programming work I had dried up, and a few attempts at starting a serious band fell at the starting line. Time too move on.  Fate intervened. I got a Green Card. I'd applied for one without really thinking about it. I'd spent two summers in the US  while in college and  had a blast. I'd also always wanted to see California.  So it came that a friend and I left Ireland in 1993 for a wedding in Rhode Island.

After a somewhat miserable summer and early fall in Cape Cod, I ended up in San Francisco and fell in love with it. After a stint as a bike courier I got a job in software and settled into the Californian life style.  For a  year I didn't play music other than in my bedroom. I did however write a bunch of songs. I had previously recorded with two of the bands back in Galway, and was enamored with the process. I had even done a project during the course of my degree which outlined setting up a studio as a business.  The idea of being able to do everything myself without having to deal with other flaky musicians appealed to the monomaniac in me. However high end recording equipment was hideously expensive, not to mind the fact that I hadn't the first clue about recording. I bought a 4 track and began the very slow process of learning about the science and art of recording music. After a year or so slaving with tapes, drum machines, guitars and microphones I had a tape which I called "Piebald".  At best it was a rough demo with a few decent songs, but mostly it was a demonstration of how much I had yet to learn. Around this time I spent a year traveling and when I came back things had changed. Their had been a sea change in the recording equipment industry. Audio gear  had become cheaper and more sophisticated and many companies were catering to the home project studio market. On top of this computers were about to revolutionize the world, and were ideally suited for recording and editing music. I saved up and over a year and a half outfitted my dream studio.  Learning was easier this time around. I started from a point of some knowledge and had the web to search when I needed to figure something out. I was determined to be more professional this time around. 

After a year of learning and recording I had a few songs I was happy with. Again the Internet provided an arena for unknown and unsigned artists. The web has have provided a forum for distribution for musicians like me. I think the predictions of the demise of the main stream recording industry are a bit premature, but it is true the web has provided access to a whole new stream of music.  Granted a lot of it is terrible, but some of it is excellent, created by independent talented musicians who for one reason or another exist outside the mainstream music business. Personally the dream of being a rock star lost its shine some time back. Maybe!

Over the last few years I got back to playing live. I formed a band, Stride, with Gareth Finucane a drummer friend from my old neighborhood in Limerick.   The bass job seems to be a rotating position - some things never change!  Playing with a band is where its at. My Les Paul cranked, the guys going full tilt. You can't beat that.

So there it is. My musical history to date. Now go listen to the songs. After all that's what this is all about. Let me know what you think.

John