If you are reading this, you were either invited to do so by me, or someone blabbed. :) In any event, I am not overly proud of the recordings on this page. They do not accurately reflect the talent of any of the participants and are certainly not of sufficient quality for anyone to "enjoy." However, if you feel you can stand the sounds of ambitious high school students desperately trying to produce music with inferior equipment, read on. You will anyway.

In high school and college, I played trumpet and guitar. Unfortunately, I do not currently have any samples of my trumpet performances. I will confess that I am much better at trumpet than guitar, but as blues go, I can hold my own on either, given the right equipment. Even given the wrong equipment, I can usually do reasonably well with a trumpet. Below you will find brief samples of some guitar and/or vocal work that I did in high school. The recordings were done for the benefit of rehearsal and none are of a quality that I'd expect anyone to listen to them more than twice. I do hope, however, that perhaps someone can find something meaningful here, and that my own musical mishaps may be in some way enlightening to someone else. In any event, you will enjoy laughing at the extra sound effects in "Give or Take A Few" and perhaps even call out "Go Axl!" when listening to "Twisted Justice."

In 1989 I was the bassist (neat trick, without a bass) for a metal band known as "Counterpoint." I don't believe any audio recordings currently exist, but soon I will post the lyrics to "The Other Side of Sanity" and "Creatures of the Night," the latter of which was made into a music video in both English and German. By 1990, "Counterpoint" had all but dissolved and I joined a smaller, more organized alternative band called "Deviant's Palace." We wrote two songs and were prepared to cover The Cure's "Fascination Street" before we disbanded due to lack of funds and time. Deviant's Palace were: Amanda Holm (Guitar, Vocals), Britt Hartenberger (Keyboard, Percussion, Guiter) and Jay Bolton (Guitar, Vocals, Bass). We rehearsed in the most accoustically sound environment we could find (Amanda's basement) with a portable dual-cassette recorder and two mono microphones. I wish we had a recording of our cover of "Fascination Street," as it really was production quality and I think that if the Cure had been more popular we might actually have had a chance at the high school talent show circuit.

As it is, I have the only existing recording of Deviant's Palace, if you want to hear it. The song is original material, and features three guitars. Amanda took the lead on this, with Britt and I doing rhythm with occasional counterpoint. There were words, but the words were never recorded. This was an "at-home" rehearsal tape. If you listen carefully to this version of "Give or take a few" you might hear the phone ringing. We forgot to unplug it. By the time we'd finished the tape we were laughing so hard you could hear it as we scrambled to shut off the recorder, but I've spared you that in this .WAV file.

Another song from the DP era is "Twisted Justice," written, composed, and performed (in this recording) solely by me. This was primarily composed in an afternoon at home, with nothing but a mono microphone and a dubbing tape deck. The music was recorded first, followed by the voice track dubbed with music on second tape.

I mentioned "lack of funds" as one of the reasons for DP's eventual demise. To give you some idea of the severity of this issue, I should explain that my acoustic guitar had a cracked bridge, which made it nearly impossible to replace strings. My electric guitar (a poor-quality Lotus clone of the famous Fender Stratocaster) had even worse problems, including fatigued tremelo springs. This caused the guitar to stay continually out of tune. You can hear this in one of my own personal practice tapes of several themes I explored on my own. I also built an amplifier (I couldn't afford a performance-quality amp) for home-use from spare parts I'd salvaged from radios and other equipment. It required hand-tweaking of the circuitry for desired distortion level. You can hear the amp in action as I explore the previous themes further. You can also hear the guitar stray out of tune in this recording.