There is still some room in my Fall course on Sophiology—but it’s filling up. Reach out if you have any questions. But to the matter at hand…
As I mentioned before, I am toying with the idea of doing a Kickstarter or similar thing in order to record an album of Catholic/Neopagan folk-rock. I’m still trying to think through such a project—and I am friends with some of the best players in Michigan, so I have the right personnel in mind. Once the farming season settles down next month, I will probably have a better idea of how this project might proceed—and if it does. But since it’s been on my mind, I though I share some of my musical biography.
My first guitar was a refugee from trash day in Detroit. A kid at my school junk-picked an electric guitar covered with thick black paint; it had no strings, a busted machine-head, and a chrome pick-guard. I lusted after it and he said he would sell it to me for twelve dollars. We were poor and my father wasn’t working, but I ended up borrowing five from my best friend (he had a paper route) and five from a friend’s mom. I scraped up the rest on my own. I was thirteen.
By the next year, I was playing high school dances and youth clubs and played my first bar gig at fifteen (I did not tell my mom). By the time I was eighteen, I had a record deal. It was a crappy record deal, mind you, but it was still a record deal. It allowed me to play showcase gigs at The Ritz in New York and other places on the East Coast as well as the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, where a local radio station even made it “Michigan Day” in honor of our playing there.
That band, The Lordz, was a kind of pop-metal, garage band kind of outfit, heavily influenced by Alice Cooper, the MC5, the Stooges, and the Amboy Dukes—we were from Detroit, after all. We made a lot of noise—both metaphorically and literally—for about five years and we even appeared on quite a few television shows, including Good Morning, New York and The Joe Franklin Show, as well as MTV when it was still a music channel. Here’s the video they played (I don’t knw why, probably VHS to digital transfer, but my guitar solo gets squinched—the nerve!):
If this song sounds like the kind of thing high school kids would write, that’s because it was written by kids in high school—yours truly and the singer, Graham Strachan, whom I’ve known since kindergarten. At the time we were seventeen.
Detroit garage-rock vibes not withstanding, my first love was always folk music and folk-rock. That’s why the first thing I did with the money I received at high school graduation was buy a Westbury twelve-string. I still have it. I play it almost every day.
But, wait, there’s more! A girl I dated when I was seventeen had a mandolin. Nobody in Detroit had a mandolin! But she did. She taught me a few chords and I was playing Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” within a few minutes. I was smitten. Eventually I got my own—a Crestwood for $35! I still have it (which is amazing, as so many of my instruments have been stolen or sold for food along the years).
Graham and I continued to write songs and as our skills improved we started to move away from garage rock and write folk or folk-inspired songs, often with country or Celtic influences. So we left that group and started another, Robb Roy. This was a really good band, and things started happening in a hurry (we shared a manager with Chad Smith who would soon leave Detroit to join the Red Hot Chili Peppers). But, as Yeats says, “Things fall apart.” Things fell apart. I left the music business disillusioned. Unfortunately, I left the group before we had done any serious recording (when I left, our manager was talking to Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham about producing), but we do have this rare television appearance circulating. You can hear the Celtic and folk influences pretty easily.
So I left the music business and eventually became a Waldorf teacher. One of the great things about being a Waldorf teacher was I was able to teach my students great folk songs—and also to write songs in a folk idiom for them to perform. I did this, among other occasions, when I would direct classes in productions of Shakespeare’s plays, as in this clip featuring rapper Big Sean (one of my students) when he was still Little Sean:
Even though I had left the music business, I still would get requests to play various recording sessions, often on mandolin (remember: nobody in Detroit has a mandolin). But it wasn’t until many years later that I was tempted to come out of my exile to play with the Corktown Popes, a Celtic rock group started by one of my former mates from Robb Roy, Jason Kuehn (now, as it so happens, my brother-in-law) and my longtime friend (and former housemate) singer and songwriter Terry Burns. Initially, they asked if I’d like to play on a couple of songs, including one Terry and I had written when my eldest son Brendan was an infant (when we wrote the song, Brendan was in his bouncy chair and I bounced him with my foot while Uncle Terry and I wrote the song). I ended up playing on much more. Here’s a video of the song recorded years later—and Brendan appears in it (the young man with long black hair and and dressed in a black and white shirt):
We had a good run and eventually recorded one of the songs I wrote for my Waldorf kids (Bello Pizzimenti, now on the Netflix series Average Joe) to sing in the role of Feste in Twelfth Night. Bello’s told me that the song has been a touchstone for him over the years, and he even asked to use it for a Shakespeare production in the Age Before This Our Covid. The Popes cut it almost entirely live with the exception of a few overdubs, including a blistering fiddle solo by Nashville session player (and Alan Jackson’s sideman) Ryan Joseph.
Not long after that session, I had to leave the Popes. My wife and I were taking care of my mother, who suffered from stroke-related dementia, and I really couldn’t have too many commitments elsewhere. But I still get together with the Popes upon occasion, as I did this summer when we played with Don Was on bass for the annual Detroit Concert of Colors.
Over this long trajectory, I have continued to play and to write. Once you start—as I did at the age of thirteen—you really can’t stop. So it would be actually be nice to record some of these mostly unrecorded songs in a format worth preserving. I have rather a backlog of Catholic/Neopagan folk-rock (not to mention some of these Shakespeare songs) and I would love to do them justice.
I'm definitely here for the fruits of that Catholic/Neopagan folk-rock project.
Also, some good news: I finally heard from John again, after a full year. (I had faith, but not gonna lie, I was getting a little nervous.) Apparently he was under the impression that I already had a contract, which I should be receiving soon now. He said that he will give my final draft to you for an edit, and that the book is on track for release in January.
I wanted to pick up a copy of Angelico Press' *Christendom or Europe?* for the last class session, but it looks like it wouldn't arrive in time if I ordered now. Is there anything online that you would recommend I check out?