Singer/Songwriter Dekoto

    My influences are pretty scattered, but grounded in the Beatles, Stones, Floyd, Grand Funk, Zepplin, Aerosmith, ZZ-Top, Deep Purple, Zappa, Paul Simon, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, The Eagles, Queen, Guns N' Roses, Metallica, System of a Down, Christina Aguilera, Green Day, Prince, etc. just to name a few. I'm sure I've left out dozens. In reality, I guess I've been easily swayed by anyone who has ever picked up a guitar and sang about a broken heart. It's all about the blues.

    The first gig I ever did was a fund raiser for St. Peter's, a local orphanage where we had talked the nuns into letting us rehearse in their basement. I was a novice guitar player in those early days and, even less, a vocalist. I eventually became a bass player, but more on that later.

    As a band, we were so unprepared. But almost naturally, the "show must go on" mentality took over and we muddled through the ten songs we had been rehearsing for months. An indication of things to come, the show went great and turned out to be a career aphrodisiac. I was lethally hooked. However, as these stories go, it has not been without occasional heartache and regret. The Fort Mudge Memorial Band did split up soon after their debut performance and so it began.

    Because of an inability to find a bass player, my next band, with an abundance of guitar players, voted me most likely to be our new bass player, simply because I happened to own a bass guitar my dad had brought home years earlier. It was one of those cool Paul McCartney type basses - semi hollow with the double cut-away body. However, I fell in love with and ended up playing strictly Rickenbacker basses soon afterwards. I've owned a half dozen. I just loved the sound they made, as opposeed to the Fender P-Bass or Jazz everyone else seemed to be playing in those days. I've always been a non-conformist. But not for any specific reason. I'm sure that'll eventually come out on the couch or on a tombstone someday.

    Over the years, I've devoted my creative energies into the likes of 93 North, Nucleus, Pyratt, The Nu, Orion and the last ten year stint with YamunJam. Each built upon the successes, failures and lessons of the past. By the mid nineties I had had enough of the rock n' roll lifestyle, my daughter was growing fast and the drudgery of dealing with and managing the regularly complex relationships between band members and managers and agents and anyone and everyone with a goddamn opinion . . .   do I sound bitter ? ;--) . . . It made going solo an easy decision.

    So I recorded the proverbial solo album - Dekoto Unplugged and, surprisingly, got a little air-play locally and even in the Boston market. Not a lot mind you. Just enough to tease me out onto the road again. So for nearly two years, I toured mostly around New England with the A&R guy from IGP, the small independent record company now long since defunct. We promoted and sold the CD at gigs and small record store signings, but only managed to sell about a thousand or so copies. That wasn't quite enough to generate more funding. A common story ending in pissed off investors, road exhaustion and a new appreciation for an insightful lawyer joke.

    But now, after taking a little time off, I've been writing some really beautiful stuff and getting ready to record another album which I plan to call "Heavy Metal Love Songs for the Acoustic Heart". There are plenty of rockers in the cue as well, but also some interesting ballads and pretty love songs. I am hoping to get out this summer and do as many live shows as possible in between everything else that's going on. And boy is stuff going on. My new mantra is, "It's always something!" I'm pretty sure that'll be my epitath someday, but not too soon I hope!