My old high school friend, Paul Keller from the Bay Area Prog band Hush, stopped by and told me his friend and band mate, Robert Berry, gave him a Tom Anderson guitar as a gift. Robert had picked up one of two Tom Anderson guitars being sold in an estate sale. These are high end, three thousand dollar guitars but that’s not what made the gift so thoughtful. Paul and I went to high school with Tom Anderson. He is an excellent guitarist and a very good singer and it surprised me that he eventually found his success in this end of the music business. I jammed with Tom in high school and he became the guitarist for Greg Piper ( the star of Rock & Roll Rehab ) and Tim Piper’s ( the star of Just Imagine and Working Class Hero, the John Lennon Tribute), Eighties Newwave original band, The Pipers.
Tom reminds me of the many times I’ve been in recording studios to record my music and asked the owner of the studio why he built it. They always say the same thing; that they are musicians and wanted a studio to record their own music. However, the cost of building a recording studio is so high they ended up having to rent it out to guys like me and never find the time to use it to record their own music. I’m not saying being a luthier is a substitution for being a musician but Tom seemed to have had a lot to offer musically besides making instruments.
When I was in Junior High School I made an animated film and paid a fellow student to film it on his stop motion super eight movie camera. He was a fledgling animator himself, which was extremely rare back then at that age, and I expected to run into him one day in the business. I did. It was backstage at an after show party at the First Los Angeles Animation Celebration where our animated video, Mass Murder Man, had been screened. He reintroduced himself to me after all those years and although I wasn’t in the least surprised to see him at a professional Hollywood animation industry function, I was surprised and a little saddened to learn he was there because he had become not a professional animated filmmaker but a professional animated film camera operator.
Time and again I witness the truth that one must be careful what one takes as a first job since many, many times that sets him or her on a path from which it is very difficult to get off. My first real job was as an inbetweener at Hanna-Barbera which directly lead to a career in animation that I never intended to follow. It could have been worse. I could have started at H & B as a cell painter and end up painting houses for a living. But at least I’d still be employed.
Tom reminds me of the many times I’ve been in recording studios to record my music and asked the owner of the studio why he built it. They always say the same thing; that they are musicians and wanted a studio to record their own music. However, the cost of building a recording studio is so high they ended up having to rent it out to guys like me and never find the time to use it to record their own music. I’m not saying being a luthier is a substitution for being a musician but Tom seemed to have had a lot to offer musically besides making instruments.
When I was in Junior High School I made an animated film and paid a fellow student to film it on his stop motion super eight movie camera. He was a fledgling animator himself, which was extremely rare back then at that age, and I expected to run into him one day in the business. I did. It was backstage at an after show party at the First Los Angeles Animation Celebration where our animated video, Mass Murder Man, had been screened. He reintroduced himself to me after all those years and although I wasn’t in the least surprised to see him at a professional Hollywood animation industry function, I was surprised and a little saddened to learn he was there because he had become not a professional animated filmmaker but a professional animated film camera operator.
Time and again I witness the truth that one must be careful what one takes as a first job since many, many times that sets him or her on a path from which it is very difficult to get off. My first real job was as an inbetweener at Hanna-Barbera which directly lead to a career in animation that I never intended to follow. It could have been worse. I could have started at H & B as a cell painter and end up painting houses for a living. But at least I’d still be employed.
