Jerry Strull Live At It's A Grind

Last Friday I attended the performance of singer-songwriter and part time Tooner, Jerry Strull, at It's A Grind in Castaic. It's A Grind is a chain of coffee shops and the one in the town of Castaic is located in a shopping center.

The room itself is very nice and a good place for an intimate acoustic music performance. I had seen Jerry Strull's old friend's Jazz band play there a few weeks earlier in an afternoon show but Jerry's show was at night. The shop has a big fireplace in front of which the performer sets up and along with the typical wooden tables and chairs found in any coffee shop it also has large plush armchairs lining the back wall so the place has the look and vibe of someones living room, if their living room had a coffee shop in the back.

I'm not a coffee drinker having developed an allergy to caffeine that means if I drink coffee, some soft drinks like Dr. Pepper or eat chocolate (!) I get terrible day-long migraine headaches. So I ordered a decaf caramel latte blended with ice. Yum!

This gig of Jerry's reminded me of when I was in junior high school and had a girlfriend whose parents thought was too young to date (she was) so we'd meet on Friday nights at "The Coffee House". The Coffee House was actually called The Broken Wall and was in an auxiliary room of the Presbyterian Church right across the street from the junior high school and down the street from my girlfriend's house. We'd sit in the candle light (very romantic), sip hot chocolate (which I miss a lot more than I do the girlfriend) and listen to live folk singers. Most of the performers were local artists including my old friends Paul Keller (from the Bay Area Pro Rock band Hush) and Randy McKay (the future singer of my Acid Rock band and now with The Free Radicals in Sacramento) as well as guest professional artists such as Kusudo & Worth.

It's nice to see the tradition of "coffee house" live acoustic music continue. Back in the old days I'd go to the coffee house to hear music but didn't drink coffee because I was too young and now I go and still don't drink coffee but it's nice to know young people have a place to go to hear FREE live music in their neighborhood. I wonder if today's junior high school and high school kids realize they have this opportunity? It's a great place for young Romeos and Juliets to meet for a romantic evening.

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Drummer: The Joke

 By now we've all heard plenty of musician jokes but have you heard this one?

Question: Why is a drummer like a keyboard player?

Answer: Because they both want to get paid.

That's funny because it's true. No, wait, that's not funny! But it sure seems true. We've been trying to find a drummer for a while now and all of them want to get paid, even to rehearse. I suppose a drummer doesn't quite have the creative satisfaction of someone who is playing a song's melody or singing its lyrics and it is a physically demanding job. Just transporting the instrument is hard work. But rock bands seldom have "producers" the way other forms of entertainment do. I don't mean Record Producer as in someone in charge of recording a band's album but an Executive Producer, someone who puts up the money up front to get the show going. TV shows, stage plays and movies don't even begin without a budget to pay for it all but a band has to get their equipment, write and arrange their songs, rehearse and purchase their stage clothes all on their own dime.

Love of the music requires you love the particular songs, the vocalist and the instrumentalists of a particular band, along with all the members' personalities, before it becomes a factor in whether or not to join a band as a member as opposed to a paid position.

Sure, we'd all love to get paid to play our music (my music) but the money won't come, if it ever does, until it's presented to the public in its finished form. Young people just starting out understand this but us older folks have had our dreams destroyed and our bands break up before any money started rolling in enough to have awaken from the dream and just want cash up front.

Enter the drum machine and playing to tracks. A terrible proposition to a real musician used to the energy, sound and camaraderie or a real band but more and more a real possibility. We used to use an early version of a drum machine for recording the drum tracks to our demos, tape versions for the band members to help them learn the songs, we named Mister Coffee. His friends called him Joe not just because he made a good cup of joe (which being a drum machine he did not do) but because the spokesman on TV for the Mr. Coffee Coffee Maker was baseball great Joe DiMaggio.

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A Tip O' The Hat

 At one of The Tooners' Rock & Roll Rehab shows someone accused Greg Piper of "ripping off" Slash's look. Slash (Saul Hudson of Guns & Roses and Velvet Revolver) has long black curly hair and wears a top hat. To set the record straight when Greg Piper and I were in high school, back before Slash was born, we would go to high school football games and to the dances held after the games. We weren't interested in the games but it was the only way to get onto the campuses of other schools in order to meet different girls. We knew better than to mess with the girls with whom we had to be in class, also they knew better than to date us as well. After the games was when the real games begun as the school hosted a dance with a live band and we loved to check out bands almost as much as we loved checking out new girls. Almost.

Football season is in the Winter and when it was real cold out (for Southern California that meant in the 50s), we would both wear hats to the games. The hats helped keep us warm but mostly they made us stand out. I worn an "Aussie" hat my grandmother brought back from Australia for me when she took a trip around the world and Greg wore an old magician's top hat he got from his show business father. His hat was the kind that would collapse into the brim and snap out with a flick of the wrist.

I lowered the brim of my Aussie hat, one side was supposed to be pinned up but I wanted the hat to keep the rain off not look like a fan of The Rat Patrol, so it looked more like a wide brim version of what we now refer to as an Indiana Jones hat.

Back then wearing a top hat, if you had long hair, was just part of looking Rock and Roll. Mick Jagger had worn one, Jerry Garcia had worn one and Alice Cooper was very popular and wore one. Greg had the same hair as Alice so that was the comparison that was made back then.

It's funny how the context of things change. About a decade ago I grew what was known in the Sixties as a Fu Manchu moustache. To me it represented the Old West like Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp or a Sixties rocker or a hippie but some kid saw me and called me "Hulk Hogan". 

The styles come around again but the context changes. It just irks me when someone accuses Piper of ripping off the style of someone who wasn't even born when he started wear it.

* Greg Piper

* Mick Jagger

 * Alice Cooper

 * Jerry Garcia

 * Leon Russel

 * Slash (Guns & Roses) 

* Mick Mars (Motley Crue)

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The Haight - by Neal Warner

My novel, well, novella maybe, The Haight (amazon.com) is now available as an Ebook for the Kindle. The Haight originated as a script after my agent, Ann McDermot of the Coast To Coast Agency, asked me to adapt my novel Paid To Die, Anarchy In The USA, as a script. She explained that the publishing industry is in New York while agents in Hollywood shopped scripts. Adapting the full 300 plus page novel to a 120 page script was tough so for my next writing project I elected to start with a script.

The Haight - Now for the Kindle.

I signed the agency contract on September 7th, 2001 and one week later on the eleventh, everything changed and Coast To Coast soon after eliminated their literary department. Since I stopped writing books in order to concentrate on scripts, since that's what my agent wanted, I was now stuck with movie scripts and no agent. People outside of the film and television industries don't know how to read a script. A lot of a script is written in code, movie maker lingo, and is very difficult to understand and even harder to enjoy just as reading material. But I liked the story of The Haight, which was about what it was like to be a hippie in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer Of Love like the John Millius film Big Wednesday was about what it was like to be a surfer in Southern California in the Sixties, and I wanted somebody to be able to read it so I adapted the script into a book.

Adapting a movie script into a book has its own set of problems. You don't have to throw out over fifty percent of the story like you do when adapting a novel to a script but a script can have a lot of scenes that work visually and are very difficult to describe to a reader. In a script you're basically writing directions to a director so you can just say what effect you're going for and suggest how to achieve that visually but in a book you have to make the reader see that scene in his or her mind and you have to describe it in a clear yet poetic manner. Very tough.

Unlike a script for a movie or TV show the book I wrote about the Summer Of Love doesn't have to be about an undercover cop disguised as a hippie in order to catch a serial killer just a story about what might have happened if you were a young person who decided to spend the summer of '67 among the Flower Children.

Please leave a review if you read the book or ebook, thanks.

The Haight for Kindle HERE

The Haight in Paperback HERE

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The Boomers' Wild West Show

In a recent interview with Amy Arkwy of Blog Talk Radio singer-songwriter Jerry Strull commented on the state of the music business today as being top heavy with people wanting to be musicians and not enough people to be fans. It's the old too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

He's right. The Baby Boomers, which I call the Fan Generation (1946 - 1964), numbered 78 million. The War Babies (1940 - 1945) were given a huge potential fan base with which to create the Classic Rock Era. When it became the Boomers' turn in the Eighties, they had each other but very few fans from the next generation since their total numbers just weren't there.

Now the Boomers are still rockin' but they haven't any fans as their peers are either their competition or are happy still being fans of the War Babies and the next generation, their children, are also FANS OF THE WAR BABIES! As a generation of stars we're being bypassed altogether.

Our only hope is that our grandchildren will appreciate what we Boomers have to offer as artists. At the very least we may be appreciated for being the last generation to have known the artists of the War Babies firsthand and therefore the only ones with any authenticity when it comes to keeping their legacy alive. We will be to Rock & Roll what Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show was to the Old West. That would be better than nothing but it better happen soon.

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Truth In Song Writing

I've been reading Janis Ian's autobiography Society's Child and one of the surprises is learning that she wrote the song the book is named after about something that never happened, at least not to her, personally. Such a "personal" song but completely invented. That was one of the things that influenced me about The Beatles, almost all their songs seemed to be about them. Perhaps Yellow Submarine, Eleanor Rigby and Paperback Writer aren't specifically about any of the band members but most of their songs seem to come from personal experience.

I remember an interview with George Harrison talking about a conversation he had with Paul Simon. He said he was asking Paul about his song The Boxer and that Paul couldn't answer his questions because The Boxer was about some boxer, not him. Paul Simon often writes "in character" which baffled George who said he didn't think he could write that way. All George's songs are in one way or another about George.

I started to wonder could The Beatles have written Society's Child? They did write some political tunes but only in how the politics affected them personally. Probably the most political song, John Lennon's Revolution, is essentially about how he was being pestered by various political groups to support their cause. It's really an anti-political song. George Harrison's Taxman was his complaining about the high tax rate he had to pay in England and the most political Paul McCartney ever got was complaining that the English banks wouldn't give him a loan in the song You Never Give Me Your Money. It is this tendency The Beatles had of showing us, the fans, their lives through their song lyrics that went a long way toward making us feel we knew them and made us bond a lot more than with other bands. This aspect of The Beatles songwriting heavily influenced me. Unfortunately, no one cares to hear about my life so my music doesn't have quite the same effect, or success.

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Jerry Strull Interview On Blog Talk Radio

The Tooners' guest guitarist and good friend Jerry Strull just did an interview with Amy Arkwy of Blog Talk Radio. Jerry is a great lead guitarist in the school of Blues Rock that features Eric Clapton of Cream and Leslie West from Mountain and it is in that respect that The Tooners always ask him to lay down some killer licks whenever we record.

These days Jerry is doing a solo acoustic show that showcases both his elegant acoustic guitar arrangements, his very expressive singing and his exceptional songwriting. His songs are heavily influenced by the music with which he grew up such as The Beatles, in that melodies come first. Not only in the writing process, but in importance as well, melodies come first. It seems like it's getting rare to hear a truly unique melody on the radio that wasn't recorded over twenty years ago so Jerry's songs are both a breath of fresh air and a nod to the past.

He writes from a very American point of view and a very male point of view in that a lot of his songs are about men who are having difficulties with their women. To a man a song about a guy telling a woman he's had enough and is leaving or a man who leaves to go to sea or on the road can seem empowering. But to a woman it just seems sad. They don't see a man who is heading off for adventure or because he is doing his duty and sacrificing his love life as noble and selfless, they see it as someone tearing apart a family, deserting a loved one and breaking a promise. Songs of the sea and of the open road are apparently only romantic to men.

With a fifty percent divorce rate in America (higher in California) the sort of subjects covered in the songs of Jerry Strull will certainly resonate with a lot of people and whether they find them romantic or melancholy will largely depend on their own personal experiences. Those are the kinds of songs we adopt as the soundtracks to our lives because they have deep meanings, real emotions behind them and musical arrangements that perfectly match the thoughts and feelings.

Visit Jerry Strull at www.jerrystrull.com and hear his interview on Blog Talk Radio HERE.

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