The Big Oaks Lodge

A couple of Sundays ago I went out to the middle of nowhere till I found a place called The Big Oaks Lodge and heard singer-songwriter Jerry Strull play an afternoon's worth of Classic Rock hits and his own original tunes outside under some truly big oaks.

Jerry Strull soothing the savage beasts.

I was a bit concerned how Jerry's acoustic 'lonely troubadour' style would go over with the sizable crowd, about thirty, of bikers and their old ladies who make the Lodge a stop on their bike run through rugged Bouquet Canyon in outer Santa Clarita Valley.

Before Jerry even started his first song he expressed concern that a jeep had just arrived that appeared to sport a mounted 50 calibre machine gun.

Anyone remember "The Rat Patrol"?

However, to my surprise and considerable relief, the crowd seemed to love him. It was odd to see what appeared to be the cast and extras of the show Sons Of Anarchy actually taking seats right in front of him and quietly sit there drinking beer and really paying attention to the music. In a very gratifying gesture of honest appreciation the audience even came up one by one and left bills in his tip jar. Their comments were very complimentary and seemingly very sincere. These aren't the kind of people who feel the need to be nice or sensitive to the feelings of others. They are however an older crowd and Jerry's repertoire of Sixties and Seventies cover tunes must have brought back some memories and triggered a nostalgia in a crowd that had a very tough looking exterior.

The Big Oaks Lodge front parking lot.

The audience's attention and appreciation really touched Jerry and has made The Big Oaks Lodge his favorite place to perform. The owner and booker of The Big Oaks Lodge, which is a real nice hunting lodge style restaurant, also really liked his music and have invited him back. Oddly enough the sound of chopper engines worked right in with Jerry's music and really added a unique and memorable atmosphere.

They Died Young

Happy Birthday to The Tooners' Rocktasia CD which is twenty years old. On a sad note, Rocktasia had four songs which were written or co-written by songwriters other than Neal Warner and Greg Piper of The Tooners and unfortunately, those folks have not had an easy past twenty years. Cindy Mady who co-wrote Backstabber with Greg Piper has disappeared so I really don't know whatever happened to her but the next writer with a song on the CD is Don Coorough who wrote They Died Young and his story is not a happy one.

THEY DIED YOUNG

Sometime in the late nineteen-nineties Don decided to chuck it all and went "off the grid". He became homeless and found his way to Arizona. In Arizona he became a poet which is what he claimed to be when I first met him back in the Sixties. He had asked me to write some music to his poems hoping to turn them into songs. Unfortunately he held to the philosophy that poetry didn't have to rhyme while I contended that song lyrics did have to rhyme so I never managed to put his poems to music. Don eventually started writing rhymes and joined the pre-Tooners band, Womanizer, as the bass player before Greg Piper joined the band. In his band before Womanizer Don had written the song They Died Young and he, on guitar and Greg on bass, recorded a demo of the song. When The Tooners rerecorded They Died Young for the Rocktasia CD we kept his original arrangement intact as much as possible.

After Don quit Womanizer, then eventually his girl friend, his job, the state of California, his friends, steady employment and a roof over his head, he enrolled in a program the state of Arizona started that offered a free dorm room and college tuition to homeless people and Don began poetry classes. It was there that he met Jared Lee Loughner, the mass murder and potential assassin of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and was interviewed about Loughner by Christiane Amanpour.

Don has since published a poetry blog called Shoreline Driftwood,

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The Tooners' Rocktasia CD Twentieth Anniversary!

Today is the day, twenty years ago (Sept. 29, 1993), that is printed on the master CD the pressing plant sent as a proof for The Tooners' Rocktasia CD. It was TWENTY YEARS AGO that the first Rocktasia disc was pressed. A lot has happened in the last twenty years and Rocktasia has become a classic of its genre.

Advertised as "a concept album about life in the age of free love" it reflected our (The Tooners) early lives in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The first two tracks were recorded as a potential single (45 RPM, 7 inch vinyl records with one song on each side) and reflected highschool age relationships: I'm Growing Away From You was a song about a young person feeling his independence from his parents, peer pressure and even from his girl friend as he enters the next stage of his life. Backstabber was the flip side of that coin with the feelings of betrayal that come from being left behind and outgrown.

Eve Of New Year was about looking for love in all the wrong places and the pain of knowing that you're too young to commit to true love even if you did find it.

They Died Young was about the very real fear of the military draft at the tail end of the Viet Nam War.

I've Seen Love In My Dream was about a young person's awakening sense of spirituality and the faith that the best is yet to come and segues into a beautiful instrument version of Heat Of The Night which seems to continue the dream to the end of what would have been Side 2 if pressed as a record rather than a CD.

Side two on the vinyl version would have started with Paid To Die which was about working as a body guard for a rock band as a metaphor for entering the working world not really knowing what you're doing, what to expect or what is expected of you.

Let Others Dream was inspired by the bedroom scene in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and is about the first rush of finding true love followed by the late Gary Gladstone's classic, Paradise, about true love really taking hold. This two song suite is the emotional peak of the album.

Together All This Time is the Grand Finale and shows that the true love of the previous songs actually lasted the test of time and Heat Of The Night is a sad epilogue remembering those who didn't live to see the end.

Rocktasia is one of those CDs where listening from beginning to end is important to get the full story arc and the full effect. After twenty years, after all the ideas of how it should have been and what it could have been have been forgotten and all that's left is what actually is, Rocktasia is able to stand on its own as one of the best unknown neo-classic rock albums of the Nineties.

Coincidence Or Cosmic

It is simply coincidence or cosmic? You decide. I was designing a logo for The Tooner's old friend the singer-songwriter (and our guest lead guitarist) Jerry Strull for the posters for his up coming solo acoustic shows and one of the ideas was to use his monogram. Using one's initials is pretty standard and not very creative but I incorporated his monogram into the design of a Gibson ES 335 electric guitar. I felt this was an appropriate guitar since Jerry actually use to own one, they're simi-acoustic models and have "F" style sound holes on the face.

I found a flowing style type font called Henry Morgan's Hand and put a J and an S where the F holes would be. Besides doing a little stretching, titling and placement of the letters they lined up very well with the holes on the guitar. I added a little diamond design in the middle of each letter to mimic the swelling the F holes have at their center. It looked nice, made its point and seemed clever enough.

Using an N and a W would have looked stupid on this design.

It was only when I was done and saw that it actually worked did I realize that it really only worked, at least this well, using ONLY those two particular letters. Each letter needed to have a curly cue at the top and bottom and they had to be facing the right way. The J of his first name had to face left and the S of his last name had to face right. I went back and looked at all the other letters in the alphabet and very, very few would have worked at all. Of all the people I know who play guitar and have a guitar styled logo be appropriate for them to use, ONLY Jerry Strull had the right letters in his name.

It makes me wonder if Jerry was born with the name he has specifically so that one day he could become a guitarist and be able to use this logo? How cosmic is that?

Rock & Roll Easter Eggs

I like to read the wacky (but is it true?) stuff they print on Cracked.com, especially the Rock and Roll stuff. Here's a new article about hidden messages in rock records:

20 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden on Famous Albums

There are also a lot of weird things snuck onto kid's animated movies. I should know since I've worked on a lot of children's animation. Sometimes we would draw something wildly inappropriate but knowing the assembly line process of old fashion 2D drawn animation we'd figure someone down the line would get a giggle out of the joke and then fix it. Most of the time the folks following up your work are either doing it in their sleep, don't care enough to fix it or let it pass through to see if you'll get in trouble for doing it in the first place. Some of the things we (the animators) would do is write rude words into the soles of tennis shoes when a character's foot is in the foreground while running away from the camera. Also, drawing anuses or genitals on animal characters.

The truly bizarre and sometimes frightening things that turn up in songs and movies aren't the ones that immature artists sneak in for a laugh but things that just happen by coincidence or by accident. One of the strangest happened to us when some fan pointed out how our song I Wish You'd Love Me syncs up with the movie The Wizard Of Oz. It was totally unintentional and freaked us all out when we saw it. Don't believe me? See for yourself;