In my last blog post I was talking about Sync Licensing and how it’s helped to get the music of DownTown Mystic on TV. I was primarily talking about how the instrumental tracks of DownTown’s songs are used. What I didn’t really get into was what it’s also done for me as a musician and a composer.
I was hanging out with 2 guys who are very big in Sync Licensing—Eddie Caldwell of Music of The Sea and James “Desi” Desmond of BeatClock Productions. We were hanging out one night in NYC on the roof of one of those swanky hotels, and Des asked me if I played acoustic guitar. I had only met Des, via Eddie in LA a couple of months prior, so we didn’t really know each other. I told him I did and asked him why.
Des proceeded to show me some pix off his iPhone of this studio up in New Hampshire he said he recorded at, and that he needed some acoustic guitar tracks for his catalog. He said if I was interested, I should check my schedule and let him know because he could get the studio and have the run of the place for a few days. Being somewhat jaded by the biz, it sounded like an LA “let’s do lunch” sort of thing that never amounts to anything. But Des was cool and I thought, ok why not?
I contacted Des with my schedule and a few weeks later, true to his word, we were up in New Hampshire working at Studio Metronome. For 4 days, Des, his engineer pal Panuah Kalayeh and I had the run of the place, cutting tracks and making music. The great thing for me was I didn’t have to worry about writing lyrics. I could just concentrate on playing and writing music. It was a truly enjoyable experience! We cut 15 tracks all together.
I guess my work with Des gave Eddie some ideas because he hit me up to do some tracks for him. He had his guy Floyd send me some tracks to work on and do whatever I wanted with them. Again, it was very freeing for me musically. I find it allows me to experiment more than I would if I had to write and cut tracks for an album, which does wonders for my head!
One of the last tracks I cut for Eddie was this jam that I recorded using only 1 guitar—my vintage 1964 Fender Stratocaster. In its honor I called the track StratoBlaster. The track came out so cool that I decided to create a video using it for the soundtrack. Playing off the word strata, which has to do to with rocks, it gave me the idea to use the photos from a trip to Utah a few years ago.
1964 Strat
The photos were taken from visiting the national parks that are located in Utah—Bryce Canyon, Zion and Arches. Being from the NJ/NY area, Utah is not a state that would come to mind to visit on a vacation, unless I was a skier. If my nephew David hadn’t taken a job in Salt Lake City, I would never have gone there with his family to visit him. While there, we decided we’d rent a van and do some sight-seeing, driving down to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon.
On the way down to Arizona were the national parks in Utah. I came away from the experience with a new appreciation for the Country that I live in—the US of A! Without a doubt, I saw things that do not exist anywhere else on planet Earth. The awesome beauty of nature was on full display. At times the landscapes resembled something out of a sci-fi movie and you could only imagine what it must have been like for the early pioneers that ventured west.
The weather can turn on a dime out there. We stopped for gas a half hour outside of Bryce Canyon and the outside temperature read 105 degrees. By the time we got to the road that you take to the park entrance, a giant black cloud opened up a hail storm. Within minutes the road was all white, covered in hail stones as big as golf balls and the temperature had dropped to 55 degrees. 15 minutes later we were entering the park with the sun shining and the temp was 85 and rising!
The video is made up mostly of photos of the Hoodoos in Bryce Canyon. The Hoodoos are those rock pillars that look like they were sculpted by hand and not by erosion from water, ice and gravity. Millions of years ago they were under water and now they’re some 8,000 feet above sea level. The local Native Americans called them “Legend People” that were turned to stone. If you look closely you can see faces in the stone. It’s kind of freaky. You can’t really appreciate the scale of them until you’re right there in person because they’re huge!
The Garden of Hoodoos
Hoodoo City
So that’s the story behind the video. Check it out and see what you see in the rocks, set to the rhythm and sound of StratoBlaster. To quote Sly Stone, I want to give thanks to Des and Eddie, “for letting me be myself again”. 🙂