My recent post about my first live looping song/video “Takes a Village” and my life circumstances at the time I made it was so well received (for which I humbly thank you all) that I decided to do a little series of autobiographical posts of the last 5 or 6 years of my life and the music I was making at the time.
Looking back through video and sound recordings of music I’ve made is like looking at little snapshots of my soul at different times in my life. These past 6 years have been pretty action packed for me so it’s nice to be able to revisit these moments and reflect on the people and experiences that inspired and accompanied the music that I’ll be sharing with you here.
Back in the Habit
When I was about 30 I had just started coming back to music after taking almost 10 years off and thinking that my life was going in a completely different direction. I was inspired to study upright bass seriously again by an awesome jazz theory teacher at a community college in Santa Cruz Ca. called Cabrillo. His name is Ray Brown. No not that Ray Brown. He played trumpet and arranged for the Stan Kenton Big Band back in the day and his grasp of theory is amazing and his humanity is even more so. Plus I’m a sucker for cheese and this guy laid it on thick. His favorite phrases were “that guy’s full of balloon juice” and “heavy fa”. I took a class with him just for fun and was almost immediately sucked back into the world of jazz. I also met some other people in his classes that would become really important in my life.
One of those people was a really interesting lass who I dated for about 3 years in an extremely toxic relationship that I learned a lot from. More about her in a later post. Another is the piano player that I played with in this band Groove Service as well as other projects and who is also still one of my best friends and favorite people. (Incidentally I’m really trying to get him to start blogging and posting music here on Hive, his account is 
Alex the Aspiring Astrophysicist 
He had only been playing for a year at the time but he grew as a musician amazingly fast, mostly by playing live almost every day for over a year. He started before I had met him, while studying physics at UCSC, playing boogie woogie on an old upright piano that he had mounted on huge castors and would wheel around town to busk with his buddy on drums. They slowly built up a bunch of local gigs and by the time I joined them they were playing 5 nights a week, some payed some not, at local restaurants, coffee shops and bars. He never finished that astrophysics degree though...
TARB
At the time we were called “The Alex Raymond Band”. I was living in my car then so life was a bit complicated. I would usually be sleeping in the back (of a small hatchback) with my amp and electric bass next to me, and my upright in the front seat. Those were crazy times.
Eventually things got stressed with that drummer and we started playing with a new guy who I was now going to school with at UC Santa Cruz. We dropped the non paying gigs and changed our name, tried to get a bit more professional, I was now living on campus and was super busy with school and life got more complex.
Groove Service
Spending Time in the Woodshed...
The next year I moved out of campus housing and back into my car, but was usually sleeping in either a shed in the back yard of a really nice couple that I did some freelance gardening work for (it was actually shaped like an icosahedron. We had built it together and it was pretty damn awesome...) or more often in the music building on campus. Kept my sleeping bag in my locker and just waited till the janitors left to go to bed. Since I had to be up before they came to open the building in the morning I wasn’t getting very much sleep, but damn I was getting a lot of hours of practice in.
Eventually we finished school and moved into a house together to pursue our act more seriously, which was a disaster and we broke up within a year. But that is another story.
And Now for the Show
Our Gootube channel seems to have disappeared, potentially due to a vindictive drummer, not sure, but here’s a selection of what I could find on the interwebs of Groove Service. Two of these were recorded in the UCSC recording lab in front of a live studio audience (of about 5 people). I did the production on all of them. The one below is a standard you might recognize called “Beautiful Love” and if you like that, check out this original written by Alex “Juicy J” Raymond himself called “Why Bother”, or even this rendition of “Since I Fell For You” which has probably my favorite solo I’ve got on record in it about halfway through. I hope you enjoy.
