Happy birthday to the guy with whom I recorded an album

Today is my friend Nate's 50th birthday. He and I have been friends since high school. We always shared a love of music, technology, and sports (particularly baseball).

We also had a little two-man band together in the late 80s and early 90s. It has been a while, but I've written about the band before. We called ourselves SRO, which as I've mentioned is ironic when you consider we never played a single gig that was truly standing room only.

But we did play gigs. And we recorded an album together.

"Album" is perhaps too grandiose a term here, but we did collaborate on an 11-song cassette that a few people actually bought with real money. Of the songs on that cassette, all but one were originals written by Nate, the exception being Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" (which we covered because Nate could play it on the piano and people love that song).

The album was/is called "Sandlot Tunes." If you have a few minutes free and no real purpose in life, you can click here to listen to some of it.

The recordings are a bit dated, limited as we were by our musical tastes at the time and the technology available to us. But many of the songs still stand up and are pretty catchy, if you ask me.

Anyway, it was a cool thing to have done, and it led to me continuing to make music now whenever I get the chance, even at the age of 51.

All of which is good for the soul.

And the mind. I may not be able to recall what I had for dinner last night, but I can just about tell you the key in which our most popular song "X-Squared" was written (A-flat, I think).

Anyway, happy birthday, Nate. Someday we'll get together again and jam.

Why getting the band back together is rarely a good idea

For a few years in the early 90s, I was in a band.

I use the word "band" in an extremely loose sense, in that there were only two of us: Me and my friend Nate. We called ourselves SRO, which of course is an abbreviation for "Standing Room Only," which in itself is funny in that we never played a single show in which you couldn't find a seat.

All told, we really didn't play that many shows in the first place. Our busiest time was the summer of 1991, when I was a junior at John Carroll University and Nate was a sophomore at Case Western Reserve University. We played something like 8-10 gigs that summer, I think...maybe fewer, I don't know. Like all things, the number tends to inflate as I get older.

I like to think we were an entertaining live band. There were only two of us, so we kept ourselves pretty busy during our shows. Nate is a keyboardist, but seeing as how he only has two hands, he couldn't possibly cover all the parts in our songs by himself. So he always brought his desktop computer to every show (this was before laptops, remember), and the computer would control our bass, drums and other elements as needed.

I, meanwhile, played saxophones, wind synthesizer and miscellaneous kindergarten percussion toys I picked up at various music stores when I had a few extra bucks in my pocket.

A wind synthesizer, for the uninitiated, is an electronic instrument that you play by blowing through a controller, like so:

(NOTE: That's not a picture of me. There are subtle differences between me and the guy shown here, not the least of which, I'm guessing, is talent.)

Anyway, that controller is fingered like a saxophone – so it wasn't a huge adjustment for me – and you can vary the volume and pitch of what you play by blowing harder or softer, and biting on the plastic "reed" in the mouthpiece.

The controller is hooked up to a digital tone generator, allowing the player to sound like just about anything at all, from a tuba to a distorted guitar to a bagpipe. It was always a fun conversation piece.

Most of the songs Nate and I played were originals written by Nate himself. Nate is, was and always will be a genius. Like one of those literal geniuses whose natural insight and intelligence is obvious from the moment you meet him. More than anyone I've ever known, Nate combines a left-brained knowledge of mathematics and mechnical principles with right-brained passion and creativity. The result was some really cool tunes, most of which he cranked out over a three-year period from 1988 through 1991.

We recorded one album. No, really, we did. It was called "Sandlot Tunes," and it included several Nate originals along with a cover of "Linus and Lucy" (the piano song Schroeder plays in the Charlie Brown Christmas special that everyone dances to). I still have the entire 10-song album in my iTunes library.

The recording was done in Nate's basement over several days in the hot summer of 1990. Without Nate's technical skills, we never could have made good use of the mixer/recording device we rented for the purpose, and "Sandlot Tunes" never would have come to fruition.

Eventually Nate and I both married and had kids, and we ended up living several hundred miles away from each other. The last time we played together was April 1994. I've often thought it would be fun to get back together and play some of our old stuff, but I realize it probably wouldn't work for several reasons:

• I threw out my Casio digital horn (a contraption similar to the wind synthesizer) several years ago after it stopped working, and a few of our tunes depended on the sound and feel of that instrument.
• I'm not sure Nate still has the 90s-era sequencing software that powered the computer that drove our live performances.
• We're old and rusty.
• You can't go home again.

Re: that last point. Nothing is ever quite as good the second time around as the first, especially when there are two decades of time in between. So it's probably best to just let good memories be good memories.

But hey, if you're ever interested in hearing some homemade early-90s electronic pop tunes, let me know. I can send you the files!

Let's do the iPod Shuffle

A couple of years ago, there was a Facebook meme that instructed people to put their iPods on shuffle and list the first five songs that came up. I thought that might be fun to do, especially since my iPod is filled with all kinds of strange music.

And I do mean all kinds. I have reggae and rock, classical and country, ska and salsa (OK, I don't actually have any salsa music, but I needed a musical genre that began with "s" to complete the pattern of alliteration).

Anyway, as I type this, I haven't yet pressed the "shuffle" button, so I don't know what five songs will pop up first. But I'm predicting that Sting and Colin Hay will both be in there, since I have just about everything those two artists have ever recorded. And there's a good chance some Dave Matthews Band and Billy Joel will make the cut, too. Let's see what happens:

(1) "Murder by Numbers" - The Police
OK, this pretty much qualifies as a Sting song since he co-wrote and recorded it as the frontman for The Police in 1983. I love Sting. I have been obsessed with his music for nearly 30 years. I actually met him, too. It was July 1996 and I managed to score a backstage pass with my nephew Mark when Sting was performing at Blossom Music Center. We met him before the show, and he was as nice as anyone can be when they're getting ready to perform in front of 12,000 people in about 15 minutes. He never calls, though...

(2) "Genus Rockus" - SRO
Who? What? There are only about five people in this world who would hear that song title and know what it is. It's a song written by my good buddy Nathan Woods and recorded by SRO, the two-man band that consisted of me, Nathan, and an old IBM personal computer. We recorded one album, titled "Sandlot Tunes," in the summer of 1990. And I'm just vain enough to have my own music on my iPod. Hey, I like listening to it, OK? And I have to say, I turn in a particularly nice tenor sax performance on this song, which we always used as our closer when playing live.

(3) "Moondance" - Van Morrison
I was stunningly ignorant of Van Morrison and his music until I joined a band called Tooney Loons about 13 years ago. I was by far the youngest guy in the group, which played a lot of Eagles, Beatles and Van Morrison stuff. This is one of Van's most popular songs. If I knew how to play the flute, I would join a band again just to play this. What a great tune.

(4) "Cuban Highway" - Dave Koz
Dave Koz is the king of smooth jazz. I realize that's an almost meaningless designation to most of you, but trust me when I say that when it comes to smooth jazz, Dave is The Man. Strangely enough, he's also a good acquaintance of Terry and me. We met him at a benefit concert in 2000, and since then he has always graciously left us tickets to his shows and backstage passes whenever he plays in Cleveland. He's also my favorite Jewish saxophone player, in that he's the only Jewish saxophone player I know.

By the way, I mentioned that I have a lot of different kinds of music on my iPod, but so far we've had three rock-pop songs and a smooth jazz tune. Let's hope we pull off another genre with song #5...

(5) Movement #4 ("Presto") from Beethoven's 9th Symphony - Cleveland Orchestra
Yes! I know it totally seems like I staged that, but this really is the fifth song that came up in my random iPod shuffle.  I have just enough knowledge of classical music to be dangerous, and Beethoven's 9th is definitely my favorite of his symphonies. Powerful, emotional, almost mind-bending stuff. Just incredible music from one of the few people in history who truly deserves the title of "musical genius." Give it a listen if you haven't already.


So in the end we have three musical genres and no sign of the predicted Colin Hay, Dave Matthews and Billy Joel sightings. Which is fine. I was scared to death Barry Manilow, Pet Shop Boys or Cyndi Lauper would come up and make you all think less of me...

(Hey, feel free to do the "Top 5 Shuffle" with your iPod and report the results below in the comments!)