This blog’s sixth birthday happened while I was in Seattle over the Christmas holiday, but I made a mental note to post as soon as I got back.
It’s been quite a year, full of travel, and music, new friendships, and even a bit of romance when I least expected it (isn’t that always the way it works?). It’s also been a year that saw the beginning of my new band, and our amazing new CD that we released in August. It’s been a year of very little money, and I’ve really had to scrape by for months on end.
I’m just starting to get my blogging momentum going again, after many months off, so while I’ve broken made many promises here regarding the frequency of future entries, I will say that my goal is to bring many more of the stories from this past year to fruition over the next few weeks and months.
In the meantime, if you know of any music-related or data entry jobs, please let me know.
Here’s to six more years of beauty, humor, sadness, and truth!
When I left you hanging at the edge of the cliff with Vinnie’s story, I didn’t realize that it would take A MONTH AND A HALF to get back to the story. Huge apologies for that.
When we left off, Vinnie had disbanded his Invasion band (truth be told, the singer and bassist quit and formed the band Slaughter, which was much more successful, and still exists today), and the so-called ‘grunge’ of Seattle made 80’s metal obsolete. The guys from Kiss are pretty tight-lipped about their dealings with Vinnie, but Gene Simmons famously called him “the most self-destructive person I’ve ever met.” Vinnie also apparently reneged on contracts with Kiss, or failed to sign them completely, and even ended up suing the band—twice!—for songwriting royalties he felt he was owed. Apparently the courts didn’t agree, since he lost both of the lawsuits.
In the late 80’s, he also dabbled in songwriting for other people, including—somewhat surprisingly—The Bangles.
Color me surprised, then, when in 1992, Vinnie got called to write songs with Kiss again for their Revenge record. Most people didn’t see that one coming, but apparently he swore up and down to Gene and Paul that he was sorry for all the shenanigans he’d pulled, and that he wanted to make a fresh start with the group. They agreed, but it soon became obvious that Vinnie was still Vinnie, and that it wasn’t going to work out.
Vinnie has spent the intervening years as a recluse, turning up at occasional Kiss conventions, and even awkwardly sitting in with a tribute band in Sweden called Kiss This. Watching Vinnie fake his way through these songs is hilarious and priceless, since he clearly doesn’t know them. The guitar solos you hear in the video aren’t played by Vinnie, they’re played by the band’s usual guitarist. I suspect that Vinnie’s guitar isn’t even plugged in. See what you think.
These days, Vinnie seems to have become obsessed with embellishing his reputation. In 2011, he was offering an online chat session on his web site for the admission price of five hundred dollars. He sells his own brand of V-shaped guitars for the astronomical price of nine thousand dollars, unless you want the gold-plated one, which boosts the price to well over twelve thousand dollars. Good luck with that, Vinnie. And his questionable reputation still lives on. The guy who wrote the following piece (in 2011!) is a guitar maker who used to do some work for Vinnie, and who also currently sells his own V-shaped guitars.
“In my past experiences with Vinnie I am aware of certain issues that will likely trainwreck this instrument. If you want details contact the Jackson Custom Shop, they will tell you why they discontinued the original model. In the case of many multitalented individuals there are certain eccentricities that cause them to become their own worst enemies. I am and always will be a fan of Vinnie’s work but working with Vinnie was very unproductive for us.”
Six months before the online chat thing happened, however, he had a bit of a kerfuffle with his wife, allegedly punching her in the face and dragging her through broken glass, before she drove herself to the police station in Nashville, where the couple live today. Also, the police found a bunch of dead dogs, who had apparently been killed by their ‘aggressive’ dog, on their property. Here’s the news story from the incident.
The picture I posted at the end of my previous blog entry was his mug shot from that night.
It would be unacceptable not to let Vinnie speak for himself, regarding all the things I’ve posted here so far. I came across this rebuttal on another web site:
“There is much to say to all of you but the most important thing for me to let you know is that what you have been reading is not true. Irresponsible reporting and fabrication of events that never happened destroys people’s lives, and that is exactly what has happened.
“It’s very unfortunate we live in times where you’re guilty even if you’re innocent, but it’s the way of the world now. It’s also sad to me that not only do the media get away with publishing unsubstantiated sensationalized reports that are then taken as ‘the truth’, but people now routinely hide behind their computers and usernames to intentionally inflict enormous damage without consequence, all for their own amusement. What they don’t know is the pain they cause will always be greater than their fabrication or exaggeration.
“About my precious dogs: My dogs and cat have been, are, and will always be the most important thing in my whole life. I love them more than my words can say. I look at dogs and cats as ‘perfect little people’ with loving and unconditional hearts that I believe God gifted to us to help comfort us through our lives, which always seems to be filled with pain in one way or another.
“I have 20 dogs that were rescued since 1999 from unspeakable and horrible abuse. I never turned my back or said no if a dog or cat needed a loving home. Each one of them is spoiled rotten; great food, love, comfort, care and shelter. They never leave my side and sit with me when I watch videos or when I play my guitar, the sound of which seems to fascinate them.
“Out of my twenty dogs, half of them are big dogs and the others are small. Fencing was put up to separate the big dogs from the little ones who could roam without any problem. One day, without my knowing, some of the big dogs accidentally got loose somehow and killed three of my babies. When I found out, it was too late. I was shattered and just too devastated for words. I still am and always will be. I will never get over it and I will always live with a pain greater than that of anything I had ever known or ever will know. I wrapped them each in blankets and laid them to rest in ‘caskets’ where I made a cross and wrote the words to ‘Danny Boy’ on their casket.
“The weather had been pretty bad here for awhile and an excavator was planned to come the property to dig up the ground so I could give them a proper burial when this terrible thing happened.
“I only hope someday we’ll be together and I can watch them once again run in the meadows under the deep blue skies.
“As for the despicable reports regarding my beloved dogs, those who know me know I would never harm any animal as they are God’s most beautiful and innocent of creations. I’m a vegetarian because of my respect for all animals.
“For those of you who wrongfully accused and judged me based on these ‘stories, I understand because I would feel the same way if it was the truth. But it’s not the truth. So, to all who perpetuated these cruel and vicious lies, may the truth bring you to your senses so you can stop these terrible and unfounded accusations.
“About the domestic situation: As you must know, this is a private matter that I cannot comment on at this time. Please don’t believe everything you read. I would never hurt anyone – ever. What has been reported is an absolutely inaccurate depiction of the events that occurred that evening. When it’s time, the truth will be known.
“In all, God gave me a silver lining to this terrible time by putting a long-lost family back together through this tragedy and for that, it was worth what I am going through. Unfortunately, this ‘incident’ caused my loved ones, who suffered through another emotionally devastating experience, to suffer a new burden they didn’t need to bear. As much as they are hurting for me and from this, they’re still there for me. I am a lucky person.
“I’m an immensely private person and these events have caused me great pain and emotional anguish.
“I am requesting that you respect my privacy and that of my family during this difficult time and not engage in harmful useless gossip posted on blogs and forums.
“My music: It has been my greatest desire to put out my new music, including remixed/remastered tracks that I am very proud of which many of you seem to enjoy, but I have experienced setbacks that hindered and delayed my plans. I am hoping to work through it all and get back on track. I would appreciate it if you could please bear with me.
“About the Vinnie Vincent model guitar: My website is in the process of being constructed. Keep watching YouTube for the link to the site and for the video catalog. The Vinnie website will be a fun place to visit with everything Vinnie Vincent: music, photos, and the Vinnie Vincent guitar in all its glory.
After all this research and writing, I have to admit that feel bad for Vinnie. His rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags story is a fairly tragic one, and I would hate to see him become just another rock and roll casualty, but I fear the worst. I learned to play guitar to many of the songs that he wrote, and his guitar playing is part of my musical DNA. I have both of his albums, and I still listen to them much more often than you might think I would. My intention with this two-part story was to provide a sort of tribute to Vinnie, but his story, compelling though it may be, is a troubling one. It seems to me that his woes are self-inflicted. He’s made some bad decisions, and burned some bridges that he shouldn’t have burned. That being said, I’m still a fan of his, somewhere deep down in my heart of hearts, but I’m also an adult and a professional musician in my own right—on a much smaller scale, admittedly—who’s had to deal with the slings and arrows of not-so-outrageous fortune in my own ways.
If these stories have compelled you to explore Vinnie’s musical career further, I recommend that you check out his iTunes page, as well as the Kiss albums Creatures of the Night (my personal favorite) and Lick It Up. And, as always, thank you for reading all of this.
We now return you to BFS&T’s regularly scheduled programming (whatever that is!), already in progress.
There have been a number of things happening recently, the biggest of which was a musical trip to New England, which included my first trip to New York City, which seems to have changed something in me. If you’ve never been there before (or even if you have—ha ha), the scale of everything is enormous. There are people everywhere, from everywhere. Every place you go is crowded. You can stand on one street corner for just a few short minutes and you may very well hear people speaking ten or fifteen different languages within that time. Most impressive of all, however, is the scale of the architecture and infrastructure. It’s staggeringly huge. You can start in one part of the city, get on a subway train and ride for an hour, and when you get back up to street level, you find that the buildings are still crammed together as far as the eye can see. Parts of San Francisco are built up densely like that, but not nearly as tall, and only in small parts of town. New York goes on and on for miles in all directions. Somehow it manages not to be overwhelming, though, and I actually found myself energized by the bustle. Every street seemed to be associated with a song title, or a movie scene. Here’s a picture from the beautiful West Village.
My goal for NYC was to see as many of the various neighborhoods as I could. Obviously we spent the majority of our time in Brooklyn, but I had a few days to get out and explore, either on my own or with the help of one of my long-time blogging friends. A lifelong Brooklynite, she was very familiar with the city, and she was a fantastic tour guide and host.
At some point, I’m going to want to recount the stories and pictures from the rest of the trip, but my head is still buzzing from it all and trying to make sense of everything I saw, and all of the interesting and lovely people I met, so for now you’ll have to settle for some pictures. You can click on them to make them higher resolution.
I happened to be underneath the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time as this yacht (I think it’s a yacht; I have to confess that I don’t know much about boats, but I DO know that it’s one of the racing ones) was passing by, and another photographer and I were taking full advantage of the situation. I love this picture, and it’s probably my favorite one from the entire trip.
From there, I walked across the bridge to lower Manhattan, all around the Financial District and to the site of Ground Zero and the new World Trade Center. Here’s one of the new towers, in a late stage of construction. I love pictures like this, because once the thing is built, you never get to see it ‘in progress’ ever again. I feel lucky to have been there to see it and take this picture before it was finished.
This was a sticker I saw on a traffic signal pole in Greenwich Village near the Village Vanguard. It may be blurry, but the message is clear. I spent the whole trip with my camera—and indeed my entire brain—in ‘record’ mode.
After going full speed ahead for so long—and I haven’t even started writing about the Louisiana or Bay Area trips yet—I’ve found it a bit difficult to transition back into the ‘normal’ pace of life, whatever that is. You could call this feeling the Post-Travel Blues. Joseph Campbell might call these feelings ‘peak experiences’, which is to say that when people are operating at their highest levels of consciousness, the things they experience gain a certain amount of gravitas and significance, and settling into everyday life after times like those can be difficult. I daresay that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs would support this theory.
I think—and this is me thinking—that when you’re in the upper levels of Self-Actualization and Esteem, it’s hard to be excited about everyday things like homeostasis and excrement. When you’re traveling, you’re pulled out of the lower realities and pitched into the higher ones, which is what makes travel so exciting.
Incidentally, I just knew that I’d have to mention excrement at some point. I had to drag this conversation down to my level, didn’t I? Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, and excrement. I really should have named this blog High and Low.
Anyway.
There’s more to come on the blogging front, and while I was coming back from the beach this weekend, I thought of a few stories from back in the day that I think will be worth your while, so stay tuned. Don’t touch that dial or whatever. We’ll be right back after this important commercial message, courtesy of someone I photographed in Central Park.
So let’s see. . .it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, despite my friend reminding me that I promised—on this very blog—to write more and tell more stories this year. I’m attempting to hear and obey, and I have a ton of stories, since I went to Louisiana and the Bay Area for gigs recently. My silence around here definitely isn’t due to a lack of material, it’s due to busy-ness, mixed with inertia, mixed with, um, something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s created an overwhelming backlog of stories to write about, which is also part of the problem. I don’t want to dump a ten-thousand-word novella on you, so I’ll have to figure out a way to break up the stories into more manageable lengths. I’ve had a couple of friends make fun of me recently for posting such gigantic entries. More often, however, they’ve made fun of me for not posting anything at all, so there’s that.
Major news on the music front. My band (which I might call GhostBand for BFS&T’s sake) just finished mastering our CD, after I spent the last few weeks recording the last few parts and then mixing the entire album. In case you were wondering, mastering is the process by which the ‘master’ CD is created, from which all of the future CD’s will be copied. It’s the stage of the process in which the songs are officially named, put in album order, and a combination of some technical stuff (equalization, compression and limiting) to make the songs all play at the same volume level and make the individual tracks sound like a coherent collection. It’s one of the many underlying but crucial steps along the way, and now it’s done. Mastering is a process that began with vinyl records, because if there was a section of a song that was too loud, or if a sudden low-frequency instrument like a drum or a stand-up bass was too loud, it would make the record skip, or it could damage speakers. Mastering is a way to smooth everything out, and to eliminate unwanted fluctuations in the overall sound and flow of an album. CD’s are more forgiving, certainly, but the process is still important, and it really enhances the overall sound. Our next steps will be to get the thing duplicated (we’re getting a thousand CD’s made), and to design the album cover. Exciting! I can’t wait to get this thing released into the world, so that you and everyone else can hear it, love it, and buy it.
We also filmed a video for one of the songs. Can’t show it yet, because we’re waiting until the album is a bit closer to its release date in August, but it’s done, and it looks amazing. It showed in a music video screening at the historic Hollywood Theater here in Portland a month or so ago, and that was the first time any of us had seen the finished product. Our minds were completely blown. It’s supposed to look (which is to say that it does. . .ha ha) like it was filmed in a night club in 1959. We all dressed in period clothing, thanks to the costume designer; there are various characters (each with their own miniature stories), dancers, and choreography, and it’s absolutely stunning to watch. Very distinctive, and it’s all somehow crammed into the framework of a three-minute song. The filmmakers did a brilliant job. Okay, okay. . .I CAN share a still from it. FYI, I’m in the back left, with the vest and red tie, playing the electric guitar.
Pretty swanky, eh? We used KickStarter to fund this whole process, which is a short way of saying we worked our asses off for an entire month, playing as many gigs as possible, making short promo videos, and generally promoting ourselves in every way we could think of. And it worked. We raised enough to pay for the video, and to finish the mastering, duplication and design of the CD. We also will be paying for the rights to the two cover songs that will be on the album.
At the same time as all this was happening, FrenchSinger and another friend on whose CD I played cello had their own CD release parties a week apart, right before the Louisiana trip, so there was the obligatory flurry of rehearsals and craziness getting ready for those as well.
As if that wasn’t enough, there was the photo shoot and KickStarter video for PolishCellist, who is about to start working on her next CD. Certainly can’t forget about that. What a hilarious and awesome photo session that was. And yes, that’s a buffalo-head hat that we’re all wearing.
So that’s the biggest news. I still have to go through my mountain of pictures from the band-related stuff, and from the trips to Louisiana, California and Washington (the state) with FrenchSinger. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some entries posted before my next musical trip, which is in a couple weeks and will take me to New York, Massachusetts (including the town where I was born!), and a dip into New Jersey as well. Super excited, since I haven’t been back East for quite a long time, and many of these places—notably New York City and Ithaca—I’ve never been to before.
I should mention how grateful I am to have the opportunity to travel, and to play so much great music, and to be in videos, and to have photo shoots. It’s a huge honor (not to mention expense) to be a part of these various endeavors, and I owe even more thank yous to my friends and collaborators who continue to make it all possible.
When I was in sixth grade, one of the crazes in that myopic little world was for everyone in the class to have a small stuffed Garfield doll. Guys had them, girls had them, everybody had them. We didn’t play with them, per se, the thing was just to have one in your desk. Incidentally, my mom told me a few months ago that with the release of the new Garfield movie, the little stuffed dolls were becoming a craze with kids again, thirty years later.  I never saw THAT one coming.
A more universal craze of the time was the Rubik’s Cube, a maddening brain teaser of a toy that took the country, and indeed the world, by storm when it was released in 1980. You know, one of these:
I was hooked on it too, and even bought a book on how to solve it. You start by solving one side, then another, and it all sort of comes into place that way. The book was full of these arcane strings of formulas with acronyms like, “F L U2 R2”, which stand for Front, Left, Upper 2, Right 2, etc. Some people just gave in and pulled their cubes apart in order to ‘solve’ them, and some people pulled the stickers off and moved them into place, which I think would be a prohibitive amount of work, and it would make the stickers look crappy once they were back on. But I digress.
I learned to solve the Cube in record speed. When they would have national competitions on TV, like this one, from the show That’s Incredible. . .
. . .I would always beat them ‘by a large margin’, as my brother used to say. I wondered how they got to be on TV and everything, when it took them an eternity—like forty-five seconds!—to solve it. My hat’s off to you if you sat through that entire piece of crap video, by the way. The episode of the show is staggeringly boring, and the video ends before we even get to find out who wins the contest. What a letdown!
The world record for solving the Cube was seven seconds, and I could only whittle my time down to around eight. When I was in New Hampshire visiting my grandparents, one of their neighbors, upon meeting the eleven-year-old me, handed over his scrambled Rubik’s Cube and said, “If you can solve this, you’re a better man than I am.” Little did he know what he was in for. I whipped it around and handed it back to him a few seconds later, completely solved. He gave me a stunned look, and was actually a bit angry and petulant about the whole thing—although he tried to hide it—which I found hilarious. I got the feeling he didn’t particularly care for kids, and he wanted to give me something to keep me occupied and out of the way of the adults. I had my secret skill, however, which foiled his little plan.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was telling a friend about this story on the phone today and afterwards said, “This is probably a blog story.”
“It’s totally a blog story,” he replied. “You should call it ‘Eight Seconds.’ You can start it like this.” He lowered his voice in imitation of a melodramatic TV announcer. “Eight seconds. That’s not the length of time I can stay on a bull, or the amount of time before I have an orgasm, that’s how long it took me to solve the Rubik’s Cube.”
We both laughed, and then he had to get off the phone and return to work, as did I. I liked his suggestion for the name, but I obviously took some liberty with (i.e., completely disregarded) his other suggestions.
In the interest of even more disclosure (is that possible, after proclaiming the last disclosure ‘full’?), unlike my skill at playing Ms. Pac-Man, which hasn’t ever really dwindled over the intervening decades, my ability to solve the Cube has completely evaporated. Sad, I know, but it’s the kind of skill you have to use, or else you lose. I might still have my old Cube in a box somewhere at one of my parents’ houses. Amazing how little of that childhood stuff actually survived, and also amazing are the things we adults WISH had survived. My brother and I do still have a bunch of our original Star Wars action figures, and my little Yoda one is the mascot for my recording projects, to remind me and the people working with me, “Do, or do not; there is no ‘try.’ “ More than anything, I wish I had my collection of toy cars. I have a couple of them, but most of them got given away, or lost, or given to Goodwill, or just. . .vanished. I also wish I had my collection of cassettes from childhood through high school. My brother and I made tons of cassettes in which we acted out skits, or made up songs, or just recorded ourselves talking and playing with our friends, being our dorky selves. Those are my favorites. I still have a couple of them, but we made tons, and they don’t seem to have survived. The ones that have survived are worthy of their own separate blog entries.
By way of the television industry calls a ‘teaser,’ I’ll tell you that my favorite of the tapes, which has been safely stored away from almost thirty years until I recently copied it onto my computer and digitized the audio, is entitled, “One in a Million,” and it’s quite possibly the best thing ever. If my brother will agree to it, I’ll write the story out and post the audio on here. If he doesn’t, then I’ll have to just tell the story minus the audio, which will still be entertaining.
