Secrets History Chapter Two
The Road to Tampa Bay
Julie and I bought an old popup camper and made sure that the van was in good working order. We loaded all of our band gear we could into the van and headed out. The camper became our home for a while as we went off in search of our future. Julie's sister was in Jacksonville, Florida, her husband stationed at the Naval Air Station. We had a standing offer to stay with them for a while. We took a scenic route through Virginia and south, exploring many places along the way not sure where we needed to be. On one occasion we found ourselves in a campground on Virginia Beach with a hurricane on the way. We found out a little late about it and by the time we folded up our wet camper, the park was flooding. We scurried into the town (Virginia Beach) and realized that most of the folks had evacuated. So with the wind blowing strong, we grabbed a small motel that was still accepting guests and weathered the storm. With no power we stayed the night and partied with a few others that decided to stay on the beach. We and our belongings survived this brush with a small hurricane. The obvious thing here is that as Midwesterners we did not have any experience with this kind of weather and that perhaps living in the camper might not be a good long term plan. Also good idea to tune into weather reports on the coast in the summer!
OUR VAN AND CAMPER
We made it to Jacksonville about a month later and immediately started trying to round up a band to work with. We made contact with a group calling themselves Cakes. We got busy with them and did a short stint performing in a few clubs from Cocoa Beach to the Carolinas. One particular club we played at "Pandora's Box" in Greenville, SC stands out. A private club, which was common then in South Carolina, where the band starts at 1am and plays until 6am. Very strange hours! Partially due to the fact that the band was a hard rock band and also via their booking agents they were setting their sights on a Northeastern tour for the fall and winter, we soon left Cakes behind. We both figured we didn't come all the way to Florida just to turn around and spend winter in the North. They were very good at the hard rock but we felt like we wanted a little different style of music.
CAKES
1986
Soon we realized that Jacksonville did not seem to have what we were looking
for. We made a journey to the Tampa Bay area and liked it a lot. By then it was December
and we noticed that the temperature was still in the 80's and we agreed that maybe
this was finally far enough south to escape winter. So we packed up in Jacksonville
and moved to Clearwater, Florida. There appeared to be a pretty strong market for
music and entertainment and we loved the area. So we parked our camper at a campground
in Seminole and started trying to find income. We took day jobs, got an apartment
in Clearwater, and then began searching for the music connection again.
The
next couple of years we worked day jobs and tried various projects out, meeting a
lot of different players in the area. One memorable guitarist was the late G.W.Rose
who later made a name for himself in the Tampa Bay area with a number of bands. His
guitar playing was awesome, hailing from Texas, he had just arrived in the bay area
after an extended road tour playing lead guitar with the blues legend John Lee Hooker.
His playing very much would remind you of the late Stevie Ray Vahn. We finally got
out of the proverbial garage with a group of great guys known as Cruise Control.
Performing occasionally around town we eventually realized that these guys did not
want to work that often and the market seem to offer opportunities for full time
engagements. So we soon left to work on other ideas.
CRUISE CONTROL 1988
By then Julie and I had purchased our first few digital keyboards and a drum
machine. The drum machine mainly for writing and recording. One particular keyboard
"Ensonique Mirage" a digital sampling keyboard had a built in "real
time" sequencer in it. This would allow you to play a phrase into the memory
and then play it back. That is, the memory would tell the tone generators what to
do to repeat the act of playing the keys. Real time means it will play back exactly
as it was played. (mistakes and all) no ability to edit the phrase. One evening I
had a moment of clarity and decided to put a bass guitar sample on the keyboard and
find a simple rock drum beat and play and store to disk a bass line sequence to a
song we knew. By synchronizing the digital clocks of the drum machine and this keyboard
sequencer I made a huge discovery that the two would work together and repeat this
rhythm section just as I had conceived it and play it back . Julie and I were shocked
and surprised and sensed that this could change things a lot for us. By then the two
of us had developed a lot of experience in various audio mixing techniques and arranging
music from our work with Key Recording Studio. We knew that we could use these arrangements
in a live situation through proper sound reinforcement and mixing. This has nothing
to do with Karaoke which is so common today. So began our era of small bands. It
would eventually enable us to keep a good sounding group together without relying
on several people and trying to earn enough money to support them all.
With
this new concept in mind we met a guitarist/singer then working the beach clubs with
a group called Ann Arbor Connection. Billy Keenahan was an experienced player hailing
from Rhode Island. Bill was interested in trying to work a smaller group as well.
So we set to work on this idea. Long hours of building sequences is what it entailed
mostly and Bill be a talented session player helped out. Finally having enough of
these sequences and rehearsing as a trio we were able to get out. We called ourselves
"Symphony Street." Julie and Bill handled lead vocals, we all sang backup,
and by now Julie had become proficient on the sax as well. Bill's wife Lena handled
sound and lights. We played oldies and Top 40 at clubs like the Banana Boat,
Dock of the Bay and the Beach Place in Clearwater also playing several
clubs in, Palm Harbor, Tarpon Springs and New Port Richey. One thing was becoming
apparent in these days, Julie's singing and on stage persona was finding wide acceptance
in the Tampa Bay area.
SYMPHONY
STREET 1988
In 1988 digital memory was still
limited and a pretty difficult obstacle. I remember working
clubs where my entire break would consist of uploading the memory banks from a tape
data recorder. But we were all amazed that it was working and we were actually getting
return engagements at several clubs. We finally upgraded the equipment to a Yamaha
digital sequencer with a disk drive and enough internal buffer memory to hold an
entire set of sequences. Thus with a little advance planning we could run an entire
set without stopping to load anything from disk. What a huge difference it made.
As we progressed we also purchased more digital sound modules enabling us to vastly
improve our mixing capabilities. This new idea was not always accepted by the public
at large then, especially since we were playing clubs that were accustomed to complete
bands. We all accepted the occasional critic as part of the change. Canned music
was a phrase we heard from time to time. All four of us new the huge amount of work
we did to create this though and by now Karaoke was now beginning to emerge as a
new type of entertainment as well. It seems there was a lot less scrutiny applied
when a member of the audience could get on a microphone and sing to a purchased
CD
(Karaoke). Who knows but the change was happening and we were glad that we entered
into sequencing when we did. It proved later to be our path to full time engagements.
In 1989, a lot of the Top 40 was turning into a style best described as "techno
pop" and we were able to achieve this kind of sound, but it was very labor intensive
and dependant on having the latest digital gear. We noticed from the outset, even
though we could produce this new style the younger audiences were not all that supportive.
It seemed more like the band functioned as a backdrop or jukebox in these type of
clubs and the audience rarely got excited whether you did a great job or whatever.
We were much more at home creating the classic rock and oldies which mainly consisted
of a bass and drum arrangement on sequence and playing our instruments. Also there
was a great demand in Florida for the oldies. The fans of the older music seemed
to be ready and willing to get excited over hearing their old favorites done well.
We really do get addicted to seeing a crowd go ballistic with excitement and swing
from the chandeliers a little bit. This is the audience we wanted to cultivate. Bill
eventually parted with us to build a more contemporary band as we recommitted to
what we both knew was a somewhat untapped demographic, retirees that love to dance,
and folks our own age that love the sixties and seventies hits. We found that the
audience that likes a Bob Seger hit also appreciates Patsy Cline or Hank Williams
but inserting this "techno" style music into that same crowd did not always
work.
With these realizations in mind we set about building our new band
and thus the birth of "Secrets"
