This is the debut CD from my band, Citizens Of Contrary Knowledge.
After a couple of years writing music on my own, following the break up of my group, Father Oblivion, I had amassed a bunch of songs and felt a burning desire to play them and record them with a band. A chance meeting with an old colleague, Gary Brown, an R&B singer and producer whom I had worked with while living on the West coast, turned out to be a dance with destiny. I had been jamming and writing with Mike Leslie, a bass player I had met during my stint playing guitar in the Off Broadway hit, Love, Janice, about the life and music of Janice Joplin. Gary suggested I meet him at an Upper Westside bar to give him a CD sampler of some of my work, in the hopes of doing some TV music together. I lamented that what I was really looking for was a singer and a drummer to form a band, at which point his jaw dropped and, shaking his head, he pointed to his two friends sitting at a table in the bar. As it turns out, they were a singer and a drummer. As fate would have it, they were lamenting to Gary that they badly needed to find a guitar player and a bass player. We talked, we clicked and they asked if I knew a bass player. I said I did and we arranged to get together and play. It was one of those first jam sessions you hear about where everyone just seemed to know exactly what to play and it sounded like we had been playing together for a lifetime. And so, Citizens Of Contrary Knowledge were born. We were all songwriters so there was plenty of material to choose from. We recorded our debut CD in my studio, The Dungeon, in the Fall of 2005. A lot of great things happened for us with this debut effort. We licensed a bunch of music from this CD to places like ESPN, MTV Logo, cable network, Nickelodeon hit shows, Drake & Josh and Zoey 101, and more recently had a featured song, House Of Cards, in Showtime's hit series, The Tudors. At the same time, we headlined the Macy's Fourth Of July Fireworks Festival in 2008 and then won a battle of the bands contest sponsored by the New Jersey Nets and played as the halftime entertainment for a Nets/Pistons game at the Izod Arena in front of 16,000 fans. That was one of those life-coming-full-circle moments for me; the culmination of an artist's journey that began some twenty years prior, when I was pushing road cases into places like this for groups like Foreigner and Joe Walsh. Once you get a taste of that you can't really go back. |
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