John Kammerer

Part 1 of my story

Hello there "“ my name is John Kammerer and I live in Salt Lake City, Utah in the U.S.

I’m 38 years old and am married to my best friend and have 3 perfect kids. I’ve been doing music for a long, long time. One of my first memories is dancing around on our old fireplace bricks as a very young boy with a toy guitar. I also remember when my Dad was sick (he died of a brain tumor when I was 6) and we would travel from our home in Lemoore, CA to see him in the hospital, my Mom and my brother and I would sing Barry Manilow while we drove. I started playing guitar when I was 8, but I wasn’t that into it. I wanted to play and sing though, I knew that, I just couldn’t get the hang of a full-sized acoustic. Too bad, it was a beautiful Yamaha acoustic.

When I was about 13 or 14, after I cried and begged, my Mom got me an electric. A white Ibanez Roadstar. I distinctly remember the shock and disappointment I felt when I plugged it into my ghetto-blaster and heard "plunk" instead the screaming electric sound I had envisioned. I took some lessons, but really learned how to play when I got three Prince songbooks. They were the kind you would buy at the mall record store that had basic piano and guitar chords (with the diagram of where to put your fingers and what strings to play) over the top. I really liked Prince, I had since the first time I heard the commercial for Purple Rain (the movie). Yes, heard! I was walking up the stairs at my Grandma’s house in Centerville, UT and heard the music and froze in my tracks.

I remember falling backwards in some kind of dramatic, inspired stupor, but that’s probably just my subconscious making more of the moment than it was, because of the profound effect Prince’s mid-80s music period would have on me.

Prince was huge, but not so much in Centerville. I would go to record stores and scour them searching for anything Prince. I found that he had not only made records, but he had b-sides, tracks in movies, and songs he’d given to other artists. That was the profound awakening in me. You could make as many songs as you wanted to, by yourself, if you learned how. So by God, I learned how. I started by plugging my guitar into the left channel of my ghetto blaster and my microphone into the right and recording me playing and singing "“ I had a rudimentary 2-track recorder. When I was in high school, I got a 4-channel mono mixer from Radio Shack. Doubling my territory to explore.

Oh yeah, the song books "“ well the gist is this. I knew those songs inside and out. Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, and Parade (Under the Cherry Moon Soundtrack) were the three I had. I wrote my first real song, "Tomorrow’s Door" when I was about 16 years old. I was bagging groceries at the Alpha-Beta and there was a checker named Debbie who was a bit old and, in my opinion, really hot. I formed a band with some friends and we called ourselves "Sleaze & In-A-Sense" "“ yeah, I know, that’s a really ridiculous name, but Guns N Roses was the big thing, this was 1988 I think.

When I got out of high school I went to Utah State University for 2 years (well, most of) but I did poorly. I never really cared about college, something I regret now, every day. I wanted to be a musician. I had a room mate named Steve Simmons and he wanted to play bass. He liked David Bowie, The Cult, and U2 (and others, but the point is) these we bands I really hadn’t listened to. I was into the LA rock scene. I was a huge LA Guns fan. Anyway "“ we were roommates in the dorms and he got a bass and we would "˜jam’ "“ there were also some guys across the hall, real rocker-type dudes, who would jam with me too and they were into Soundgarden and the Seattle scene. Our second year of college, while we were on break from school, Steve introduced me to Mike Doran. Mike and Steve knew each other from high school and he was in a band. Sort of. But we cold jam at his apartment, loudly, with drums, and he was, in my opinion, the coolest guitarist I had ever heard. Mike’s playing wasn’t flashy in a traditional sense, what it was was melodic. It was an instrumental section that I had never had the chance to sing along with. I didn’t have to fight Mike’s playing to be able to sing easily over it, I sang along with what he was playing and, I know, everyone says this, but we just seemed to know where the other was going without having to do anything but create the music. It was liberating in a spiritual sense. Cheesy? OK, but what I mean is that for the first time in my life I felt that I could create music at the speed I felt it coming. I could just go. If you’ve ever had a burst of creative expression, you know what I mean, it just comes out. To this day, whenever I feel it happen I cry. Its like the most beautiful feeling in the world when you feel the music coming out from deep inside you, passing through all the experiences you’ve collected over your life, each one peppering it with something that is a part of you, until it reaches the realm of conscious thought and you spend that last nanosecond, in your brain, putting that last finishing touch of what you feel at that moment and it comes out "“ and whether or not there are lyrics/words "“ you communicate exactly what it was you felt at that moment "“ and strung together these moments of sound weave a song.

I always think that must be as close to God as a person can feel in this mortal existence.

Mike, Steve and I started a band. We didn’t have a name, at least if we did not one that I can remember. Our first drummer got scared the night of our first show and really ruined the experience for the rest of us. We played at the Perseus Opera House in Downtown Salt Lake City. It was in the basement of an office building, it was only used on the weekend nights "“ it was a low-ceiling, concrete room with large concrete pillars in the middle and a door on each end, but only the back one was open. And that place was packed with the craziest people a kid from Centerville had ever seen. The band we opened up for was called "Hate Times Nine" but I think they wrote it "H8X9" or something clever "“ we played our set, I tried my best to dance about and do my best Jim Morrison impersonation, the people were cool, and I was hooked. The feeling of creating music is amazing, the feeling of creating music for a crowd of people who dig it is down-right addicting. If you’ve ever known someone in a band who seems to be going nowhere, but won’t give it up, that is why. Talk about chasing the dragon.

So, we had to get another drummer. I had grown up with a guy named Brad Marshall. He lived next-door to my Grandma, and went to school with me through high school. He was in the Sleaze&In-a-sense band!! LOL So I found him and asked him to play with us. He was totally into it. Brad, like me, since we were very young, had always had stars in his eyes. If I was into the LA rock scene, he was INTO it. He bought all the rocker magazines, knew all the bands, etc. I really always like Brad. He was a good person and one of the hardest working musicians I have ever met. He truly wanted to be good at drums. He practiced a lot. He just didn’t have a natural sense of tempo "“ which is not a diss "“ a lot of good musicians and drummers don’t have a natural grasp of tempo and use a metronome or something similar. Hell, when you play a very structured show in a large venue, you have to use something to keep everyone uniform, because even with good stage monitor sound, there’s a lot of distractions.

Brad had been to New Jersey to a bar called the "Stone Pony" and said Bruce Springsteen owned it. We thought the name was cool and went with it as the band name. Later people told us about Linda Ronstant (sp?) and her band but at that point it was too late "“ Brad had a logo (a guy made us one with a chess rook as the pony and it said "Stone Pony" in what looked like granite lettering) on his bass drum!

We played everywhere we could, as often as we could. Our reasoning was that if we played every show we could, someone would see us, like us, and tell someone else. As I type this I wonder if I’m not making the same mistake now. I don’t play out anymore, but I give all my music away and I crank it out in droves. Maybe I am being too broad and not focusing in on what it most productive. Hmm something to think about.

One day Steve came in and said he was quitting the band. We weren’t making much money (sometimes playing for nothing, to next-to nobody in crappy bars) and he wanted to concentrate on his work and get married and have a life. No one faulted him for it, we were disappointed, sure, but Steve never wanted to be a rock star. I think he’s just one of those people who is too smart and capable to be willing to chase the ring and leave so much of his future up to chance. But Brad knew a guy. A guy we met as Jamie.

It real name was Sherman Smith and he was one of the best friends I have ever had. He hated the name Sherman. He went by Jamie. It was Jamie Smith until I suggested Starr, because Prince had a pseudonym of "˜Jamie Starr’ and, well, I though that would be sweet. Jamie had gone to Music Institute of Technology, the Bass School, in Hollywood and its an understatement to say that we were impressed with his level of play. He literally took us all by the bootstraps and elevated us to the next level. Mike especially, because now he had someone who really spoke the language of music theory, became a much more complex songwriter. For me it was a dream come true, and we had a full-on band.

We were a great live band. We had a slew of original material that was very catchy and was the kind of music people were listening to at the time. We played constantly, so we were tight as hell. We played some carefully chosen covers, songs that people knew and liked and would get up and dance to, and mixed in our original material to fill 4 or 5 full hours. We won some awards, got to play in some really cool places and met a lot of really cool people, but we weren’t getting anywhere. When I listen to our demo tapes from that time period I can see why "“ the energy and sound we had as a live band was not the same sound that was on our demo tapes. The tapes were recorded in the best studios we cold afford at the time, which isn’t saying much. They sounded very produced, really vanilla. Nothing that would get noticed at least. I don’t really remember why the band dissolved, we were probably just burned out on the life of playing out almost every night, who knows, but me and Mike started trying to record our own music in my basement with an old 8-track "“ the kind that used a normal cassette tape and split the tracks to get you 8. Mike and I called our project 7-Below and we were going to make some cool songs and send them off to record companies.

When Mike and I were first starting out, I remember one time we were in his car and he had a little portable cassette player and asked if I wanted to hear one of his old band’s songs. I asked if they had been in a recording studio and he said "˜no’, it was recorded on a 4-track and gave me a brief rundown on how that worked. I was really impressed "“ I mean, sure it wasn’t a full-on studio sound, but you could hear the song and I was floored. So I was able to get an 8-track, this was probably 1994.

At this point I really got into recording my own music – I will write part 2 and post it soon – I don’t know how many parts there will be, but thanks for reading this!

~j 10/12/09