My first album, not to be confused with the lost one from my youth only released on tape to select friends, High Society released in 2010 is a punky gritty, fast moving trip. Compared to my other early songs from the 80's this album delivers a unique sound and captures the angst I was feeling. I had just recently divorced my first wife, Nanette and had a collection of songs from my youth that I had been singing for years and the combination of the grief and depression fueled a year full of blasting punk music down the road into downtown from my cute pink house by the railroad tracks in Nanaimo, British Columbia Canada and culminated in this album recorded in my living room, a show at the Nanaimo Conference Center, The Cambie and a lot of fun times at the river.
This is how it began. This is the first time I recorded multi-track without sequencing or looping. Most of these songs were written when I was 16-18 and reflect on a difficult time of my life where I had to deal with the challenges growing up and not conforming to the norm. I was very industrial punk without realizing it and had to work through my inferiority complex and desire to say what I wanted to without changing for others. It was during this time that I left home and started hitch hiking and living on the streets in Vancouver, BC. It opened my eyes to the indifference and angst felt by many people without the amenities of modern comforts, and the vast destruction of our environment for capitalistic gains. I had sequenced these previously as synthesized beats in the late 80's in my parent’s basement studio made from mostly scavenged parts, a IBM 386 PC, and a Juno 106 Synth, but unfortunately lost those recordings when I moved away from home. At least after all the cold winters and brutal summers stuck in the attic, archived on 3.5” floppy disks, after many hours of OCR and rebuilding the damaged files, these songs lived to see another day.
These songs bring back a lot of feelings and memories of living in run-down squats and alleyways, knowing the status quo is looking down their noses at me. I learned to do it by myself, and not to rely on others. But, with community as one of my core values, I found that outlet for my emotion among the other punks, goths and industrial freaks. Of course, the anger I felt built up and eventually spilled out into my music, instead of raging at the mindless working class that is blindly following orders.
There is an underlying layer of undoing, from the embedded guilt and shame coming as a result of my Christian childhood upbringing, and rebelling against those unneeded and unwanted feeling was a big part of my acting out, and moving out. That process to heal took many years, and is still ongoing.