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Here is the story behind "Dances
for God"
I tried again and again to form a band in Frostburg, Maryland.
At the same time, God was finding ways of telling to me over and
over again that He intended me to perform alone.
I discovered that I could not draw sizable audiences with merely
my singing and acoustic accompaniment. Maybe I could, but I gave
up trying.
A Frostburg State University student named Jerry went into a
partial trance upon hearing of my difficulties in forming a
band, and he said that I should obtain an electronic drum
machine. I recognized this as being a message from God.
It was the idea of Dan Merrill (email to him @ stASis@email.ro
if you are interested in electronic music) for me to purchase a
Korg Electribe-M groove box to use as my backup band.
Dan is a fanatic who lives and breathes electronic music. His
life's time is devoted to that medium, both listening,
cooperating with others, such as myself, and producing his own
and other people's electronic music.
I had previously tried to recruit him and his electronic
equipment to accompany me on stage, and we rehearsed several
times with his groove box and sampler. It went verily well, but
nothing came of it, except that he convinced me to purchase my
own groove box instead of going onstage with him.
In between times, before I was able to purchase a groove box,
another FSU student from Cumberland, Maryland, by the name of
Jason Crawford recorded accompaniments for me onto cassette
tape, using his Roland electronic keyboard and drum machine.
Jason is presently equipped to record and master music, and is
mastering my lo-fi acoustic albums.
I gave several free impromptu (unannounced, unpublicized)
performances at a local bar, using those backgrounds recorded by
Jason Crawford. They were well liked by the few hearers who
happened to show up during those performances.
Eventually I saved the money and bought the Electribe. I had
spent decades conceiving of arrangements that I would do
whenever I would get the means to generate multiple tracks. Thus
I have, waiting to be produced, about 40 albums that will employ
the electribe groove box. Dan Merrill offered to capture (into
computer) the tunes from the groove box, and to record my
singing and guitar playing along with them, and to master them,
using his sophisticated equipment. We started doing this slowly.
In the meantime, I made some cassettes of the accompaniments and
lent them to people. Those people played the cassettes for their
friends, and everybody said they wanted to buy the cd's when
they would be available.
So I asked Dan to go ahead and burn one with the only few
numbers we had done so far, just to fill that demand as soon as
possible, and we could finish the album later.
Meanwhile, I recorded almost all of the instrumentals and
song-accompaniments stored in the memory of the groove box, into
a second cd, "WAY
OUT THERE"
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