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In spite of the fact that my Dad was a musician, and there were always guitars around the house, it never occured to me to pick up one of them until I was 17 years old. I started learning some acoustic-rock songs, and I was presented with my own Yamaha acoustic guitar as a high school graduation present from my parents (a guitar which I still own and play). The summer I graduated from high school, I started practicing with Marc Roulier, who had been playing the bass as long as I had been playing guitar (although he had an advantage on me, having played double bass in the high school orchestra). Marc taught me some rock songs, so it's all really his fault. The story of "*Batteries Not Included" has already been told on the band history pages, so I won't go into it here. I moved to NJ, played in *BNI, got a degree in Visual Art from Rutgers University, worked as a graphic designer for a housewares and imports company in South Brunswick, and along the way, got married. By 1988, *BNI had essentially broken up (we'd get together a year later for a final "Farewell/Reunion show), and I was playing with a more avant-garde group called Gangster Clairvoyants, which later opened at the Farewell/Reunion show, but otherwise didn't play more than a handful of gigs before we called it quits. By this time, my marriage had broken up as well, so in 1990, I moved back down to the Washington, DC area. A year later, I was remarried, and working in the desktop publishing field. I didn't have the time or mental energy to devote to a serious band, so for years I just jammed with friends and formed temporary bands to play at parties (such as "Simon Millgan and the Hecubi", "The Ravens" and "The Unprepared"). Marc, who also eventually moved back to the DC area, participated in these ad-hoc bands as well. Tragically, my second marriage also broke up within a few years, but in October 1999, I married my wonderful wife Ellen, and we're still going strong, with a beautiful little girl named Nina coming along on April 11, 2003. Ellen played drums in our most recent ad-hoc band, "The Unprepared," which we retired from a few months before Nina was born. In the spring of 2004, something happened to give me a musical kick in the pants. Apple released a music package so easy to use, so powerful, and so cheap, that there was no good excuse not to start playing with it. As I worked with it, I found myself able to create recordings that were of such high technical quality compared to our old demo tapes (indeed, as good or better than what we'd done at the studio) that I found myself wanting to record all the old songs properly, once and for all. One thing led to another; Marc lent his talents to a few songs, then more, then all of them; I recruited Harrison Sherwood to embellish a couple, and even managed to interpolate a drum loop from an old *BNI demo into one of the songs. I was so inspired, I began writing again, so the forthcoming CD, "Meet The Stevos" includes an all-new instrumental track, "The Bends." Meanwhile, I had located the final NJ lineup *BNI members (the internet is a wonderful thing) and discovered they were all eager to get together for a one-off reunion show. Jeff Ganis (who continues to play with Paul Bergen in a cover band called "Prankster") booked us to play at a charity marathon show in NJ in August 2005. Maybe this is a mid-life crisis thing, and I'm just reliving the past, but I actually feel like (musically, anyway) I was in suspended animation for 15 years and just woke up to pick up where I left off. *BNI isn't re-forming, but Marc and I will continue to record, and I'm hoping we can perform here and there as "The Stevos" in the coming months. If it's a mid-life crisis, it's a crisis I'm fully enjoying. |
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I
was born in Manassas, Virginia on April 4, 1962. In 1970, we moved to
Dale City, one of the many suburban developments sprouting up around
the Washington DC area, so that's really where I grew up.