So you want to be a "Rock Star"?

Ha!

Have fun sleeping in your car, or in the dirt next to your car, or in some stranger's house, with your guitar player snoring and farting four feet away from you, mosquitos buzzing around your head, and some three legged dog barking just outside the window. Sure, you could get up and drive the seventy-five miles home to your own bed, but you've had a few, and the singer will try and take your keys, again. Singers. They often get big black eyes for this. Then people ask, "Hey, what happened to the singer?" the next night while you're on stage. Fingers get pointed.

If you're lucky, you get into a studio and record stuff. It comes out... OK. Never as good as certain nights when everybody was "on", though. Then there are the live recordings, the ones where you say, "Man, we must've been loaded when we played that one..."

I played in a lot of bands, but none ever managed to get into the studio until Ruby Groove, or even figured out how to get a live show recorded. This was 80's and early 90's remember. Nobody had a 96mHz 48 track studio on their laptop back then (nobody even had a -laptop- back then). Getting into a professional studio was a huge deal.
Below is some recorded music from bands I've played in.
It's all copyrighted, so don't try to sell it, somebody will come after you (probably the rhythm guitar player). In mp3 format.

Ruby Groove
I came up with that name one afternoon while staring vacantly at the names of a bunch of guitar amp tube boxes on the fireplace mantle. Groove, Ruby, Sovtec, and one other. We had our third gig coming up that week, and still no name. "Sovtec Groove" sounded stupid, so...
Later on people would say, "Cool name, kind of a double entendre, like Pearl Jam!" Hmm, well how about that?
This was a Chico based band from '94 through '96. Some of these songs still stand up fairly well, "Heaven" in particular. Some don't. Wayyyy off time, and some flat out, blatant mistakes, all recorded for future generations.
These were recorded, mixed, and roughly mastered, over two weeks in November '95 at Orange Whip Studios in Santa Barbara. We were POOR, so we got the studio (a veeeerrrry nice studio) from about 11:00pm until the wee hours.

Heaven
Strange
Fear
The Riff
Gum
Thunder (#1)
Straight Ahead
Youth's Defense
Memories
Green (like me)
High Hopes

We played quite a few instrumentals back then as it had taken us a few months to find Bo Morse, the singer. He was just a kid, 20 years old, without two nickels to rub together. But man, what a voice. When we were recording in S.B., he held a note on key for nearly a full minute while laying down scratch tracks. I wish we could have used it.
Those original instrumentals morphed into jams interspersed with vocals, and we often ended shows with "Steamroller" or "The Riff". It was the tightest band I ever played in. We played every single day together for those two years.

What do you do when the police show up at your gigs (again) and tell you to shut it down? You agree to peacefully wind it up with two more songs and say "Goodnight". Then you play a 10 minute song, the first five minutes consisting of the band jamming and the singer inviting girls on stage for a couple big swigs of tequilla. The police then bust in, screaming "WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE!?" and disperse the crowd. Ah... Good times...

Ruby Groove, live, October '95.
Steamroller-Live

We were doing very well in the Central Valley, getting known, building a fan base, and then the idiots decided they wanted to move down to the south bay area to "make it big". Brilliant, start from scratch all over again. I made my case for staying another year or two, but no. Have a good time. Adios amigos. I played jazz and blues, on and off.

Kronic
South SF bay based band from '99 - '02.
My wife and I moved down to the bay area in '99. Three years had gone by and the old band hadn't even managed to find a new bass player, let alone gig in the interim (go figure). Two of the best musicians had also left, the drummer and lead guitarist, Ben. The remaining original members asked if I'd come back, I said, "yes," and the band was re-named Kronic (I had -nothing- to do with this name). We immediately started gigging and went into LeeTee's Awesome Sounds Studio in early 2000 to start laying down tracks. These were eventually mixed and mastered and CDs sold at shows.
We were still pretty tight, but the chemistry of the band was never -quite- there. I had drummer issues. He was a bit on the L-7 side for me, I wanted to be able to play somewhere, anywhere, other than on the 1 and 3. And then greed reared it's ugly head. The "CORE" members, meaning -not me-, wanted ALL the possible future pie (99.5% of nothing is...). A band is a "band", a group of folks with a common goal. Things should be divvied up equally. All for one, one for all....
I'd have given them the shirt off my back. But that wasn't nearly enough. "Us" was suddenly a dead concept, "me" was in vogue, so -I- walked out (but I'm not bitter about it).

On the "up" side, we had a lot of fun. Below is a pic from one of my favorite memories of the "Kronic" era. We were asked to play a Ralph Nader for Prez gig. Now understand, Ralph is right up there with PCBs and toxic sludge in my book, and I wish he'd just do everybody a favor, and vanish...
So, when the promotor called and asked if we'd do the show I said, "Sure, we'd love to play, but I get to park my Corvair right next to the stage."
Ha ha! Good one, Rick! I was certain that they would say "No!" and that would be that.
But (you have to love it when an ill-informed twenty-something is running the show), they said, "No problem... what's a Corvair?"
Awesome!
Below, the Corvair. Parked right next to the stage...

Below are the studio results from those few years. Standouts are; Hideaway, Invisible Friend, and New Wings.

Seethe
Hold (the line)
Father
Hideaway
Invisible Friend
Kings
Indecision
New Wings
Come Down
Big (and after a few minutes, the Riff again)

I remain friends with Bo and Groove lead guitarist, Ben, both good guys, great musicians. They got together again after Kronic ended to form World Wide Sickness. A band that had quite a following for a while in the south and East bay for a few years. Bo is still at it, plugging away at the music dream. I hope he makes it big someday. Ben is a responsible daddy now.
I haven't heard anything about the original Ruby Groove drummer in years (insert gurgling bong water sound here). He was a real good drummer, on of the best I've seen. I'll post up the studio verion of Steamroller drum intro here shortly. There was a rhythm guitar player, too... Who knows what he's doing now.

A few years back, I got a call from a local blues guitar player, and joined up with him for a while. He booked -great- paying gigs, but after a year and a half of cruising through blues standards, drinking beer, and having fun, he wanted to play his original compositions.
They really sucked.
He said "Hey Rick, what do you think of the new songs?" I said, "I think they really suck."
No recordings from that period.

These days I play my songs at home, on the couch, for my wife.