Lime Green (1988-1989)
Shortly before graduation from ASU, I had the opportunity to play a rendition of Liszt on a Hamburg Steinway Model D before an audience of about 5,000 at Gammage Auditorium. Oh, what fun! Within a day or two, pop singer Steve Stuart and a guitarist named Stevie J. Larson showed up at my door asking me to play keyboards in their rock band.
It was called Mind Over Matter, and we started out playing all sorts of sorority and fraternity parties. The money was great, and the crowds were even better. We went through more drummers than Spinal Tap, but we eventually found Greg Naylor, who to this day runs his own studio in Mesa, Arizona and engineers at Saltmine Studios. Greg is the shit, and so was our bass player, James Carr, who at the time had already made a name for himself with The Outcrowd. After a slew of gigs, we went all original and called ourselves Lime Green. Phoenix's renouned DJ, Mary the Bone Mama, took over as our manager, and our gigs kept getting better and better.
The cool thing about Tempe at the time was that 55,000 college students all lived within a few square miles of campus. Even a Sunday night show at the Sun Club would bring in 100 to 200 music lovers, and a gig on Thursday through Saturday nights would pack any place. That is the thing I immediately noticed about Portland in 1993 when I moved here - only the best shows would draw crowds. I never knew how lucky we were. After about a dozen all original shows, Lime Green entered and won the Phoenix Battle of the Bands contest - woo hoo! - which meant we were invited to open up Living Color at the Celebrity Theater in the round.
We played in so many clubs I honestly cannot remember them all, but I do remember being billed with great acts like the Gin Blossoms, the Meat Puppets, Dinasaur Jr., and the Dead Milkmen. What did I learn from all this? Answer: That there was no way I wanted to tour around in a van and try and earn a living in smokey bars! It was pretty obvious how polluted the industry was, how the clubs would skim the door, and how dependent the whole band notion would make me if I pursued it as a career.
Honestly, writing and recording thrilled me. Notoriety meant nothing. One weekend Steve, our lead singer, and I drove to Hollywood and he sprung for a 1/2" 8-track open reel recorder and some outboard gear. He then bought a 16 channel mixing board, some Shure mics, and hired a contractor to soundproof our rehearsal room and build out a control room. When it was all finished, my fate was sealed.
I learned a lot from trying to make those early recordings with Lime Green. I had no idea what Mic Pres were, or what compression did, but one of our live engineers, Jim Coleman (aka The Wonder Finger due to his magic working the faders) gave us whatever advice he could. Around this time I reconnected with an old artist/lingerie model friend of mine on a holiday trip back to Oregon, Jenny Harmon, from Oklahoma City. She was a good stairstep taller than me and an actual "woman," as opposed to me - just an idiot kid.
Thank goodness for me, the sparks flew, and within no time she moved to Scottsdale and were lying in the sun on top of Steve Stuart's roof blasting the neighborhood with XTC's Skylarking. In 1989, a friend of mine introduced me to a group I had totally missed in high school and while studying composition and piano - The Beatles. He recorded Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for me, and I remember thinking - HOW could I have missed all this? Well, I did know a bit lot about Prokofiev and Schoenberg and Ligetti, but still!
By the end of 1989, Jenny missed the Northwest something fierce, and I hadn't read a book in three or four years and needed something challenging, a change, somewhere to grow, and so I quit the band. I called my dad and said I was going to law school, and that I was going to sign up to take the LSAT. I remember his exact words of disbelief - "right!" Well, not to be dissuaded, Jenny and I packed up a U-Haul trailer and left Arizona one sunny cold December morning in 1989. My band mates were bummed, and I had no idea what life had in store for me. Jenny drove her car and pulled the trailer, and I followed her all the way back to Oregon in my convertible VW Bug leaking exactly 1.5 quarts of oil out the main seal every 1/2 tank of gas. We made it and later got married.