GRYNNE IN WONDERLAND

The Backstory of Pictures & Conversations

I’ve never been guilty of rushing to finish a recording project, and no clearer example of that is “Pictures & Conversations,” the album I wrote and produced with my recording band Grynne and released in 1998. It was based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and it all started in on July 1, 1978, when Cindy and I moved from Albuquerque to Raton, New Mexico where I had taken a job as a customer service representative for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I had been playing guitar (badly) since I was 12 but when we moved to Raton I bought my first good guitar, a sunburst Ovation acoustic-electric, the kind with the black bowl back. I loved that guitar, it played like a dream and went on to serve me well for many years. I still have it. My friend Alan Whitehouse and his dad taught me my first guitar chords when I was 12, and although I was more interested in being a drummer, I managed to keep learning things on the guitar as I was getting more and more into playing music through my teen years.

When I got the Ovation, I started buying songbooks that had the guitar chords in them and teaching myself how to sing and play at the same time. I also got a guitar chord book which showed me all the fancy chords I’d been missing. This quickly led to me starting to write more. Cindy and I went to the library quite often in Raton, and it was there I found an annotated version of “Alice in Wonderland.” As a songwriting experiment I put two of the poems in the book, “A Long Tale” and “The Lobster Quadrille” to music I wrote using every weird chord I had learned. I was so happy with what I had done, I wrote two more original songs, “Falling In The Darkness” a song about Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, and “…In Wonderland” a song about the first time Alice meets the Queen of Hearts. All of the songs were pretty good rockers, but right after I wrote them I joined a country band and although I never forgot them, I didn’t play them again for 15 years. And Grynne was nowhere in the picture or conversation.

Part 2

Sometime in 1992 I was playing drums with The Lelands at The Peppermill Casino in Wendover, Nevada. The stage was behind a bar in the lounge we played in, and one of the bartenders was Wayne Shepherd. Wayne gave me a cassette tape of him singing his original songs with his own band to see what I thought of his songs. Unfortunately the tape was not of very high quality so I couldn’t really make out what he was singing but what I did hear was this voice that just soared. Wayne was into metal bands and that was the kind of music he wrote. I had written a rock song called “The Glove of Love” and though it was nowhere close to what he usually did, I asked Wayne if he’d be interested in singing it on the recording. It was our first collaboration and the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The track for “The Glove of Love” was played by Steve Rigney on keys and keyboard bass, Russ Letizia on lead guitar, Rigney, Valentino Hernadez and me on background vocals and me on drums. Valentino and Steve Rigney were both members of The Lelands when we recorded the track, and Russ Letizia was playing guitar with the Laura St. Romain band. It was one of the first songs I recorded on my TASCAM 688 Midistudio, an 8-track cassette deck that I took with me on the road everywhere The Lelands played. By asking my friends to play on the recordings I was making I started developing a network of players who were willing to be part of what I was doing. This network of players was the beginning of Grynne.

I was so pleased with how “The Glove of Love” turned out that I immediately started making plans to use Wayne as often as I could on my recordings. The next song I picked to record with him was “Falling In The Darkness,” one of the songs I had written back in 1978 in Raton. It turned out to be the first song recorded for “Pictures & Conversations” although at the time it was just the second song Wayne and I collaborated on. By the time we started working on “Falling In The Darkness” a very fortuitous thing happened for me. Tom Davis joined The Lelands as our guitar player. I had known Tom for quite awhile as he played on the circuit we played on as a bass player and he was a phenomenal bass player. So I asked him to play bass on “Falling,” our first recording together but certainly not the last. Again Russ Letizia played lead guitar and Steve Rigney played keys. With Tom in the mix the core of Grynne was being formed. Again it turned out really well and I knew the next songs we’d record would be the other three songs I’d written in Raton. The as-yet unnamed Grynne was beginning to take shape and “Pictures & Conversations” was becoming an as-yet untitled idea.