“Tommy” the 1969 double album by The Who includes the piece “Underture.” This is a story of how Jeff Belding used that obscure album track to get through a challenging assignment in college.
Category: My Life as a Musician
Hello to all my east-coast friends, new friends, and any future friends! As always, good music follows us wherever we go. Edwina (a.k.a. “Mary”) has been learning electric bass as a second instrument. First, she started sitting in at our local jam on her bass. Then, she got an offer to play bass for…
This is my third installment about the making of the Hudson Valley band “Stockade” covering the years 1967-68. “Jeff, you’re spreading yourself a little thin there, aren’t you?” That is a question that I should have asked myself back in 6th grade of 1967-68. I don’t know how, but I managed to juggle quite a…
Four guys with stars in their eyes! The Stockade was a rock band with high hopes and dreams. The image in our collective “mind” no doubt out-weighed our musical abilities of that time way back in 1966. The matching polka-dot shirts were our “uniforms” for quite some time. The day would come, of course, when…
Mozart! I think anyone who plays music, or listens to music, or even doesn’t care that much for music knows that name. I have a suggestion for anyone out there in “Listening Land.” Take the time (about 12 minutes) to listen to Mozart’s Symphony #1 (composed 1764) – here’s one from YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eka8yscjE3g He wrote…
I was just a kid, a neighborhood kid, living a “ kids life” in a typical 1960’s suburban development between Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, NY. I did a lot of “boy/kid” stuff – riding bikes, playing “army”, playing with electric trains and race cars, not to mention baseball. George Carlin once said, “somewhere in the…
This is a tale that began fifty or so years ago. It covers rock bands and musicians in NY’s Hudson Valley meeting by chance and in some way affecting each other’s careers over this long arc of time. About Stockade My career as a rock musician was in full swing by 1968. I was playing…
My formative years as a banjo student were spent studying with Roger Sprung, who was one of the original “Washington Square” NYC pickers along with the likes of Pete Seeger and Doc Watson. Learning banjo from Roger was like getting a weekly Vulcan “mind meld” from a computer that contained infinite encyclopedic knowledge of all…
There I was, twenty-two years old and done with music school, at least for the time being. One the one hand, I was “trained” to be a performing Euphonium (a small sized tuba) soloist. On the other hand, I had my “side hustle” as a guitarist. The rock band that I was in (“Orion”) was…