Meet the Geeks

In 1978, I heard Kiss Alive II. I was nothing but a babe at the time, but the sonic bombast of the album forever changed my life. In 1982-1983, Todd was playing guitar, and blew my mind. From that point on I vowed to share a stage with him. While I was waiting for that dream to happen, I had hooked with Dan Saltel in a band we would call Salty Bear. It was this garage-y thing that I was quite proud of. But it was nothing quite approaching the technical ability of what Todd was doing with his band MiToMa. I mean, hell, they were playing Rush and Van Halen. Dan and I were getting better as musicians with a lot of hard work, but Todd was Todd. Todd was shredding. I was writing. Salty Bear was pure songwriting. What we were missing in musical ability we made up with in sheer integrity and experimentation. We might not have had the chops to play along with these technical bands, but we were crafting some different rock and roll. I will be honest, I don't think I...

When it comes to playing music, I have a fair amount of insecurity. It still feels like a fallacy when I say that I am a musician. I see musicians as true royalty. They create emotions and feelings, or more properly, turn our own emotions and feelings on. They concisely shape stories, crafted in small dense time capsules of 2½ to 5 minutes long. Each of these songs have the ability to take you back in time, to key moments in our lives, awakening all our senses in pure recollection: your first crush, your first rebellion, your first adult moment, your first win, your first loss. The pure craft of creating all of those moving parts and making them fit together into that perfect song that can purely capture a single moment in your life, is pure genius and pure madness. Am I a musician? I sure hope so, but those are lofty heights. (And please don’t get this confused with the other “musicians” out there that are created, packaged, produced and put out there, that have all of their pa...