Chapter 17: Tempted and Tested

          Here's one that Jack and I wrote together in record time. It was one of those inventions mothered by an opportune necessity to place a song on an album of promised prominence that was already in production. [Hint: it involved Jack's niece and a son of a Detroit Motown™ Temptation in L.A.]   It is the fourth and final entry in the “Well Ain’t She Suite” series.

          This was 1998. I had moved operations from Avery Street [in (Detroit Tiger Hall-of-Famer) Ty Cobb's old neighborhood] to Clinton Township—a Met-DET suburb near its northeastern extremes. Ask anyone who was around in the Avery studio [S. A. S. Productions] and they'll tell you we left a lot of good memories…fortunately, we still have most of the music in one format or another. [Note: Look for the release in the medium-near future of some of the best of this on a release titled "The Avery Tapes".]

Chapter 8b: (When Love Has) Gotcha

Among memories of living times with my father, etched indelibly on my mind is one of my father commenting favorably on my college band [Ebony Specktrum]'s style. He told me that he could envision our sound someday being known as the Delta Sound. It's doubtless that he meant that highly complimentary; but to my shame, back then there was nothing about the Mississippi Delta with which I wished to be associated.


I grew up on a culturally cosmopolitan island known to its inhabitants as Valley State—literally in the middle of a cotton patch. Outside our collegiate borders—wherein seemingly every Mr. or Mrs. I addressed owned a graduate degree (many of those doctorates, who would be addressed as "Dr.")—most of the basic aboriginal element with whom I had my dealings were imaginatively restricted within the generational bounds of their limited expectations. Other than athletics—where successes blooms sufficient enough in occurrence to be a legitimate hope, anyone spouting any other so-lofty expectations was certifiably SIDney.


Fast-forward eight years…

Chapter 1: ‘SIDon ‘S’on the Map’ Ten-Years-After Story

Ten years ago, I was wrapping production on “The Men in Martian Ice”—SIDzCarbonatedMilk’s second release. This was almost a decade after the first †official Carbonated Milk release: “Please Don’t Harmonica”. “PDHM” narrowly missed pick-up by Motown™’s then brand new Jazz label Mo-Jaz™. Ultimately they chose to build their label on Smooth Jazz offerings. “PDHM” was Jazz/Funk-Jazz-Rock fusion—formerly known as Fusion—that was heavy influenced by my late-late childhood idols: ††Return to Forever, featuring: Chick Corea. For “Men in Martian Ice”, my strategy was to choose a more popular idiom that would as well hold my interest. …especially my love-interest: synthesizers.