Focus On The Family-My Younger Brother Benjy The Music-Maker>Act 1

Whenever my younger brother Benjy is gigging locally in town, I do my best to see him. See, Benjy holds down a regular job, plus gigs for four bands, two rock and roll, one reggae band and one jazz group as either an electric bassman or a stand-up bassman. It’s the current jazz group that he's in, that I’m particularly fond of.

Alright, I’ll admit it, I’m a jazz fiend; before got my first CD player, I listened to nothing but cassette tapes, mostly jazz and even had a big carrying cassette case, filled with 120 jazz cassettes. I carried them around in the truck of my car when it wasn't so full of the useless, trvial junk that now occupies the space for the winter season.

I haven’t quite figured out what draws me to jazz so much, but maybe it’s the freeness of it all, or perhaps it’s the unpretentiousness of it, sort of like early punk rock, you know the solidarity and friendliness between band members even after the show.

It’s a rare moment when I get to see a good band with a lot of heartfelt happiness in it. Now, knowing that I’ve mentioned that the jazz group my brother Benjy is in, it sounds like I might be a little bias, but no not really, when I consider all of the crappy bands he went through from age 15 to his late 30s.

I wasn’t always around for the later years, but I remember his first band he was with, in 1981 to be exact, the summer after my first year in college, a band by the name of Eternity, a basic Journeylike namewise, cranking out music that was a cross between a screeching tires and a shoulder dislocation; sort of like early Christian rock music.

I ought to know a lot about the band, I managed the group for about a month that summer, trying to get them organized, recorded them on cheap tape so I could score them gigs at local church with a demo, trying to manage their rehearsal times, working it around summer school and such, but when you have a drummer who believes he’s the next Keith Moon, what could one do, but to shrug their shoulders.

a month into the mangement gig, I realized that they’d do better if they managed themselves as most musicians I know (hint-hint) don’t like being told what to do. I have their early tapes; they sound…well, interesting, but it’s not much to crow about. They disbanded eventually and everyone moved on to the next great gig....