The Petra Zone

Post it please, or email...or text.
[email protected]
8165647281

Yes please post John.

Very interested, please post.

This should be interesting.

Yessir! Would love to hear your thoughts, even if it's making fun of us.

Yes. That would be awesome. tmlowther3@gmail

I'd love to read it.

Is this the: JOHN SLICK posting????? The founding father of the Petra sound we all know well and we all love????

This would be very interesting!

fcollazo wrote:Is this the: JOHN SLICK posting????? The founding father of the Petra sound we all know well and we all love????

The only founding father of Petra was Bob Hartman. Anyone else who came along later merely contributed.

My modest contribution was keyboard work on Never Say Die, More Power To ya, Not of This World.

John what was recorded on those 3 albums with your keyboards was simply amazing, and these came out when I was 1-2 years old. I know when your good at something it's easy to undermine what talent and impact/ it has on other people. We sure are interested to hear stories of the band the good times and bad. Stories about your computer equipment. Also what you are doing these days?

Hi John. Thank for being here! We miss you. I see what u are saying. What I meant to say was that at least in my eyes, Petra became a cohesive unit when you joined the band. The Petra sound and concept that I think worked the best through their 40 plus years has always been Guitars, Drum, Bass, a broad range singer and of Course the wall of sound that you created with your keyboards that Later John Lawry continued to develop. But for me you set the standard for what a Petra record and live show should sound like, and I believe this in my heart even though I am a guitar player. Thank again for all the great music, and please post your thoughts. We are very interested in what you have to say. God bless you and yours.

Thanks very much for your kind words.

I might have met John Lawry once, maybe at a festival where he probably played with Joe English. I always thought that he was the perfect one to take over after I left the group. I am honored that he retained some semblance of some of the things I recorded, although he certainly is a very talented keyboard player with plenty of his own style of creativity.

JL added some interesting visual antics with his keytar synth gadget. That thing didn't exist when I was in the band, else I'd have wanted one. In fact, I even tried to make my own portable keyboard, yes, I really did. I had a Korg MS-10 mono synth (given to me by a dear friend, Bill Little, who used to generously provide PA gear for us in the early days around 1981 or so).

Someone asked about computer equipment, so here's a funny story.

While sitting in the van on those long arduous drives, I often read electronics books from Radio Shack. I thought it interesting, and figured that, if the band never went anywhere, at least I might know a bit about electronics.

"If the band never went anywhere"... what a fool I was, huh? Ah, it would not have worked out for me anyway.

So, I wanted to make a portable keyboard that I could run around with on stage. Thinking myself very clever, I bought a 50-pin SCSI connector, about 30 feet of multi-conductor cable and some wood. I didn't really know what I was doing, so my scheme was to open the bottom panel of the Korg organ I used, and solder in enough leads to be able to play as many keys as were on the little Korg keyboard... maybe it was two octaves or so.

I rigged up the thing and built a box to hold the small keyboard and put a guitar strap on it. Then, at one of our shows, I debuted My Creation, jumping off the keyboard riser and running across the stage with this 1/2" grey cable in tow. I must have looked like a possum with a 30 foot grey tail.

Well, it worked just fine! I could actually play the organ from that remote keyboard... exactly once. What I didn't think of, was that the cable dragging across the carpeted floor induced a static charge and damaged the UART chip in the organ. Oh, the organ still worked... all the time.

The static damage caused a stuck-on note, which could not be turned off! From then on, I had to borrow an organ or not use the organ until we got back to Nashville. Or, maybe I ordered a new UART from Korg and installed it on the road. Yeah, I think that's what happened... the chip arrived at one of our shows a couple weeks later, I guess. Can't remember.

But hey, I was visionary, right?

By the way, reading those electronics books did pay off in a very unexpected way. I learned about boolean logic in transistors: AND, NAND, OR, XOR, etc. At the time, I had no inkling that it would become part of my later work as a software engineer. I didn't become interested in software until about 1990, while working for New England Digital, manufacturer of the Synclavier.

But that's another story.

jmslick wrote:Thanks very much for your kind words.

I might have met John Lawry once, maybe at a festival where he probably played with Joe English. I always thought that he was the perfect one to take over after I left the group. I am honored that he retained some semblance of some of the things I recorded, although he certainly is a very talented keyboard player with plenty of his own style of creativity.

JL added some interesting visual antics with his keytar synth gadget. That thing didn't exist when I was in the band, else I'd have wanted one. In fact, I even tried to make my own portable keyboard, yes, I really did. I had a Korg MS-10 mono synth (given to me by a dear friend, Bill Little, who used to generously provide PA gear for us in the early days around 1981 or so).

Someone asked about computer equipment, so here's a funny story.

While sitting in the van on those long arduous drives, I often read electronics books from Radio Shack. I thought it interesting, and figured that, if the band never went anywhere, at least I might know a bit about electronics.

"If the band never went anywhere"... what a fool I was, huh? Ah, it would not have worked out for me anyway.

So, I wanted to make a portable keyboard that I could run around with on stage. Thinking myself very clever, I bought a 50-pin SCSI connector, about 30 feet of multi-conductor cable and some wood. I didn't really know what I was doing, so my scheme was to open the bottom panel of the Korg organ I used, and solder in enough leads to be able to play as many keys as were on the little Korg keyboard... maybe it was two octaves or so.

I rigged up the thing and built a box to hold the small keyboard and put a guitar strap on it. Then, at one of our shows, I debuted My Creation, jumping off the keyboard riser and running across the stage with this 1/2" grey cable in tow. I must have looked like a possum with a 30 foot grey tail.

Well, it worked just fine! I could actually play the organ from that remote keyboard... exactly once. What I didn't think of, was that the cable dragging across the carpeted floor induced a static charge and damaged the UART chip in the organ. Oh, the organ still worked... all the time.

The static damage caused a stuck-on note, which could not be turned off! From then on, I had to borrow an organ or not use the organ until we got back to Nashville. Or, maybe I ordered a new UART from Korg and installed it on the road. Yeah, I think that's what happened... the chip arrived at one of our shows a couple weeks later, I guess. Can't remember.

But hey, I was visionary, right?

By the way, reading those electronics books did pay off in a very unexpected way. I learned about boolean logic in transistors: AND, NAND, OR, XOR, etc. At the time, I had no inkling that it would become part of my later work as a software engineer. I didn't become interested in software until about 1990, while working for New England Digital, manufacturer of the Synclavier.

But that's another story.

Two of my favorite songs off of Not Of This World were penned by you; Were those the only 2 songs you wrote or were there more and they just didn't get used? I felt you had a lot of talent in writing those songs.

Dan wrote:Also what you are doing these days?

DISCLAIMER: I find that I have an awful lot of stuff to write, and it gets a bit longer than I expected. I guess it's therapeutic. If you get bored just close the browser.

After Petra, I bummed around Nashville for some five years, trying to get freelance recording work. Those years were a real "dark night of the soul" for me. I had lost my identity and was very unhappy. Work was very sparse, and I quickly learned that I was nothing special and nobody cared that I'd been in that band. I played on a lot of demos and a few releases, also did some jingles and did a lot of synth sound design for David Huntsinger, a tremendously gifted pianist and composer.

Around 1987, I was hanging around the Benson Publishing company studio, when I happened upon a guy who was demonstrating a portable music computer system. I'd never seen such a machine before, and was fascinated by this thing called Synclavier http://120years.net/the-synclavier-ii-n ... -usa-1980/

I followed him around town the next three days, helping schlep the gear into studios for other demos. Later, he opened a dealership, where I was able to learn a little about the machine. Eventually, I learned enough that I was hired as a product specialist. By then, I was way over wanting to play music for a living. In fact, for the prior few months before I was hired, I'd been praying that God would "give me a way out of the music business"... a business which I was barely even in.

My new employer, Richard Head, (yeah, real name) told me: "Your job is to know the box inside and out." Rich was a great Christian guy, and treated us fair and square. Can you believe that I even wore a tie to work for nearly five years?

One of the highlights of my time with New England Digital (N.E.D.) was that I got to spend a month in studio with Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine. They had bought a fully loaded Synclavier/Multi-track hard disc recorder, so I went to install it and be on hand as a consultant. I even got to sing background on one track... (but I get no royalties for that). However, they give me credit on the album for my "Synclavier chops". The album is "Cuts Both Ways", 1989.

I didn't play on this album; just did sound design and a few musical suggestions to take advantage of the sounds.

Here are a couple of my favorite tracks, first one is very heavy with Synclavier stuff:
Your Love Is Bad For Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEhK1s4tX4c

This one has some lovely rich Synclavier string pads with voices:
Here We Are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf9DYeePLJY

It was pretty nice to be driving along and randomly hear that song on the radio.
A lot of the sound design stuff was influenced by my work in Nashville studios.

The N.E.D. job ended when the company went out of business in 1993, so I happily took unemployment for about 8 months. I went to an electronics trade show in Las Vegas (probably COMDEX) to get business cards and look for a job. There were thousands of people at the show, being held in one of the many very large convention halls in Vegas. I was walking around, looking up at all the banners, when someone grabbed my arm and exclaimed, "John! What are YOU doing here?" That somebody was the former V.P. of Sales from the defunct N.E.D. He said, "We could use a guy like you in Cambridge... I got somebody I want you to meet!"

So, he introduced me to his associate: a brilliant scientist who held three master's of science degrees from M.I.T.: electrical engineering, computer science and physics. That fellow hired me as a member of technical staff at a small engineering firm, named "Aware" http://www.aware.com/company/ literally in the shadow of M.I.T. in Boston. On my first day he said, "I can see that you have demonstrable programming ability. I can't put you on my front line programming team, but I would expect you to spend, oh, 20 percent of your time improving your skill. If you want to go to school, we'll pay for it."

That was an INCREDIBLE opportunity! It was like saying: "Here's a block of gold. Make what you want with it." In fact, I've often wondered whether it was a blessing from God (not that I deserve any)... maybe a consolation prize for having parted ways with Petra 10 years before. Unfortunately, that sad parting really didn't have to happen at all. But that's another story.

So, I worked in Cambridge about 18 months and attended software engineering courses at Harvard. The company dumped our little multimedia group, so, being armed with new software skills, I went back to Nashville in 1995, and went to work for Nortel Networks doing Windows and UNIX programming.

I had a woman I deeply loved, a stepdaughter, a 1 year old kid, a new career and a new horizon. It was the happiest time in my life. I still have the kid, and the stepdaughter, but the woman dumped me for someone else. Can't say as I blame her, but that's another story.

So, what am I doing these days? I work as a senior Java engineer for a USA defense company which builds "boomers":
http://www.gdeb.com/.

I also write boring old history on sites read by about 3 people.