Re: THEY OWNED THE STAGE!!
Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2016 7:35 am
The only founding father of Petra was Bob Hartman. Anyone else who came along later merely contributed.fcollazo wrote:Is this the: JOHN SLICK posting????? The founding father of the Petra sound we all know well and we all love????
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.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.
Dan wrote:Also what you are doing these days?