Author: davidreedwatson

Now that I’m rested after an amazing week I can sit down and tell you a bit about what happened. I was trying to do all of this while in Anaheim, but it was impossible. There was spotty reception all week long in the convention center as well as at the hotel.

When I got to Anaheim I had to check in to the hotel and bust my butt to get over to get my pass before our interview with Brad Cohen of Buzz TV. Trina, our Manager, had her head down, texting, and walking a pattern like memorizing some grand maze in her head all the way to the Mike Lull Custom Guitar Booth where we were getting interviewed. I have no idea how she navigated her way there… I just followed and did what I was told. JP is endorsed by Mike Lull and he wanted to introduce our new band, Electric Messiah, to Mike and the rest of the world and we are grateful that Brad took the time to interview us. We felt like Rock Stars, especially after Brad just got done interviewing Dixie Dregs guitarist, Steve Morse. And the week just got better and better as it went along. Early mornings and late nights shmoozing with industry people and other musicians. Another highlight of the week was playing at the Calzone Cases booth. Our drummer, Michael Maysonet, couldn’t make it out this year so JP’s drummer from his band Kaos back in New York, Tommy Nagy, filled in for him.

So… in summary, it was amazing. I’m tired but satisfied with the results. I’d like to thank the following people for their support and friendship;

Clayton USA Guitar Picks
Spectraflex Cables
Epiphone Guitars
Chris DeLisa at Sabian Cymbals
Mike Lull from Mike Lull Custom Guitars
Brad Cohen and his film crew from Buzz TV
Joe Calzone and crew of Calzone Cases
The folks at McPherson Guitars.
George Kennedy at Rock-n-Roll GangStar Apparel
The guys at Temple Audio Design
Terry at Music & Musicians Magazine
Sennheiser Microphones

and all of the cool people I met throughout the week as well as my friends; Tommy Denander, Kori Koker, Stoney Curtis & Jackie, J. Boomer Crenier, Ron Robertson, John Fitzgerald McGill, Randall “R2” Bostick, Chris Eversoul, Eric Zaveta of J&E Guitars in Las Vegas, Gregg Fox, Kevin Wilson, Darren Simonian of Jewelry by ISIS, Paul Geary from Extreme, Todd La Torre from Queensryche, Lloyd Grant, Jeff Cohen, Gregg Fox, Rod Miller & Leslie Shields Hoen, Rick Martinez & Amy, Gus Griesinger, Jose Karose, Johnny Haro, Lez Warner, Margie DiBella, Roberto Quintanar,  Cathy Alberts, Joel Steele, Kim Poudrier, Bob Vitti, Stephanie Quick, Vince Galante, Sylvana Hart, Leah Burlington, Stacy Blades & Paula Mauter, Ernesto Thunder, Freddy Stahmer, Whitney Wagoner, Michael Lardie of Great White, Reneé & Ron Keel, Scott Westbrook, Gee Silver & April Jones, Glenn Cannon, (the other) David Watson, Channing Heath, Steven G Knight, Kimberly Joy, Valerie Ince, Meytal Cohen….. whew!

And of course special thanks to my band Electric Messiah; JP Michaels & Trina, Jason Constantine & Brandy, Michael Maysonet and last but especially not least, Taylor Gedgaudas.

I’m sure I missed a ton of names. Please forgive me if you were excluded. It wasn’t intentional.

Peace,
D

I’ve been scrambling around the house here trying to get everything done before we take off to NAMM on Wednesday. So, I’m sorry I haven’t written much. The boys and I (Electric Messiah) are doing our best at getting our promo packs in place to hand out. We were hoping to get a recording out before we took off, but unfortunately time wasn’t on our side. It’s tough when everybody is gigging. Hard to lock down recording time. Oh well, that’s Rock n’ Roll!
There is so much I want to do when I get there. I’m like a kid in a candy store. I can’t exclude my girlfriend in this… she and her friends are just as excited. We’re going to head to a traditional dinner at the Rainbow the evening before we head to Anaheim for NAMM. My buddy Jeff puts it on. It will be nice seeing the old crew in California. If I get a moment I’m going to head to the Marina to see some of my friends. Possibly sit on the pier with a cup of coffee from The Cow’s End. I miss the Marina a lot. I miss the water. Being with Taylor is a pretty good trade though.

If you have a moment take a look at our Press Kit and go to the links that are on it. This is going to be one hell of a line-up.

Electronic Messiah Biography

Listening to this song brings me back in time. To the time when I first picked up a guitar and played until my fingers bled. Literally.

Right before I picked up the guitar I played piano. Mrs. Tower was my music teacher and then became my private tutor. It was also the piano teacher for my first crush, Puppy love. We’re still friends to this day and we can laugh now about the heartbreak we left each other with. Her, living such an incredibly different life than I, and I still living my Rock Star dream. We only reconnected after years thanks to Facebook. The world has gotten so much smaller. We (and I mean us 60’s and 70’s children) couldn’t have even imagined the ‘internet’ or ‘celphones’. Impossible dreams. Yet! We had Star Trek, and the writings of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. That was our internet. If I wanted to contact that first love back in the day, I couldn’t just pick up my cel and send her a text, or an email, or Facebook for that matter. I had to wait. I had to ponder what she was up to so when I did get to talk to her it was HOURS spent on the phone, with my Mom impatiently asking me how much longer I was going to be on the phone.

I’m not here to talk about her, though. I’m here to talk about patience.

Patience… something we’ve all lost. We are now a society that wants everything now. And if we can’t get it in 2 seconds or less we are switching providers. I’m not pulling a crotchety old man speech out of my back pocket. Believe me, I’m part of this society. I understand the impatience at times. I was fortunate to grow up in the era that I did. I had no choice but the wait for things, like the telephone that I mentioned in the last paragraph. Patience was going to record stores and looking through thousands of albums to find the one that spoke to you. And still it was no guarantee of it being your saving grace. Like the first time I bought an ELP album. I’ll admit… it was not an easy listen, at first. Not all of the songs were; ‘Still… You turn me on’, ‘Lucky Man’, or ‘From the Beginning’. But to get these gems I would listen and wait. Knowing that they were eventually coming up. And in waiting I grew to appreciate the rest of the music. The depth of those three instruments (four if you count Greg Lake switching from Bass to Guitar and vise versa), it was incredible to me. Imagine doing that now? I can’t even listen to 10 seconds of a song on Amazon without losing my patience. Ok… that’s an exaggeration… I’m not like that. But I bet you know someone that is! We also didn’t have the distractions that we have today. I could sit there with an album cover and stare at it while listening to the music. Nothing else existed. I perfected the art of album cover staring, learning ever inch of it. The more interesting the cover the better. I remember getting Elton John’s ‘Capt. Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’. I would find new images on that album cover every time I looked at it. It fascinated me. It was a kind of meditation you could say. Sitting silently, alone, with the music.

Sit silent, alone, with the music.

It will do you some good. It will do this world good. I challenge you to only look at Facebook a couple times a day to start. See if you start going through withdrawals. You might. 🙂 Of course I’m being selfish here. I want you to sit with MY music for hours and I want you to open your eyes and create the world that you really want. No need to see what everyone else is up to. Forget about them for a bit and concentrate on you. You don’t have to listen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  🙂 Pick what you want, but pick something that will allow you to wander around those dark chasms of your brain that you haven’t explored in a LONG time.

Like I said, I don’t know if I’d want to grow up in these times. I’m sure the generation before me says the same thing about my generation and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. There is so much going on outside of ourselves now that we don’t have time to stop and think even if we wanted to. People pay to stop thinking now. One of my good friends owns a Yoga studio. Ask her, she’ll tell you. She can get your brain to shut off for awhile.

Peace,
D

“From the Beginning”

I don’t recall where or when it happened, but when I got my hands on the first Black Sabbath album… something clicked. Hearing the song ‘Black Sabbath’ sent chills of excitement down my back, and being new to playing guitar it was an easy riff to play. Again, I don’t know where it really started because I love all music. But singing Hard Rock (guitar is mainly to accompany my voice)  just worked for me. Hearing Ian Gillian scream or the power of Morrison’s words. I felt something. The Beatles and the Stones were just music to me at this point. They didn’t carry that weight that I felt with this deep, dark music. It somehow got me to look a little more cheerfully at the world around me. It gave it all meaning. I didn’t feel so alone anymore. I was a pretty miserable kid really. I think the breakup of my parents effected me more than I would ever tell anybody. That might have been why I joined the Marines. In hindsight I don’t regret joining the Marines, but on another note after recently talking with one of my Rock Peers I would probably be at their level of success instead of being such a late bloomer. No regrets though.

My neighbor two doors down from us had an old Ampeg amplifier in his basement that he let me use. It was big and LOUD. I would plug my cheap Les Paul copy into it and get the distortion up and I could feel the power. I can’t remember his name anymore, I should because he had a massive impact on me musically. He’s the guy that introduced me to Joe’s Garage, Mad Magazine and Heavy Metal Magazine. He taught me the importance of music and how it can open your soul, your own expression. And that brings me back to Sabbath. My first ‘real’ concert was the Black and Blue Tour at the New Haven Colisium in 1980. Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult. Ronnie James Dio blew me away. He possessed the power and the range that would take me as a vocalist to a whole new level. By the way, that neighbors nephew ended up moving to DC and started a little band called Dag Nasty.

My father was a folk musician. He played Banjo and sang in a group called The Tikis. He later went on to become an English Teacher and also followed his passion for the theater, which I follow as well. I’m a sucker for the theater. (I spent most of my youth singing in plays or hanging out in the music room. My grades were less than stellar.) Both sides of my family have the music gene. I have a family of great singers. When I started singing Metal I wasn’t really encouraged to follow this passion, which in turn, like all rebellious rockers, made me do just that. I don’t want to turn this into a memoir, not at this time, so I’ll skip ahead…

I spent most of my time, when I could, hanging out in record stores. I have fond memories of hitchhiking to Amherst, over the Notch from our house and going to Backroom Records and the Amherst Music House. Backroom Records is long gone now, but when I was a kid this was my refuge. I spent countless hours there. There is something about a College town that is hard to explain. I got to meet many people that turned me on to different ideas and different music. There were protestors and anarchists, philosophers and pot heads. I was once picked up by a music professor who told me why a new band called Sonic Youth was going to change music forever. Stuff like that. Another loner in Amherst who I never got to really know, probably because he’s a loner, was J. Mascis from from Dinosaur Jr. I remember one day walking into the Amherst Music House and my friend Rusty telling me to stay away from the music book section. I guess J. was in ‘a mood’. I just remember looking over and seeing him staring at the wall. Great musician though. 🙂

As I mentioned above I was a late bloomer in the rock world. I never sang with a band until I got out of the Marines in 1986. I moved to Cape Cod and I would sit on the porch and just play my guitar and sing. That’s when I met Donnie Rainwater. He was my neighbor and guitar tech for Johnny Winter. He handed me a cassette, said I sounded like this dude and I should listen to it. It was Queensryche. And that is where the lightbulb really went on. Right there on that porch on Cape Cod in 1986. Yes, I knew I wanted to always really sing Rock, but never really had a band until then. It would be many years before I fully committed to singing, but that’s another story.

Horns to the Sky,
D