Music

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Music has been a major part of my life for as long as I can recall. In late 1980, I joined the St. Peter’s Men & Boys Choir in Worcester, MA, conducted by Professor Louis Curran. The choir was unique in that it performed many classic and obscure liturgical pieces, ranging from the works of Palestrina, Gounod, and William Byrd among countless others. Included among the more famous works we performed were Handel’s Messiah, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. In 1982, the choir would move to Notre Dame des Canadiens Church in downtown Worcester before disbanding two years later. Before doing so, we would perform regularly every Sunday and I’ve even performed at places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C., St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, and The Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec. It was an incredible opportunity, one which very few people get to experience, and I am grateful that I was able to have the chance as a young boy to have these memories. For my efforts, I was awarded a medal from the Royal School of Church Music in 1983.

In the fall of 1987, I had become enamored with punk rock and began playing in bands as a vocalist. My first band was a punk band, based out of Northborough, MA, originally called Candy Apple Abortions. However, the community center where we were going to play at refused to allow us to perform under that name so we chose the name Passive Resistance for the show. The gig happened at the Quinsigamond Village Community Center in December of 1987 and we broke up soon after. I would play with various people for the next two years or so before meeting Marc Wright from Webster. Marc and my friend Skully and I started the short-lived band Special K which also performed once – at the Worcester Artist Group in the spring of 1990. Funny enough, our drummer quit before the show, so the guitarist from Passive Resistance, Steve Digregorio, came up and played drums for us, It also had a calming effect as some of the skinheads in the crowd were becoming hostile towards us as we played and when Steve,a skinhead, got up and started playing with us, it settled the antagonizing element.

I would move to Michigan in 1991 and by the summer of the following year was involved with the local music scene. Besides putting on shows and DJ’ing at WCBN, I became the vocalist for the band Barbed Wire Play Pen for the next four years. The experience was cathartic and it is one of the most intense experiences of my life as we traveled across the state and constantly played shows which sometimes would break out into open riots.

With the end of Barbed Wire Play Pen, I decided to embrace a more eclectic approach to making music. I would begin to play keyboards and played percussion alongside performing vocal duties. This resulted in my first four-track recording session, eponymously known as the Holy Ghost EP. I also began to experiment with 1/4″ tape loops in the studios at WCBN which resulted in the unreleased Spool EP recorded in 1996 under the name Holy Ghost. In the late 1990s, I would participate in a couple short lived projects: Spicehole/Blessed Energy Recycler with Be Hussey, Thom Klepach, and Tom Hohlman. Then there was Wailing Wall with Chris “Box” Taylor and Steve Bradley. Under this name, we would record two songs for a never-released single, “The Al Gore Version of the Macarena.” Bradley and I would unite later for a project we did around 2000 that played a single show on New Year’s Eve known as Liberation Beat Threat, playing a killer version of Iggy’s “The Passenger.”

Chris “Box” Taylor and Andy Furda and I would join forces in 2001 and form a “super-group” of sorts, the rock outfit Tomb of the Unknowns. The band had a moderate amount of success, performing a number of local shows and even alongside Denz Tek, Ron Asheton and Powertrane at the Rock and Roll Revival at the Blind Pig on November 10, 2001.

Following Tomb of the Unknown’s break-up, and a brief Barbed Wire Play Pen reunion in 2003, I decided to take a break from playing in bands. My argument has always been that playing in a band is like being in several different romantic relationships at once and it’s nearly impossible to keep everyone happy. The other issue is that all of the other members of the band are at the mercy of another member quitting. So, if the momentum is going and then a member decides to quit, it kills that momentum as the band needs to find a replacement member, integrate them, teach them the material, etc.

Deciding instead to forgo joining a band, I have spent the last two decades as a solo musician, having taught myself how to play guitar, bass, and keyboards. Using a drum machine and recording software, I record my own music and am currently writing music with the intention of performing live at a later date. Since 2006, I have put out a few different releases under the moniker of Autoerotick. In 2007, I self-released The Splendor of Wisdom & The Tragedy of Ignorance which came out in a limited CDR format. The unreleased Sacrifice EP was recorded in 2008 and has since been released.

My latest solo-project is The Archconfraternity which released a split album on No Sides Records with The Machinist in November of 2023.