The majority of this document appeared as a direct mail flyer sent to members of the Power Windows mailing list as part of the pre-release promotion for the Ten Ton Tide CD. If you have already read the original version, you might want to skip directly to the new stuff at the end.
It all began back in the fall of 1991. I was looking for a new band to play with after the breakup of a band I had joined some time previously, The Tempted. Like most bands that break up, it had broken up in large part due to poor (or maybe I should say, "non-existent") management. So I joined an outfit called The Racket, which was doing fun, pop-oriented, good-old rock and roll, and which was being led by a man who impressed me immediately as being an excellent salesman (which is half the management battle). One extremely important thing which I learned from working with that project was how to stop worrying and have fun on stage. But I also got two far more important benefits that I didn't even recognize at the time.
I would never call The Racket a progressive rock band, and I would never have imagined that I would meet progressive rock musicians in it. The Tempted, however, had been a progressive rock band, and when we played at the Rock N Roll Cafe, we always threw in a few favorite covers from Rush, Yes, and King Crimson. The Rush songs always drew a very enthusiastic response, and the club manager suggested that we do a Rush tribute show. Unfortunately, the bass player was the only one other than myself who liked the idea, so it never happened. When The Tempted broke up, I decided to put together a Rush tribute of my own, starting with the bass player from The Tempted and a drummer named Jim Toscano from another band I had played with who I knew was a great Rush fan. I was telling my plans to the drummer from The Racket one night after rehearsal, and his eyes lit up. "You're starting a Rush tribute band? Can I be in it? You know I play the bass, too!" That was Joe Scarangella, who you know as the singer in Power Windows. Well, as it turned out, my bass player left to work on another project, and so Joe's wishes came true.
But there was another progressive rock fan in The Racket who I didn't know about for several more months. That was the singer, Dennes Cynd. I had assumed that pop rock was his thing, because he did it very well, and it was not until much later in the midst of a discussion about band promotion that he told me that he had been dreaming for years of putting together a band with a sound like (among other bands) Rush! We were too busy at that point to do anything about it, so I just filed the information away in the back of my mind.
The Racket soon came apart under the pressure of "personality conflicts" amongst the members. (Unfortunately I don't have the space here to recount the excellent piece from The New Yorker on the subject of show biz "personalities", except for the author's observation that there is another frequently used word for "personality" which has seven letters, of which the first is A, the last is E, the second and third are both S's...) Anyway, there were Dennes and I with no band to work on original songs with, and the Roll the Bones tour had just hit Nassau Coliseum, and I said to myself, "But I don't just want to play their songs at the Rock N Roll Cafe! I want to be where they are on that stage down there!" And so began my songwriting partnership with Dennes.
Continue on to the next page for Part Two...
Dan Gibson, (c) Copyright 1995 Dan Gibson. All rights reserved.
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