With Bhang and When Music Becomes a Tool, I had bridged the gap between being "a guitarist looking for a gig" and becoming an independent recording artist. Starting a record company gave me a vehicle for controlling my creative output, but it also made me responsible for building the systems and infrastructure needed to grow the business and keep making music. I originally thought it would take twenty years to figure it all out. It took a little longer, but the payoff was complete ownership.
I kept recording new music while throwing myself into the deep learning I described in Blog 4. For the next leg of the journey, while I waited for the physical vinyl copies of When Music Becomes a Tool to arrive, I decided to help a good friend whose manufacturing company was growing and needed an extra hand for two weeks. I ended up staying for two years.
His company, Hartke Systems, made speaker cabinets for bass players. It was a perfect fit. They made some of the best equipment in the world at a great price for musicians.
While working there, I also began my next record and continued releasing When Music Becomes a Tool. At the same time I was playing and recording with Young and Company, the Buddy Hank Band, and many others. During a recording date for a blues artist, I met John Rollo, an English studio owner, engineer, and producer who had worked with Joe Cocker, the Kinks, Whitney Houston, and many others.
We formed a production partnership. He had a real old-school analog recording studio and was expanding into digital recording which was just beginning to take off. That experience helped move my work forward. By the end of the '90s, I had finished the demos for the new music. I started with four-track cassette recordings, then moved into our 24-track analog room. I finished the demos on my first PC, running Cakewalk.
By then, the world was changing fast. The events of 9/11 and the financial crash of 2008 hit international touring hard. I was fully immersed in the work with Steve Washington and his Slave Family of Funk project — and Robert Lumpkin, who had been part of the story since those early New Jersey days in the '60s, was back in the mix with the Uprising.
Then, in the winter of 2008, I met the woman who would put everything into perspective. She was French Canadian and came to a gig of mine with the Slave project. I visited her in Québec over the Christmas holidays, and I knew I'd found where I belonged.
Long-distance dating was a challenge, but we made it work. The move from New Jersey to Québec happened one step at a time. A friend from Montclair had started a record company selling downloads exclusively. Signing with him gave me a New York label address and a professional release structure — the last piece I needed to commit fully to the move.
The demos were finished, and since we were talking about digital downloads before streaming was a thing, I chose to release them under the title Better Late Than Never. It marked the beginning of my new life in a new country, in another language.
Spoiler alert: we got married, and we're living happily ever after.