The Opening Act

This blog is about me--or rather, it's about me as I was, have been, and hope to always be. I don't plan on talking business or my professional life, except where they intersect with my leaning into the hard rock/heavy metal scene. Funny. Back in 1983, when I had issues of Circus and Hit Parader and Creem piling in drifts around my room, when I was screeching "Aces High" (Iron Maiden, Powerslave) to air guitar or puttering around in a t-shirt for some obscure band called Metallica, my parents promised me it wouldn't last and I'd grow out of it. Grow out of it into what--a Stepford wife? Anyway, they were wrong. 31 years of wrong as of 2014.

I've been in and out of more metal experiments (I can't rightly call us groups) than a Gideon Bible salesman has been in and out of Motel 6 units, but I'm no musician. Okay, I do kind of play the piano, and I do know my way around a fret board. But I'm more a lyricist/performance artist type. At the moment I'm playing gigs with Rage of Bettie Page, which is a side project of my more regular group Eden Evicted. And none of it is really getting much play, which was our plan. The Internet has made sharing music as banal as bananas, so my theory is to keep playing live gigs without recording precisely because people have to actually be present to hear it. Maybe it sounds idiotic, but it's my free time anyway, and besides, there's something to playing music for music's sake.

If you're lucky, I might get to talking about Sebastian Bach...

This is me circa 1988 as I was rendered and painted for the cover art of Skid Row's second album, Slave to the Grind. Aside from the blonde hair it's a pretty good likeness. Well, and the boots and the leather bikini. All that was artistic license. Time is a cruel bitch mistress.

Anyway, as I was graduating high school in '89, I could have taken one of two paths. One was to go full throttle into music--if not in a band, then as a journalist, a publicist, that sort of thing. Or, I could have done what I did, grab my scholarship, kiss my family, and head off to college. I definitely recommend the experience if you're going to be studying actual subjects, like history, science, language, and so forth. Don't go to learn a vocation. Put some knowledge into your brain. It feels good.

Around that time I found my one and only metal goddess nom de plume--Roxxi Gunnes. Because of a penpal ad placed in Metal Edge Roxxi enjoyed several years of infamy. In retrospect I'm not happy with the Gunnes part, with "Gunnes" sounding like "guns" and all. But back in the day, remember Guns N' Roses and LA Guns and maybe it was more of a metaphor--and besides, the spelling came from the designer of my senior prom dress.

That's really all for starters. I'm writing from the rotten pit of a bunch of messes converging and I need to go make a fraction of a dent. Protect it.