माय मुसिक Story

My name is John Kammerer. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah in the U.S. I have been doing music since I was pretty young. I like to record music more than play shows. I did the whole working band routine from 1992-1997 full time in the Intermountain West. It was fun, but honestly not very productive.

On February 12, 1997 I played my last show. I tell everyone the same schpeil - like if you loved to make pies. You made pies all the time. It was fun, all kinds, and so you decide to go into business making pies and all the sudden, one day, as you stare at the gazillionth pie, you say to yourself “Dear God if I have to look at another pie I am gonna throw up!”

All the fun went out of it for me. It was a job. A job that kicked your ass 5 nights a week and you barely made enough to pay rent on the rehearsal studio, cover the costs of playing out, and try to hold some semblance of a life.

So I walked away.

And for 10 years I was like the AA guy who can’t go into a bar because the temptation to drink would be too great. I avoided listening to and playing music, even being around it, as much as I could. I knew that one good whiff of that rush that you get when you are playing your set and that feeling, no use explaining, because if you can dig it you know its like trying to describe a sunset, you just gotta be there at that particular time.

So I ramble, a little over a year ago my old friend Mike (guess maybe I should not use his last name without asking, eh?) Mike was the guitar player that I started playing with in late 1991. My college roommate, Steve, knew Mike from high school. Steve and I were college roommates and good friends. He had just started playing bass. I’d been ’playing’ guitar since I was 8, but not ’really playing’ until I was about 14. Basically the minute I realized that a very average looking kid could get girls’ attention with writing a song.

And I sang. I really, really loved to sing. I feel like all my childhood was spent mumbling songs. That probably sounds ridiculous. I was always singing. And I was really into Prince. I was at my Grandma’s house when I heard the song on the trailer for Purple Rain on TV. It was like a bomb had gone off in my soul. Funny thing, to me is, I can’t remember what song? Regardless, I was really flippin impressed.

All the sudden my lure to music, just because I thought it was cool, became like an astral tractor beam. I went and got the song book and dove in with all the passion, and tunnel vision, of youth.

So of course I listened to, played, enjoyed all sorts of other bands’ music, it was the early-mid eighties. It was heaven for a kid in suburban Utah . Music was the perfect release, hobby , whatever for me. I made bands with my friends, wrote some songs, learned some covers, played at places (ie other friends’ houses when their parents were away and a party going on) I went to college for 2 years, but I vividly remember thinking “College? Pfft… screw that. I’m gonna be a fetchin rock star!” So I met Mike at the end of my sophomore year . Mike and Steve and I played at Mike’s apartment. Mike had been in a band and had WAY more experience than either of us. We finally got a drummer named Tony and we got a gig.

A real life, honest-to-true gig!

At the Perseus Opera house. It was a hollow, concrete basement in an old building in downtown Salt Lake City. We were to open for a band called “Hate times nine”. I don’t like labels, but let’s just say that the crowd were primarily people I wouldn’t want to have over for potstickers and beer. And we had to drag asshat Tony to the show because he was literally hunkered down in a corner shivering in fear.

We got another drummer. My friend since 4th grade, Brad. We started a group called “Stone Pony”. We had nofa king clue that there was a Linda Rondstandt (sp?) and the Stone Ponies - Brad said he went to a club in Jersey that Bruce Springsteen owns and it was called the Stone Pony. It was Stone Pony with a chess Rook (the horse guy) and we tough we were just about as bad ass as we could be (I’ll post some pics)

Steve left after a while and we got the biggest musical influence ever dropped in our lap by the gods.

Sherman Smith, although he never let anyone call him that, we called him Jamie. Jamie Starr. He told me his name as “Jamie” and I said (because of Prince) “Jamie Starr?” and he said yes. We all took it at face value, he wasn’t being deceptive, he just didn’t like his name, and it stuck. Jamie had been to the music institute of technology in Hollywood. He was WAY better than any of us. Way.

So we began writing a whole new body of songs. We already had about 40 or so. Some pretty good, some not, but we could play all night with our own material. Even when we satiated the crowd by agreeing to play a song by -band-name-goes-here- but saying it was off their brand new album (always) ‘Grandma Unchained” and playing one of our own. We played covers, but we tried to do them our own way. But when Jamie came along it was taken up a few notches.

We began playing out full time. Like 5 nights a week. And when we weren’t playing we were rehearsing, sending out kits, working on getting shows, you know the drill. We got good, IMHO, and we played EVERYWHERE we could.

That was our downfall. Even when we got a new drummer, Rob, who could play at Jamie’s level, we still never took any time to stop and smell the roses. When we could record, we tried to record ‘records’ not demos, meaning instead of applying our limited resources to getting one song perfect, we tried to make 10 or 12 perfect. Big mistake, in retrospect.

I’m going to post it all here, if they will let me. That band, with me, Mike, Jamie, and Rob was called “Dolphin” - I lobbied for “The Groovy Dolphins” but everyone else thought that was too corny. If I put in a band name here I am gonna use that!

We played until Jamie got a lung transplant. We recorded a demo, “Polarity” of about 10 songs with the idea that when Jamie got back we would finish it. Jamie never made it back. Jamie had cystic fibrosis and had lived a hell of a lot longer than his doctors had predicted. He was in his 30s. There is more to that story, but I won’t tell it here.

So Mike and I got a friend of his, Sean, and a guy named Derrick who played bass and sang and we formed a band called Swallow. We played quite a bit, but nothing like we had before. I played a show with the guys on Feb 12th 1997 and then told them the next day I was done. I was all burnt out. Life can be a sucky bitch sometimes.

At the time I was dating a girl named Melinda. She was the one for me and we wanted to have a family. I didn’t want to play in bars and rehearse every night and record every chance I could get and go into the whole family thing like that. That would have sucked. Our son was born in April of 1998 and we also have 2 daughters. I told myself, and I am not trying to put myself on a cross here, I was SICK of music, that I should give it 10 years and see what the gods bring me.

I’d lost track of Mike and he tracked me down in early 2007 (it was eerily odd, like 10 years to the week) and we hung out a bit, but I lost his number and he lost mine and we just fell out of touch. Mike came to my house in February of 2008 and ‘popped in’ - we chatted, and decided to play ‘just for fun’ the next - like - Tuesday - the 12th of February. You may find this stupid, but I think things happen in cycles. Ups and downs if you will.

I talked my wife into letting me get a little 8 track recorder and we’ve been making some songs. I’ve not got much equipment, so I have to improvise a lot, but its taken me back to my roots. Hot summer nights in my uncle’s back bedroom in Albany, California recording my guitar into the left channel and my mic into the right of my ghetto blaster and trying to mix it to sound good .

So that’s my story. I’m 36, married, happily, three cool kids, have a full time job, just getting back into music. I can’t imagine ever being into it as much as I was, but I also have to be honest with myself and admit that it truly does make me happy and fulfilled in a weird, spiritual, deepsoul way that is pretty cool.

~j

John Kammerer
Aka Vince DelGato
Salt Lake City Republic of Utah
Vincedelgato@gmail.com

BANDS:
Stone Pony - SLC, UT 1992-1994
Dolphin - SLC, UT 1994-1996
Swallow - SLC, UT 1996-1997

PROJECTS:
With Mike Doran as 7-Below 1994
With Jamie Starr as New Karma 1995
Misc.

I like to do vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion. I can’t say I am an expert at any of them, but I like playing everything myself. I love playing with other people, and am playing with Mike right now once a week, but I like to go fast when an idea hits me, and I can’t write out the music, so I have to try to record it while the idea’s in my head. Dig?