My Musical History Part 4 -- #Blaugust2021 Day 13

Part 4 -- Enter the MMO, the Elixirists, and the Future

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Playing several years of Everquest and World of Warcraft kind of changed everything for me. Video Games became king in my life. Who had time to write music when there were giant virtual worlds that would gladly absorb every last ounce of spare time I had? You mean I can be social and play games at the same time? Yes please! 

How to explain? I don't know if I can fully explain it. At the time I was writing emails and forum posts about games and then journaling my adventures became kind of a big deal to me. It was absolutely revolutionary. Yes, I would still mess around on my music software, but now writing about playing video games kind of . . . just . . . took over. 

The year before I started playing Wizard101 I also started to learn how to beatbox, and I was beatboxing like crazy all the time. I think people at work were pretty sick of me beatboxing in the hallways. whoops. I tried incorporating beatbox into electronic music, but it wasn't really working out. Perhaps that's because I never really was that good at it. Jus' sayin'. (I think the very first wizard101 theme remix I did had some beatboxing in it -- but that wasn't MY beatboxing, it was sampled from someone else.)

I made a whole string of videos that showcased me beatboxing and playing around with my kids called the "Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show." These were all done at 2x speed to amplify the crazy part of the crazy stuff show. Every once in a while, I'll still pull out the DVD I made back in 2007 of our Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show, and the kids and I will get a kick from the 20 or so 3-minute-long segments we made together.

Then 2008 happened! I started playing Wizard101 and writing about the game on this very blog and the words just came pouring out of me. I threw myself into the community and started writing little podcast segments for a Wizard101-themed podcast known as Ravenwood Radio -- hosted by none other than Steve and Leala (Yes, THAT Leala)!  These segments often turned musical with my background in music, and I ended up making a number of strange parody songs about Wizard101. I even wrote the theme song for Ravenwood Radio! I was all in.

My greatest parody song shall always be A Day Without 101. 

It's hard to believe this is approaching 140k views. I still have people mention this parody to me on Twitter to this day. Crazy. And really, this just started out as being a segment for Ravenwood Radio when Selena Gomez was added to the game, but I made a full video, and it kind of took off.

I have a folder on my cloud storage with a bunch of old wizzy jams. Maybe someday I'll make a collection of them and put them up on Bandcamp as well in a Wizard101 themed album. In the meantime, you can always check out my Parody Playlist on YouTube. This Katy Perry parody never got the love it deserved. Jus' sayin.  Uber Wife's rap at the end is fire.

One of my favorite moments as a Wizard101 player was when my Grizzleheim remix was put up on the ringtone page of Wizard101 for all players to download. It felt epic. That link no longer exists on the webpage, but still . . . it was pretty great at the time. I love putting energy into video game communities and doing this with music is right up my ally.

But it wasn't only about videogames and parodies . . . Around 2010-2011, I was contacted by a guy that was in a band that I opened up for one time back in the 90s during my industrial phase.  This was was my old friend Brian Jenson. We met for lunch and had a great time talking about the old days. He was looking to collaborate, so we formed a little virtual band together and wrote songs and back and forth very slowly for several years under the band name "The Elixirists."  

My favorite song from The Elixirists: Time Creeps Up

The Elixirists aimed to be be in a genre somewhere near the feeling of trip hop, electro funk, industrial and generally in the Electronic music world.  One person described our sound as a newer version of Severed Heads. That's actually not a bad comparison. I used to listen to Severed Heads in high school.

It was Brian that convinced me to switch from Acid Music to Ableton, and the hope was that we would be able to collaborate more closely together. We made a full album's worth of music but never released those songs as a collection for some reason. I went ahead and uploaded them to Bandcamp as a collection.

Unfortunately Brian would end up taking his life on January 1st, 2018. Brian wanted a recording contract more than anything in the world. He tried for several years with no success. I remember one time he told me that if he didn't have a recording contract by the time he was 45, that was it, he was going to take his life. He didn't want to be old and, I suppose, unsuccessful in his eyes.

An old picture of Brian standing with Howard Jones and Howard Jones' Daughter

I tried my best to be a good friend and a positive influence in his life, but his mind was made up. We had emailed weekly back and forth to each other for 8 years and talked about all our hopes and dreams. No amount of talking on my part was going to change his mind, and he avoided the topic whenever I'd bring it up. He took his own life. It was tragic, and I was devastated. He never said goodbye to me, and I had a hard time finding music inside me after that. 

Fast forward to the present . . . 

My life as a rock star wannabe had become nothing more than a dusty, distant 30-year-old memory up until a few months ago when a great guy named Adam Terry contacted me over Instagram holding both my Darkest America and Freeze tapes from back in 1990. "Are you this Purdue?" 

Now THAT's a rare sight you don't see . . . ever!

It's like everything from back then unlocked all over again, and we had a great conversation about the good old days. With Adam's help, I may actually release some old music of mine on his label, FountainAVM! But that's still an announcement in the making.

The real help from Adam has been feeling like someone actually cared about me as an artist enough to reach out and help me dust off the old tapes. While there may be a lot of sadness and regret from the past, his simple act of reaching out kind of unplugged so many things that I had bottled up over the years. That alone was appreciated.

Who knows . . . I may just have another tape or two of music inside me still. I don't think my musical journey is quite done yet, regardless of any outcomes. 

Here's to the future!

Thanks for reading along with my musical history. There's still a lot of blanks here and things I missed, but I'd need to pen an actual autobiography instead of 4 blog posts to really get it all down, and since I've still got lots of living to do, now isn't the right time to write a full autobiography. ;)

Happy Dueling!