From There to Here: A Brief History of Soft Charisma
(as recalled by Scott Kingsley Clark)
Most of my life, I begged my mother for a drumset. I used any tabletop, desk, and wall that I could get a hold of to reap my havoc through. It all started when I moved to Phoenix with my mom and brother.
We moved to Phoenix, AZ in 1994 during "Winter Break" as they called it in Phoenix and "Christmas Break" as I remember from Carrollton, TX where we lived from the time of my birth. My fond memories of the move include getting to honk a trunk horn all on my own and building a humongous box fort with all the boxes (big, small, large and tall!) from the move -- But let's get to the music!
It was 3rd grade, I was 9 years old, and my brother went into the orchestra program for violin. I had piano lessons for a few years off and on before the move, so I had a faint background in music already. It was time for me to answer the question of whether or not I wanted to play in the orchestra or band. Those horns seemed so loud and fun, I couldn't resist. I joined up in 4th grade on the Trumpet. I spent about a year and a half on the Trumpet and I was really getting the hang of it. Then allergies and mild asthma set in. It became difficult to play the Trumpet, so I switched to Percussion. The band director (and computer teacher at the time), Steve Edman, recommended that my studies focus on mallet percussion since I had a beginning understanding of piano theory. I was pretty much in mallet percussion from 5th grade onto 10th grade.
After 7th grade, we moved again. This time it was Euless, TX that we called home. I joined up with the Euless Junior High School percussion department and began rudimentary studies of the snare drum.
From there, we moved to Irving, TX and I started high school. At MacArthur High School, I was in the band program for 2 years, while I and everyone else could easily say it was for a year and 1/4. On paper, it was 2 years because of the weird scheduling system we were on at the time.
During High School is when I began to study the drumset. Although my first class performance was enough to make it so I wouldn't play the drumset ever again in class, I managed to finally convince my mom to get a drumset for me to play at home. I played that drumset every day for hours. It was originally in my room, but after a while we moved it to the garage.
Now I was no
Buddy Rich, but I was beginning to make some sense of the mystery behind all the different parts of the drumset. I joined up with other musicians in Irving just fooling around with sounds and songs. I started my first album which was me REALLY fooling around on the drumset and singing on-top of it using a 4-track Tascam tape recorder. I'm very protective of that album and as I find that people still own it I gradually steal them from existence.
Eventually, fellow Irving musician Andrew Savage decided to give me a shot with his band
The Skankaholix. At the same time a bunch of us from the Drama department decided to make up a story band called
The Spuds. We were apparently the direct decendants of Irish potato farmers who were the original punk rockers. You can hear a couple of the songs that still survive from both of them that I've found (MP3s/CDs are lost or broken over the years).
After The Skankaholix played the Irving scene for a while, our musical tastes changed and we formed the
Five Pointers. At the end of High School, I was off to the University of North Texas. When we all graduated, we drifted out of Irving and the band disbanded after being inactive for a few months. Andrew later formed
Teenage Cool Kids in Denton. I joined up with
Obsession With Depression which eventually changed it's name to
The Affected around 2005/2006. The band was headed by Travis Jones and disbanded to form
Analog Eyes which I bowed out from to focus on my solo music. Travis Jones later went on to form the band
'A' with his fiancee, April.
My time at the University of North Texas was to be ground zero of the next chapter of my music.
Labels: albums, history, music
