Musically Speaking! Biography Valhalla While it wasn't my first band, Valhalla was certainly my first successful band! Sure there were plenty of basement and garage projects, but Valhalla was the first time I got to taste what it was like to actually have a great sounding band and get paying gigs! It's been a long time (longer than I care to admit), and the beginnings of Valhalla are a little hazy. I seem to recall that Lisa may have been trying to put something together with either Andy or John at the time. Lisa and I knew each other from the party scene at the time and at some point we talked about putting it together. In addition to vocals, Lisa was an accomplished guitar player in fact, alternating leads both in performance and style with Andy. To me Andy was always the blisteringly fast lead player with technical chops. Quiet on the outside, but when he picked up his guitar, things hit the fan! Lisa's style was different, in that she made that guitar sing, often with slow, deliberate, note bending power ...a perfect compliment to each other! Punching out the bottom with a vengence, was John on Bass! With an evil grin he could switch from extraordinarily heavy bass chords that would shake the house, to a speaker popping jazz-blues riff that was a blast to jam to. An all around good guy that made his bass and my drums sound like one. The core of Valhalla went together pretty effortlessly as a foursome, but we needed a powerful front person to round out the vocals. Initially we had a female front person, which enabled us to do some great harmony work with Lisa's Heart tunes! For reasons I don't recall, our first front person didn't last long. Little did we know, that it would be for the better! Enter Glen, the fifth and final member of Valhalla. Glen's raw, powerful vocals were the perfect contrast against Lisa's killer Wilson'esqe voice. Put the two of them together and it was wicked rapture! We were all pretty young back then, but we had a serious blast for just about 2 years. In fact, we may have been one of the youngest bands getting paying gigs back then! Probably pissed off the current bands of the day, I'm sure! While the band did break up eventually, it was on a high note. We never fell into that ugly place that a lot of bands fall into. Lisa and Andy both moved out of town, and while John and I moved on to different bands, fate would find us jamming together on more than one occasion in coming years. Glen left music altogether, as far as I know, but I bump into him a couple times a year! It's usually unspoken, but there's a certain reminisce in the air when we meet. Most likely because we were the two oldest members and probably feel the farthest from our youth! This page has actually been empty for a long time, and I have to say, the inspiration to get it completed is two fold. Through some pretty unlikely aligning of the cosmos, I re-established contact with Andy. Exchanging emails every couple of months with the promise of eventually hooking up for a beer or two. And of course, my renewed committment to launching what I call the final project.		The Greatest Lies of Rock n Roll I have to thank Lisa for this one. She gave me a page torn from a magazine one day at practice, and apparantly it was never discarded after all these years. I found it the other day in a scrap book and thought I share some of the one liners I thought sounded most familiar over the years! The booking is definate. Don't worry, we can fix it in the mix. The show starts right at 10. We'll have your tickets for you at the door. Don't worry it sounds fine out front. The stage mix will be fine, you'll hear everything. The club will let us use their house PA and lights. We'll have it fixed before the show. If it breaks we'll fix it free. The place will be packed. Have your agent call, we'll book you again Yeah, I put it on the truck. Someone will be there early to let you in. I'm with the band. The band drinks free. I got someone to work the door tonite. We'll have plenty of time for a sound check. I am singing on key - there's something wrong with the PA. I just use this little amp for practice, I have twin Marshall stacks for when we play out. Yeah, I've been running sound for years. Got a suggestion for this column, drop me an E!