Allen Spaulding: songs, guitar, vocals, keyboards, programming, engineering, mixing, and mastering.
Influences
Lou Reed, Velvet Underground, The Clash, Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Thomas Dolby, Neil Young, Television, Tom Waits, Ricky Lee Jones, Kate Bush, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Rolling Stones, Soundgarden, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, A.R. Rahman, Prince, Aerosmith, Stevie Wonder, Throwing Muses.
I found my first guitar in a trash can on my newspaper route in when I was 15. My older brother taught me to play a few things. I picked up stuff from records: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams. I started playing in a band, The Boxcars, during senior year in high school. I loved it! Music. People interested in music. Hip social scenes. At first I was heavily inspired by British Punk: The Clash, Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers. In college, the '80's college radio boom had a major impact on me. Lots of great music on non-commercial radio. The hip scene got a lot more hip. Lots of these bands came to town: REM, Replacements, Dream Syndicate, Bangles, Concrete Blonde, We eventually changed our name to Western Chapter. We met with some success playing radio station sponsored shows, sometimes opening for bands we loved. After a while Western Chapter broke up. Three of us reformed, as Ruth and the Hypocrites. The music in Ruth was a lot more experimental. Breaking the mold was the goal. After a hiatus, another singer/songwriter joined us as front man, and then another guitarist. That quintet became Kindergarten, although we changed the name with almost every show. The new singer and new guitarist and I moved to Santa Cruz, California to form Zuzu's Petals. This was a few years after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. We had some good times, recorded a nice set of tunes at the Music Annex in Palo Alto. Zuzu's Petals fell apart due to financial mismangament on the part of the singer who was funding the whole recording. When I went back to college, I began home computer recording. The Adventures of Johnny Pavement was the result of a year’s work during graduate school. Artistically, it is quite different from anything I've done in the past.
