Musicians that moonlight in other genres

[Progbear]

John Lawton’s day job:



John Lawton’s moonlight gig:



Actually, all of the Lucifer’s Friend members did moonlight jobs, mostly as crack musicians for the Europa exploitation label. Some of them (keyboardist Peter Hecht for sure) spent time in James Last’s band.

Does Oscar-nominated actress Amy Madigan getting her start as singer/mallet percussionist in the pop-soul trio Jelly count?



And how about Julian Jay Savarin, musician and author? He originally tried to blend the two, his Lemmus science fiction trilogy becoming the basis for two albums. But he eventually abandoned music and science fiction, going into the action thriller genre.

[Rarebird]

Ton Scherpenzeel wrote music for a youth theater company and worked with a Dutch comedian.
Mathias Ulmer works with German singer/songwriter Heinz Rudolf Kunze.

[Lopez]

Not quite different music genres, but Sneaky Pete Kleinow, late steel player for the Flying Burrito Brothers, had a simultaneous career as a stop-motion animator. He worked on Davey and Goliath, Gumby, the Mrs. Butterworth syrup commercial, and one of the Star Wars movies. He wrote the Gumby theme song.

[at least 100 dead]

And let’s not forget world savior Bono Vox, who finds relief in Africa whenever the sad remains of U2 are not touring EnormoDomes® the world over.

[gryphs also]

Who knew the lead singer of the New York Dolls would "clean up" to become this

[walt]

Guitarist Nick Didkovsky(Doctor Nerve,Bone,etc) has written/created/programmed music software(JMSL,MaxScore).He's quite well known in that field.

[bob_32_116]

Perhaps the most successful "crossover" artist: Professor Brian Cox. Formerly a member of D:Ream, now a world-renowned astrophysicist and TV presenter.

[SteveSly]

Salem Hill guitarist / bassist / keyboardist /vocalist Michael Dearing makes his living playing bass for blues musician Stacy Mitchhart. He was also a member of country superstar Gretchen Wilson’s band for a while when she hit the big time a while back.

[Dana5140]

For many musicians, music is what they do for a living (duh!). Told this story in another thread, but it bears repeating. I used to work for Showcase Jazz at Michigan State back in the mid 1970s. We put on a show with Roscoe Mitchel and his band, featuring guitarist Spencer Barefield, and pianist Gary Schunk. The music was thorny and avant-garde, and way, way out, as you might expect from Roscoe. Later that year I got married and we hired a wedding band to play all the hits of the day. The pianist was Gary Schunk. And he played the music of the day, quite well.

Musicians need to work and to pay the bills.

[Burley Wright]

Herb Schildt, keyboardist for Starcastle, has written a boatload of programming textbooks, the ones I've used are quite good.

http://www.amazon.com/Herbert-Schild...6378663&sr=1-1

[Progbear]

Not quite different music genres, but Sneaky Pete Kleinow, late steel player for the Flying Burrito Brothers, had a simultaneous career as a stop-motion animator. He worked on Davey and Goliath, Gumby, the Mrs. Butterworth syrup commercial, and one of the Star Wars movies. He wrote the Gumby theme song.

So I have Sneaky Pete to blame for my childhood nightmares! Those Mrs. Butterworth commercials were creepy!



Speaking of musicians moonlighting in other genres, the piano on this song was played by Jordan Rudess:

[GuitarGeek]

Talking about TV commercials reminds me that Suzanne Ciani created the sound of the bottle being opened and poured into a glass that was used in a number of Coca Cola ads in the 70's. She did with a Buchla modular synth. SHe actually did a lot of TV commercial type things, a lot of which I didn't know about until fairly recently. One that I remember she did (there's actually a video on Youtube showing the "making of" of this one ad) is the one with the "talking" dishwasher from around 1984, where she programmed all these sort of R2-D2 style sounds into her Synclavier, and in the ad, there's subtitles showing what the dishwasher is "telling you" about itself. She also did the Columbia Pictures "fanfare" music that played at the beginning of all their movies from the late 70's and early 80's. And she did the music and voices for Xenon, which was the first pinball machine to use digitally recorded sound, and which was the subject of a big feature on the PBS NOva show. She also did the sound effects for Meco's version of the Star Wars theme (ya know, the disco thing).

Mind you, most of this was all before she started making her own records, so maybe this doesn't constitute moonlighting.

[GuitarGeek]

And how about Julian Jay Savarin, musician and author? He originally tried to blend the two, his Lemmus science fiction trilogy becoming the basis for two albums. But he eventually abandoned music and science fiction, going into the action thriller genre.

You talking about Juilan's Treatment? Were those records ever issued on CD? I used to have a mix tape my old penpal sent me back in the 90's that had some of their stuff on it, but I've never seen actually seen the records anywhere.

[Rarebird]

And how about Julian Jay Savarin, musician and author? He originally tried to blend the two, his Lemmus science fiction trilogy becoming the basis for two albums. But he eventually abandoned music and science fiction, going into the action thriller genre.

In the Netherlands we had an author of fantasy Maryson, who did 2 albums with music for 2 of his books. One has Thijs van Leer as a guest.

[Lebofsky]

How about Matt Lebofsky, who currently plays keyboards in MoeTar and Secret Chiefs 3, and bass in miRthkon, and everything in Bodies Floating Ashore, but also played in various indie pop bands, and still gigs in various wedding/corporate party bands doing pop covers from the 60's to modern day? Oh and by day he is the computer geek maintaining the world's biggest distributed supercomputing project and world's biggest search for extraterrestrial intelligence (at UC Berkeley, not the SETI institute which gets all the attention). He also was recently seen doing baking shifts on a food truck and generating levels for the iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge.

- Matt

[progeezer]

^^^ And because of this mega-involvement in all of these musical & techie things, Matt has a staff of servants at home to deal with the plebeian crap.

Seriously, do you have enough f'ng hours in a day, ML?

[Jay G]

Garth Brooks recording rock as Chris Gaines
Ritchie Blackmore as a renaissance musician
Tons of rock artists doing big band side projects

[Progbear]

You talking about Juilan's Treatment? Were those records ever issued on CD? I used to have a mix tape my old penpal sent me back in the 90's that had some of their stuff on it, but I've never seen actually seen the records anywhere.

A Time Before This was credited to Julian's Treatment, but he released Waiters on the Dance under his own name. A Time Before This...Plus features all but one track from Waiters... as bonuses. Waiters... later came out as its own CD (it's a short album, barely over half an hour). My copy of Waiters... is on vinyl, 80s reissue on 5 Hours Back (smooth cover unlike the textured original).

I also own the Lemmus books. They suck, BTW, a mega-cheesy space-opera attempt to reconcile the Biblical record.

[klothos]

Er, if you play music for a living and you're not a famous rock star, don't play in a full-time symphony orchestra or not a jazz artist famous enough to do that full time, you HAVE TO be able to play convincingly in several genres.

Amen

...Being a Chameleon is what has kept me working all these years

[Jerjo]

play in a full-time symphony orchestra

I read this article about a percussionist auditioning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ye gads, what an ordeal.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2012/0...stra-audition/

Here's an update on it from NPR

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptiveca...on-of-his-life

[Onomatopoeic]

These two musicians both moonlighted as remodel / finish carpenters: Arthur Brown and Jimmy Carl Black.

[bigbassdrum]

Ronnie Wood - painting
http://gallery.ronniewood.com/prints-recent.html

[bob_32_116]

A Time Before This was credited to Julian's Treatment, but he released Waiters on the Dance under his own name. A Time Before This...Plus features all but one track from Waiters... as bonuses. Waiters... later came out as its own CD (it's a short album, barely over half an hour). My copy of Waiters... is on vinyl, 80s reissue on 5 Hours Back (smooth cover unlike the textured original).

I also own the Lemmus books. They suck, BTW, a mega-cheesy space-opera attempt to reconcile the Biblical record.

I thought Lemmus Vols 1 & 2 were good, at least as good as bloody Star Wars. With Vol 3 he seemed to lose his way, as though he was only completing a trilogy to fulfil a contract.

As for the music, I saw Waiters On the Dance at the time of its release but I have never heard the music and have no idea what it's like.

[bob_32_116]

Ronnie Wood - painting
http://gallery.ronniewood.com/prints-recent.html

and Joni Mitchell also paints. And Leonard Cohen wrote poetry and at least one novel.

Linda Perhacs has released only two albums, 44 years apart. She made a career as a dental technician. Hardly "moonlighting"; it would be more accurate to say she moonlighted as a musician.

[trurl]

Micheal Dearing from Salem Hill has gigged for years in some big country touring band- it might be Gretchen Wilson but I'm not sure.