Chapter One from my current work in progress, (working title is The Tragedy of Tristan and Isolde) unedited

(The Faux-Forward that proceeds this Chapter is below.  I recommend reading that first to put this Chapter into perspective)
Chapter 1


Interview with Gary Hunter, September 20, 2009.

JF: First of all, I want to say thank you for agreeing to be a part of this book.


GH: (laughs), Yeah, I have to say that I definitely have some reservations about it. I can't believe you found someone willing to publish it.


JF: I had some friends that owed me some favors. (pause) Considering your reluctance to address your time in Tristan and Isolde in prior interviews, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by your willingness to be a part of this.


GH: Yeah well, honestly, my inclination was to tell you to go to hell but I realized that if I didn't, you were only going to get her side of the story.


JF: You're referring to Emmie Ware.


GH: (pause) Yes. (long pause). So what do you want me to do? Should I just start talking about her?


JF: Actually not today. My thought was that you could take me back to how you got into music in the first place.


GH: Jeez, hasn't everyone heard that story a million times?


JF: I'm sure your fans could recite the story as well as you could but there is the possibility of people reading this book who aren't familiar with you.


GH: (laughs) Who the hell would read a book about me that doesn't know anything about me? (pause) Oh well, it's your dime.


JF: So you got started in Orlando?


GH: Yeah, (sarcastic laugh) the music mecca of the known world. I guess it was back in '82 . . .

I was living in a shithole apartment in one of the rare, poor sections of Winter Park, Florida. It wasn't exactly the 'hood by any means but it was definitely lower income. Apartment living was something I was used to. My parents got divorced when I was five and after that, it seemed every year was spent moving from one apartment to another. By sixth grade I had managed to attend five different schools and I never left the Orange County school district. This tended to make me a little more outgoing around people. I was the perennial new kid wherever I went so it was always up to me to make friends.

In 1982, my mother managed to get us into Jackson Square apartments. Again, it was a shithole but its one redeeming quality is that it was in the Winter Park Junior school district. Though my mother was happy, I was like a fish out of water. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by kids who were from well to do, affluent families. I was suddenly the poor, trailer trash kid. Fortunately, I wasn't alone. There were about ten of us that lived in Jackson Square or the neighboring complex Park Green and we kind of banded together. We were, in short, the bad kids. During this time, I read The Outsiders and needless to say, it became my favorite book. I think I read it three times that winter alone.

After school, we would take the old, yellow 383 bus home. To be honest, I'm not sure how it happened. All I remember was that Ricky, my new best friend at the time, told Jimmy and I to come over to his place after school one day because he had something he wanted to show us. Honestly, I don't think Jimmy and I were too curious about it. We probably just figured it was a new 2600 game. Fucking Atari. That stuff was like crack back then.

JF: This is Ricky Sedgfield and Jimmy Kaine?


GH: Yeah. . .

Anyway, we get over there and he pulls out this old LP. It's Genesis' Foxtrot. I'm pretty sure Jimmy and I were initially disappointed but man o man talk about a moment that changes your life. Ricky told us that he had found the album while looking through a box of his father's stuff. Ricky's father died of a drug overdose when Ricky was seven. I remember Ricky telling us that he pulled it out and thought that the cover looked cool. I don't know if you are familiar with the album but on the cover is a drawing of what appears to be a slender woman in a red dress except that where the head would be is the head of a fox. It's definitely something that immediately grabs your attention.

Ricky puts on the album but he doesn't fuck around. He goes straight to Horizons which then is immediately followed by Supper's Ready. I would still say today that I think Supper's Ready is my favorite song of all time and of course, I now know that Supper's Ready is full of all this hidden meaning and is basically a song version of Revelations from the bible. I didn't know any of that shit then but then again, I didn't have to. You could hear Supper's Ready and feel like you were entering another realm. I think it also blew our minds because it's not like we didn't know Genesis. Those guys were regulars on the radio stations back then but the stuff that you heard on the radio hardly sounded like anything off of Foxtrot. It was like it was two different bands. Of course, as we later found it, it really was like two different bands. The threesome that was left after Gabriel and Hackett left the group were more interested in Top 40 hits and didn't seem too concerned about staying loyal to their core audience. Beyond the musical influences that we got from Genesis, we definitely learned other, unintended lessons about keeping our core of fans. I think we've done a pretty good job.

Well after we listened to Supper's Ready we listened to the whole album all the way through. I was shocked when I recognized the song, I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe). I think Jimmy and especially Ricky were surprised when I could sing along to some of it. On Sundays, there was a radio station that would play a lot of classic, oddball, rock songs and that song along with another old Genesis song, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway were somewhat main staples. I think over the next few weeks we wore that LP out. I'm sure it was getting more scratchy and poppy. To be honest, I don't remember who suggested it though I know Ricky always claims credit for it but someone suggested that we form a band. There were a few problems with this suggestion, namely we were three thirteen year olds that couldn't play an instrument between us and didn't have any instruments even if we could play. Still, I guess that was the beginning of Dean's Acid Project.

What we lacked in talent and equipment, we definitely made up in heart. Ricky and I had a couple of old tennis rackets lying around. I don't remember what Ricky's was but mine was one of those old, Wilson T2000 metal tennis rackets. I was lead guitar, Ricky was bass and vocals, and Jimmy was drums. I do remember that Jimmy's drums consisted of a couple of old paint cans, some school books and two of those fat pencils that little kids use when they are learning to write.

For a couple of weeks it was fun and just like a real band, we had our first, real controversy. It turned out that Ricky wasn't much of a singer. After some talk it was agreed that I had the better voice. Ricky then wanted me to give up lead guitar and take the bass but I was pigheaded, I mentally saw myself as a lead guitarist at that point and I wasn't going to give it away. I don't know who finally figured it out but somehow we discovered that bands usually had more than one guitarist and that one guy would play lead while the other played rhythm. This helped us to avoid early disaster. We continued on in our new formation for about another week but you know, honestly, we were thirteen and a little too old to play pretend. For a while we drifted back into the video game scene and then someone, Ricky of course takes credit again, and he's probably right, suggested that we actually try and get our parents to get us real instruments. At first this was met with skepticism. As I stated before, none of us were rich. Musical instruments were the domain of rich kids, not poor kids living in Jackson Square. Ricky did keep talking it up though. He kept saying that they didn't have to be good instruments and that if we agreed to tell our parents that that was all we wanted for Christmas we could maybe swing it. Look, this went over like the proverbial lead balloon. It meant no video games, no new bikes, no cool toys. Jimmy and I were definitely hesitant but Ricky kept hammering, "look you guys, if we make it as a band, we'll be rich. We can buy ourselves all the bikes, games, toys that we can dream of." Eventually Ricky won out and operation, "get instruments for Christmas" was well on its way.

I really give us a lot of credit. We could have easily sold our dream for some crap video game but the three of us stuck to our guns, we leaned heavily on our parents and I think we were shocked when it actually worked. I wound up with one of those crappy, Japanese, Harmony guitars from the 1960s. I loved it though. Ricky got a Global guitar which was basically a 1970s, Sears version of a Stratocaster. His guitar was way cooler than mine. Jimmy got screwed. His parents refused to get him a drum set because of the apartment situation. He wound up with some shitty keyboard and he got signed up for piano lessons. I've never seen an unhappier kid at Christmas time. I think a lot of it was that Jimmy thought we would move on without him. Instead Ricky and I immediately started telling him how the keyboards were cooler and that instead of being Phil Collins, he was going to be Tony Banks. I don't think he liked the idea at first but we were like, "hey man, Phil sucks, Tony's the awesome one." Of course Ricky and I didn't believe that, piano lessons just seemed like the stuff of sissies but really looking back on it, we were dead on. Out of all the members of Genesis, the real heart of that band is Tony Banks. His work on the keys is incredible.

We were definitely on our way then but we did have one more issue to tackle. My mother couldn't afford guitar lessons for me. Fortunately this was rectified because Ricky's mother signed Ricky up for guitar lessons. Ricky went to a half an hour guitar lesson after school every Wednesday. Immediately upon him coming home, Ricky would sit down with me and we would practice together with Ricky literally parroting the stuff he learned that afternoon to me while it was still fresh in his head. After we practiced, I would sit down with a pencil and paper and transcribe all of his tab that his teacher had written for him and make a copy for myself. Looking back on it, this was probably ten times better for Ricky and me than if we both had had guitar lessons. This basically forced us both to practice. It also really forced us both to understand the lesson because I may have a question and Ricky would really have to understand it to explain it to me. When I transcribed, I really had to understand what I was writing. If we both came across something that neither of us understood then Ricky would ask his guitar teacher on the following Wednesday and we would have our answer. I do remember that Ricky and I got into a fight about something stupid at one point. Neither one of us remembers what it was about but the effect was that I was cut off from the guitar lesson that week. Man o man you can bet that I kissed his ass after that to make it up to him. Ricky was the kind of guy who wouldn't take advantage of that. He's still that kind of guy. Anyway, that's it, version number 1063 of how Dean's Acid Project got started.

Faux Forward from my current work in progress, (unedited).

Forward

As a journalist who covers rock bands for various magazines, I'm not used to writing forwards. Please forgive me if it seems a little amateurish. When you write a book, you have a tendency to be excited about it and you are consumed with an overwhelming desire to tell your friends, family, and colleagues about it. To be honest, the initial responses were underwhelming. Most of the reactions I received were along the lines of "why the hell do you want to write a book about Gary Hunter, Emmie Ware and their time together in Tristan and Isolde? There are a thousand other things you could write about that would be far more interesting." Five years ago, I would have readily agreed with them. My interest in Gary Hunter and Emmie Ware came about quite by accident and was built up through a few interviews that I had done through the years.

Like most people my knowledge of Gary Hunter, Emmie Ware, and Tristan and Isolde was limited to the basic facts. Hunter and Ware were members of an early 1990s alternative band with pop overtones named Tristan and Isolde. The band had some commercial success but like a lot of those early 1990s bands, they quickly faded way as the decade came to an end. I knew that Hunter and Ware were an item while they were together. I knew that they frequently sang duets which seemed to be their band's hook and I knew that they had a bad breakup that resulted in Gary Hunter leaving the band.

On the surface, focusing on Hunter and Ware's relationship during their time together in Tristan and Isolde definitely would seem anti-climatic. Of course Hunter is far better known as being the front man and lead guitarist for the modern progressive foursome Dean's Acid Project which has had far greater success than his time in Tristan and Isolde. Most people will rightly assume that Hunter seems to be embarrassed by his time in the pop driven duet though to give the devil his due, T&I's hit, Bad Boy Bad Girl is the highest charting song of Hunter's career and is still a main staple today on many radio stations. Ware, of course, disappeared for quite a while after the eventual break up of Tristan and Isolde but recently found major critical success in her melancholy solo work with the release of last year's Dance of the Blue Girl.

As so many people pointed out to me, a much more interesting book could be written on either Hunter or Ware based on their work outside of Tristan and Isolde. Again, there was a point in which I would have agreed but as I discovered and I think you will too, so much of who Hunter and Ware are is based in that Tristan and Isolde time period. I will tell you, the title is misleading, this book does address Hunter and Ware from their beginnings to where they were at the time the last sentence of this book was written but don't be mistaken, the center of it all emanates from the days of Tristan and Isolde.

Okay, enough about the content. I think once you read the book, you will feel the same way I do about the importance of the T&I time period. I do want to comment on the style of writing. When I first decided to write this book, I debated back and forth about how I was going to write it. Should I write it in a narrative form, basing the various scenes on the many interviews I conducted or should I write it in the style of an article that I would write for a music magazine? I realized that if I went with one direction that the story would lose something and if I went the other direction something else would be lost. It may seem obvious now but what I eventually decided on was to incorporate both styles where it is appropriate. At times, the story will be in interview form and at other times, the story will be a narrative. It should be noted however that almost all the dialogue is backed up by at least two sources and sometimes more than two.

Primarily this book is told from the perspective of Hunter and Ware even though I interviewed several people while writing this book. Though both were interviewed extensively for this book, they were never together in any of the interviews. Since their break up and Hunter's leaving Tristan and Isolde, they have spoken very little to each other through the years and those conversations have been nothing more than superficial.

I also realized early on that to keep the content of the book pure, that I couldn’t tell what I had learned from Hunter to Ware and vice versa. To do so would have literally destroyed the book before it was written. It is only with the publishing of this book that Gary Hunter and Emmie Ware are seeing their different perspectives on events that happened so long ago and had so much of an effect on each other's lives. My silly little hope is that somehow this book will cause a reconciliation between Hunter and Ware. Truthfully, I realize how vain a thought that is. I am not a therapist. My guess is that Hunter will read Ware's account and chalk it up to self-promoting b.s. and that Ware will read Hunter's account and be greatly saddened by it all. If Hunter and Ware find nothing of value in this book's content, maybe you the reader can find some sort of greater message in it regarding forgiveness. (Wow, that's some grandiose bullshit. Skip that, hopefully you just find it to be a good read).



Jake Farris

12/10/2010