What the heck to web surfers everywhere want to know about li’l ole ME?? I grew up in beautiful Middletown, NY and had a damn great time while I was doing it. I went to college in Bethlehem, Pa (near Allentown, if you must know) and just never left (the area, not college.)

I’m guessing, though, that since this website is really about the music you probably don’t give a tinker's cuss about how many Matchbox cars I had or what I did for summer vacation my sophomore year of high school, so I’ll stick to the minutiae of my musical past. Grab a beer and have a seat.
I guess the person most to blame for me being a musician is John Eisenhart, my uncle. He got me started down the dark path of rock and roll at an early age. The rest of my family was also supportive, but he gave me my first electric guitar when I was somewhere around 10, I guess. It was a hand-painted monstrosity, which stirred both wonder and fear inside of me. I eventually traded him for a slightly tamer model and actually started to learn to play the thing. (By the way, I'm now convinced that the afore mentioned hand-painted monstrosity might have been the coolest guitar ever.) John also exposed me to bands like Yes, Genesis and Deep Purple which laid the foundation for most of my taste in music. This was around the same time the rest of the world was discovering radio-friendly Glam Metal, so an immediate basis for being an outcast was formed. I’ve never once regretted it.

Around the same time I absorbed my dad's Fender acoustic, too. Armed with my first two guitars, I proceeded to learn how to play She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain very poorly from a nice Italian man named Sal Scarsafava. I took lessons for probably a year or so, but pre-adolescent patience for practice is not what it could be. I didn’t learn much partly because I didn't practice and partly because I just really didn't know what I wanted to play.

Then I discovered Rush, and it was suddenly all so clear. My folks bought me a book that had the music to all of their songs up through the Signals album, so I learned ALL OF THEM. Once I had gotten my mind around the time changes and Alex Lifeson's bizarre chord voicings, I found it was fairly easy to learn at least the basics of most other songs.

Late in High School I first started listening to Steve Morse, Jethro Tull, Marillion, and Yes among others and realizing that there was A LOT out there for me. I had a band together, but it was a lazy band, so not much happened. We pretty much just made some noise and had some fun. We also played Rush's Red Barchetta at a talent show. It was probably terrible, but it was my first rock gig and I was hooked.
College is actually where my fate was permanently sealed. I played in a couple bands and got to like it more and more. Then I heard Marillion's Seasons End album for the first time and said to myself, if there is music like this in the world, I'm going to be part of making it. That album KILLED me and still does 14 years later.

After College (where I was an English major, by the way) I ended up playing full time in a wedding/dance band called the Starlites. They had been around for a LONG time, were well established and had TONS of gigs. I remember that starting from my third gig with them we played 11 days in a row and probably 250 gigs per year. I stayed with them for a couple years. I learned a lot about how to run a band and also how NOT to run a band. I bought all kinds of cool gear and wrote it off against my taxes. Gotta love the music biz.

Through a bizarre turn of events, I also ended up with a guitar endorsement while I was with the Lites. A company called PBC had opened up near where I lived and I would go and hang out there pretty regularly. (For the tech-geeks out there, PBC was the company that made necks for Ibanez Prestige line for a couple years.) They ended up selling me two hand made high-end guitars with cases for the cost of the parts, which was around $350. I was PSYCHED until a couple years later when I found out that a) they did that for practically everyone, and b) the company was going out of business due to horrible miss-management (i.e. selling guitars at parts cost) and if anything broke on either of the guitars I was up poopie creek because the parts were all custom made. Groovy.

While with the Starlites I recorded a solo album using a 4 track and a dinosaur of a sequencer for drums, keys and bass. The album was called The Life in a Year and contained the original version of Timberline.
It was around this time that I read probably the single most valuable piece of advice I've ever heard relating to music. Steve Morse was talking about making it versus doing what you love. He said that as a musician, you should ALWAYS follow your heart. The odds of you achieving any sort of success are so astronomical that if you follow the formula and make it, you’ll always wonder what would have happened if you had stuck to your guns. If you follow the formula and FAIL, then it’ll be a REAL shot in the nuts (I'm paraphrasing). If you do what you love and succeed, the victory is that much sweeter, and if you do what you love and fail, at least you still believed in what you were doing. That kind of got me thinking
Once I could no longer stand playing the Electric Slide and Hot Hot Hot for a living, I left the Starlites and began doing things for myself and it’s been a slippery slope ever since. Some friends and I formed a band called Twist of Fate. We played for about two years before differing ideas of what we should be striving for pulled us apart. Out of that I got a lot of good experience and a PA system.

In 1997 I formed what became an acoustic duo that I still play in. The group is called RED and we recorded a CD called ORACLE in 2001. I play guitar and sing and Chris Michels plays fiddle and mandolin and sings. We do mostly covers, but the originals are sort of in the vein of the more acoustic end of Jethro Tull and Joe Jackson. (Not Michael's father and not the baseball player. The other one.)

Then I met Greg Jones and everything changed. First we were called Dread Pirate Roberts then Landslide, lost our bass player, found Bill Fox, called the whole mess Pinnacle and recorded an EP called A Man's Reach which we’re all pretty proud of.

I'm also currently playing in a country/rock band called Silverthorne which includes Bill Fox, Mo Jerant and my fabulous wife, Tammy, and I run sound for Jim Robinson's New Jersey Proghouse concert series.
As far as guitar goes, my influences are mostly named Steve: Howe, Morse, Vai, Rothery and Wilson. The non-Steve influences are Eric Johnson, Albert Lee and John Eisenhart.

My rig is absolutely RIDICULOUS. I work at a music store, which has done nothing to ease my guitar fetish. I currently own somewhere near 20. Sheesh. I'm currently using a Line 6 Vetta head and cabinets and also a Roland GR-33 guitar synth. I have two electrics with Piezo bridges for getting acoustic sounds live, so they split out to a separate volume pedal and a Zoom 504II (Cheap and crappy, but effective).

The complete discography/ bandography minus the stuff I'm ashamed of is as follows:
1989-1990 Mr. Brown
1990-1993 Different Strings
1993 A Marketable Manifestation of a Collective Imagination (Different Strings)
1994-1996 The Starlites
1995 The Life in a Year (solo album)
1996-1997 Twist of Fate
1996-1997 Beef
1997-present RED
1998 Some Just Sleep (solo album)
1998-2001 Dread Pirate Roberts/Landslide
2001 Oracle (RED)
2001 Everything To Excess (solo album)
2002-present Pinnacle
2003 A Man’s Reach (Pinnacle)
2003-present Silverthorne