"Sarah
Rubow was a precocious flute student of mine for many years, and
she actually began performing music professionally at age 13. She was kind
of shy about it, but never complained about getting paid afterwards, considerably
more that what her babysitting jobs paid.
When I arranged a concert at The United
States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, it was to be a full blown
affair for the cadets: big PA, my own instrumental music, and some rock
and roll. Knowing the audience would be a bunch of guys, I asked Sarah
if she would like to get a couple of friends together and learn some backround
vocals to my pop songs. Again, she said okay and The Brain Revolutionaries
were born.
The Brain Revolutionaries were a smash
hit at the USAFA. We continued to give concerts with a variety of other
singers joining in with Sarah. Scheduled to play at my high school reunion,
another piano student of mine,
RUTI MOR had been begging me to
join our group. Ruti learned all the songs by heart in a remarkably short
time, and did a fantastic job. At one point during our performance, I broke
a guitar string, and while I changed it I told Ruti "Do something!"
She started making up this hilarious and bizarre version of "The Sound
of Music" that had all of us in stitches. She was great!!! Now at this
point I must confess, doesn't EVERYBODY at some point want to be a ROCK
and ROLL STAR??? Well, me too. Even though I had spent my whole life
composing and performing instrumental music, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and
all kind of modern stuff, I decided it would be fun to sing for a while.
Consequently, we spent the next YEAR in the studio recording Amygdala Brainbites.
We did a few gigs after that, including one interesting live radio show,
and a 30 minute public television show, which today remains the most often
repeated program in the history of that station. By the way, we got our
name when Sarah and I visited T.D.A. Lingo's Dormant Brain Research and Development Laboratory. Lingo, who had has own NBC TV show singing folk songs on
the late 1950's, said "...blah blah blah something....the brain revolutionaries..."
and Sarah blurted out "That would be a great name for our band!", and so
it was.
Postscript: Ruti Mor graduated from
Columbia University in 2003, now lives in Manhattan, Sarah lives about
ten blocks away from my present location. I'm hoping one day they'll both
come by and put down a few more vocal tracks with their lovely voices.... (!)
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