Music History

Part 1 -- A Disco Kid and a Drummer

I started writing music when I was a Junior in High School, when I was a Sophomore in High School, when I was a little kid. It all started with a piano tune I plunked out downstairs on our old timey out-of-tune piano in the basement, and my 8-year-old-self would wail out "Where you going Mr. Goodbar! No body knows who you are!" I think I was singing about the Goodbar candy bar? It could also be that there was a film in the theaters called "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" that my parents said I couldn't see, which made it all the more mysterious to me. Regardless, I still remember singing that line.

It's kind of strange. I grew up liking Lipps Inc, the BeeGees, Abba, and all kinds of disco'y goodness on the local radio and American Bandstand. Yes, I watched American Bandstand. Those early electronic sounds and disco beats were what it was all about for me. Sure, I mean, who didn't love Rock You Like a Hurricane by the Scorpions when it came out, and I had my levi jacket full of rock band pins . . . but I gotta be honest about my early love for disco and pop. Eventually that would lead to a love of New Wave and Post-Modern music. I remember being completely blown away the first time I heard People Are People by Depeche Mode on the radio. It was completely different and new. I loved it.

Disco kid on a banana bike, Let's go!

Anyway, when I turned 10, I took a year of piano lessons and absolutely hated it. I couldn't relate to it at all and never got to the point where I could sight read music. Playing the piano just wasn't my thing much to my mother's disappointment.

The next year I switched to drum lessons, and, much to my mother's new-found excitement, I had found my musical thing -- all thanks to a couple of really cool high school kids that taught me how to play drums in exchange for my parents' money. (I eventually did the same thing and taught kids how to play the drums in exchange for their parents' money) From there I ended up in Junior High Band and eventually High School band. 

Playing those bongos in my acid washed jeans and monogrammed Jacket!

This offered up other opportunities in our small town because random old people in town always needed a drummer to back them in their random gigs. One such group was a group of senior citizens that played Swing music. They'd play the local parks and nursing homes. I'd tag along and give them a swing beat to play around. It paid 20 bucks here and there, but the real reward was the looks on the old folks as they'd start dancing to their jams.

One of the old dudes must have told the newspaper reporter that my name was Tommy

Another such random group from my youth came in the form of my old girlfriend's mom and dad, who had a country western band called Leather and Lace. I kid you not. Wanting to get in good graces with my old girlfriend's parents and since their band was missing a drummer at the time, I joined in and learned the ropes. These guys held regular practices and did gigs at local rodeos back in the 80's.

This was pretty wild actually. I remember we played a gig where our bandstand was up at the top of a tower, and I swear it was swaying in the wind while we played. I've never felt more afraid playing an Elvira cover song in my life. These gigs also paid 20 bucks here and there, but one time we played on a local university stage and I made 100 bucks. That was pretty good money for a kid without a job!

It was this same old girlfriend's mom who I went to after purchasing a synthesizer and begged her to teach me the basics of music theory. She taught me all about music scales, chords, and the magical circle of fifths. As a drummer I knew none of these things! . . . and after I broke up with that girlfriend, that was pretty much the end of my music theory lessons, as you can imagine.

Part 2 -- The Industrial Music Years

Armed with a limited knowledge of music theory, I started to write songs that went beyond just plucking random notes out of the air. My old friends and I from our small town made a synth band called Decussion Council -- it was like "Discussion" and "Percussion" mashed together with all the 80's vibes in-between. 

Our highlight was being featured on a local radio program called Local's Only with a 20-minute interview. Being on the radio was monumental and felt like we pulled off something that we shouldn't have been able to pull off. Collectively our favorite song we wrote was called Don't Stop. I have an early iteration of that song loaded up on Soundcloud. (Last year I even made a remake of our old jam during quarantine.)

Tom Purdue · Don't Stop

As High School ended, we all separated and went our own ways to different colleges and universities. I ran into a new group of drummers at the local university and made fast friends. They asked me to play synths for their Pink Floyd/Cure-esque band called Deep Anna. I wasn't very good at playing the synth live, but I did it anyway.  (The guitar player, Sean Young, in the band ended up being a really solid musical ally and best friend for the next several years . . . he even ended up being the best man at my wedding!)

To be honest, I was more about creating/producing songs that could be sequenced on-board my good ol' Ensoniq DPM Sampler/Synthesizer with a miniscule 8 tracks to mess around with. I totally mastered that art of onboard sequencing with a synthesizer. Keep in mind that this all was 1989-1990. I didn't even own a PC yet (and I certainly wasn't writing music on my old Commodore 64).

Then came a fateful day for me . . . I failed a pretty important Music Theory test in college, and that was it.  I was a drummer that didn't know how to transpose flute to tuba. I didn't have perfect pitch or a musically trained ear.  I was done with school, and in my mind, so what, I didn't want to become a high school music teacher anyway. With my hopes of being a music major over, instead I dropped out of college and decided that I'd try being an industrial music dude instead.

So I wrote an album of my own flavor of industrial/dance music and used my 1990 tax return to fund a run of 200 copies of a tape I called Darkest America. (which I uploaded to Bandcamp recently if you're curious.)

Cover photo of Darkest America

I even paid to have them shrink wrapped with a little onion skin paper insert with lyrics that came with the tape.

I originally wanted to go with a band name for myself instead of just "Tom Purdue," but my friend Sean talked me out of it and said I should just own it by making it my name. I kind of regret that a bit in that using your own name was a very folk artist thing to do. Sean loved the music of Bob Dylan and Kate Bush and any number of artists who used their name. I don't think you really ever saw that in Industrial Music. I remember hearing that the hosts of a local morning radio show show spent several minutes making fun of me because they were sick of saying my name when they had to announce upcoming local concerts as part of their show. Anyway, my choice was made, so I stuck with it. (It made it easier for people to track me down later -- but that's a story for part 4.)

I started playing local clubs here and there and selling my tape in local record stores. Most of the spots I played were total dives: The Pompadour club (and old church converted to a concert hall), Perseus Opera (an old bowling alley converted to a concert hall), etc. I actually have some old concert footage up on my YouTube channel and recently went through all my old video tapes. I may do something with all that footage in the future sometime.

An Ancient Concert flyer from when I opened with a band called Fractal Method.

I would send out copies of my tape to record companies that I found in the 1990 songwriter's market handbook and got back a lot of rejection letters. I was living on my own at the time, just trying to survive really, and distracting my girlfriend (future wife) who was going to college. They were magical yet confusing times, and when I wasn't making music, I was playing my Super Nintendo or working as a Checker at a local grocery store.

A year later, I wrote a second album of my own flavor of industrial music, using my 1991 tax return and funded a run of 250 copies of a tape called Freeze. (Also uploaded to Bandcamp for your amusement/enjoyment). The cover of Freeze was super noteworthy in that it was almost like a work of art. It folded out several times with lyrics and a newspaper clipping collage by my friend Sean Young. I spent some extra money on that, but it was totally worth it.

I only played one gig after its release. It was a big show though . . . I was one of six or seven local bands chosen to play at "Localpalooza" in a "Lollapalooza" format. I was the token industrial act.

Again, all I really got back from this endeavor was rejection letters. It wasn't for trying though and some good did come out of my efforts.

Cover photo of Freeze

There was one fella (Carl Howard) I connected with who listed me on his tape exchange mailing list and we made a special print-on-demand release of Darkest America on his label aT Tapes, but . . . I don't think there was much interest for it generally. I definitely didn't see any money from it.

I wrote one more album of less-industrial-more-experimental music over the next two years that probably never will be heard past my own ears . . . because that tax return money went toward a ring for my future wife! And, yes, the music was still there, but the dream of being an industrial music star kinda died as Grunge took over the world. 

Part 3 -- Marriage, Poetry, and the IDM era

Marriage settled me down quite a bit.  I started thinking more outside myself and now I started thinking about "us" and "our future." So music making in general kind of took more of a hobbiest-stance in my life, and I returned to college life with a renewed fervor.

I did have one last small stint with an Industrial music in a band called Drill Smear Theory, but it didn't last longer than a few months. Of course, I still remember the weird upstairs apartment these dudes lived in. I kept my gear at their apartment for those months, and the drummer beat the snot out of my electronic drums. When I left the band, I gave them all the sound disks and made a clean break. 

Chris, the leader of the band, later found a replacement keyboard guy. He brought me over to the new guy's house to teach him how to run the songs. The new guy seemed like he had no idea that keyboard could even string songs together like that. I can't remember where they went from there, but I think the drummer went on to play for an industrial act out of New Mexico that was eventually signed in Germany?

Man that was such a try-hard band name . . . 

I don't know . . . it's been too many years now and I've lost track of all those people. My interests were changing as well.  

That's also when I started writing poetry and participating in the Toastmasters speech club. I started performing spoken word at local poetry slams and did surprisingly well. I had so much in-store money coming to me from one of the local bookstores that the owner became a little bit annoyed that I was sitting on all that poetry-slam-won money. (He didn't need to worry, I wasn't going to cash it in all at once . . . in fact, I don't think I cashed most of it in.) A big moment came from winning a university-level poetry slam where I won $100, which was/is pretty decent money for poetry. ;) That even tied my best paying country music gig! (It feels great to be paid for creativity.)

It's a lot of words on a page . . .

So at this point, poetry was life, and I wrote several chapbooks worth of verse. I even made a pilgrimage with my old guitarist buddy, Sean, to Boulder Colorado and casually met THEE Allen Ginsberg. I ended up writing a poem about him wandering through a party wearing his blue pajamas. These were strange times, friends. 

A couple of years later I even made a long road-trip pilgrimage to participate in a poetry event known as Picnuke in Portland, Oregon and made friends with another poet that just happens to be none other than THEE Lord Spode of Team Spode. Yes! If you've read a lot of my other blog, you've heard of him! Before video games, there was poetry!

Eventually I figured that this whole time with music and poetry what I was really trying to do was COMMUNICATE with people, and that's when I finally decided on Communication as a degree and finished out school, Summa Cum Laude style, with a Technical Writing minor.  I was all set to make money in a real job.

In fact, my first job out of school was being a Technical Editor for a contractor for the Air Force, and I worked for 14 years there while my wife and I started our family and had three kids. I had become a dad.

My ultimate dad/family photo

Let's rewind a bit. *insert tape rewind sound* All the while and through it all . . . I was still tinkering with music in the background. For some reason I started remaking Christmas songs in a techno style and my co-workers at the time (1996) egged me on into making a full CD of Christmas music. 

My wife laughs every time she reads that "co-produces" headline

I was fired up about it too. I had big plans for my Christmas CD especially after getting rear ended in my car and suddenly finding the payout from the car accident was exactly the amount needed to fund creating 500 copies of the CD. I actually sold enough CDs that I broke even . . . the rest of the CDs became easy Christmas gifts for years to come!

yeah . . . 500 copies was definitely too many copies

Eventually the computer became a thing in my life, and finally I could tinker more with music production as well as play a mean game of Diablo. Wild was my first album where I started using a computer to produce music instead of strictly using the on-board synthesizer. At this point my music was still a blend of on-board sequencer and computer, but Audacity was there to help me make things as strange as I wanted there in 1999. (Wild is also uploaded to Bandcamp for your amusement/enjoyment)

I took a full week off of work and finished the Wild CD up. Back then MP3.com was the place to go for uploading your music and sharing it with the world.  I wish I wouldn't have relied so heavily on using that site for releasing my music at the turn of the century. Some cool stuff is gone because of that, but I still have the CDs and the memories. I made some excellent friends on that site and it even led to me joining a podcast that featured local bands on mp3.com.

I was listening to a lot of IDM at the time. Bands like Aphex Twin, u-ziq, and Future Sounds of London solidly had my ear. When you listen to Wild, you can tell that was the case. Although, the gap between my home production and what professional production was capable of at the time was growing ever further apart. It wasn't until I got my hands on software programs like Acid Music and Reason that I could really increase my music production quality.  

Getting crazy with the early graphics programs! Note I switched to "Tompur" as my band name.

Eventually, wanting to promote my Wild CD, I formed an alliance back in the early 2000's with like-minded musically inclined people on the young Internet, and we called ourselves the IEMC or Independent Electronic Musician Collective. This was pretty much an email group where we would promote our stuff to other songwriters like ourselves. I met some great people through this group like Eric Piotrowski and Stephen Phillips.

Our super cool Geocities-esque logo

There were plenty of opportunities to collaborate in this group, and I ended up remixing Eric's music and being remixed by Eric himself.  Stephen ran a downtempo/chill-wave Internet radio show that I used to visit quite a bit as well. 

So many cool artists were in this group in the early 2000's. Unfortunately the group pretty much fell apart right after we produced our first CD as a group. The stress of making that happen seemed to be too much for the group, but you can still hear a few of my tracks from that era on Soundcloud.

Our compilation CD from 2002

Part 4 -- Enter the MMO, the Elixirists, and the Future

Playing several years of Everquest and World of Warcraft kind of changed everything for me. Video Games became king in my life. Who had time to write music when there were giant virtual worlds that would gladly absorb every last ounce of spare time I had? You mean I can be social and play games at the same time? Yes please! 

How to explain? I don't know if I can fully explain it. At the time I was writing emails and forum posts about games and then journaling my adventures became kind of a big deal to me. It was absolutely revolutionary. Yes, I would still mess around on my music software, but now writing about playing video games kind of . . . just . . . took over. 

The year before I started playing Wizard101 I also started to learn how to beatbox, and I was beatboxing like crazy all the time. I think people at work were pretty sick of me beatboxing in the hallways. whoops. I tried incorporating beatbox into electronic music, but it wasn't really working out. Perhaps that's because I never really was that good at it. Jus' sayin'. (I think the very first wizard101 theme remix I did had some beatboxing in it -- but that wasn't MY beatboxing, it was sampled from someone else.)

I made a whole string of videos that showcased me beatboxing and playing around with my kids called the "Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show." These were all done at 2x speed to amplify the crazy part of the crazy stuff show. Every once in a while, I'll still pull out the DVD I made back in 2007 of our Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show, and the kids and I will get a kick from the 20 or so 3-minute-long segments we made together.

Then 2008 happened! I started playing Wizard101 and writing about the game on this very blog and the words just came pouring out of me. I threw myself into the community and started writing little podcast segments for a Wizard101-themed podcast known as Ravenwood Radio -- hosted by none other than Steve and Leala!  These segments often turned musical with my background in music, and I ended up making a number of strange parody songs about Wizard101. I even wrote the theme song for Ravenwood Radio! I was all in.

My greatest parody song shall always be A Day Without 101. 

It's hard to believe this is approaching 140k views. I still have people mention this parody to me on Twitter to this day. Crazy. And really, this just started out as being a segment for Ravenwood Radio when Selena Gomez was added to the game, but I made a full video, and it kind of took off.

I have a folder on my cloud storage with a bunch of old wizzy jams. Maybe someday I'll make a collection of them and put them up on Bandcamp as well in a Wizard101 themed album. In the meantime, you can always check out my Parody Playlist on YouTube. This Katy Perry parody never got the love it deserved. Jus' sayin.  Uber Wife's rap at the end is fire.

One of my favorite moments as a Wizard101 player was when my Grizzleheim remix was put up on the ringtone page of Wizard101 for all players to download. It felt epic. That link no longer exists on the webpage, but still . . . it was pretty great at the time. I love putting energy into video game communities and doing this with music is right up my ally.

But it wasn't only about videogames and parodies . . . Around 2010-2011, I was contacted by a guy that was in a band that I opened up for one time back in the 90s during my industrial phase.  This was was my old friend Brian Jenson. We met for lunch and had a great time talking about the old days. He was looking to collaborate, so we formed a little virtual band together and wrote songs and back and forth very slowly for several years under the band name "The Elixirists."  

My favorite song from The Elixirists: Time Creeps Up

The Elixirists aimed to be be in a genre somewhere near the feeling of trip hop, electro funk, industrial and generally in the Electronic music world.  One person described our sound as a newer version of Severed Heads. That's actually not a bad comparison. I used to listen to Severed Heads in high school.

It was Brian that convinced me to switch from Acid Music to Ableton, and the hope was that we would be able to collaborate more closely together. We made a full album's worth of music but never released those songs as a collection for some reason. I went ahead and uploaded them to Bandcamp as a collection.

Unfortunately Brian would end up taking his life on January 1st, 2018. Brian wanted a recording contract more than anything in the world. He tried for several years with no success. I remember one time he told me that if he didn't have a recording contract by the time he was 45, that was it, he was going to take his life. He didn't want to be old and, I suppose, unsuccessful in his eyes.

An old picture of Brian standing with Howard Jones and Howard Jones' Daughter

I tried my best to be a good friend and a positive influence in his life, but his mind was made up. We had emailed weekly back and forth to each other for 8 years and talked about all our hopes and dreams. No amount of talking on my part was going to change his mind, and he avoided the topic whenever I'd bring it up. He took his own life. It was tragic, and I was devastated. He never said goodbye to me, and I had a hard time finding music inside me after that. 

Fast forward to the present . . . 

My life as a rock star wannabe had become nothing more than a dusty, distant 30-year-old memory up until a few months ago when a great guy named Adam Terry contacted me over Instagram holding both my Darkest America and Freeze tapes from back in 1990. "Are you this Purdue?" 

Now THAT's a rare sight you don't see . . . ever!

It's like everything from back then unlocked all over again, and we had a great conversation about the good old days. With Adam's help, I may actually release some old music of mine on his label, FountainAVM! But that's still an announcement in the making.

The real help from Adam has been feeling like someone actually cared about me as an artist enough to reach out and help me dust off the old tapes. While there may be a lot of sadness and regret from the past, his simple act of reaching out kind of unplugged so many things that I had bottled up over the years. That alone was appreciated.

Who knows . . . I may just have another tape or two of music inside me still. I don't think my musical journey is quite done yet, regardless of any outcomes. 

Here's to the future!