The Sound Field

Nic Grabien and I have been playing together for over forty years. We met at SIR in San Francisco, in December of 1976; he was running the door and I walked in with my electric guitar and the desperate need to get a couple of songs I'd written during one of the darkest years of my life out of me and onto tape, before those songs devoured me from the inside out. I plugged in and began playing, and he heard guitar that tasted just like what he had been doing on bass for years.

I finally noticed that he was standing in the studio doorway watching me. I lifted my shoulders at him: what? He asked where my band was, I told him no band, just me. He asked where my bass player was, I told him no bass player, just me. He asked if I wanted a bass player. By this time I was getting cranky and sarcastic and I said why, have you got one?

Well - yes. It turned out he did.

He plugged in. About five hours later, with my fingers throbbing, we stopped playing. I stared at him and he stared back. At that point, we exchanged names, discovered we had the same birthday one year apart, and a musical partnership was born. Nor was that the only partnership. We got married in 1983.

The Sound Field was born because, after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and years when I wrote books instead of music, I began writing songs again. I'd emerged from a self-imposed exile and invisibility from the local music scene that had been my life through the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, and begun tentatively playing again; the first song I wrote after that long hiatus was a thing called "Cry For Memory". It's not on our first CD, but it will be on the next one.

In 2013 or thereabouts, a drummer named Larry Luthi sat down and jammed with us at our place in San Francisco. He must have liked what he heard, because he began leaning on Nic and me to form a band. We did.


The Sound Field \| About

Nic Grabien and I have been playing together for over forty years. We met at SIR in San Francisco, in December of 1976; he was running the door and I walked in with my electric guitar and the desperate need to get a couple of songs I'd written during one of the darkest years of my life out of me and onto tape, before those songs devoured me from the inside out. I plugged in and began playing, and he heard guitar that tasted just like what he had been doing on bass for years. I finally noticed that he was standing in the studio doorway watching me. I lifted my shoulders at him: what? He asked where my band was, I told him no band, just me. He asked where my bass player was, I told him no bass player, just me. He asked if I wanted a bass player. By this time I was getting cranky and sarcastic and I said why, have you got one? Well - yes. It turned out he did. He plugged in. About five hours later, with my fingers throbbing, we stopped playing. I stared at him and he stared back. At that point, we exchanged names, discovered we had the same birthday one year apart, and a musical partnership was born. Nor was that the only partnership. We got married in 1983. The Sound Field was born because, after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and years when I wrote books instead of music, I began writing songs again. I'd emerged from a self-imposed exile and invisibility from the local music scene that had been my life through the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, and begun tentatively playing again; the first song I wrote after that long hiatus was a thing called "Cry For Memory". It's not on our first CD, but it will be on the next one. In 2013 or thereabouts, a drummer named Larry Luthi sat down and jammed with us at our place in San Francisco. He must have liked what he heard, because he began leaning on Nic and me to form a band. We did.

The Sound Field | About