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"My musical life began early when I was exposed to many varied influences beginning with my older brother
who played steel lap guitar with various members of the Grateful Dead and New
Riders of the Purple Sage, among others. I spent many hours in the attic of my
family's San Francisco bay area Victorian home watching and listening to the
swaying, throbbing sounds as my brother and his friends made surreal music that
they would then play at places like "the Barn" in Santa Cruz, California where
some of the "acid-tests" made famous in Tom Wolfe's book "The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test" were held. The band, under the name of "The Hershey Gumbo Band" in
one instance, played the Barn, a two story, well... barn, while people like Big
Brother and Janis Joplin played upstairs. Playing along to tape recordings of
creaking drain-pipes taken from another downtown Victorian house and stuffing
microphones into socks and down wailing saxophones, my brother's band drew the
majority of the crowd downstairs to their hypnotic rhythms and between sets
brought bitter curses from Miss Joplin, classic liquor bottle swaying in hand.
In fact, the house that my family moved into in downtown Palo Alto, California
in the early 1960's was referred to as "the Chateau" in the Tom Wolfe book.
Along with members of the Merry Pranksters and Grateful Dead my brother lived in
the house just before my parents rented the property. When my family rented the
house a major cleaning and painting project ensued as the place was a truly
unfavorable mess. One aspect of this cleaning that had major impact upon my
impressionable young mind was the discovery of spiderwebs in the
refrigerator...the "beautiful" lifestyle of what were known as "the hippies"
appeared to rest upon some kind of foundation of filth. It was beautiful filth
though, or at least interesting and the world that surrounded us was a Fellini-like
circus that I wouldn't have missed for the world. There has probably never been
another place quite like Palo Alto in the 1960's. A strange, magical and
unpredictable time.
While my brother was upstairs making the very tall and extremely old house
(built in the late 1800's) actually sway back and forth from the volume of the
band's amplifiers, downstairs my sister practiced as a classical pianist as well
as playing stunning versions of ragtime tunes from Scott Joplin and the like.
From these diverse surroundings I drew much inspiration and formed my first band
when I was seven or eight years old. We wrote songs such as "Orange Soda" and
"Kill Me Baby - Rah Rah Rah" and of course made a general racket, once claiming
to the sister of one member that we
had written "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" long
before the Beatles had. She wasn't convinced, but we were.
In the hellish years of high school, together with musician/artist friends, I
formed an extravagant band that played what could only properly and politely be
called performance art rock n' roll, combining theater of the absurd and music
in such a fashion as to alternately astound, dismay and amaze our audiences. The
band was appropriately named "Idiot"
after a passage in Shakespeare's Macbeth
("Time is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing..."). We played high school dances while dramatizing realistic knife
fight scenarios between the lead singer and a large blood-bag equipped man
wearing a life-like rubberized Richard Nixon mask, threw Hostess cupcakes into
the crowd and crucified band members on stage. We were not your average
teenagers. The band wound up playing the San Francisco club scene at the same
time bands such as The Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, etc., were hitting the city
for the first time. At San Francisco's semi-legendary Mabuhay Gardens during the
beginnings of the punk movement while other bands put the required safety pins
through their heads, wore pseudo-military costumes and took themselves much too
seriously, we demonstrated an irreverence for anything and everything. We took
nothing, that was important at least, seriously and thus the band eventually
disintegrated with the times.
With a couple members of idiot
and our newfound friend Z Blue, I then found myself having formed
Zru Vogue, an
avant-garde music group that semi-improvised rhythmic and dreamy music inspired
by the experimental works of Brian Eno and others. We went into a San Francisco
recording studio and made a record that found it's way onto radio stations,
inspired fan clubs and made it's way across the Atlantic and into the European
music press. In London The New Musical Express said "...this should signal the
coming avalanche of African rhythm based pop.". The world had been warned.
Outlet Magazine said about the music that "Sometimes the whispers of San
Francisco are more powerful than the screams of L.A.". How true. The record was
eventually voted "Best Independent Single of 1981" by
Sub-Pop magazine.
While the other members continued to perform and record, the original
Zru Vogue became no more after various personality
differences, artistic differences and difference differences lead me to move on
to discover new worlds yet uncharted. I moved into the realm of film
soundtracks, creating songs and scores for independent art films. Later with
Andrew Jackson, I composed music to accompany high quality computer animation
demonstrations like that now being seen in films like "Terminator" and "Toy
Story", "Antz", etc. Meeting with cutting-edge French computer graphics artists
we provided music for some of the first films for Silicon Graphics, displaying
the power of the new technology. The field of film scores soon lured me to make
the move from the San Francisco bay area to Hollywood, California where Z Blue
and I set up camp in the celebrated Hollywood Hills, renting a very small
turn-of-the-century upstairs-half of a duplex above singer Lucinda Williams and
her boyfriend and next door to actor John Goodman. Down the street were the
former homes of many immortal Hollywood stars including, only a few houses down
from us, Marilyn Monroe's first home in Hollywood before the world had heard of
her. It was a strange and amazing land.
In between composing and recording music for film trailers, documentaries and
short films for clients including MGM, Orion films and more, we dodged bullets,
watched riots and avoided crazed comedians. A tenant downstairs, a rather
belligerent stand-up comedian from New York, had somehow managed to give the
impression to the even more belligerent comic Sam Kinison, that he had been
stealing some of Sam's material. Naturally, Sam showed up with two enormous
henchmen and tore the front door off it's hinges seeking sufficient physical
retribution while Lucinda's boyfriend hid in the closet. Ah, Hollywood - a land
of movie magic and killer comedians.
In 1995 I released a new CD with Z Blue, "Bone
Jar-
Flowers From A Freaky World".
The CD was played in heavy rotation on college radio in the United States.
Internet Music Review called the CD "...a soothing combination of mellow John
and Yoko, a little Everything But The Girl and a touch of Annie Lennox.". The CD
has since been seen and heard by thousands of people all over the world via the
Internet, with fan letters appearing in the mail from places far and wide.
Campus Circle Magazine's Jeff Matlow said in his review that the CD would "
provide the boat for listeners' mind to drift off into musical bliss.". and that
it "...can be played on radio as easily as anything Bryan Ferry has ever
penned.". His glowing review finished by stating that the CD had "...a Robbie
Robertson aura" and summed up with "I think we'll be hearing a lot about these
two in the future".
We were joined on one of the CD's songs by Robin Williamson, former member of
the Incredible String Band, on vocals and Northumbrian bagpipes giving a Celtic
flourish to the CD's finale. We had met Robin after one of his shows and asked
if he would lend his uncommon touch to the CD. We got together at his Hollywood
home to go over the song and shortly thereafter recorded his parts (including
long-necked cittern) at Chick Corea's Mad Hatter Studios, also in Hollywood.
In 1997 I released a self-titled CD of rock n' roll songs. CD Reviews.com said
in their review of the CD that "If John Lennon were alive and young today, this
is probably what he would sound like". Several songs from the CD, as well as
some more of my original soundtrack compositions, appeared on the soundtrack to
the independent feature film "Kinda Cute (for a White Boy)" which had
it's world premiere at film festivals in London and Portugal late in 1997, and
won "Best Picture" at the Savannah
Georgia Film Festival in 1998.
1998 also saw a semi-reformation of the band Zru Vogue.
Along with original founding member Andrew Jackson, I released the collaboration
"Zru Vogue -
Unlimited Enjoyment/Instant Gratification"
The entire CD was done "long-distance" with Andrew Jackson and I at least 300
miles apart in two separate studios, never setting foot in the same room during
the entire process. We sent tapes, lyrics and art via the mail and the internet.
It started out as an experiment to see what would happen with such a setup and
resulted in a CD that evokes the feel of the original Zru
Vogue while portraying aspects of both of our distinct, strangely similar
yet entirely different artistic personalities.
In 1999 I released the CD "Unseen Worlds-songs of the
spirit", a culmination of my influences and work up to
this time. This year also brought the release of the previously un-released CD
"Angel Moon", recorded in 1996. Some of the songs from this CD were used in film
scores and the others are heard here for the first time."
The latest Max Tyrell CD is
"Life After Life" and you can hear it
here.
Discography:
Zru Vogue - Nakweda Dream/Cumulonimbus (Single -1981)
Compositions for Documentaries, short films, MGM/Orion, etc. (1982-1994)
Bone Jar "Flowers
From A Freaky World" (CD
-1995)
Angel Moon - (CD -1996)
Max Tyrell (CD-1997)
Instrumentals (CD-1997)
Soundtrack compositions for "Kinda Cute For A White Boy" (Feature Film -1997)
Zru Vogue - Unlimited Enjoyment/Instant Gratification
(CD-1998)
Unseen Worlds -songs of the spirit
(CD -1999)
Life After Life" (CD - 2003)
Max Tyrell is
also an accomplished photographer and visual artist.
To view a galley of his works click
here
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