Who are some of your musical influences?

Some of my earliest musical influences were Eric Clapton, Steppenwolf, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, BB King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jeff Beck, Neil Young and Jimmy Webb.

Later influences included jazz greats such as Wes Montgomery, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

In the last few years I have been highly influenced by a lot of Country and Bluegrass, including Chet Atkins and Alison Krauss.

How did you get started with Chik-A-Boom?

Around 1987-1988 I was recently divorced from my first wife, so I was going out and hanging with other local musicians a lot. One of these musicians was John Cavallo, who was performing regularly at Bar Anticipation with Joey And The Works. John was an old friend of mine from Neptune High School and was starting to get interested in putting his own band together.

He was doing a lot of solo gigs in addition to Joey And The Works and asked me if I would like to join him on some of them.

The in the summer of 1990 I got a call from him saying that he wanted to put a band together to perform at the Stone Pony on Sunday nights in the warm-up slot for Bobby Bandiera.

We put a four-piece band together  with very little rehearsal and in August 1990 Chik-A-Boom  played its first performance at the Stone Pony. I actually have a cassette tape of that night!

We did the Sunday night gig for a few months and soon were performing at several other venues, eventually working full-time from about 1992 to 1995 in such places as Jenkinson’s in Point Pleasant , the Parker House  in Sea Girt, the Tradewinds and the Rumrunner in Sea Bright, Bar Anticipation and many other places.

Around 1995 we all got day jobs and continued to perform mostly on weekends. 

How did you get started with the Mike And Al-Vis band?

Mike Cusack is the cousin of Tim Cusack (see Timeline page). We have known each since the 70’s, when Timmy first introduced me to him. Mike was a solo act back then.

In the spring of 2000 Mike was in the process of re-forming his duo, Heart And Soul, which had recently gone through some personnel changes.

He asked me if I would be interested in taking some work on the side and since Chik-A-Boom was not performing much at that point (2-3 times a month) I jumped at the chance to pick up more work.

I was immediately impressed with what a great guy Mike is to work with!!! It is rare to meet someone with his talents who is also just a sincerely good person.

Performing with Mike proved to be a bit of a challenge at first, since almost all of the songs were carefully sequenced, I had to get used to beginning and ending in the right places! The band can always follow me but the sequencer demands that I follow it.

But like I said, working with Mike made it much easier on me to get over this learning curve. After a while we started relying somewhat less on the pre-sequenced parts and started doing more and more acoustic duo stuff.

Another thing that I enjoy about performing with Mike is that he is so good with audiences. Since I am a bit of an introvert myself it is great that he is so good with the “schmoozing” part of the business.

And last but not least, Mike is a tremendously talented singer and guitar player, who manages to sing and play great even while working the sequencing, schmoozing the audience, setting up and worrying the PA equipment, etc. etc. etc.!