Dogpark - part 3 (1995-1996)

Since we didn’t really know many people yet in LA, Sherri and I continued on recording and gigging as a duo. Sherri moved out of her Burbank apartment and into a large castle-type mansion in Eagle Rock with Kevin Gilbert and Dave Kerzner. A few months later Dave moved out and I moved in. Kevin wanted to produce our next demo, but his busy schedule didn’t allow for it so instead he lent us a Tascam DA88 to record the tracks ourselves. Once finished he would do the final mixes at his studio in Pasadena. So Sherri and I took advantage of the high ceilings and stone and hardwood floors of the castle to make some nice recordings. We also borrowed professional quality microphones from the Ground Control scoring stage. Also at Ground Control we met a young kid named Dorian Cheah. He had come to LA from New York to pursue a career in music and recording. He played electric violin and joined Dogpark for about a year or so. Len Fagen from The Coconut Teaszer booked us into The Crooked Bar. This was downstairs at The Coconut Teaszer and more suited for smaller acts, so we gigged there as a duo, and then a trio when Dorian joined us. At these performances instead of playing keyboards Sherri switched to drums. She created a quirky little drum set out of parts of my Pearl kit, but using mostly percussion and a Sparkletts water bottle as a kick drum (see photo in Dogpark part 2)! I played acoustic guitar to make up for lack of a bass. With Dorian on violin and backing guitar we had quite a unique look and sound. At this point we were gaining more interest, and the house engineer at The Crooked Bar started recording our performances. Then one night we were playing upstairs at the Teaszer (with Dorian on bass) and some DJ’s from a free-form local radio station in Pasadena, KIEV, took notice and played some of our songs on the air. They even invited us to the studio for an on-air interview and performance. Soon our new demo tracks were finished being recorded. We had enough new songs for a full album and Kevin started mixing them. Around this time we all got kicked out of the castle in Eagle Rock (it had been sold) and Sherri and I moved into a neat little house in Silver Lake, with a downstairs utility room we converted into a rehearsal studio (we had given up the studio in North Hollywood after moving into the castle). It was at this house in Silver Lake that one evening Sherri received the horrible phone call from Nick D’Virgilio that Kevin had been found dead in his home, from a freak accident. This turned our world upside-down, and took a long time for us to recover. In addition to being a close friend to Sherri, he had been our mentor in the LA music scene, and we were now on our own. He had only finished mixing half the songs on our new demo. After some time a friend of his, Mark Cross, offered to complete the mixes. We called the album “The Good Box”, after Kevin’s pet name for his favorite vintage compressor.