Brian Christian Beach, links, Music, New Jersey, NJ, YouTube

Great music for a great cause

A great event is happening this weekend on BlowUpRadio.com. It’s a benefit to raise awareness and funds to fight Spondylitis, a chronic inflammatory disease that causes pain in the back, neck and hips. “Banding Together” features an amazing number of performances streaming all weekend, and my longtime friend Christian Beach is one of the participating musicians. You can hear his set TONIGHT (Oct. 21) at around 6:05 p.m. ET.

Also, anyone who clicks on this link and makes a donation to the Spondylitis Association of America this weekend will receive a compilation CD that includes lots of great music, including the track “Platte Cove Road” from Christian’s upcoming EP.

So head on over to BlowUpRadio.com, listen to some great music from the state of New Jersey and try to make some kind of donation to this worthy cause.

Below, is a video of Christian performing his song “Taking It Real Slow” at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia in July 2009. That’s me on accordion and the drummer is Michael Scotto of the band Agency. Incidentally, a solo set by Scotto can be heard during Banding Together at around 7:15 p.m. ET tonight.

Brian Brian Kelley, links, New Jersey, NJ, Twitter

On the cusp of fatherhood…

As I explained in my last post here on May 10, I curtailed most of my social media activity to my Facebook account over the past few weeks. At the time, I realized I was closing in on 10,000 Twitter posts on my @bktandem account and I wanted to make sure I used that milestone tweet to announce the birth of my first child.

Well, I’ve written this advance, but I will be making this post visible to the public as soon as my wife and I are on our way to the hospital to bring our son or daughter (it’s going to be a surprise) into the world. That means this post will probably generate tweet No. 9,998, giving me one more to burn before the birth announcement in my 10,000th tweet.

Anyway, I have to be honest…I’m nervous about being a parent. For the first time in 41 years, I’m going to be responsible for another the welfare and protection of a human being. I know millions of people do it all the time, but I really never saw myself as one of them. But I have a wonderful wife and feel that I will be up to the challenge…it’s just weird. Everything is going to change over the next few hours…and that is good. But there’s still anxiety…about my role as my wife’s labor coach…about the well-being of my wife and child…about my decisions as father during these early years…and so much more. Like computer software I experience for the first time, I guess I’ll just have to work with it until I figure it out…at least to the point I’m effective with it.

The other thing I wanted to mention here is the social media policy I have planned for my child’s early years. Basically, except for when there are milestone occasions or other gatherings of family and friends, I won’t be posting a lot of photos of my kid online…and even then, it will likely only be on Facebook shared with family and close friends. But I can’t see my wife and I putting any random, semi-private photos of our kids online for anyone outside our families to see…and even those will likely be rare. And we likely won’t be doing many “hey, guess what my kid did today” posts, if at all. You know…didn’t our parents embarrass us enough with baby photos and silly stories about our early years? Well, why are we now as parents putting all that crap online so when our kids are old enough to venture into social networking, they have access to it. Talk about embarrassing…I’m just not inclined to do that to my kid. We’ll take photos documenting our child’s growth, but we’ll put them on an external hard drive or private online galleries, and let him or her decide what he or she wants to do with them when old enough to join social networks.

People have assumed that because of my social media activity level, I would be sharing everything my kid does on Twitter, etc. Well, I have made a choice to share my life on social media. It’s only fair that I give my child that same choice.

Brian Brian Kelley, NJ, Philadelphia, Philadelphia 76ers, Philadelphia Phillies, Phillies, Sixers, sports, Twitter

Why I won’t be tweeting much until July

A couple of months ago, I realized I was going to send my 10,000th post to Twitter at some point this year. At the time, I thought the milestone would come no sooner than mid-July, but I just happened to check the other day and noticed I was only 25 tweets away. That’s probably due to an unexpectedly high number of tweets related to the craptacularness of the 2012 Philadelphia Phillies.

After tonight’s huge Sixers 79-78, playoff series-clinching win over the Bulls in Game 6, my tweet count stands at 9,983. Once this post is published, it will also go to Twitter and put me at 9,984.

I estimate that 98 percent of these 9,984 tweets were inconsequential and unimportant. So I have decided that I want my 10,000th tweet to mean something. I would hate to think I may casually use that milestone to tell the world for about the 1,000th time that Phillies pitcher Kyle Kendrick sucks or use it to retweet a funny quip by a fellow fan or beat writer.

Since my wife and I are expecting our first child in early July, I would like to use that 10,000th tweet to announce the birth of my son or daughter (it’s a surprise). Therefore, I’m going to refrain from doing a lot of tweeting until that day comes.

I’ll still be reading my timeline and chiming in every now and then…hopefully, after another Sixers playoff round win…or two…or three?! But once I hit 9,995 tweets, I’m going to stop tweeting entirely until my wife goes into labor. Fortunately, the Phillies being so bad is actually helping at this point, as I’ve entered that phase where I now feel they’re just not worth tweeting about.

So if you don’t see me on Twitter much over the next eight weeks or so, this post explains my absence.

And, if you missed it when I posted this here in late December 2011, here is the horror/sci-fi teaser trailer I made to tell my family and friends about our new addition…because I’m a huge geek…

Baby Kelley Teaser Trailer

Brian artist, Asbury Park, Brian Kelley, Christian Beach, Music, New Jersey, NJ, TMC

A blast from my musical past

If you search “TMC” or select the “TMC” category on this blog, you’ll find a bunch of posts about a music group I was part of back in 1988-90 called TMC + The New Generation (although, shortly before I left the group, we informally changed our name to Interläken Pröbe to reflect a shift to a more industrial hip-hop sound). The group consisted of me and my friend Christian Beach—who went on to become very talented singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist—on keyboards, samplers, sequencers and drum machines…and a rapper from Asbury Park, N.J., named Tariq Mohammed.

Christian’s father, Gorgo, also a musician, put us in touch with Tariq, who was a rapper looking to work with a band rather than using backing tracks or a DJ. Knowing that Christian and I had recently started working on electronic “new age” music together, Gorgo suggested to Tariq that the three of us should get together and see if we could combine rap with electronic music.

The full story of TMC + The New Generation can be read here, but the short story is we obviously didn’t get anywhere as a band.

Looking back, though, you could say that we were very ambitious—actually, TOO ambitious. But what we were trying to do—combine rap with electronic music AND multiple pop/rock genres—wasn’t very common in those days. And here we were, three teenagers along the Jersey Shore (and not one of us drunk or with a stupid nickname) to create this type of music with an array of electronic instruments we didn’t fully understand. As you would expect, we just were not experienced or mature enough to properly turn our musical visions into reality. But there were moments that still exist on old recordings and videos in which a glimpse of brilliance shines through. One such moment was a song that started out as something we nicknamed “Reggae Rap.” Tariq had the idea of rapping over a reggae-style song so we started playing a preset reggae rhythm pattern on Christian’s Roland R-8 drum machine and improvised some keyboard parts over it.

Eventually, we added a three-part harmony to the chorus and the song became known as “You’re That Kind of Girl.”

We performed the song a couple of times, including once at The Green Parrot—the long-gone rock club that used to be on Route 33 in Neptune, N.J. Someone videotaped that show for us so, despite the poor quality of the audio and video, it  provided us with a recording of a lot of our material. Unfortunately, videotape doesn’t last forever and the quality continues to get worse over time. My copy of the tape, which I believe is the only one still around, actually broke near the beginning of “You’re That Kind of Girl” and I had to repair it to salvage a partial version of the song.

Anyway, I’m rambling so here’s the deal…after a few years of being in and out of touch with each other after our TMC days, Christian and I have been reconnected since 2005 and I have even performed and recorded with him a few times over the past few years. More recently, a virtual TMC reunion took place when Christian and I became friends with Tariq on Facebook.

Tariq and I have since exchanged messages via Facebook and an audio excerpt of the live version of “You’re That Kind of Girl” popped up unexpectedly on my iPod while driving a few days ago. It got me thinking that I should record a decent version of the song…so that’s what I did. Of course, since I never knew the lyrics rapped by Tariq in the verses (and the lone surviving recording is mostly unintelligible), I rewrote the verse lyrics while retaining the spirit and melody of the original version (and, yes, I rhymed “me” with itself at one point…I wasn’t spending THAT much time on this). I also tweaked the arrangement a bit.

But, overall, the 2012 version of “You’re That Kind of Girl” is pretty much just an updated version of the 1989/90 version…and I even included a some faux auto-tune as a nod to the song’s rap origins since I was not about to try rapping.

Enjoy…

“You’re That Kind of Girl (2012)”
[audio http://tandemwiththerandom.com/misc/music/You’re%20That%20Kind%20of%20Girl%20(2012).mp3]

Brian Brick, football, NJ

Back in good ol’ Brick for H.S. football playoff action

I was in Toms River, NJ, this morning to get a routine service done on my car and found out my alma mater, Brick Twp. High School had a playoff football game at home in the afternoon…and that’s where I am now. And let me tell you…Brick, NJ, is my beloved hometown (even though I was born in Edison and lived in South Plainfield during my first year of life)..but I have to say…it is a strange, strange place.