A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE

Before i ever had a band,i had been playing guitar for many,many years.By the time i
was 17 i'd been playing guitar for 6 years.I played alot when i was younger.No one ever had
to tell me to practice.I would just start playing guitar and before i knew it hours had past.
For 6 years i would practice,but i didn't think of it as practicing for at least several hours
a day and some times longer.I didn't just play the guitar-i would get so into the music
that i literally forgot about everything else.I also was writing songs at this time.In fact
from the very begining of my guitar playing i was allready making up original songs.
For nearly all of my early guitar playing day's and certainly for all the original songs
i made up-I played in a finger picking style with a thumb-pick.Because of all those years
of finger picking i am still pretty good at it today.I only learned to play with flat pick
many years after these early day's when i first realy learned to play guitar.I also practiced
scales endlessly.I got really good at it and i was fast.One reason i'm telling you all this is
because many of the musicians that formed Punk rock bands only had very rudimentry
skills as musicians.This was not the case however with me.By the time the first incarnations
of what would eventually become "Pete Holly and the Look's" started forming i had all-
ready been playing around Boise as solo acoustic act for several years.
There were many reasons i didn't stay a strictly solo act and started forming
bands.One of the main reasons was it was around this time that the singer-songwriter
movement lost it's popularity.Record labels were no longer signing acoustic solo acts.
Believe it or not-one of the last successful singer-songwriters to be signed to a major
label was John Couger Mellencamp known then as "Johnny Cougar".Two of the other
last one's were Willie Nile and Steve Forbet.Both came out of the starting gate strong
with Steve Forbert even scoring a big hit with "Romeo's Tune".But Forbert failed
to ever score another hit and as talented as Willie Nile was-he didn't breakthrough
to the mainstream. and both of them eventually faded into obscurity.I loved Steve
Forberts first album "Alive on Arrival".I used to listin to it alot even after we formed
"The Look's" but the writing on the wall was easy to see.The Heyday of singer-songeriters
was over-history.So as much as i had wanted to be a singer-songwriter and didn't
really want to start a band-because the singer-songwriter movement had come to an end-
I ended up starting "The Look's".
That's one of the reason's why "The Look's" had a sound that was hard to pin down.
The band was really just a vehicle for "souped-up" versions of the songs i'd written on
acoustic guitar.All of them.For the most part-I have never written even one song on
an electric guitar;the instrumental "Pete's Naima" is the lone exception.
And that's the way it's allway's been for me.Behind all the labels people have put
on me and on "Pete Holly and the Look's".The catagory that the greatist majority of
my songs and the song's we played in "The Look's" really belongs in is singer-songwriter.


written by Pete Holly-2010-copyright-all rights reserved