PITOIP featured artist Don Ross, a world-recognized giant of groove-based 6-string acoustic guitar composition and virtuosity, hasn't missed a step during the pandemic. He's translated much of his solo work into a new band adventure, Don Ross Louder than Usual, put out two new albums and won Canada's prestigious 2021 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts!

And yes, he continues to tour -- in fact, he'll be in Paradise, CA in the very near future! See below.

Plugged In and Turned On In Paradise is a team effort.  And what a great team!  It's time you heard from them.

I've asked Brian Peterson, our PITOIP Video Director, to give us his angle on shooting Season 1.  Take it away, Brian:

Here, after 65 years of life experience, I’ve managed to live some of my wildest childhood dreams... 

I grew up in a small college town in Northern California with music on my mind.  Playing rock-&-roll in some of the popular local bands, and having felt even then, that I was living the life...  

With great friends, and musicians to play our favorite songs together, we often played every day, performing for crowds two or three times a week from my early teens through my early 20’s.  I often say I can count on two hands those weekend nights we were not playing a gig during that decade.

Now after a different kind of lifetime, immersed in small business ventures and back home in the Northern California Sierra foothills, I’ve kept on pursuing my love of music.  Playing my guitar when I’ve found some likeminded musical friends along the way.

Today, after several years producing our new TV series, Plugged In and Turned On in Paradise, I’m grateful to be surrounded with so many uber-talented friends whom I’ve been able to play music with.

Some of them were my idols as a young player. I’ve been onstage with Sir Paul McCartney’s friend and lead guitar player Laurence Juber.  I’ve played with members of the Doobie Brothers, Santana, Tower of Power, Cold Blood, Iron Butterfly, The Animals, Journey, Miles Davis, and Motown session players, some of the best musicians on the planet...  

I really must be dreaming...!

Last winter, we were invited to a friend’s home for an evening of music with Jenna Mammina and Rolf Sturm.

I was spellbound.  Jenna’s captivating delivery of her songs and Rolf’s accomplished accompaniment were especially compelling to listen to in that intimate setting.
​
On the drive home I felt buoyant and reflective.  And I started to put two and two together.

I was reminded of the many years I’d spent in the Bay Area on the board of directors for the Steinway Society – a charity that several times a month would bring some of the world’s best pianists to play in large concert halls and small intimate home concerts like this one.

Half our proceeds went to buying musical instruments for local high schools, the other half for more professional instruction for those 10-15 year olds whose budding musical genius had eclipsed their neighborhood piano teacher.

I thought of my pro musical friends, connections I’ve developed over a lifetime of immersion in both the art and the business side of the musical world.

I reflected on our little town of Paradise, which is some kind of magical vortex for amazing musical talent.

So many artists that the world should know more about… that with a little help, could go to the next level.

And I imagined a TV series that will highlight these hidden gems who are, right now, some of the world’s best players...

And then inspiration came:

We’ll call it “Plugged in and Turned On in Paradise.”

​--Clay

Once committed to produce this new music TV series, I called the most accomplished guy I know in entertainment – my old friend Scott Ross, whose resume is unequaled.  Scott made the first music videos for MTV in the early 80’s, then was recruited by George Lucas to run Industrial Light and Magic, then partnered with James Cameron to start a new special effects powerhouse Digital Domain, which produced a long string of hit movies that has over the years resulted in too many Oscars on his mantle to count.

Scott’s advice: find a young music celebrity to host the series.

David Greene and Pamela Covias, a couple of high-powered TV producers in L.A., echoed Scott’s guidance, and so we began the search.

At first we pursued more mature talents, but they were understandably reluctant to work with an unknown outfit that hadn’t yet secured airtime. 

Thankfully, my good friend Paul Bannister chimed in with a referral from his daughter Rachel who knew this beautiful young music celebrity in Oregon… Halie Loren.

Halie is a remarkable talent and perfect for the job.  Not only is she a top selling jazz vocalist in Asia, well known in Canada and elsewhere, and a prize-winning songwriter, Halie also speaks 7 languages, and has an engaging intellect that can bring out the best in our musical guests.  It’s hard to believe she has yet to be "discovered" here in the U.S. as the super-talent she is.

​We’re extremely proud to have Halie and her personal agent and cheerleader, Keith Altomare, on the Plugged In and Turned On In Paradise team!

In a momentous decision, I decided to leave my hometown of Chico (in northern California) and my local musical success to find my future as a recording engineer in Hollywood. So I transferred from Chico State to Cal State Northridge where my audio recording specialty fell into the Broadcasting School’s jurisdiction. This change quickly resulted in an amazing series of connections.
 
Within my first two (junior year) semesters there, I became the student instructor of the high-end music recording laboratory, where my students recorded all University musical events on campus and off. I also became acquainted with four outstanding men who became my mentors: Bill Lazarus, a recording engineer for BB King, Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield, and later the head of audio at Universal Studios; C. Wayne Taylor, former RCA engineer and head of the University’s audio services; Sidney Salkow, my film professor (I was his student aid) who was concurrently directing “Ironsides” with Raymond Burr at Universal Studios; and Dale Manquen, who was my Acoustics professor, and former lead engineer at Ampex in their professional recording machine division as the inventor of the MM1000. He was also chief design engineer for the 3M M79 2”/ 24 track machine, and served as President of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for the U.S.. Mr. Manquen and Wayne Taylor were my sponsors into the AES, an elite professional association.
 
A new Southern California drummer friend, Marty, had been talking with my (first) wife, Kathy, and one day when we found each other waiting for the same elevator, he said, ” I didn’t know you wanted to be a recording engineer! My uncle Arnie owns some of the top recording studios here.”
 
The following day I got a phone call from Uncle Arnie who started the conversation with, “Marty said you want to be a recording engineer.” And over the course of this momentous 15-minute phone conversation, he offered me my dream job, and then completely talked me out of my life’s ambition to be involved in the professional audio world!
 
Arnie continued, ”You can start here at my Santa Monica studios tomorrow morning, but I understand you’re a newlywed...?” to which I said yes.  Then Arnie explained, ”Well I really wouldn’t feel right unless I told you my life story. I’m 34 and I’ve been married 4 times, and it’s all because of this crazy business.” He also told me what to expect over the coming months with unreasonable record producers, diva artists, and the hard and very demanding life in the studio. The clincher was his forecast of what my new wife would do. The first night of the first week, he said, when you are held over by a producer, your wife will call and nicely ask when you are coming home, and you will say, ”I don’t know dear, as soon as we’re done here I suppose.” Then, after the producer keeps you overnight and into the next day, and until the project is done, she’ll ultimately be calling almost hourly, her voice getting progressively louder and more and more angry, until she’s yelling at the top of her lungs for you to ”get your ass home if you want to see me here in the future!” Arnie finished, ”That’s almost always, exactly the way it goes, every time.”
 
After that call, which confirmed what I’d also been hearing around the water coolers of the other studios where I’d been spending time (downtown at Sunset & Vine, Hollywood), I decided to change course, away from the hazards of that fast Hollywood lifestyle, valuing my new bride and our marriage above whatever powerful lifelong dreams I’d always had for becoming a recording engineer.
 
Shortly afterwards, I got a sales job with the stereo-video chain retailer Cal-Stereo, which was, ironically, a few blocks from Arnie’s Santa Monica studio. I’m not really a sales-type, I thought, but was soon surprised with some early success. Over the next 5 years I became a store manager, subsequently being called upon to help manage the simultaneous opening of 5 new stores in the remote Northern California Bay Area. I was the only person in the company who’d come from these (very foreign) Northern California territories and therefore was one of the point-men for this expansion.
 
After some amazing years with Cal (and after it went surprisingly bankrupt), I opened my first stereo-video store, improving on the Cal-Stereo template, and only 2 blocks from Cal’s highest performing store (out of 27), a San Jose location. I was off and running into a future that included the ownership of 13 varied and interesting businesses, providing a wonderful lifelong journey (with my new wife) to the present production of our music TV series, “Plugged In and Turned On In Paradise.”

I’d started playing Music for Money when I was 12, and continued into my 20’s, in my little Northern California college town of Chico. Over those early years, I’d experienced some of my life’s most fabulous times and also learned a “fair-dinkum” bit about future roads, both taken and those avoided!
 
My dad was musical.  While he was working for his architectural degree at U.C. Berkeley in the 1940’s, Dad earned his pocket money playing trumpet in a big swing band. He transmitted his love of music to all four of the kids in our family; and while we deeply love our tone-deaf mother, she was somewhat less responsible for our common musical interests.
 
When I was eight (and the oldest), my folks bought a piano and I started taking piano lessons just down the street. Then in 1965 at age 12, I bought an acoustic guitar and, with the first tunes of the Beatles playing on our transistor radios, my neighborhood friends Conrad, Artie and I formed a garage band, The Pollywogs. Simultaneously, I followed my father’s musical lead and started playing trumpet in the Junior High school band.
 
So between these three competing instruments – piano, guitar and trumpet – it quickly became pretty clear that I would find my future playing electric guitar in a rock band. (I was really thinking of girls at the time. Shortly after we started practicing, The Pollywogs played a birthday party for Artie’s older sister, Melody, and we were gob-smacked with the idea of becoming rock stars!)
 
Over the next three years, and the rising popularity of The Jackson Five and The Osmonds, we polished our craft, becoming a proficient novelty act, and a party band for the fraternities and sororities at Chico State. We were these little kids who could actually sing and play some good music. We were four young musicians whose parents had to split the task of driving us to and from our steady weekend gigs, for which we earned an average of $50-$100 a night playing... This was 1965-1968!
 
At 17, and a few years into this musical joyride, I looked up into a beautiful fall Chico sky and recognized that this will probably be a time in my life that will be hard to beat. I’ve always remembered that moment, and after these many years, it proved to be prescient.

After winning a few of the local musical battles, our new little band, Soul Generation, qualified to enter the 1968 California State Cal-Expo Battle of the Bands. After three weeks of back-to-back appearances, we won fourth out of over one hundred entries.

Immediately after returning home, two of us were chosen by a few much older college-aged musicians to form a new rock band which we called Sara Jean. This band took off very quickly, and within a week of our first practice, we were playing regularly and earning a good musician’s living. We played all over Northern California, from the many small town "teen centers," to high school dances, and after-game events. Our bread and butter, however, were the fairly continuous sorority and fraternity “keggers,” or outdoor, beer-bash events that boosted Chico State College into the record books as Playboy’s “Party School U.S.A.” Sara Jean was partly responsible for that designation, playing 2-3 times a week for these events. I often reflect, that was the golden age of live music and our 6 piece band was charging up to $650 a night in 1968-1971, a number that’s hard to match even for semi-pro musicians today. We often camped along a roadside turnout after these little Sierra Mountain town gigs and one night, when our bass player’s girlfriend was heard changing vans (her sleeping arrangements) in the middle of the night, Sara Jean suffered a mortal wound, and this fabulous era ended a few weeks later. (The “lady of the night” later married her new favorite band-mate, the lead singer. But wait, time tells the tale, and she’s now back with the bass player and they’ve been together for decades now!)
 
Entering my first year of college at Chico State, my younger friend Melissa asked if I’d like to team up with her fine piano playing and we formed what would ultimately become Panamiga, a large horn and keyboard-based band à la Chicago, Tower of Power, Cold Blood, etc. With 9 members, including Dave our traveling soundman and electronics wizard, we were again playing continuously every weekend and one of the most popular bands in our Northern California region. This band was to be the fountainhead of many of my lifelong friendships and relationships to this day.

Our new music TV show, “Plugged In and Turned On in Paradise” got another honorable mention, this one in comments to my Britt friend and best-selling author Paul Bannister's internationally-followed blog.

The comment came from Scott Camlin, who was the BBC's top sound engineer for the last soccer World Cup.  

Scott said he "...finally got around to watching the YouTube preview of Clay Reid’s new music series 'Plugged in and Turned On in Paradise.' I’m looking forward to catching it when it is shown here in the UK."
​
He continued with a little praise and a gem of a story:

"As a "Sound Tart” in the TV industry, I particularly appreciate how well the music has been recorded and mixed, and I am reminded of a show I worked on around 1990 with (Sir) Paul McCartney."

"For professional reasons, I don’t make a habit of asking people I work with for their autographs, but on this occasion I asked Mr. McCartney if he would mind signing my treasured CD copy of "Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” He smiled, signed the cover of the CD booklet, and as he handed it back to me he said (with a glint in his eye) “Next time bring something newer for me to sign, that record is ancient!” I couldn’t resist replying “I know it was produced back in the ‘60s, but I don’t know if you’ve heard - it’s considered a classic these days…”

1-11-17
 
Happy New Year 2017, all!

I’ve been getting ready for our next PITOIP episode (Aja Vu with their amazing tribute to Steely Dan and Chicago), and find myself thinking back to the weekend I spent locked up in a small Santa Monica Recording Studio – just my-22-year-old-self… my buddy Marty… and Chicago Transit Authority, as we knew them back then.

Here’s the setup:

It was 1975. An undergrad in my final year at school, I’d been teaching the audio recording lab at Northridge University, working at Winchell’s Donuts in Granada Hills, and I was married.  I met Marty in the elevator in our student housing apartments on campus.  After we’d been friends for a few months, one day he said: “I didn't know you wanted to be a recording engineer.  My uncle owns some of the top studios on the West Coast.”

Indeed, Uncle Arnie owned The Record Plant in Sausalito, as well as Sun Spectrum, right on the beach in Santa Monica.

Arnie called me the next day. “Marty says you want to be a recording engineer...” And then he offered me my dream job. The rest of that telephone conversation changed my life in big ways, but I’ll save that for another time.  Suffice it to say this was and still is one of the highlights of my life.

So I was just finishing up my 11-7 night shift at Winchell’s on a sunny Saturday morning, when my boss hands me the phone and says, “It’s for you.” With my flour-dusted hands, I grab the phone thinking it was my wife, but no, it’s my friend Marty, clearly excited, and he says “Get down to the studio!”

I said: Look Marty, I’m just getting off an 8-hour shift, all worn out and sweaty and I smell like doughnuts.

But Marty’s frantic.  ”Just get here as soon as you can!”  

Okay! I ran home and took a shower, kissed the wife and told her I’d be back, and drove the 45 minutes to the Santa Monica Exit off the 405 and down the street to the beach and the studio.

You’d probably recognize the place because the studio sat on the second story of a converted three story house, right on the sandy beach with a ribbon of sidewalk that everybody knows because it was so often in movie and TV scenes, like the opening for Three’s Company, or just about every shot with roller skaters and beach volleyball.  It’s long gone now, turned into a public parking lot for the Santa Monica Pier crowd.

I ran up the rickety wooden staircase and opened the heavy public front door to find a bunch of my childhood idols sitting on the couch in front of me, drinking beers and telling lies. Wow!  Chicago!

I loved Chicago!  I’d grown up playing piano, then trumpet, and then rock guitar in a number of popular local bands in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  We loved Chicago with their great rhythm and wall of horns and keyboards and their ridiculous hooks.  They’re still one of my favorite bands.

They were just coming back from several months of chill time, a rare break of not playing together, and they were rusty, so they’d booked the studio to rehearse for their upcoming year long tour.  They forked out the equivalent of a down payment on a nice house for several days of rehearsal at Sun Spectrum – not uncommon for the top-flight bands, since only they could afford the outrageous hourly cost of studio time in those days.

That entire weekend Marty and I sat in the control room, running sound and keeping the wrong people (except girls) out of the studio and away from these musical superstars, while the boys ran down their set-list.

It was a fabulous weekend with the CTA Boys, and one of the highlights of my youth.

Plugged In and Turned On In Paradise (PITOIP) is blessed to have a stellar line-up of talents for our first two seasons.  Top players such as:

• Laurence Juber – He’s toured with Paul McCartney and Wings, and recorded hundreds of tracks for the music industry’s biggest talents, as well as 23 solo albums.  Acoustic Guitar Magazine calls him one of the top players of all time.

• Ian Ethan Case - One of only five musicians in the world considered a virtuoso on the double-necked guitar.  Critics are calling him a revolutionary, blazing talent. 

• Danny Hull - He has sung and performed on sax, flute, harmonica and keyboards with some of the best musicians in the world – including The Doobie Brothers, Michael Bolton, Eddie Money, Journey, and Michael Jackson.

• Simon Lynge - A native Greenlander whose debut album got rave reviews in Rolling Stone, BBC, and Cashbox. His new CD “The Map Of Your Life” debuted at the top of the charts in Denmark.

• Jenna Mammina and Rolf Sturm - Jazziz Magazine calls Jenna one of the leading women in jazz and pop.  Rolf has earned the praise of master jazz guitarists such as Joe Pass and Bill Frisell. These two are what musical chemistry is all about.

• And more top-draw players that deserve to be household names, such as Carlos Reyes, Chris Cain, Tony Lindsay, Ron E. Beck, Rock Hendricks, Aja Vu, David Zink, and many others.

You’ll get more familiar with our featured artists in the coming weeks.

--Clay