A little bit about me ...

(You clicked to get here, so you asked for it)

I was born in New York City in 1963. At an early age, I was able to try my hand at many instruments from trumpet to drums to piano until finally settling on guitar at the age of 12. At that time, however, there was no money for lessons, so I taught myself how to play guitar by playing along to records, reading books and trial and error....emphasis on error. I played in a few bands in my teens, one of them, a hardcore band called Voltage, landing several gigs at NYC's famous CBGB's and Max's Kansas City nightclubs. At the age of 19, I landed a job in one of the top recording studios in New York at the time, The Power Station (now called Avatar). This job consumed all of my time so playing guitar in a band took a back seat. After working for several years at The Power Station, Soundworks Studios and Skyline Studios, I took a full time job as Nile Rodgers audio engineer which I did for almost 5 years. During my engineer and assistant engineering career, I (under my real name, Jon Goldberger) had the pleasure of working with such great artists as Stevie Ray Vaughan, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Steve Winwood, The Stray Cats, David Lee Roth, Lloyd Cole, Peter Gabriel, Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman.

After 12 years of working 70-80 hour work weeks (sometimes over 100), I decided that I needed more out of life than just working, so I moved to Maui in March of 1995 and became a SCUBA Instructor. I moved to Maui with 2 suitcases and an acoustic guitar. I had no intentions of returning to playing in a band when I got to Maui, but with my new much less demanding work schedule, I found myself playing a lot more than I had since my teens. In 2004, I started going to Life's a Beach Monday night open mic, hosted by the very talented Adam Bowen. While playing there one night, I was asked to play guitar in the Maui Onstage production of Hair, which I did in August of 2004. It was my first paying gig in over 20 years. I had the bug again. Shortly after that, I hooked up with Mark Kelley (singer/guitar), Tait Gielow (bass) and Holo Werner (drums) and formed Fragile X, a cover band playing modern rock. After months of rehearsing and honing our sound, we played a few gigs around the island and then the drummer left the band due to musical differences. With Fragile X falling apart (no pun intended), Mark referred me to Ron Shadian of the Crunch Pups. We jammed one evening and Ron asked me to join the band. I was ecstatic. With the Crunch Pups, I had been gigging an average 4-5 nights a week since April of 2005 until June of 2009. Needless to say, my playing improved immensely in that time and playing music has been my only "job" for most of that time. In July of 2009, I moved to Oregon to inpursuit of romance. When I got here, I joined the band Impulse, in which I played guitar, keyboards and sing backing vocals. We played our first gig together in August of 2009 at Yukon Jack's in Veneta, Oregon and had a few more after that, but unfortunately a couple of the members had to leave the band for personal reasons. Since then, I have not had luck with playing music with a band. My eyes are open though.

Oh, and somewhere in there I got really into photography. It started underwater as a way to make some extra money by selling pictures to my divers (hey, a guy's gotta make a buck). Before you know it, I had a big SLR (the film kind, remember those?) and was shooting slide film. I even had my own darkroom for a very short time. The picture of the church on this page is one I shot and printed using my darkroom. Then along came digital. I sold all my film gear before it was worthless, so I have not had a decent camera in many years. I am currently in the long, tedious process of digitizing all my film and hope to be posting stuff on here as it enters the world of bits and bytes. Feel free to enjoy my pictures, download them, make them a wallpaper, screen saver or digital dartboard, send 'em to friends and take credit ... whatever. Just don't make money with them without my permission. That's fair, right?

I am currently putting my focus on school, trying to capitalize on the nerd in me. I am studying computer network operations and security, which does entail some web design work, hence the long overdue update.

Oh, and don't forget to check out my music and let me know what you think.

Aloha and a hui hou!

Johnny