ROGER JOSEPH MANNING JR

The way my mom tells it, at the age of two I demonstrated my musical prowess with the old cliché of banging on pots, pans, and bowls found in the kitchen. When my brother Chris received a box of toy percussion instruments for Xmas one year, I hijacked all of the tambourines and bongos and began beating them with utensils only to absolutely destroy them within 24 hours. In restaurants I was known to be a complete attention whore. If I wasn't busy doing my impression of Flip Wilson as Geraldine, I would get out of my chair and dance and sing flamboyantly to only 2 songs: Blood, Sweat, & Tears' “Spinning Wheel” or the 5th Dimension's “Age Of Aquarius.”

When we moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area, my mother began the hunt for some kind of music instructor in an attempt to satiate my musical cravings and outbursts. Salvation arrived in the form of a babysitter who also provided piano instruction for neighborhood children. However I had NO interest in playing piano at all. If anything I wanted to bang away on the drums like my Uncle Donald who had not only played in the seminal fuzzed-out surf band Davie Allan and the Arrows, but continued to do casual work around the country. He was my hero needless to say. I remember as a kid seeing him play in a Las Vegas lounge act. I would have sworn to you then that his gigantic 70s-era drum set looked like it had 30 to 40 drums. Somewhere along the line my mother had been made aware of the advantages of the chordal-harmony instruments like guitar or piano. And since the grandparents' family heirloom piano had been acquired as a marriage gift years before, the instrument choice was made for me. I agreed to start piano lessons for the 4 following reasons: first, to humor my mother who seemed much more passionate about this endeavor than myself (thanks, Mom!); second, the instrument was rather intuitive and the learning process was quite natural for me (in other words I never practiced and somehow still excelled); third, I received lots of attention at school and during holidays for the silly little show-off numbers I could play; fourth, and most important, my instructor Anne was a 17-year old high school girl and a stone cold FOX!!! This was a no brainer!

Even though my lessons with Anne had been filled with the wondrous new feelings of puppy love, musically speaking I continued uninterested for years. Teachers came and teachers went and none of them looked as pretty. The traditional curriculum was employed using the same predictable classical literature we've all heard in TV and movies 1,000 times. Although I learned the invaluable skill of reading & writing notation, I was ultimately bored out of my mind. Just as I was preparing to tell my parents they were wasting their hard-earned money and the time had come for me to quit, within the time span of a year or two, two pieces of 70s Top 40 fare, amidst all the other guitar-heavy and disco-driven tunes on the chart, caught my attention and convinced me to give this piano thing another go-around. Both featured acoustic piano as their main instrument: Scott Joplin's “The Entertainer” (theme from the movie The Sting) and “Nadia's Theme”. My teacher at the time didn't have many reservations about the melancholy and almost classical style of Nadia's Theme, but that jazzy Scott Joplin ragtime music was quite another story. Once she realized, however, that Joplin's songbook was probably the only way I was going to stay on as a student, she caved in and reluctantly taught me not only The Entertainer but also about 40 other Joplin classics.

The new found joy of actually being able to learn and perform a song that I had heard on the radio inspired me to hunt for more music that would excite me. Like many impatient kids my age, I enlisted the help of the Columbia House Record Club where one could supposedly buy 13 albums for the price of 1. Yeah right! We all know the rest of that story and I won't bore you with the predictable outcome of that disaster. Suffice to say that when their giant package finally arrived at my door some 10 weeks after it was supposed to, I was quite possibly more excited than I had been since my very first memorable Xmas morning at the age of three. One problem: the record club of course screwed up the order. I had ordered Chicago's Greatest Hits as a thank you to my parents for allowing me to take on the adult responsibility of joining a record club. I liked Chicago a little bit and knew most of their hits. It was a small price to pay in exchange for all of the KISS records they were reluctantly allowing me to get with my initial order. Unfortunately, or so I thought at the time, I received not one but five different Chicago records I didn't order instead of the five Kiss records I had ordered. For some reason it never occurred to this naïve 11 year old that I had the option of returning the items. So, desperate at that age to listen to as much new music as possible, I spent lots of time exploring the various tracks on those Chicago records. I began hearing foreign and alluring chordal harmonies and melodic shapes as well as instruments I had not yet heard up to that point from my favorite Kiss, Led Zeppelin, and Beach Boy albums…namely electronic keyboards! I became obsessed with the mechanics of these records.

As the saying goes, “when the student is ready the teacher will appear.” And that's just what happened. Whenever my family would take a weekend trip to one of the ever-exciting Bay Area malls, I would make a be-line for Musicland, your one stop-all things related to rock culture rebellion-shop a la suburbia. For some reason, though I never saw a single person ever purchase such an item, Musicland stocked sheet music to every single in the Billboard top 100 charts as well as entire music books from several of those bands represented. I purchased not one but 5 music notation books of transcribed Chicago albums. These amazing books contained guitar tablature, piano chords, vocal melodies and lyrics, as well as separate transcriptions of brass and string arrangements represented on the original recordings. This was a crash course in pop song composition and arranging. From these books I was able to teach myself piano chord basics, a skill that traditional piano lessons never afforded. I was then able to play along with my favorite songs at home. NOW things were finally getting interesting. Simply put, I was in shock! At 12 years of age and barely in the 7th grade this was a musical dream come true and I was hooked for life!

The previous year I had acquired, as part of my birthday present from my folks, Uncle Donald's old 1965 Ludwig Ringo model drum set at a healthy family discount. While honing my rhythmic skills drumming along with the radio and developing my chordal accompaniment with the Chicago records, naturally I started to improve at a rapid pace. Nobody ever had to tell me to practice again. This was not only fun but purely instinctual and intuitive as well. Doors began to open to an amazing world of self-expression and creativity that had been unknowingly pent up inside me for years. I had no idea at the time that this obsession would prove to be how I would spend almost the next 30 years of my life.

From here on out one can pretty much imagine how the story unfolds. I rapidly began digesting any record I could get my hands on, especially if there were crazy keyboard sounds on them. I welcomed all eras of music no matter how passé or uncool. I explored ALL genres in the pop, rock, and jazz realms. Artists like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, Jean-Luc Ponty, Chick Corea, Frank Zappa, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Brian Eno and Roxy Music, Steely Dan, Mahavishnu Orchestra and all the jazz greats of the past and present, as well as the wealth of fresh new music emerging from the punk and New Wave scenes like Gang of Four, Thomas Dolby, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, Talk Talk, The Damned, XTC, Tears for Fears, Suicidal Tendencies, Madness, Wall of Voodoo, to name just a few. Nothing was taboo. If the artists had well-crafted hook-laden songs and explored creative arrangement and production possibilities, I would devour their art. The more awkward my teenage years became the more I compensated by throwing myself head first into developing my skills a musician. I helped form all kinds of music groups. From my high school jazz quartet which won several national jazz competitions, including several awards in Down Beat Magazines' student music award competition, to my local punk band Nothing To Prove (I played drums) which, while frightening all of the adults that had watched me grow into an accomplished classical and jazz pianist, also provided the soundtrack to the burgeoning local skateboard scene.

So there I was with spiked hair and trashed thrift store clothing going to punk rock shows at the On Broadway nightclub in San Francisco by night and in my marching band uniform by day! What's this you say? Oh yeah, I was a big-time band fag so to speak. Not by choice of course. The rule in Amador High's music program was that if you wanted to play in the exciting rock-jazz ensembles you had to do your time in the ever un-cool and dreaded marching band. Surely though piano players were excused. Not so fast buddy! The head of the drum corps comes up to me and hoists the portable marching marimba set over my head and down onto my shoulders ... and down I go to the ground! The damn thing was way too heavy and cumbersome for this little 125lb. weakling. So now I'm off the hook right? Wrong!!! "Hey Manning", shouted Mr. Christiansen, "you know anything about the trombone? We're short a bone player!” Yep, that's how bad I wanted to keep playing piano in the jazz ensembles. (Did I mention that my high school had a Minimoog Synthesizer at the time?) Although I resent all the time wasted in marching band, I left with an incredible understanding of brass phrasing and arranging which serves me to this day. And what better a time to give a big thank you to my first mentor, Mr. Greg Christiansen, who not only played me my first ever Miles Davis recording but said to me when I was thinking about quitting the marching band which then of course meant quitting the jazz band by default, “so Roger, how bad do you want it?” He already knew. I wanted IT more than any other kid at the school. Well, except maybe one other kid ... Andy Sturmer.

1988-1994 Beatnik Beatch and Jellyfish: see Jellyfish section bio.

1994-1998 IMPERIAL DRAG & THE MOOG COOKBOOK:

Jellyfish was never supposed to self-destruct, but when it did, I kept the momentum going with not one, but two very intense and diametrically opposed projects. The pop sensible but more hard-rocking Imperial Drag, with former Jellyfish guitarist Eric Dover, and the electronic-based and comedic Moog Cookbook were two equally beautiful sides of my Gemini personality that desperately needed to be expressed after the breakup of Jellyfish. Eric Dover was amidst an incredibly expressive and prolific time in his life musically and lyrically. I am so fortunate to have worked with him for this three-year run, and I am so proud of the classic rock-influenced explorations we brought to the mid 90s modern rock music scene. The rest of our musical family, bassist Joe Karnes and drummer Eric Skodis, rounded off the group perfectly and helped us bring a very unique form of pop-rock entertainment to the world at the time.

Literally the very same month Jellyfish disbanded, I met an artist that would change my life forever, Brian Kehew (aka Uli Nomi). Our mutual fondness for not only vintage music gear and the history of popular recording, but also for pop culture humor, has sustained our friendship to this very day. He is an incredibly underrated talent in synthesizer programming, recording, and arranging, and it was inevitable that Brian and I would express our mutual admiration for a bygone era of keyboard-based record-making and a desire for pop-rock satire in the formation of the Moog Cookbook duo. Over the course of two albums, we honored our keyboard and electronic music heroes by doing very premeditative but nonetheless satirical arrangements of 80s & 90s so-called modern rock classics, as well as some of our favorite 60s & 70s classic rock pieces. What a way to say thank you to our heroes and no thank you to the rest!

1997-2002 BECK & AIR:

As Imperial Drag came to an end and other side projects took Brian and I away from the Moog Cookbook, I became very frustrated with how to express myself next. I felt as though I wanted to continue having a band that would be a vehicle for my writing but that was not to be. In the fall of ’97, famed producer Jerry Finn called me out of the blue one day asking if I did “session work,” fearing that he had insulted me in the process. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from various producers, “I thought you’d be insulted at the thought of doing session work since you have your own bands.” But nothing could have been further from the truth. For a fellow contemporary artist to think enough of you to request that your musical contributions grace their records is one of the greatest compliments a musician can receive. And although songwriting holds the greatest rewards for me, performing, arranging, and just overall improvising is always gratifying. Since that first request, I’ve been lucky enough to perform keyboards, vocals, and arrange on hundreds of albums (see discography).

Early on in my career, I can remember a bit of philosophy that producer Albhy Galuten offered up to me: “just do what you’re passionate about with honesty and sincerity and the rest will take care of itself.” My introduction to the world of Beck is the perfect case in point. In December of ‘97 I got a call from Justin Meldal-Johnsen, bass player for Beck. Seems they had a keyboardist position to be filled. HOLY SHIT! Is this really happening? I had just been talking to my musical friends Ross Harris and Robert Caranza (both, unbeknownst to me at the time, mutual friends and collaborators of Beck’s) about how much Beck’s music had been inspiring me recently to make original music again. In addition, it turns out Beck was a big Moog Cookbook fan. One thing led to another and within four days I was auditioning for the band. I had to learn 33 songs in three days and then we were all off to Australia for a three and a half week tour. That was the insane beginning to what became a five-year magical mystery country-fied hip-hop tour of musical fulfillment beyond my wildest dreams. During my time with Beck, I was privileged enough to record three albums, go on several world tours, make numerous videos and TV appearances…you get the idea. In addition I was introduced to, and continue to enjoy the company of, some of the most talented, creative, witty, and funnier-than-shit artists on the face of this planet, in the form of Beck Hansen and the various incarnations of his band. If I was going to temporarily forego my own band projects I could think of no greater talent to accompany during this time of modern music-making than Mr. Hansen. What an inspiration, folks! Due to Beck’s unique abilities as a band leader and teacher, to this day some of my favorite personal keyboard work can be found on those records we did together. Someone once asked me what it was like working with him and I came up with the following metaphor: Beck takes me to the edge of the cliff and says “now I’m gonna push you off and I know you’re kind of scared but I totally trust you to land on your feet or your face, and either one is going to be beautiful and fine with me!” Wow, now that’s how you earn the right to be Captain of a ship; unconditional love and respect for your shipmates. The only reason I voluntarily stepped down from the keyboardist chair somewhere around 2002 was to get myself off the road (which I’d been doing for over twelve years) and back into the studio full time. I love being involved in the record-making process, be they my own albums or other artists’, and you just can’t do that from a hotel room in some little town I can’t even pronounce in the middle of Spain. Mr. Hansen I know we will be working together again soon. Thanks for the ride of my life.

Albhy’s philosophy of remaining true to oneself continued to serve me and was further demonstrated by my encounter with the French band AIR. Basically the duo heard a Moog Cookbook album and asked Brian & I to do a remix of their song ”Kelly Watch the Stars.” I was relieved that after one of the toughest remixes of my life (three weeks in the making), they were very pleased. They then proceeded to surprise us both by asking Brian and I to assemble a touring band for them as, “in France there are no musicians who understand what we do!” Along with bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and drummer Brian Reitzell, we four Americans toured Europe and the U.S as Air’s back-up band in the fall of 1998. Mike Mills’ documentary “Eating, Sleeping, Drinking, & Playing” wonderfully captures this unique adventure. This led to a number of amazingly creative and fun-filled adventures including being asked to perform keyboards and sing on Air’s follow up release 20000 Hz Legend and execute another remix for the them, the single “Don’t Be Light”.

1998-PRESENT: SESSIONS, REMIXES, SCORING, & TV EYES

After doing the first Air remix, I realized that a huge part of my musicality was being fulfilled by the remix process. The act of reworking an already great song idea and using my skills to manipulate it into another realm (ideally one that people could dance to) was incredibly intriguing and rewarding for me as a composer and arranger. I began seeking out as many remix opportunities as I could. Groups like Soulwax, later of Too Many DJs fame, provided lots of remix opportunities. I was even asked to remix the first single from Beck’s Midnight Vultures record, Sexx Laws. In fact it was Beck who unknowingly provided me with my remix moniker, Malibu. While joking around at Disneyland, Beck proceeded to make up aliases for all of us who were there in attendance as his birthday guests. I continue to do remixes and welcome all opportunities to rework other artists’ material. The joy of remixing for me is that no style of music is too foreign to be remixed. After all, I met the most welcome challenge of remixing recently on the Doobie Brothers classic, “Listen to the Music” with great success.

While working on the Air album in Paris in the winter of ’99, Brian Reitzell and I fantasized about putting together yet another side project (we had already teamed up for the soundtrack album to Logan’s Sanctuary, the fictitious follow up to Sci-fi film classic Logan’s Run, for Emperor Norton Records). We had had such fun working with old Jellyfish band mate Jason Falkner on a couple of tracks for the soundtrack album that we wondered what would happen if we all got together for a new project inspired by all of our collective 80s influences. TV Eyes was born… kind of. Jason was inspired by the idea as well, and in the summer of 2000 we finally began. We wrote the album in one week in Jason’s living room but unfortunately spent the next two years, because we were all so busy with other projects, recording several versions of the record, trying to perfect our vision before unveiling it to our collective fans. From the winter of 2002 to the spring of 2003 we developed the most elaborate live show any of us had ever been involved with individually or together. Determined to execute the album live as a trio, we assembled not only complex backing track accompaniment but all original synced video to be shown on a stage screen behind us. TV Eyes debuted its 10 song album and accompanying video show in May of 2003 to sold-out crowds at Los Angeles’ Troubadour and Synthetic night clubs. We played additional shows in October of 2003 as well. After many mixed reviews of both colossal praise and simultaneous utter confusion from the major labels, we continue to this day in trying to find a proper home for the release of the record. The biggest irony in all of this passing of time is that once the album is finally released, it might just turn out to be an even more perfect time to release such an album as various trends in the ever-changing fickle hit parade continues to ebb and tide in our favor. What was once a project very ahead of its time may in fact turn out to be right on time for once in our collective musical careers!

While moving into our first new house in the summer of 2000, I unpacked and rediscovered various demo tapes of original songs that spanned the course of my musical journey from my days in college up to the present. I almost started to cry at the thought of so many of these precious ideas never seeing the light of day simply because I didn’t have the right band vehicle assembled to execute them. “Screw it”, I thought, “I’ll just get started and work them up even if nobody but myself ever hears them. I have to see what they’re going to look like in 3D,” so to speak. So off and on for the next four years, in between all kinds of fun projects, I sculpted away one lyric or overdub when I found the time and assembled my first batch of eleven solo original ideas, totally executed by myself in my home studio. And there are hundreds more. Way too many dreams and just too little time. But believe me I’m not complaining. I’ve had more dreams come true in the last 20 years than I know what to do with. Many of which I didn’t even know I desired.

Today I am feeling incredibly fulfilled as I continue to do session work as a keyboardist, vocalist, and arranger. I still do remixes whenever they’re offered. I have enjoyed contributing music to various film scores including Sophia Copolla’s “Lost In Translation” with band mate and music supervisor extraordinaire, Brian Reitzell. I am on the staff of an amazing audio and visual design agency in New York called Expansion Team and as a result do lots of scoring for commercials and cable TV networks like Comedy Central and VH-1. Not only is my second solo pop album under way but an all electronic dance record of original material is also nearing completion. I am raising fruit trees, am a better skateboarder, thanks to the ramp I had built in my backyard, than I was in my teens, and am the proud father of six lovely pet animals: two rats, three cats, and a dog. Oh yeah, and I’m still together after fourteen years with my best friend, Charlotte. Some of you probably remember her as the first coordinator of the Jellyfish Fan Club.

So, this should bring all of you curious folk up to date for now. But as this website continues to develop and grow I look forward to eventually including more detailed histories of each specific band or project from my past.

www.rogerjosephmanningjr.com