Album Notes

I've written music for the last Grateful Dead Chinese New Year show, NPR, ESPN, PBS... played with Tom Waits, The Ramones, Krist Novocelic of Nirvana... I'm an old man who's done it all. More data vailable at http://www.richardsales.com
BIOGRAPHY (If this gets chopped off again let me know!)
I was born just ten minutes from the White House, just outside of Washington D.C., or what I call "The Bullseye". This was before cars had big fins and enormous engines, before there was such a thing as rock and roll, back when a computer big enough to write this biography would need a warehouse to hold it.

I weep to think of Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and The Flamingos. I loved the days when music was important, when it carried the lifeblood of change, back before the bean counters and lawyers weasled their way into its arteries like HIV at a love in.

I've done so much music it makes my fingers itch to think about it. I've been through it all from the beginning of rock and roll - from playing in teen bands at age 13 (we're talking circa 1961) to performing live onstage with Chuck Berry (1970) to producing the earliest rap in the underground music scene in Washington DC (80) to writing music for a Grateful Dead show... and then to writing music for Nike.

Here's the crucial facts: I moved from The Bullseye to Portland Oregon in 1990. Wrote music for film and video there. Moved from Portland to Vancouver Island in 2003 to become a farmer and try to align my walk with my talk, and to live in accord with what brief messages I was gettiing from the clouds and bluejays and the Inaudible That Speaks.

My songs and my web site really say it much better than I can say it here.

I do want to say that I really love music because I have that Pre Post-Modern belief that it can fundamentally change people and the world. 'Artists are the priests of the 21st century,' (Joseph Cambell). So I feel it is on me to have something of use to say - something nutritious - something you can eat with your ears and grow stronger from. I'm too old and grey to use music to get girls or to be a pimp for the ego. So it only is what it is now - the medium that carries the critical message that I want to pass on before I do.

Through music, I learned how to fly. More than anything, I want my music to feed a few listeners and to make them strong so they can carry these feathers into the future.

I want my grand children to know that God is the air.

richard sales, fall 2004