Let's start with the hair. Just for the record, I could grow it back any time I want to. I'm BBC: bald by choice. Left alone, it would all come back. Big bushy curly hair, like a lumberjack or a sheep. But more like a lumberjack.
Okay, now that we've got that cleared up, let's move on. I also play some piano (and most anything else with black and white keys). I started playing at age five, learning a two-note song called "See the Bear." After seven years of classical lessons (during which I worked rapidly up to Beethoven sonatas--and then slowly all the way back down to "See the Bear"), I discovered and started playing Billy Joel and Elton John, which basically changed my life.
As a teenager, I learned every piano-based pop song I could find and started writing for the first time. These songs hold up surprisingly well musically, but have the most hilariously melodramatic lyrics you've ever heard in your life. You will never hear these songs. It was also about this time that I started branching out, listening to folkier stuff--James Taylor, David Wilcox, etc.--and learning to play jazz. By the end of high school, I was playing piano bars around Boston. This was a lot of fun at first, but I rapidly grew to understand why people who do this type of work for years are typically referred to as "grizzled." So I eventually quit the "Misty" business to start performing my own material, and started treating the piano more like the percussion instrument it is. I started writing with a full band in mind, listening to a lot of funk, jazz, blues, soul, etc. And after graduating from college, I moved to New York City.
There, the creatively named Josh Dodes Band quickly became a local favorite. We made the Bitter End our home but played everywhere from the Bowery Ballroom to Irving Plaza. We toured a good bit, went through several personnel changes, released two albums, played everywhere from the Kennedy Center to the House of Blues, and eventually got hand-picked by VH1 for "Bands on the Run," a reality show about life on the road for touring bands. This was both the oddest and best thing that ever happened to the band. On the one hand, having cameras trained on us 24/7 was completely surreal. On the other hand, of course, you cannot pay for that kind of publicity.
We started touring much more extensively, garnering opening spots for all manner of major-label artists, without ever being signed to a label ourselves: Avril Lavigne, Alana Davis, Duncan Sheik, Pat Benatar, The B-52's, Maceo Parker, and more. Exciting experiences, to be sure, but after a couple of years, without label support or any real financial relief on the horizon, I started to get exhausted being CEO, Mail Boy, and nearly everything in between. In a word, grizzled. So in July 2004, after eight and a half mostly great years, I decided to retire.
However, as with Michael Jordan and Cher (I am like Cher in a surprising number of ways, only some of which I can discuss publicly), retirement didn't seem to stick. See, in the spring of 2003, funk legend and personal deity Maceo Parker had asked me to tour Europe as his organist, and while I had to say no (I was getting married!), it planted a seed in my mind. That seed grew to be a mighty oak tree... no, wait. What I meant to say is that it grew into a second career. A career in which I wear many hats: sideman, session player, songwriter, arranger, music director, and occasional rock star.
Which is where you find me: wearing a lot of hats and looking confused, but happier than I have ever been in the music biz. Where did I get all these hats, you might ask? How does one wear so many hats, and still look so incredibly handsome? Can one hat be worn jauntily, while another is worn proudly? I don't know the answers to all these questions yet, but I'm greatly enjoying the experience of finding out.
As my grandpappy once said to me, "Jeffrey! Never forget that the Finns hate rugelach!" (Nobody ever knew what the hell he was talking about.)