We recently connected with David Bluefield and have shared our conversation below.

David, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

My mom bought a baby grand piano when I was 13 and as soon as I hit a C major chord the vibrations went through my body. Then, as luck would have it, my next door neighbor, only a semester ahead of me, had a teacher who had taught him the 12th st rag and I knew right then and there I wanted his teacher to teach me that Ragtime piano favorite. The rest is history. I went on to be in bands from High School onwards and we always ended our set with 12st Rag.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was lucky in high school to find music bandmates that were talented enough to get us gigs and eventually we were good enough to get a record deal on Warner Bros records. The Bass player’s wife’s sister was Chuck Negron’s ( lead singer of Three Dog Night) wife. So we had a connection to the number one band in the word at the time and we toured with them and Chuck produced us and we had some success. As I became known as a songwriter/keyboardist I eventually got hired by the Don Drowty Youth Foundation to direct the American Music Project -sponsored by A&M legend Herb Alpert – and we made an album of Nursery Rhymes (rock and country style) that made it 22 million kids in 71k schools. I also got a call to play the piano live on the nationally televised Tracey Ulman show in a very funny dancing skit with Steve Martin (called “Skin the Duck” and available online). Then I got a call from ABC TV to arrange and compose a theme for full orchestra to advertise their huge Soap Opera Promotion called “There’s more to love in the afternoon” sung by Mary MacGregor ( of “Torn between two lovers” fame).
Another proud moment for me was winning a Clio award for arranging and composing the music for a PSA starring Teri Garr for M.A.D.D. (Mothers against Drunk Drivers) that played in movie theaters in America.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

This is a story about folding under pressure and learning what and when is the right time to hand in an unfinished product. I was hired (right after the art of sampling had happened) to provide the music for an 8 min video for Panasonic about the history of recorded sound. The client wanted to go decade by decade featuring the recordings that happened – starting with Thomas Edison singing “Mary had a little lamb” to Neil Armstrong “one small step for man one leap for mankind” to Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Chuck Berry etc – and I was going to “sample” all those sounds from the stack of albums the video company that hired me had dropped off. My staff and I wanted to create a wonderful sound that would be played across the transitions between the decades. So we recorded a loud long electric guitar chord and utilized the new technology to reverse the sound -so it started at the decayed ending and grew into the great strum. So as we laid out the 8 minutes we filled in the “sampled” sounds BEFORE THEY WERE SAMPLED with singing or talking to fill the time and then of course played our marvelous decade transition sound of the reversed guitar – but the client wanted to hear something right away – so I remember labeling the 8 min reel of tape R O U G H M I X and underlined it twenty times with !!!!!!! several !!!!! points fully expecting the client to understand the concept of place holders in between our marvelous reversed guitar chord. He did not. He fired me and I only found out when I called them the day before the deadline!!! I never had the chance to do what I was hired to do because I handed in something that required imagination -which I guess is the moral of the story – to never assume that a “rough mix” is a good idea.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

The simple resource is to pay attention to who you are competing with . In my enthusiasm for creating original music I did not continue listening to all that was out there from the pop music field that would contribute to my understanding of trends – I learned a little too late that what was “currently” a hit and therefore something that you would borrow from -was already a few months behind what was going to be “next”. So, instead of copying what was current we – bandmates and me – should have had bigger imaginations about how to expand and unfold instead of copying.

Contact Info:

• Website: [email protected]
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=david+bluefield+music
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/dbluefield
• Other: my current viral video (2,600,000) on youtube featuring my dad as the world’s oldest drummer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMDjQlt9Cek

Image Credits

the “hands” was from the movie Close Encounters where I (David Bluefield) played the synthesizer communication the mother ship and was directed by Steven Spielberg