Salty Rose is working-class guitar player. A bass player. A singer & a songwriter. And the blogger, vlogger, photographer, storyteller, and motorcycle rider for Two Kinds Of Light. Original music and a few other things. Based in Ventura, California.
"Salty Rose, here". I've made a lifelong musical career out of being a dive-bar bassist and guitar-slinger. I got my first guitar at the age of eight. Mom and Dad bought me a nylon string acoustic guitar and got me some lessons. At sixteen I had saved, begged, and borrowed enough money to make an instrument purchase on my own- a Vox Cougar bass. I got it for fifty bucks. It was the cheapest guitar at JB-Wilson Music, in Woodland Hills, CA. By the age of eighteen I was honing my chops in garages, at parties, and sometimes in smoke filled bars at night around Los Angeles. The bands I had the opportunity to work with play original music, classic rock, top-40, alt-country, punk rock, and the blues. My exploits on the guitar, punctuate a life spent carving out a living, as a builder and a citizen-soldier. I've survived the job-sites, the dive-bars, the battlefield, and the heartbreaks. But it hasn't all been just about survival. Along the way I've also motorcycled on Mulholland Highway, surfed from Malibu to Rincon, rocked, rolled, and experienced profound joy and love in my life. I write songs about all this stuff now. And I rock the dives every chance I get (well, I did right up until the pandemic hit).
My musical career as a sideman, is as important to me, as my original music is. It's been a mainstay of my career. Ever the showman, supporting local artists like: D.on Darox & the Melody Joy Bakers, Jodi Farrell & The Front Street Prophets, Skarecrow & The Graverobbers, Crying 4 Kafka, and The Pretty Ugly's. One of my favorite sayings is, "I just want to play my guitar".
In addition to being an artist and dive-bar guitarist, like most guitar players, I'm a little bit of a gear geek. Part of what that entails, is I've bought and sold a lot of guitars over the years. I enjoy learning about and debating the merits of different instruments. I find my own opinions don't always line up with the conventional wisdom. But I stand by my likes and dislikes in guitar-geek-dom, as they have been formed in the cauldron that is the dive-bar guitar life. On my YouTube channel, in my Gear Gallery, and on my stories page I feature my humble (or maybe not so humble?) opinions about music gear.
To sum it up I like to think of my original music project Two Kinds Of Light as being- "Tinged by love. Singed by war. Informed by years of playing the dives".
Echo's of the past ain't far behind.
Salty Rose. 2021
