I’ve had many chats and long conversations with Scott over the course of the last few years. We played in the Gandhi Method for a bit, and even though we made some different choices with regard to our music paths, we’ve become better friends by it. And in turn, I’ve shared many opportunities discussing music, life, love, God, and politics to great extent at heightened levels that are not only challenging but are also completely open to discovery and exploration.

Scott is about exploration in an enormous way. He’s not satisfied with mediocrity nor casual exchanges about the rain expected for this evening. There are more important things to talk about, and, with all there is to do in this lifetime, it’s better to be busy than to settle for idle chit chat.

Maybe you’ve seen him lately. You can find him on stage every so often, either solo or with his band. He’s also the guy who shows up with an Ipod at everyone’s show, sharing the progress of a video he’s been producing, which not only promotes his latest CD release Kaleidoscope End, but it also overtly features well over 50 San Diego artists in the video! Along with being a real triple threat artist who excels at writing, playing (guitar and bass), and singing – Scott is also up to his neck in video production. His video and documentary credits include Lenny Kravitz, J-Lo, the Goo-Goo Dolls, Foo Fighters, the Beach Boys, Melissa Etheridge, the Rolling Stones, John Mayer, Mariah Carey, Fleetwood Mac. The list goes on and on.

Meanwhile, Scott’s been working on his current release for the past several years, respecting the patience of his musical quest and holding out for what he feels is “right,” meaning “the most truthful expression of what he feels is his divine mission.”
We held this interview – intermittently – over the Christmas holiday.
While most of the rest of us saturated ourselves with food on Christmas night, Scott remained engaged in theological discussions with my father-in-law. I stayed on the perimeter in order to give them room while remaining within earshot. Eventually I got a chance at Scott’s ear.

“Tell me how you got started with music. When did you know it was in you?” I began. “Tell me where you’ve been.”

Scott flips quickly through the filing system of his own mental recall. “I got a guitar from my father for my ninth birthday. He taught me a bit when I was about five. One of my earliest memories is of him playing electric guitar while I was playing in a nearby playground and hearing his blaring Gibson 335 from a distance. One of the first songs I played by ear was the song I heard on the playground that day. I took some lessons when I was nine or ten and couldn’t quite figure out the whole sight reading thing. I could do it, but not fluently. At the school I was going to, there was a woman who taught guitar as more of a chordal/song approach rather than a note/reading approach, and I took to that a lot better. I discovered the Beatles in high school, and learned as many Beatles tunes as I could from the Beatles Easy Guitar Book [the white one]. I played acoustic guitar pretty much as a a hobbyist until I was 18, when I picked up the bass guitar in my freshman year of college at USC. I came back to San Diego in my sophomore year at San Diego State and started jamming with a next door neighbor named Larry, and started discovering the blues at that point. 

I went back up to L.A. for my junior year of college and studied motion picture/television at UCLA.  I joined a top 40 band that we called First Impression, and the drummer and guitarist eventually joined a progressive-rock band that I formed later called VFX. I played bass in VFX and produced our CDs. We released two CDs and had some success with radio play in America and CD sales as well as good reviews in Europe. I realized while I was mixing the CD for the next step that this is what I wanted to do for a living, and the seed was sown.

After VFX, I formed a band called Cruel World. I sang lead and played bass in that band, and we played a lot of gigs in Los Angeles, and briefly toured Europe, to promote a self-titled CD that was released in Germany. We did some more radio interviews and performances, and had some pretty good gigs in places both large and small in Germany, Holland, and Belgium.”

People are running around with new presents and cookies. Christmas music is filling in the silences of our home. I wonder and ask, “So, what inspired you to make the “Coffeehouse 101?”

Scott moves his legs to the side of his chair as to let a few kids overdosing on cookies run by, flips his hair out of his face, and continues, “Because I’ve done so many videos [over 100], I’ve seen more than a few that missed the mark. After 20 years of [producing] music videos, they’ve become incredibly repetitive and formulaic. They’ve evolved into little more than commercials for hit singles, and they’ve lost their edge from what music videos were in their early years, when they were much more innovative and creative. I was looking for a way to do videos without necessarily being in them. 

“You certainly managed that objective,” I said. “Tell me about the video. You have a lot of locals represented here.”

“My original idea for “Coffeehouse 101” was going to be a state of the world newsreel type video with clips from CNN. It was conceived as being very hardcore and heavy, and dark. There were two problems. The first was budget. It costs a fortune to get footage from CNN. The second was that I didn’t necessarily want to make a heavy video. I came up with the idea of making a video with all my friends doing the lip syncing, and I ended up getting almost everyone that I wanted for the video.”

“What are you gonna do with the video, when its completed?” I ask.

“I do plan on trying to get it out there in the public eye. I hope to make it available on my website and on iTunes, and I will seek every avenue that I have available on the Web to play the video. I also plan on taking advantage of whatever contacts I have in the industry because of my work to get the video aired on television, but I don’t want to be too specific about that, because it’s all a long shot anyway — releasing the album, and therefore the video, independently.”

By now there is a crew of people on the living room floor, fire blazing away, ripping paper from presents. Scott and I are looking around, taking in the action.”
After a minute I keep the interview going. “Cool. How did you get into making videos in the first place?

“I tried for awhile to get into the music video business, but it was a difficult nut to crack. I had sent out a ton of demo reels, and nothing took, so I was working on a series of video press kits, which are documentaries for motion pictures. I ended up getting a job on a low budget jazz video for a drummer who used to play on The Arsenio Hall Show, named Terri Lynn Carrington. The song was called “Message True.” Next door to the editing bay a pretty successful rock music video director was working on a video, and when he found out I was a musician, he asked me to edit his next video, which was Headed for a Heartbreak by Winger. That video was a huge hit, and I didn’t stop working for the next year. It eventually financed the recording of the next step, an ambitious17-song cd by VFX. I worked on a bunch of hard rock videos, including Kiss, Skid Row, and LA Guns. I also did a bunch of different styles, including videos for Melissa Etheridge, Amy Grant, Wynonna Judd, and Babyface among many others. Recently I’ve done videos for the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Goo Goo Dolls, the Dixie Chicks, and John Mayer. I’ve also been editing a lot of television lately, and my most recent job was on Rock Star: INXS during the summer. Basically I split my time between L.A. and San Diego, earning money in L.A., and spending it in San Diego.

“Nice! So you sorta go between L.A. and San Diego a lot?”

“I grew up in San Diego and then moved to L.A. to go to college, and I eventually started working up there. I came back to San Diego in September of 1997.

“You’ve been pretty darn involved with the scene here for a while now. What do you have to say about the San Diego scene?” I wonder.

“The thing that’s great about the San Diego music scene is the community aspect of it, and that’s what I’ve tried to achieve in the video. Something’s brewing down here, and I do feel privileged and honored to be a part of it. I have a group of friends who are all musicians, and we hang out at each others’ shows and support each other, which has been very rare in my experience, especially in L.A.”
Scott elaborates further. “There’s a line in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron – I think that’s where I came across it – that says ‘leap and the net will appear.’ When I decided to stop editing, this is where I ended up, back home where I started. I’m not sure if it’s a net or a noose, but I’m here in San Diego, doing what I love to do and enjoying most every minute of it.”

“Your new CD kicks booty. What is it about? Tell me the story if there is one.”

Scott continues, “I started writing songs for the album in 1997. At that time, there was a lot of talk in the media about the Y2K bug, a general fear of the year 2000, the Hale-Bopp Comet, and the end of the world, and that was the original inspiration for the album. I started to think about a spiritual perspective of the world, and the idea that reality is an illusion of matter and light, much like the patterns formed by a kaleidoscope, which was the inspiration for the song and album title. I started looking at the idea of the end of the world from a cultural perspective. Movies like Armageddon. TV Preachers like Jack van Impe. Cults like Heaven’s Gate. Books like the Left Behind series. People drop the idea about the end of the world like a joke in a fake newscast, yet I don’t find anything to laugh about in the Book of Revelations.It’s pretty serious stuff from what I can tell. Heaven’s Gate inspired the song “No Body’s Home.” Look at Herb Applewhite’s eyes in the Heaven’s Gate videos and it might be apparent what I’m talking about. A lot of the songs on the cd are related to the subject of the end of the world. I was trying to talk about the reasons why the world seems to be degenerating into chaos, with songs dealing with celebrity worship [“She Won’t Stop”] to alienation [“Van Gogh’s Ear”]. There’s a loose thread connecting all the songs, and most of the songs on the cd bridge together, a remnant of my Pink Floyd influences. I remain hopeful that this end of the world phenomenon is only a cultural trend, but only time will answer that question. It is a very dark album lyrically, but there is a ray of hope that we’ll find a way out of the mess that we’ve created. Albert Einstein said that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. There is a possibility that somewhere within that idea lies hope for resolution.”

And on that note he refuses a suddenly offered late night dessert, citing a long past few months of decadent eating, which is coming to an end on the very next day. Somehow we decide we’re gonna start an exercise routine out of all this.

You can find out more about Scott Wilson – his creative doings and musings at www.metalogicmusic.com. Kaleidoscope’s End is reviewed in this issue.