My Secret Career (Zero): Mission Statement

I have a confession to make. To make it, I have to go back to the beginning. The beginning of my other careers.

I have been a professional actor since 1989 and an amateur much longer. I have worked in children’s theater, college theater, educational theater, musical theater, regional theater, Off-Off-Off Broadway theater, in commercials, and on film and television. 

I’ve also written professionally all along the way, first as a playwright for the children’s theater I acted with, next as a tongue-in-cheek investigative journalist on the fledgling internet, then years as a freelance copywriter, and finally as an actual screenwriter.

Amongst all the paying gigs were countless unpaid gigs that furthered both endeavors.

If I were a baseball player, I could hang my hat on the fact that I made it to the major leagues. Was I Big Papi? Was I Pedro Martinez? Was I Ted Williams? No. But I did what I set out to do and I am very proud of the body of work that I continue to achieve. I am by no means done with those careers.

However, running alongside these other careers is a different career. A secret one. One I always considered to be as integral to who I am, as deep a wish, in fact even deeper. 

Music. 

The fact that I have to announce this to the world instead of it being evident is proof that I haven’t done myself justice in this regard. In some alternate universe, my actions would have been all the explanation needed. The music I have created over the past forty years (!!!) would be widely available for public consumption.

But this just simply isn’t the case. Now, to my credit I did regularly perform live music over the years but it was always very informal, an obvious sideline activity. However music is not my sideline. It is my lifeline, my timeline, my bloodline.

These tracks, with a few notable exceptions, were recorded at home in ramshackle fashion. They are not professional affairs. I think of them as audio diary entries. But crude as they are, they were always intended to be HEARD. So I am humbly asking you to lend me your ear.

I only wish I had done this sooner. I’m tired of keeping this secret. So without further ado, welcome to My Secret Career. 

Music to follow…

My Secret Career 12: Generation Ex-Wife

This is the closest thing to a Stones riff that I will ever write.

Early on in my time in LA, tossed off, but still one of my favorites. Helped by Jon Leary who programmed the drums and played the bass. Mean-spirited but fun, a nasty romp, not a difficult one to decipher.

I guess I needed to vent a bit. Really the title didn’t even refer to my ACTUAL ex-wife.

Here is “Generation Ex-Wife” by High School Hero.

My Secret Career 14: My First ALBUM, Bull Cancer…Meets The Brown Recluse Of Hwy. 54

The first but not the last.

Rough but ready.

I wrote my first album in 1999. I started it in North Carolina, expanded it in Santa Fe, and finished it in Brooklyn.

Although I had been writing songs at the rate of more than an album per year for almost ten years, I hadn’t actually written a group of songs that were an ALBUM.

But Bull Cancer was different. IS different. If you take the time to listen to this whole album, and I truly hope you do, you will find that it is, in the truest sense of the word. A CONCEPT album.

The order of the songs is specific, they fit like puzzle pieces one after another. The entire thing is a message. When I finished “Go To LA”, I knew that was it, that what had been a growing collection had just gotten an exclamation point. It is sequenced with purpose, written with purpose, and performed with every ounce of my skill and emotion.

I have often considered the idea of re-recording these songs, to flesh them out, to give them the full studio treatment. Involve drums. Keyboards. Amplifiers. And maybe I will some day. But more often than not I listen and I can’t imagine changing a single sound.

Here is Bull Cancer…Meets The Brown Recluse of Hwy. 54. Three cities, twelve songs, one sound.

For Melody Dawn Garren

My Secret Career 13: 70’s Futureman

All of a sudden I am a cartoon character. I have a rap alias. I have abs. 

2000. All kinds of cousin energy associated with this one. As a joke, I decided to grow a mustache before my cousin Mike’s wedding. I would show up to the rehearsal dinner and he would be horrified that his wedding photos would be marred by my crazy facial hair. Then I planned to shave the morning of the wedding! Mission accomplished, joke landed. 

I also had recently bought an infamous short sleeve tight black shirt with bright red flames on the shoulders. When my cousin Josh (aka Spazz Pu, the trumpet player for the Army Jazz Band) saw me with my shirt and mustache, he exclaimed, “Who are you, 70’s Futureman?”

Little did he know what that comment would bring into the world.

Now, it was during this time that Timothy (Pimp Fu, Spazz Pu’s older brother) and I were living together in Brooklyn, hitting the gym every morning at 5 and being maniacal about physical fitness. To this day I have never been in such good shape. We were already in our own hermetically sealed world.

By the time we got back to Brooklyn from the wedding, we had somehow concocted an entire cartoon universe inspired by “70’s Futureman”.

Here is the synopsis:

70’s Futureman is our superhero. His El Camino allows him to time travel. But only one way. Back to the 1970’s. His trusty sidekick Warp Speed-O can run at light speed but has trouble slowing down, so he often overruns his targets.

They protect Id City from Master Mindgame and his henchman Hench. Master Mindgame has invented an Infantizer-Ray which will allow him to turn everyone in Id City into a baby.

70’s Futureman is, of course, his true identity. But like all super heroes he has an alter ego. Lee Minors, billionaire playboy gambling addict Coke-fiend. Warp Speed-O by day is known as Jack Chassis, Lee Minors’ trusted scientific right-hand man.

Throw in Id City Mayor Sid Itty-Bitty, Beelzebubblicious the gorgeous super-heroine who joins 70’s Futureman in his quest to clean up the city, the stalwart Id City Eagle Newspaper which chronicles his exploits, and, well, you get the idea.

Id City became a catch-all for us, the repository of all our burgeoning creativity and energy. In a fever (after lifting weights and downing coffee) we recorded a suite of songs that existed in this made up world.

Alter-ego inside alter-ego inside alter-ego.

It must be said that Timothy is responsible for all of this. He had the nerve to rap?!? To dedicate his talent to hip hop?!? A white kid from Maine?!? He created the insane musical backdrop for our imaginary Id City.

From Bomer-B’s 2000’s double album Out Of  Charactor, please enjoy!

1. 70’s Futureman

2. Lee Minors

3. Master Mindgame

Thanks to Bomer-B and Pimp Fu, Id City is forever safe.

My Secret Career 9: QE3

Here again my career and My Secret Career directly intertwine.

I had been acting in readings of “Searching For Certainty” by my cousin Mike O’Malley for several years in the early Aughts. We did it many times in New York City at different venues, at the Williamsburg Theater Festival in The Berkshires, in Cleveland as a workshop, and finally and most impactful for me, as an actual theatrical run in Los Angeles in winter 2003.

It’s a GREAT play. 

My character was a songwriter who is stuck in a rut, pining away for a girl he had a platonic friendship with at the tail end of his college years. He comes to New York City to try and mend fences with her after he learns that she is newly divorced. 

On arriving in LA to begin rehearsals, I headed straight to Mike’s house. He gave me a mix CD (!!!) of songs he thought were applicable to my character’s emotional state. He also challenged me to write a song about the woman my character was in love with: Betsy.

So, like so many other things in my life, the following song is solely thanks to Mike.

Here is “QE3” by High School Hero. 

My Secret Career 11: Sun Zed’s 2018 short album “Sun Zed”

So the last nom-de-plume I adopted was Sun Zed. 

Sun Zed is an umbrella that encapsulates tracks I recorded sporadically in Los Angeles that were never associated with any other imaginary musical outfit. 

Four of these years overlapped with the advent of my official screenwriting career and the seasons I was privileged enough to work on “Survivor’s Remorse”. I have never worked as hard as I did on that show and I am forever grateful to my cousin for taking a chance on me. True trial by fire.

To call it a learning curve is to do injustice to curves.

One great side effect, though, was that my focus was so intently trained on that process that I started recording almost without paying attention. It was a release that I needed to deal with the pressure that comes along with writing for a television show.

It was so all-encompassing that I let go entirely of music as a public pursuit. Oddly this led to a kind of relaxation into it, and the ease of GarageBand made experimentation more accessible and more fun than ever before.

I was also routinely filming myself sing cover songs I loved and posting them to Facebook which scratched my performance itch. But I was always uncomfortable with asking friends and family to be an audience.

Up til 2009 I usually did one or two shows a year, either with a full band or solo acoustic. Now it has been fifteen years since I did a full show. 

This coming weekend I will be singing a few songs at an event created by my sister Siobhan called The Wedtchester Songwriters’ Circle.

I am determined to get back on the horse after she has given me this leg-up. So coming soon to a theater near you: Brendan O’Malley as Bull De Jour.

In the meantime, follow me into the recent past and enjoy Sun Zed’s eponymous EP/short album.

Sun Zed. Los Angeles 2016-2018.

My Secret Career: Everybody Hateful

All of a sudden it is 2000.

I am living in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn with my cousin Timothy. I had somehow secured a basement apartment with two “bedrooms” and Timothy agreed on a whim to move from Portland, Maine to the Big Apple. The quotation marks around “bedrooms” should give you an indication of the size and luxury of this haven.

This is where an intersection of my real careers with my secret career magically happens. A playwright I worked with gifted me an old drum machine he had no use for anymore. I hadn’t touched the thing. It stared at me from a shelf, intimidating me.

But Timothy was undaunted. He had been programming drum machines since the ‘80s. This was just one he hadn’t seen. He had also recently created an alter-ego. Pimp Fu, aka Poppa Foxtrot.

I would leave the apartment to go into the city for an audition and by the time I returned he would have recorded something insane to show me. I looked forward to each one.

I immediately began incorporating drumbeats into the songs I was composing. The sense of darkness and dread that pervaded my writing to that point evaporated and my music started to be what it had heretofore never been: 

Fun.

Timothy taught me as best he could but the mechanics of the drum machine essentially eluded me. By accident I would create something I liked and then I would pick a riff I’d had and see if it fit. The lyrics now might happen spontaneously instead of as deep, dark personal, finely-crafted revelations.

I had never been experimental in how I recorded. I am not a skilled enough musician to “jam”, so my songs were painstaking affairs that were eked into existence by the skin of my teeth.

Now a song could occur out of the blue.

One such song came to me in a dream. In the dream I was in a band playing a Clash style reggae punk song called “Everybody Hateful”, clearly a ripoff of the actual Clash song “Hateful” from “London Calling”.

Well, I attempted this song. But my months-long relationship with the drum machine meant that I couldn’t really predict what would happen once I started recording.

So what began in my sleep as a Clash-tiche became something entirely different. To this day I have never performed this song again. Someone else would have to teach it to me. The riff of the song has been played exactly two times, each take used in the recording you are about to (hopefully) hear.

Et, voilà. Bomer-B creates the latest dance craze, the “Everybody Hateful”.

And it’s all because of Pimp Fu.

And Steve Rossiter at Axis Sound. I may have Produced this album but Axis Sound Executive Produced it and where I come from, that is the senior credit. It would sound nothing like what you are about to hear without Steve Rossiter. Thank you.

My Secret Career 8a: The 4-Track ‘95, or Onion Plays A Solo

Sidebar: I believe I got the nickname “Onion” from a  kid in elementary school who said my name sounded like “Bread ‘n onion”. It stuck. To the point that in high school soccer games, teammates would call “Onion, I’m open” when they wanted me to pass the ball.

This is the story of the terrifying moment when I first attempted a guitar solo.

I had been gifted the Tascam 424 4-track (see the whole story in My Secret Career 8b) I had barely touched it. It intimidated me.

I have never been a lead guitar player. In The Mahoneys, the other guys would encourage me to rip off a solo during rehearsal but I literally didn’t have the first idea how to do it.

You have to remember, I didn’t spend hours and hours learning to play. I picked up the guitar with the sole idea of writing songs. I would hear a melody in my head and then attempt to accompany myself. I didn’t attempt a scale until I was 27 years old and had been playing full time for five years. 

But the day came when I left a space on a recording where a guitar solo might rest.

Several takes and nervous breakdowns later, I came up with the following. But you’ll have to listen to the whole song to hear my shaky lead debut. It’s a solo approximately three seconds long.

Such A Place, from 1995’s “Beauty Is Ordinary” by Onion.

My Secret Career 8b: The TASCAM 424 4-Track, Circa 1995

Fecund Youth is no more. But Justin and I continue to collaborate. After a year at American University, Justin returned to attend URI so we saw each other frequently. Or rather, infrequently, as I was thoroughly ensconced in production after production in the theater department and Justin was heavily involved in his fraternity and actually having to study.

Somewhere in here he made a purchase that was to utterly transform my secret career. He bought a 4-track home recording unit. I know it was a TASCAM, I believe it was the 424. Seemingly out of nowhere he had recorded an album: The Z-Digs “Scared Crows”. It’s incredible.

We cut a few tracks together, here and there, with me singing his songs, but my focus was on acting. I can honestly say that during this period I had no intention of pursuing music. I hadn’t learned to play guitar yet, I wrote poetry but the melody machine that runs 24/7 in my head hadn’t come to life yet.

But then I went to France and the removal of the theater department as my daily routine meant that I had creative energy to spare. And that was that. From that moment on a great deal of my psychic energy was devoted to the excavating and building of songs. For good or ill.

Cut to ‘95. Off to grad school, Justin gave me the TASCAM 424 4-track. The ramifications were immediate and long lasting. 

For one thing, everything I had recorded to that point had either been with a live band, or in someone else’s studio, or even more crude, into a boombox.

Now I could build songs track by track. For several years even this capability intimidated me and mostly I stuck to hitting record and strumming and singing at the same time. But here and there I would attempt to layer in a second guitar, a harmony vocal, a tambourine hit by a pencil…

I was stuck in this phase for seven years. I didn’t have a drum machine so I couldn’t build beats. I was limited. 

What resulted was a claustrophobic sound, the sound of someone trying not to bother his neighbors, the sound of someone hiding. I began to tire of my own process. All I wanted was a band. I had one for a time in NYC  in ‘95 but it fizzled out after one show. I didn’t realize it at the time but I would never have a band again.

I have a hard time listening to this era of my catalog. I was so unhappy. Every song is another way of saying so but hidden in elaborate cyphers, as if I was afraid of revealing myself to even myself. 

I imagine myself as my only fan, listening to the new album and thinking, “How could he know? It seems like it was made just for me.” 

In almost every respect, it was.

Here is “Beauty is Ordinary by Onion”.

My Secret Career 7: Farewell Rhode Island, From Theatre-By-The-Sea, Summer 1994

There are times in your life when you suddenly find yourself thrown in with a new group of people. Even though it is a new dynamic it immediately asserts itself. Rituals are born. It’s like watching a cable bridge get built in hi-speed photography. First there was nothing. Then, a bridge.

My 1994 summer had a bridge like that. I don’t remember how we were flung together, Tanya, Mike, Terri and I, but it happened.

We gathered in an apartment on Main Street. It was not the hustle and bustle of today’s Main Street, Wakefield. There was no ice cream place, no theater, no restaurants to speak of. It was a graveyard at night.

This meant that I could play my acoustic guitar and sing at the top of my lungs. I was grieving many things that summer: my band was gone, my acting job was gone, my Providence life was over, and all my old wounds seemed to rear their ugly heads at once. 

I had torn my life down and swore I was going to New York City. But I wasn’t there yet. I necessarily had to regress, move back in with my parents, go back to work at the group homes, go back, go back, go back.

The only positive about going back was discovering new friendships with people I went to high school with. And they humored me in my need to share my music. They served as an audience when I guess I needed one. In fact, they were the entire crowd at the last musical performance I would give in Rhode Island. Even to this day.

And, fittingly enough, it was at Theatre-By-The-Sea.

A family friend had taken over the adjacent restaurant at TBTS. I knew I was going to New York and I wanted to capture the acoustic sound I was in the middle of cultivating. I needed a recording that would serve as an audition tape, a demo that I could use to get acoustic gigs once I got settled in the city. She agreed to let me use the cabaret room to record myself.

One afternoon, we all trooped over to Matunuck. In my memory it is only Linda the chef, Tanya, Mike, Terri and I who are there. I powered up the PA, set up Justin’s Tascam 4-track, and played a show. For four people. 

The tape ran out on the last song. I didn’t even bother to bring a second tape. So if you listen (and you will probably be the fifth person ever to do so) you will hear “Your Favorite Song” get cut off mid verse.

I’ve done many shows since, each important to me in their own way. But that day was monumental for me. My friends showed up for me. They listened. They cheered me on. 

I’ve never had fans so I don’t know what that’s like. Sometimes friends are enough.

So, without further ado, please let me share with you my final appearance on a Rhode Island stage. It serves as the back half of an album by my moniker at the time: “Rhode Island Red: Cocksure?”.

The album comprises the tracks I recorded solo at Danger Studios, the tracks I recorded for “True West”, and this, a concert at a place I’d been going to since I was a kid. A place where I had my first Equity acting gig. A place I had been a waiter.

I’d been singing to my new friends all summer. Then they held up the cables and built me a bridge out of town.