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Nantucket Top
NANTUCKET ISLAND 1985-2018
BOB LAMB
Ras Karbi
Linda and I continued to stay in NYC and work on different projects over the next several years. We travelled back and forth between Nantucket and the city and while on the island I met this great guy Bob Lamb. He and I instantly became best friends and he asked me to go to Jamaica and produce a record for him of Ras Karbi a Jamaican musician who had just won the best new artist in Jamaica. In 1985 we spent six weeks at Music Mountain Studios outside of Kingston with Bob and Karbi and a group of great Jamaican artists. After we finished recording, Bob had a film crew come to the island and video tape for a couple more weeks. We went all over the island and had an amazing time, with such great people. We returned to NYC and went to the Record Plant to add horn parts on the project with Arno Hect, sax player from the Uptown Horns, and had Gray Russel remix the project for us. But unfortunately the industry had shut the doors on the reggae scene at that time and our project with Karbi was never signed.
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African Eyes By Ras Karbi - Produced by Chris Meredith
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About this time a company called Commodore had come out with the first color computer with sound for the home. Bob and I had both talked about doing a store together one day and this was the perfect thing for us to sell. We went on to start Mindworks Computer Store and we sold not only the commodore computers but hundreds of software games that were being developed for the platform. A perfect job for us, sitting around all day and playing games! We eventually got excited about franchising our business and so we took a long trip down the eastern seaboard looking for places that we could open new stores. We didn't find what we were looking for and by the time we returned we both realized neither one of us really wanted to be in the retail business anyway, so we decided to sell the store and we both ended up going off to do other things.
Mindworks
Boys With Toys
Bob and I had way too much fun over the next years and during this time we started to write some songs together. Bob was not a musician but dabbled with the Bass for a while but he was a great lyric writer even though he doesn't know it! At one point he asked me how to get a song played on the radio. We had written this song called "She's My Girl" and I thought it might be a perfect song to show him how. So we came up with a clever name for the two of us called "BOYS WITH TOYS" and we had the girls sing backgrounds and we called them the "BLUE SEQUINETS". We waited till Valentines Day and took a heart shaped box of chocolates and put the song "She's My Girl" on a cassette and placed it in the middle of the chocolates and sent it to the woman who was the program director at WMVY Radio on the mainland as a Valentines day gift. Below is her response.
Ray
Boys With Toys - Chris Meredith & Bob Lamb
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Even though Bob was not a musician he was more musical than most I have played with through the years. One of the best people I know! At one point in our journey together we wrote a bunch of other songs together and had always wanted to write some stuff for children. We decided to tackle the alphabet song and make a new one. We worked on the lyrics together and I wrote this music track and sang our new alphabet song. I still like this one better then the traditional one! Another song Bob and I wrote together was a tune called "Where Eagles Dare". I recorded this at my home studio and our good friend Tony Lee Thomas played guitar and sang lead and the lovely Jenny Porter sang backgrounds for us.
ABC Song - Chris Meredith & Bob Lamb
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Where Eagles Dare - Chris Meredith & Bob Lamb
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Bob & I continued to work on other things together including the Balloon Wizard, A software program I wrote for Miacomet Software, but that story is in the next section MIACOMET. The Lamb Family will always be one of the best parts of our lives. Love you guys!
CAPTAIN PLANET - RAY KENNEDY
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Ray Kennedy, was another brother from another mother of mine. David Krebs introduced us and I asked him to come to the Record Plant one day with Jack Douglas who was producing, and sing two songs from The Tale of Two Cities. Ray was an amazing singer, horn player, musician and an incredible song writer! He wrote "Sail on Sailor" for the Beach Boys, and worked with artists such as Mick Fleetwood, Jeff Beck and a host of other great artists. Ray had called me to ask if I would co-write with him on a project that he was given by Ted Turner called Captain Planet. He came up to the island for about a month and we wrote and recorded 4 songs to present to Turner Broadcasting. We also had a whole group of young kids from our school come to my house and record with us singing the chorus on one of the songs.
Captain Planet - Ray Kennedy & Chris Meredith
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Unfortunately, the producers wife ended up doing some generic score for the TV show and we never got past the first stage but we always loved what we had created together. A couple years later Ray had sent me this video below and asked me to write some music for his friend Kelsey Grammer's new TV pilot show called "The Sketch Show. So I wrote, performed and recorded the front music for the pilot Title and Credits.
Juliette
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JULLIETTE
There were many productions I produced at my home studio but one that stood out to me was this young woman Juliet. She came to me with three roughed out songs she had written on acoustic guitar and wanted to do a 3 tune demo. I spent a couple of months working on the tracks doing drums, guitar, bass and keyboard parts. She eventually submitted one of these tunes to the John Lennon Song writing festival and was a finalist.
Movie - Produced by Chris Meredith
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Sleep With Me - Produced by Chris Meredith
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Hard - Produced by Chris Meredith
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Dogs
ECLIFF AND THE SWINDOGS
I have a long history of playing music on Nantucket where I live and have many musician friends here. After Linda and I moved back to the island I ran into a friend Riely Hayford, a great blues guitarist who had put together a band with horns with this really great guy and drummer Ecliff Graves. The Band Ecliff and the Swingdogs became my life for the next couple of years and we must have played over 500 weddings and parties during that time. We also took several trips off island and played in Surry London and in Auckland New Zealand. A great group of musicians and a great group of dear friends who I will never forget! One of the few shows that got recorded happened to be at the Chicken Box with Jimmy Buffet who the band played with in Italy Sardina for that famous Tyco wild party that marked the doom of Dennis Kozlowski.
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Jimmy Buffet with Ecliff and the Swingdogs at the Chicken Box
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JPD
Play Video
Women Be Wise
MONICA CHEN - AMSTERDAM
One summer in Nantucket I met a wonderful couple from Amsterdam named Monica and Vim Parrera. Vim was an amazing guy, who invented a water injecting system for driving pylons into the earth to help support large structures in Amsterdam Holland. And Monica, was his wonderful wife, a singer in Europe. Monica had a record deal with RCA and was looking for a producer and some new songs to record. I played her a couple of things that Johnathan Stuart and I had written in NYC and she fell in love with them and invited me to come to Europe to produce her next record. We spent a couple of months in Amsterdam at their apartment in the center of the city and recorded these songs with the great award winning English engineer, John Tilly.
Survivor by Chris Meredith & Johnathan Stuart - Monica Chen
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Talk of the Town by Chris Meredith & Johnathan Stuart - Monica Chen
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John Tilly
JON POUSETTE-DART
Jon Pousette-Dart is my cousin. He has been in the music business for many years now. He has recorded many albums for Capitol Records and also on his own independent label. When we were just 12 years old we used to play together at the top of Main Street and out at Jetties beach here on Nantucket.
Over the years I have had the pleasure of playing with Jon many times and have always loved his music. When he was doing his "Sample This" Album I talked him into letting me make a multi media addition. I had this idea that I could build a dual cd that would play in your cd player but also bring up an interactive section on your pc. So I had Jon write out content, lyrics and shoot extra video that I used in a back end presentation of his album. I also wrote a game for one of the songs "Amnesia" where Jon's head would slide out on the screen and you had to click on the screen to swing a beer bottle at his head to jog his memory and cure him of amnesia. If you could hit him enough times you would cure him and he would play a special song I had him write for the game as a reward. It was one of the first multi media cd's on the market and truly ahead of its time!
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Several years ago Jon came up to the island and we did a concert together at the Starlight Theatre and an interview for Plum TV, a local tv show with host and painter Kerry Hallam.
LINDA'S THEATRE & DANCE PROJECTS
For many years now Linda my wife has been doing projects at the school and the local theatre here. 17 Years of Jr. Miss Programs and she has choreographed many Theater projects as well. I started to take over the music at the Jr. Miss program and she and I would create opening numbers every year to open these shows. A couple years ago we did our last one based on FREEDOM from my show "tale of two cities". Linda and I also co directed Little Shop of Horrors together two times over ten years and a couple years ago I scored the entire musical of Oklahoma at my studio and recorded all the instruments used to sing with the performances.
My wife is an amazing choreographer and dancer. She studied at the Martha Graham school of dance in NYC as well as the Alvin Ailey School of Dance and Alwin Nikolais and Murray studios as well . She has done hundreds of performances through the years and choreographed many works. In 1994 she started the first Nantucket Dance Festival and we worked together for the next 3 years to create an amazing group of pieces. I wrote, performed and recorded all the music for these festivals with her. Some of the best work I have ever done!
She brought Incredible modern dance companies to the island to perform such as Cleo Parker Robinson Company from Denver, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company from NYC and Elo Pomare Dance Company from NYC. The first performance for the festival Linda conceived and choreographed a piece called Miacomet, a tribute to the American Indian. She created the most amazing beautiful dance and inspired me to write a piece of music for her that turned out to be one of my most favorite things I have ever written.
Miacomet - Chris Meredith
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Grey Lady
KENNY HOWARD
Kenny Howard is a drummer I met on Nantucket many years ago. I had seen him play with other people on the island and I had always wanted to work with him. The music scene was changing here and a couple times he had told me he was done playing and it always killed me because I always thought that one day he could become great if he worked at it! I finally got my chance to work with Kenny when I decided to record my show and I asked him if he would play drums for me. We spent several months tracking songs for Two Cities and Kenny played some great stuff on these songs for me. Now I always like to think that those sessions sparked some inspiration for him and whether it did or not, after that, Kenny started to engulf himself in music and drums with a passion most never feel or get close to. And he has not looked back since! And I was right! Kenny has become a GREAT! drummer. I would not only play with him anytime but I would recommend anyone looking for one of the best drummers of our time check him out!
GREY LADY MOVIE
In 2016. The Director of this film asked me to be the musical director of the live shoot and could I put together a band of locals to play a traditional song that Bruce Springsteen had recorded called "Keep Your Eyes on The Prize". He put me in touch with a producer out in LA named G Tom Mac who wrote the LOST BOYS movie title track and who he wanted to have sing the song. Over the next couple of weeks I called friends and put together a band of great local musicians to come to my house and rehearse the tune. The Director also wanted us to all be in the movie so It needed to be done live . So I organized a live recording of the scene that was to be shot outdoors at a place called NISDA on a small outdoor stage. The scene was where Eric Dane is looking for the guy who murdered his wife and he's at this outdoor festival where we are playing. When the shoot was over I sent the master tracks out to LA where G Tom Mac remixed the tracks and they became the soundtrack for that scene in the movie.
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The Grey Lady Band
Eyes on the Prize - Produced by G Tom Mac & Chris Meredith
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SL
A MOMENTARY PAUSE IN MY MUSIC LIFE
In the middle of my life of music and my time on Nantucket, there was a period of about 7 years where I changed my focus and stopped playing so I could build a software and hardware company around a bunch of products that I had invented. I have always been somewhat of a computer geek and love technology and I had all these ideas I had come up with about multi media, gaming and new ways of interacting with a computer and so Miacomet Software was born. And over the next several years, once again, I became fully entrenched in creating and inventing in the world of computers & technology and the internet.
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