Christos DC
Honest Music
I would like to welcome everyone to my personal blog.
This page has been created in order to share personal experiences and stories from my journey in music. As most of you know the climate around the music industry has changed dramatically in recent years. As a result many artists are now having to become self-sufficient in many different aspects such as promotion and distribution.
Networking now encompasses not only sharing our works but also personal aspects of our daily lives. In this blog, I plan to share many of my stories about my journey playing reggae music for the past 25 years as well as my current experiences.
My love for reggae music began at a very early age. Growing up in a middle-class suburb of Washington DC this music was not so popular among many young people. I discovered it through a show on the radio called “Night of the living dread”. On Sunday evenings my brother and I would listen to the show and often record it to cassette. These cassettes found a home in my Walkman as I would traverse through the city on my skateboard listening to the sentiments of artists such as burning Spear, Joseph Hill or Bob Marley and The Wailers.
The messages they were sharing would prove to have a profound influence on me and help to shape my consciousness as a human being.
As I reached my early 20’s I started to discover record stores and began to grow a serious record collection. This led to the creation of mixtapes which I begin selling under the name foundation steppers. There was a lot of support.
From the Rastafarian community as many of them made a living as street vendors. The tapes were soon in demand and this brought me closer to the community where I would soon meet artists who would help to shape my future.
As a Young collector I would always bring home a stack of records and pick up my guitar as I listened to them carefully studying the music.
Reggae music had a reputation of being quite simple, however, I noticed subtle nuances that required lots of patience and understanding in order to play them correctly.
The first artist that heard me play and asked me to join a group was a friend of mine by the name of Peter Broggs. Within a year or so of working with him I had the opportunity to fill in on guitar for the Itals. I wound up spending several years with the group and was even given my first opportunity to sing back up after Ronnie Davis had left. At first I was quite nervous since I did not know how to play guitar and sing at the same time. I took the chance however and quickly learned to just stop strumming when I needed to sing a part.. before long I had acquired the skill and became quite comfortable in this role. I’m very grateful to Keith Porter for having given me this opportunity. During this period I met a brother by the name of Gold, he was singing back up for Don carlos at the time and i remember playing him a song I had been recording on a four track tape machine.. He loved it so much that he contacted Don and soon I was in the studio working with them on the ‘Seven Days a week” album. This led to a period of traveling as a guitarist and back up singer with his band the Freedom Fighters and my first opportunities for playing music abroad…
There are many stories from this period I look forward to sharing in upcoming blogs.
As for now i would like to thank everyone for visiting this page!