Gary James' Interview With Paul Hoffert Of
Lighthouse



They toured three hundred days a year, playing to sold out crowds at Carnegie Hall, The Fillmore East, Fillmore West, Expo '70 in Japan and The Isle Of Wight Festival in England. In fact, their performance was so well received at the Isle Of Wight they were the only act asked to perform twice! And the other acts on the bill? The Doors, The Who, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell and Chicago. When they represented Canada at Expo '70 in Japan, they shared the stage with The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, The Doors, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, The Grateful Dead, Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell. On his first tour of the U.S., Elton John opened for them in Philadelphia. They won Juno Awards for the Best Canadian Group Of The Year in 1972, 1973 and 1974. They have four Gold albums to their credit and were the first Canadian band to see their album go Platinum. Their songs were covered by other artists like Three Dog Night and Carlos Santana. When the group debuted at a club in Toronto called The Rock Pile, it was Duke Ellington who introduced them. The group we are talking about is Lighthouse. Lighthouse keyboardist Paul Hoffert spoke with us about the history of the group.

Q - Paul, Lighthouse originally had thirteen members in the group. How did you guys all fit on one stage and how did you make any money?

A - (laughs) Two very good questions. The first one is very simple, we didn't always fit on the stages. It was sort of problematic because some of the instruments, in particular I would say the cello; we had a string quartet, a horn quartet, a rhythm section quartet, and a lead singer. The first gigs Lighthouse played were very atypical for bands starting out. The first gig we played was at a venue in Toronto called The Rock Pile, which was the major place that all the bands played when they came to Toronto. That's a place that's now called The Masonic Temple. That was a pretty good size. That probably had five hundred to six hundred people. And so that was our first exposure. It was a proper stage that was appropriate for a band that had thirteen players. The second gig we played was Carnegie Hall in New York City and that was no problem. From there on in, after those first two gigs, we immediately went on the road with the Jefferson Airplane, playing 20,000 to 50,000 seat arenas for about three months on a tour across the United States. The very first gigs we played, we didn't have any problem on the stages because of the unusual circumstances that we had for any band, whether from the United States, Canada or wherever, which was before we were a band we had a recording contract. We made a demo. We made the demo in Toronto. We took it down to New York to shop it and within two hours of taking it down to one of the major record companies in the United States, we had signed a deal, gotten cash advances, and the band was flown down to New York to start recording the first Lighthouse album.

Q - Getting a record deal then must have been a lot simpler.

A - Yes, it was. Let me come back and answer your first question. By the time we came back from the Jefferson Airplane tour, Lighthouse was more of a band 'cause we started to know each other. When you're doing one-nighters and you're doing twenty or twenty-five of 'em, you start to gel. The second part of your question is related to the first, how did we make any money, and the answer is we did it by playing a lot. In those first several years we would play I think maybe two hundred dates a year on average. And when you think about it, there's three hundred, sixty-five days in a year and a lot of times you're always traveling, frequently by bus and rented cars. You can't do successive nights 'cause you need a day's time just to do that and every three months I believe, or four months back then, we'd go on the road for basically three months and work almost every night and then we'd have to record another album. The first year we recorded three albums, so you'd come home for a month or so, have a deep compress for a couple of days, go in the studio and spend another four or five weeks finishing the album and then you'd be out again. So we were working really hard. We were working to feed the beast, as we used to call it, which was basically the cost. In 1969, when we started, it was just paying the guys in the band every week, maintaining a truck, a road crew of four or five guys. We needed a custom sound system that we traveled with because there were no sound systems anywhere that had enough inputs that you could control and balance acoustic violins, cellos, bass, drums, all the horn players, the guitar players. Almost everybody in the band sang. So, we didn't have enough of that, so we had to have a custom system that was built. When we got to small venues... as I recall, it was costing about a million dollars a year just to maintain the band, not to make any money, but just pay the travel expenses and the cost of maintaining an organization, the truck and the equipment, and gas and hotels, etc. We certainly didn't make any money and we were cautioned by everybody in the industry that it was a bad idea to have such a big band. My cofounder, Skip Prokop, his original band, The Paupers were managed by Albert Grossman, who was the most famous and successful manager in the Rock business. At the time we started Lighthouse, Albert Grossman was managing Peter, Paul And Mary, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and another dozen of the biggest acts of the time. He passed on managing us because we were too big and he had recently managed a band called The Electric Flag, which I think was about an eight or nine piece band. He was losing $100,000 on every tour they did because it was just more costly to maintain than you could get out of small and medium sized places that you could play. So, the financial plan was not a good one and it was hard to make money. In order to just keep the band rolling and get all the money we could and also to expose a new band, which is what you want to do, we played a lot of smaller places. We played the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles and we played a lot of those Jazz clubs in Greenwich Village in New York City. Places that were important to play. They seat a couple of hundred people or two hundred, fifty people. You couldn't fit on the stages. So, in addition to all the instruments I said before, at the time we started Lighthouse primarily as a performing musician, a Jazz musicians whose major instrument was the vibraphone, what we call vibes, and that's a huge thing. In those days they weren't electric or electronic. So you needed to have two or three microphones over it. It took a lot of real estate onstage to get the vibes in and because the guys in the band and the audiences encouraged me to keep it on the road along with the B-3 organ, which was a huge piece that we also hauled with us, it was just really hard and we would squeeze in, in a lot of small stages and sometimes some of us would be offstage. Most frequently it would be the vibes and the B-3 organ. You could fit everybody onstage if you took those two really big things and built up a couple of risers near the stage and get it, and we would do that. I would be sort of in the audience for a lot of the shows that we played, but it was fun. The sound was frequently horrendous because when you're sort of off the stage and in the audience, you get feedback. But it was a daring kind of ill-advised business venture. But fortunately, within a year and a half of starting the band, we were able to have some good success selling some records and we were very popular at places where we could make good money, which was festivals. We played all the festivals. So, in the summertime when the weather was good, Lighthouse had a big advantage over the four piece groups because all of the promoters of these big Rock festivals needed to fill the large stages with bodies and instruments because there were so many people that attended the festivals that they couldn't see. There were no screens in those days, huge screens. The sound systems didn't have the millions of watts that you have now that you can fill the outdoor arenas and venues with. So, Lighthouse was in part popular because maybe they couldn't see the details of who was doing what, but they could see a whole lot of bodies running around on the stage far away and they looked like they were playing, which we usually were, unusual kinds of instruments. And we carried our own sound system, which was about the most powerful you could have in those days.

Q - You and Skip got this deal with MGM Records and two days later Vinnie Fusco from Alber Grossman's office gets you out of MGM and on to RCA. Why was that?

A - I mentioned that Albert Grossman was the manager of Skip's band The Paupers. When we got our record deal we didn't have a manager. We didn't have a band. We didn't have anything. We had a deal. When we got it, as you said, it was with MGM Records. By the time we finished recording the album, our manager, Vinnie Fusco, who worked at the Albert Grossman Agency, had worked a deal that RCA Records bought out MGM and the album never came out on MGM. It came on on RCA. Part of Vinnie's renegotiated record deal, as opposed to the one Skip and I had done which we thought was great because they paid for the band to fly down to New York and I think we recorded at Electric Ladyland or one of the big studios in New York City, had ballooned out the deal to have the record company spend a million dollars. The record company agreed to build us a custom sound system, got us a truck and the they paid for the infrastructure that we needed to go out and tour and hopefully gain an audience for the music we were playing. So, that was the record deal. It was very heady times. It was very surreal. It was very unreal. It was a lot of fun. The idea of having a band that size had a couple of commercial advantages aside from the financial disadvantages. One of the advantages was that in those days what we now call Classic Rock, as most of your readers will know, was a guitar based band. All the bands were focused around guitars, electric guitars. And so, everybody wanted to play guitar. All of our audiences, which were mostly young people, were either in or had recently been in high schools or colleges. Those kind of educational institutions. Everyone of them had a school band for sports and a school orchestra and were playing violins and cellos and flutes and saxophones and trumpets and clarinets. All those kinds of instruments. They were playing guitars. So, I think one of the reasons we had some success in the industry in getting backing was that there was this whole audience that was loving Rock 'n' Roll that wasn't playing guitars and wanted to feel included, and when they came to a Lighthouse concert or heard some of our music on the radio, they were hearing the instruments that they were playing in the school orchestras then, and the marching bands. It's like today, there's a huge fraction of population that has played some kind of instrument. Nowadays when a young child grows up, chances are some of the parents want them to have some kind of musical culture. They might get them a ukulele or a guitar. But in those days you got a piano for the house or you got a violin. Those were the cultural icons that people had in their homes. Lighthouse, when I wasn't playing a B-3, I was playing an acoustic piano with some microphones on it and they were hearing and able to play and participate in what was happening. And so, it was a double-edged sword. There were some advantages of being big, but certainly being able to play on the stages. Just an aside, our record company, Universal Music, and our label, decided to start releasing versions of our original albums starting with the "One Fine Morning" album that was released in 1969. That'll be out in early 2021. It's being released as a double vinyl. So, two vinyl albums that will echo the original vinyl albums that were coming out. The original album of course was a single album and the second album they want to reacquaint the new audiences with what Lighthouse was. And what Lighthouse was, was we were a different band in the recording studio when we made records than when we played live for one major reason, especially with vinyl, the amount of time you could get on an album was limited to about twenty to twenty-five minutes a side. You needed to satisfy the audience. They wanted to probably have ten songs, something like that. Five songs a side That limited you to how long your sides were. Your songs had to be four to five minutes long. So, when we played live, our songs were about fifteen to twenty minutes long each because we always had really extended solos that we were playing. Many of the guys in the band like myself came from Jazz and nobody knew what Fusion music was, but we knew what it was to play in a Rock 'n' Roll rhythm section with all these long solos.

Q - Since you were with Albert Grossman's management company, did you ever meet Janis Joplin?

A - Sure.

Q - What did you think of her?

A - Well, the meetings that I had with most of the famous Rock people of the time were mostly restricted to on site when we were playing on the same bills with the band 'cause we were working all the time, whether it was Elton John who was opening for Lighthouse in Philadelphia and I was just sitting the green room, as we call it, waiting to go on after the opening act and one of the guys in the band said, "Hey man, you gotta come out here and hear this guy play piano. He's like really fantastic." After the show I said, "Hello, you're fantastic," and all this kind of stuff and I had my five minutes or so or less with him. Then I would have to get on the stage. It was the same with Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, you name it. We played at the Fillmore in Los Angeles and New York with The Grateful Dead. So, I'd meet these people for five or ten seconds and have a brief conversation with them. But, what was it like? I would say basically fleeting and always comforting to know when you're on the way up and you're just getting started out that for the most part, the famous people whom I looked up to, not because they were famous but because they were great musicians, and it's always great to admire people in your craft who are really good at it. What would happen is that you'd meet them and it would be a sobering moment always when you'd realize they're also on the road like you were on the road, working all the time and had the same problems you had. They were in a relationship with a person back wherever they came from and it was falling apart because they could never see each other or they had a spouse or kids. Things were falling apart because you couldn't have friends or committed relationships when you were in a different place every day. It was just too difficult. What you'd talk about was what kind of guitar you use, how do you tune the piano before you go onstage? Is there a time? Do you pay for a piano tuner? If it was Elton John or somebody like that. So, what was it like with Janis Joplin and many of my colleagues? They were drunk and stoned. So, they weren't always coherent.

Q - Would that have been the case for Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix? I assume you met both of those guys.

A - In the case of Jimi Hendrix, I had more conversations with him because we were both at the Isle Of Wight Festival off the coast of England. We were both put up in a small hotel near the festival grounds and we were in the same place. It was a motel, a hotel. I would see Jimi maybe for breakfast or dinner or whatever it was. We'd just cross paths. At the time it was before his premature and unfortunate death. At the table there was kind of a small pile of white powder and he was avowedly off of drugs and not doing any of those kind of stimulants and other mind altering chemicals. But he was somewhat coherent and we talked about stuff. He was like an ordinary person. When I say ordinary person, an ordinary young person on the road, gigging to feed his managers and agents and band mates and all that kind of stuff. He seemed to be a very nice, fairly humble person. Shortly after I spent those several days crossing his path, he died essentially from a drug overdose. It was a very sad time.

Q - And Jim Morrison?

A - Played a lot of shows with The Doors. They were a big influence on the early Lighthouse. Certainly one of the four songs on the demo that Skip and I wrote and recorded in Toronto and got us our big record deal paid tribute, if you want to look at it that way, to one of the Doors' recorded songs. Jim Morrison was reputed to be quite an eccentric character. I just watched his show from the wings of the festival we were playing with him. I never got a chance to actually speak with Jim Morrison.

Q - Lighthouse was performing at all of these festivals, yet you were asked to perform at the original Woodstock '69 and you turned it down. Why was that?

A - (laughs) Oh, man. Okay. So, your readers will get a kick out of it. Your readers might find it at least slightly light-hearted if not comic that we were asked to perform at Woodstock and we didn't go because of the toilet situation. So, Woodstock had planned for many fewer attendees than they got. It blew up and became this huge event. I can't remember how many hundreds of thousands of people ended up going there, but they hadn't planned for it in advance and so they had these Port-A-Johns on site. There was not enough water for people to drink. There was not enough food for people to eat and there were not enough crappers for people to empty their stomachs and pee. And to make matters worse, there was no physical infrastructure. It was in a field in the middle of nowhere. And between, the roads were all blocked, they couldn't get anymore bathrooms in or food supplies in, and the bands were basically brought in by helicopter. So, because we were with the Grossman agency, and so many of the Grossman acts were working at Woodstock, as the gig approached we and some of the other acts that had been booked got these reports about how terrible it was, how scary it was for the acts who went on the stage to look out at the big mob and who were mollified and pacified briefly when the acts played music, but when the music stopped they were in quite a bit of discomfort. The acts were afraid they might riot or something and that they would be in physical danger. There were no roads for them to get out. They had to call for a helicopter and one by one try to get everybody out. And so a few of us, including Lighthouse, made the calculation that it was too dangerous to play at Woodstock and certainly very uncomfortable. Skip voted no. He said it might be a good thing to be on the bill, but I didn't want it. All my life I've had a gluten intolerance so my stomach would get upset at a moment's notice, especially if we couldn't control what I was eating, and not having a toilet nearby was a pretty scary thing for me. And so we said, "No, we'll pass." That's why we didn't play. Sometimes you get the good breaks and I'm extremely thankful and fortunate that in my career I've had a lot of good breaks, but sometimes it doesn't break in your favor. And that was the story with Lighthouse. So, we did not play at Woodstock. It would've been great to be there. The good part about it is I did play with all the bands that were at Woodstock at one venue or another, but it wasn't at that seminal event that really cemented large venue, outdoor Rock 'n' Roll festivals into the world culture of music.

Q - Who's to say that had you performed at Woodstock that would've helped your career. You just don't know.

A - Well, everybody has their own little world view. You never look back and you never plan for the future. You basically live in the moment and you try to have a good time. How fortunate were we and others of the time to be living in a different culture than we have today. Today there are musicologists who study Classic Rock and there are Classic Rock stations. We were just a bunch of young, talented people who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and I believe that a lot of the great music that was made in that Classic Rock era was formed as much by our audience as it was by us as a musician and an artist. You just try to be a bit of a mirror and to aim at different parts of society and what you see and what you hear and what you live and to echo a little bit of it. Because you're an imperfect mirror, you echo it with your own experience and that gives it a unique quality. Nowadays you couldn't start a Lighthouse. All of those small stages that we couldn't sit on were necessary for us to get the band together and to be able to tour. Those stages are all gone. Now it's either you do it in your living room, send it out in a stream, or you can play a multi-thousand, twenty thousand seat and up arena. There's not much in between. So, it was a different time. I never say, "What if. If only." Some of my fellow musicians dwell there, but not me. I'm just very thankful that I've had an opportunity to be able to touch and communicate in a musical sense with so many people over the years and have an outlet for what I do. That's why you become a musician. You have a need to make music and you hope you'll connect with some other people so that you can have an audience. If you can have an audience that you can actually see, which nowadays you mostly can't, then life is pretty good. On the whole I have no complaints about, "What if. If I only played there." But I played Carnegie Hall twice the first two years I was on the road with Lighthouse and I traveled around the world and had so many good opportunities that I certainly am, on the whole, thankful and never say, "Oh, well we could have gone from being a hit band to superstars if we did that," or something like that. What does it mean that I toured with the superstars? They're just people. Were all the same. You're doing your thing. When you come offstage you basically think about the mistakes you made and you weren't tight enough with your band mate. You need to adjust the people in your head because so-and-so isn't getting along with enough other people. Life is hell on the road. Life is a mundane thing where you make your decisions whether they have good bathrooms and stuff like that.

Q - Lighthouse was so popular, Coco-Cola put you on their bottle caps. That's a new one for me. Bottle caps?

A - You're a great interviewer! You have such fantastic questions! I have to really compliment you. Interviews can be routine and your interviews are better than routine. The Coca-Cola bottle cap is a great story. And you know what? That's one of the benchmarks at the time that we and others used. You talk about having good luck! I'm trying to think about how we got on the bottle caps. I think McCann-Ericson was an advertising agency whose producer, who produced their ads because they had a lot of youth oriented clients like Coca-Cola, had this idea that you could put bands on bottle caps. It was in Canada that this happened. Their idea was to have bands across Canada that were popular. At the time Lighthouse was popular. I think The Guess Who might have been another band around that time if my memory serves me. They said, "Let's put the bands on bottle caps and we'll sell more soda," and they did. Apparently it was quite popular and they expanded it and put some more bands on it. To this day, if there's one regret I've made and think of, is that I've never saved one of those bottle caps. It would have been a lovely memento. You could put it on a mantle or something like that and say, "See, we were on bottle caps with Coca-Cola." (laughs) To round out the story and add one more for you, our first cross-Canada tour, which was problematic to finance simply because in Canada, small population relatively, big distances with no people and no places to play and therefore too expensive compared to the States where you can do one-nighters and you could basically drive, get up at five or six o'clock in the morning after finishing your gig and getting back at one in the morning. You're in a bus or car or maybe a quick flight. You get to the next gig and you show up at two o'clock in the afternoon. You set up the gear and by four or five o'clock you can do your sound check and have dinner and then you're on and the same thing the next day. You couldn't do that (in Canada) because the distances were too far. So, we needed this thing called a sponsor, which had never been done in Canada that we knew of. Our manager came up with the idea of a brewery, Labatt's. The upper teenagers that we played for certainly know how to drink beer and the beer company wanted to get in on the action just like the (soda) pop companies. So, we had a tour sponsored by Labatt's, who helped us fill the deficit of what we could take in at the gig and what it cost to tour with the trucks and sometimes sending the equipment on airplanes, which cost a fortune. So our first cross country tour of Canada was quite innovative from a business point of view because in order to play those fill-in dates, we played a lot, a lot of smaller cities and towns, and because they didn't have performing places we would frequently play the hockey rink. So we played in any kind of big space. So there you have it.

Q - Your songs were deemed too long to play on the radio. Your first three albums didn't sell all that well. Yet you played to sold-out audiences. What accounted for that?

A - Great question. And the assumptions you make are all true. It's not just that our songs were deemed too long for radio. They were too long. It goes back to technology. It's a technology thing. When Lighthouse started in 1969, radio was AM, or what they called Pop format, Top 40 radio. So the business model of the radio stations that most people didn't realize, especially in those days, radio and television were not based on presenting music, talk and TV shows that audiences would like. What they were based on is producing content that would attract audiences to advertisers. Essentially them made money. Radio stations, their real audience, their business audience wasn't the people listening. It was the people buying ads. So you have to have as little music in an hour as you can and as many advertisements in an hour as you can. So in order to get some kind of diversity, the songs had to be short and that's what really led to AM, hit radio formats. No solos. No long solos. When we started Lighthouse, that wasn't what we did. We didn't write those kinds of songs. Skip's band had extended solos and a great following, but it didn't fit that format. I came from the Jazz world where if you had to play a twenty minute set, it was one or two songs. So our songs were inappropriate when we started recording. We didn't have those ten songs on those first albums. So, they didn't sell very well because nobody could hear them on the radio. FM radios started to get installed in cars by the time we had the two or three albums out that didn't sell. That turned everything around because FM formats, for whatever reason, had a different business model and they could play longer cuts. The technology of radio really changed and it changed Lighthouse because most people don't know Lighthouse from those first three albums because they were only moderate sellers. They weren't duds, but by the measure of our record company laying out huge amounts of money to support us in touring, it wasn't enough return on their investment and so we couldn't get another record deal after we got dropped by RCA after the first three albums without having a sober discussion of we have to get an outside producer because you guys, meaning Skip and I, don't know how to produce that stuff and get it written and do what we need to do to stay alive. So, we brought in Jimmy Ienner, and he read the riot act to us. He basically said this is what a radio friendly song has to be. It has to be two and a half to three and half minutes. You have to have something catchy that people who aren't stoned are going to like. You just can't play to the stoners and sit and not change the channel for more than a few minutes. So, we started writing and Skip was our most prolific and certainly our most successful writer of songs that connected with radio friendly airplay, and we changed it. But people who know Lighthouse today know us from our classic hits. They don't know us from the performances we gave with the long solos. So our current record company have decided that the second L.P. in this re-issue is going to be never before heard, live performances of Lighthouse featuring a lot of our solos and a lot of our new audiences have an intro to what the Lighthouse phenomenon was. The only reason we could work without airplay, or without significant airplay, was because we could fill large stages and fill large arenas because of the extraordinary size of the band. If you never saw Lighthouse before I guess people would tell their friends, "We should go hear this band. They have cellos, violins and trumpets. It's a whole big thing and they're supposed to be good." And it was that word of mouth that would usually fill up the big spaces. Once people had seen a Lighthouse concert, then I'm comforted by the fact that they came back 'cause they liked the music that we played. But it wasn't usually because they heard the music until we got to the third album, what most people consider the first album of our Classic Rock era. But we veered away from the Fusion Jazz format a little bit more towards Rock and Pop friendly songs that many more people could whistle.

Q - You were working two hundred plus days a year on the road and then you would go into the studio for five weeks. Were you able to write on the road?

A - Not very easily. You'd get back and there would be maybe a week of intense writing the week that you promised your friends and family that you'd be hanging out with them. But that week off was basically just a week wood shedding your writing. Then you'd get to the studio and you wouldn't have had a chance to really rehearse all the songs. They'd be in rough shape and you'd spend a lot more studio time, a lot more studio money, unlike today when you get together, have rehearsals and fine tune everything and try to have as little time in the studio as possible to save money. In those days you had to spend the time in the studio, fine tuning songs, fine tuning the arrangements and rehearsing. So, a lot of the time would be rehearsing. A lot of the time, given the equipment they had, was getting the equipment working. Is the microphone line working? That was pretty well it. It was a grind. Lighthouse was only together that first period, that's what's now called The Golden Age Of Classic Rock for Lighthouse and many other bands, for about three or three and a half years. And then as many of us left, the band as performers, we stayed in the family. In my case it was as an Executive Producer. The guard would move on and band members, mostly Ralph Cole, started taking out the band and having different personnel. So, it was less than five years of the Classic period before the band broke up. We broke up not necessarily for just financial reasons, because the band was still touring and had a lot of fans, but when we first got together it was a lot of fun. It was very exciting. We played with symphony orchestras. It was ballet companies. We toured in universities. We played in big halls. We played in little places. And it was all new. After about five years it became routine. You start questioning whether you want to spend your whole life on the road. So, it just dies of natural consequences, not for everybody. Goodness knows I totally and unbelievably respect those artists, some of whom really maintained all of those years. In the case of Lighthouse, we broke up and then we got together once about ten years later for the Ontario Place, a one-off television show, and another ten years of being broken up. After almost thirty years (1991), we decided to reform on a less strenuous schedule. Instead of two hundred dates a year, maybe fifty dates a year. And we've been doing that for the last thirty years, which is a comfortable amount of playing to do and we're are incredibly thankful and lucky that I could mix having an off the road life with playing some music and connecting with fans and people who appreciate the music I play. So, that's it. That's the fifteen to thirty second pitch I've done with my life. Everything else is minor. University professor and Order Of Canada is great, but really I'm very grateful and appreciate the people who stick with us online and come to our gigs and allow me to stay with that band and perform that music.

Q - Are you also a film composer these days?

A - Not very much. I did that and I loved it, maybe the thing I loved best. I composed thirty film scores and worked in Hollywood successfully and thought that's what I was going to do. Then, when we put the band together again; when you're composing music for a film, the deal is that you're working twenty to twenty-two hours ever day because you can't write the music for a film until the film is finished 'cause it has to be the right length for all the cues. When the gun goes off it has to be a big kaboom! And all that sort of stuff. So you have to wait until the film is totally finished. When the film is totally finished and they've spent all the money producing the film, they want to get it into exhibition as soon as possible so they can start getting money from people coming to see the film. And so you had this very short period of time to write the film score and it's a little different every time, but normally you have between two and six weeks. During that period of time you're 24/7 and you're not playing any gigs and you're not writing songs. You're not writing anything else. So, when I was doing film scores it was out of the question that I would be able to do that while continuing a career as a performing musician. And over the years I've been able to be happy with the diversification of the things I do, but film scoring is just too intense and I had a good run of it. I occasionally do documentary scores which usually you have a little more runway to do that, but not as my main occupation.

Official Website: www.LighthouseRocksOn.com

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