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Joey
Latimer
Singer,
Songwriter, and Composer - History
Brief musical history
I started playing music in 3rd grade when I got a small
Magnus
Chord Organ and accompanied myself on songs I'd sing, such as Silent
Night and Glow Worm. I picked up guitar in 7th grade, thanks to Joe
Naspini, who showed me how to read chords out of a Beatles song
book.
In the late 60's and early 70's I wrote songs and performed with Larry Dunlap, mostly at the People Of Orphales Coffee House and various other locations around Long Beach, California. We jokingly went by the name Castor and Pollux. From 1970-1972 (during high school) I also played at local parties with school-mates Frank Furillo, Simon McPherson, Jerry Earwood, Casey Simpson, Bob Bennett, and others from my drama class.
In 1974 I moved to Hawaii, lived in Waikiki, and worked in the produce department at the Beretania  Safeway store in Honolulu. While living there I was introduced by one of the stock clerks to Jerry Santos and Robert Beaumont, who had just formed the group Olomana. They played at the Black Angus in the International Marketplace, which happened to be right where the bus dropped me when I got off work each evening. Jerry and Robert were kind enough to let me perform my songs on their breaks as well as sit in with them often. It was there I also met Liko Martin, Tony Tamsing, Chris Rego, Autumn (the violinist), Steve Vaile, and many other musicians from the Hawaiian music scene.
I have fond memories of jamming sometimes after the gig with Robert, trading licks, and learning together on the cement benches in front of the restaurant. I also had the good fortune to spend some holidays at Jerry's infamous house on 10th Avenue. There I got to trade songs with Jerry, his talented housemates, and friends (such as Cindy Combs) who would drop by. Hawaiian music will always have a special place in my heart as I remember the wonderful hospitality and generosity the musicians showed me there.
 In 1975 I moved back to Seal Beach, California and started up a group called Paddlefoot with singer/songwriter Bob
Bennett and Joe
Naspini on bass. Our primary gig was at Captain Jack's in nearby Sunset Beach, but we also played at the West Coast Bodega in Long Beach. During this period Bob and I wrote songs and started showing them to the publishers in Hollywood. We had some interest from a guy named Kerry Chater at Chappell Music who had been in Gary Pucket and the Union Gap. Kerry helped us with our songwriting form and recorded us at Chappell. We didn't get any covers from Chappell, but I think the experience really helped Bob and I focus our songwriting, recording, and production skills.
 When I was 23 years old, in 1977, I got a job working as a staff recording engineer
for Artie Ripp's Fidelity Studios (now called Studio
City Sound) and Family Productions in Studio City, California. I
apprenticed there under Joel
Soifer, Boris
Menart, and Larry
Elliot, who each had very different engineering styles and backgrounds.
Artists
and projects I was involved with at Fidelity included Billy
Joel, Joan
Jett and the Blackhearts, Lita
Ford, The
Bay City Rollers, The
Krofft Super Show, The
Ramones, Simon
Posthuma, Sneaker, Mandrill, CBS
Radio Mystery Theater, Gabor
Szabo, Ambrosia, 707, Bugs
Tomorrow, Gerard
McMann, The
Steve Miller Band, Vinnie
(Vincent) Cusano, Thom
Rotella, Tom
Saviano, Chick
Corea, Don Ciccone, Ava
Barber, Peter
Yarrow, Floyd Dixon, Bernie  Hamilton, Wayne Henderson, and Peter
Noone. Some of the producers I had the privilege to share the console
with were Phil
Spector, Clive
Davis, David
Campbell, Mallory
Earl, Irwin
Mazur, Wayne Henderson, Artie
Ripp, Artie
Kornfeld, Jim
Ed Norman, Dean
Kay, Kenny Laguna,
and Ricthie
Cordell.
During the late 80's and early 90's I was part of the
band Kindred Spirit with Elaine
Latimer, Robin
Rader, Bill Plummer,
Keith McCabe, Mark
Wenner, and sometimes Scott Fulton. Later, in 1994, I formed a group
with Bill Plummer, Dale
Spalding, and Keith McCabe called the Blues Monks. We recorded an album
of acoustic blues tunes called In Your Living Room (out of print.) Now
I play mostly in a trio called DoRoJo (left) with Don
Reed and Robin Rabens.
Family Computing and computer magazines
In 1983 I was one of the founding editors of Family
Computing Magazine and K-Power for Scholastic, Inc.
My game, music, and utility programs were featured in The Programmer
section of Family Computing. In K-Power we created the first computer
music column I know of in a magazine, called MicroTones. This column
featured music programs and information about the latest computer music
products. K-Power and Microtones also featured type in songs by artists
such as the Ramones, Talking
Heads, and the Steve Miller
Band.
Additional magazines I wrote programs and articles for included COMPUTE!,
COMPUTE!'S
Gazette, Run,
InCider,
A+,
Rhythm, Parents,
Home
Office Computing, and Small
Business Computing. I wrote or cowrote several books for Scholastic,
including The
K-Power Collection, 10
Starter Programs for Family Computing, The
Best of Family Computing Programs Volumes I and II and Amazin'
Games.
As
an offshoot of my work on Microtones I was very active in supporting
the MIDI standard when
it was being proposed and wrote many articles about it when the standard
was made available. I met a guy named Perry
Leopold from the Pan
Network (a music BBS I used to participate in) at the CES show in
Las Vegas in around 1984. He was the first one I remember telling me
about it and I thought that a standard connecting computers and synthesizers
was sorely needed. So, I through all my support behind it and experimented
with a lot of the first MIDI products.
From the late 1980's until the beginning of 2008 I worked at the Idyllwild
Arts campus in Idyllwild. For many of those years I've served as
the IT Manager and have been responsible for fostering technology growth.
During this time we built a vast computer network and state of
the art labs, studios, and offices, connected throughout the 205 acre
mountain campus, via fiber optic cabling and smart switching.
Recently, I rebuilt my Idyllwild home recording studio around the latest
digital, analog, and MIDI equipment (thanks to Linda and Richard
Page for the studio furniture) and I am currently recording a couple of new albums. I am also helping people in the Idyllwild community with computer consulting and repair.
Radio Free World
Radio
Free World began in the early 1970's when I received a wireless radio transmitter kit for Christmas
from my aunt and uncle. I built the kit, turned it on, and in the
very first broadcast in Downey, California declared, "This is Radio
Free World on the air!" This historic broadcast made it a few blocks
away to the house of one of my friends who was on the phone with me and said, "I hear it!"
I wanted a broadcast kit because I heard that another of my friends, Fred Jones
(later known as PanaFred, but that's another story,) and a guy named
David Baker (of Oink!, Middle Earth Records, and Rhino fame) had set up
some home built transmitters and began broadcasting under the name Radio
Free Downey...pirate radio in suburbia! Hanging
out with Fred Jones in his garage studio one night (I'm not sure who
all was there) we were bouncing cool 'Radio Free' station names off
each other until we agreed that 'Radio Free World' was the bee's knees
of Radio Free names--radio that reaches all over the world!
Later, after graduating high school, Fred Jones went on to become a
DJ (General Birddog) at KNAC and being a Firesign Theater freak, eventually
produced an album or two of them. Fred, myself, and other high school drama friends,
including Ned Bernardin, Kevin Bray, and Cindy Johnson, created an improvisational
radio theater group called Radio Free World, with the intent on being
like the Firesign Theater. After many personnel changes and not much
to show except a lot of great ideas, RFW faded out after a few years.
Radio
Free World was revived when I lived at a large apartment complex
in Huntington Beach, California during the late 70's, called Huntington
Gardens. Huntington Gardens was broken into four thematic sections (like
the movie Westworld) with themes such as Polynesian, Roman, Greek, and
Tudor. Around the outside were "pods" made up of studio apartments
situated on stilts around circular staircases. Each living room in the
Huntington Gardens complex was equipped with a speaker and volume control,
which the management never used. I lived in a pod and came up with
the idea to hook a large Scott tube power amp up to the speaker leads
in my living room and began podcasting 'Radio Free World' over the
'Huntington Gardens Underground Radio Network.' Since people had volume
controls, they could choose to tune in or not. The management didn't
have a clue who was broadcasting, but it soon became the talk of the
neighborhood. The programs were made up mostly of comedy shows and funny
music, interspersed with L.A. Dodgers games, local weather, surf reports,
and improvisational bits created by various friends when they dropped
by.
In the 1990's, when the Internet began to develop, I read some articles
about Internet broadcasting, and realizing that this could be a way
to revive RFW and send it across then entire planet, I started radiofreeworld.com and began Internet broadcasting--you guessed it--comedy shows, funny
music, and bits created by friends as they dropped by. Realizing that
a Web site is also informational and part of the World Wide Web, we
also made radiofreeworld.com into a guide to connect people to other
cool sites around the world. Some of the personalities who have been featured on Radio Free World include Wierd Al Yankovic, Tommy Chong, Ian Whitcomb, Rusty Warren, Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer and Crazy Jay.
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