Transitions

Out of the Ashes

[Times photo: John Pendygraft] Vinnie Saletto jams with his latest group, MediaWhore, at the Liar’s Club in Tampa in February. “If it succeeds, it’s me. If it fails, it’s me,” Saletto says.

By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 3, 2003

Another breakup. Another dream derailed. But no more, local musician Vinnie Saletto says. From now on, he'll call the shots.

TAMPA -- The first time Vinnie Saletto left a band, it was totally his idea; playing classic rock covers on the Pasco bar circuit was not his idea of a career.

The second time was the lead singer's fault. Saletto had no intention of quitting until the singer announced her imminent departure.

"Once you hear that, how can you go on from that point?" he said.

To call the third time a breakup would be overstating the case, given that the band continued to tour successfully without him.

The last time, or rather the most recent time, was the most protracted and painful.

Last fall, after nearly four years together, the Ashes of Grisum imploded. The group, a darling of local music critics, had recorded a double CD in the summer but never released it. One night in November, the group simply didn't appear for a show.

The breakup of the Ashes left Saletto, 33, feeling frustrated, humiliated and more than a little afraid that he was running out of time to make a name for himself as a musician.

"With each collapse, it becomes exponentially more difficult to pick up the pieces and move on," he said.

He has emerged from that experience with an unapologetic zeal for self-promotion and a determination that no one will ever have more say over his future than he.

"This time around, it's me," Saletto said. "If it succeeds, it's me. If it fails, it's me."

Saletto has the girth of an offensive lineman and the hyper-articulateness of a high school debater. His inmate-in-solitary haircut gives the misleading impression that he is an angry guy. He tends to address everyone, even the most casual acquaintance, as "my friend."

Since high school on Long Island, Saletto has nourished a desire to be a professional musician. "I didn't want to do auto damage appraisal like my dad," he said.

He taught himself to play keyboards on a $1,400 sampler he bought in 1988. His talent for self-promotion, however, is innate.

In 1991, shortly after moving to Pasco County, Saletto placed an ad in Players magazine. It read in part: "Keyboardist available. Various influences. Peter Gabriel among others."

This attracted the attention of a group that played bars in north Pinellas and Pasco. He did not mention that this job, if he got it, would be his first. He quickly learned to play Black Magic Woman and Magic Carpet Ride.

"I have perfected the art of figuring it out as I went along," he said.

His next advertisement seeking work got a response from a woman named Gen.

"Gen of the Genitorturers," said Saletto, referring to an elaborately costumed Gothic band from Tampa.

This was Saletto's first exposure to the industrial sound, a thrashing, aggressive form of music that Saletto thought was particularly well-suited for his synthesizer. He toured with the Genitorturers, playing to crowds of more than 1,000 in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami.

"It was grueling, but it was some of my most memorable experiences," he said.

During this time, Saletto formed a band called Shadowcraft, which gained a healthy following playing the Ybor City circuit. The singer's departure after a huge Halloween show left Saletto bitter that his ambition could be hamstrung by another's lack of it.

The Genitorturers were working on an album, and Saletto threw himself into that project. But he had "creative differences" with the guitarist, he said. When the band went on tour in early 1998 to promote an album he had helped produce, the guitarist went with them, and Saletto stayed home.

"I felt unappreciated," he said. "I was angry, and I was really not liking this world we live in."

He was doing more and more work in the studio for other bands, but he needed a band of his own.

In late 1998, his roommate introduced him to a singer named Chris Temple, who was playing solo at bars around Ybor City.

Temple, the dissolute son of a Methodist minister, was in many ways Saletto's opposite. Where Saletto was gregarious, computer savvy and driven, Temple was wiry, weary-eyed and brooding.

Temple showed up for the first meeting with a guitar slung over his back, a troubadour with a taste for William Faulkner and Nick Cave.

"I wasn't sure I could offer this guy anything," Saletto said. "Once I heard him play, I thought, 'Hey, this could be interesting.' "

They were, as it turned out, well-matched. Though Saletto had no experience playing Temple's style of Southern Gothic blues ballad, he responded to Temple's need for an arranger, someone who could pull together a more full sound around the wealth of material Temple had written.

"He had these great songs, and he didn't know how to put them out," Saletto said. "He didn't know how to reach people. One of my skills is reaching people."

The Ashes of Grisum (the name derives from Gus Grissom, one of the Apollo astronauts who burned to death on the launchpad in 1967) played its first gig in February 1999. By the end of August the band had produced its first album: Completed Works Volume 1.

No sooner had the album come out than the band's lineup changed drastically. The drummer and the bassist quit, leaving Saletto and Temple to reconstitute the Ashes. They got a better drummer, a new lead guitarist and even a cello player.

"It became a powerhouse," Saletto said. "We started picking up speed."

In October 2000 the band was playing on a tiny stage in New York's Greenwich Village as part of the prestigious CMJ Music Marathon. The group's 20-minute show was beset with technical problems -- "the lights went out -- twice," Saletto said.

The band decided it was time for the new lineup to work on new material. In January 2002 it went to work at Zen Studios in Pinellas Park. By July, the Ashes had produced 14 songs of sin and redemption, enough for a double CD they intended to title Completed Works Volume 2: The Spirit and the Flesh.

"It was some of the best work I had ever written," Temple said.

But readying the songs for a CD was an expensive proposition. It cost $95 an hour to use the mixing equipment at Morrisound Studios in North Tampa, an onerous tab for a band making about $100 a gig.

"We kind of overestimated ourselves on the financial end of it," Temple said. "I was frustrated we were in debt, but it sounded like a million bucks."

It didn't help matters that no one seemed to agree on what the songs should sound like. Saletto took much of the heat for this because he was the one who had assumed control of the mixing process.

"There was a lot of finger pointing," Temple said. "Everyone wants to be a chief and not an Indian."

"I felt like I only used the options that we all had open to us," Saletto said. The others could have exerted their influence, but they didn't show up in the studio, he said.

The money ran out, and no one was willing to pony up the remaining $814.90 owed to the studio. That meant the CD was stuck in production limbo. The band wasn't going anywhere, either.

"There was no will," Saletto said. "Looking back now, Chris didn't do anything to prevent the collapse."

Problem was, Temple was collapsing himself.

"It all came down to me. Everyone was pointing fingers, and they all wanted me to settle it. I didn't want anything to do with it," Temple said.

[Special to the Times] Chris Temple, lead singer of Ashes of Grisum, says that when the band ran into problems, “it just got overwhelming.” Adds Vinnie Saletto, “There was no will.” After the band dissolved, Saletto vowed to take charge of his career.

"It just got overwhelming. Everybody was dumping their trash on me. It was such a weight on me, I couldn't move forward.

"I just lubricated it."

There were more lineup changes. The drummer and the lead guitarist left again. Saletto and Temple found another drummer, but Temple grew weary of what he called "Ashes 101," teaching the material to freshman band members.

In 2002 they played only three shows, including one in late July at the Twilight.

"Performance-wise, it was magic," Saletto said.

"I think it was a great show," Temple said.

It was also the group's last.

The Ashes were booked for a show at the State Theater in November that featured Jim Carroll, the well-known author-turned-musician.

Saletto couldn't get Temple to organize a band practice. Finally, he called Temple and left an uncharacteristically profane message on his answering machine, something along the lines of "I can't take this anymore. You want to ignore the one person who's supported you for years."

Temple said later that he understood Saletto's frustration.

"Vinnie said, 'I've done everything I can,' " Temple said. "I couldn't disagree with that. He had."

The night of the show, Jim Carroll appeared, but most of the Ashes didn't, and that was the last anyone heard of the group.

Breaking up is, in some ways, part of being in a band. It's like seventh-grade romances or scandium isotopes; everyone talks about the splitting-up part. Coming together and staying together gets less attention because it's harder work.

"Being in a band is more than showing up and playing instruments," Saletto said. "Hundreds of thousands of albums get released, and only 2 percent of them show any profit."

The difference, he said, is the effort spent on selling the band, something many musicians find distasteful.

"I got so tired of the indie-rock mentality, that if you contact the papers and promote yourself, then you're a whore," Saletto said. "Label me that way; I don't care."

Actually, that's what he labeled himself.

Late last year, Saletto formed a band from a side project he had begun with singer Mikee Plastik as the Ashes were falling apart. He called it MediaWhore.

The sound of the band -- grinding, intense and angry -- is about as far removed from the Ashes as possible. But the real difference is in Saletto's tenacious will to keep the group intact and moving forward.

A week before a recent appearance at the Liar's Club in Tampa, MediaWhore's drummer quit. It was an amicable parting, and Saletto was understanding but panicked.

"We were under the impression the only way to pull off this show would be to have a drummer on hand who knew the material," he said. "That lasted about three hours."

Then Saletto remembered he had some digital video of his now-departed bandmate that had been recorded at a previous show. Saletto set to work on his computer, and a few hours later, he had successfully synchronized a new drum track and the video.

When the band took the stage at the Liar's Club, the drummer was represented by a large screen. "Drummer in a box," Saletto called it. It cut the band introduction time by one-third.

"Vinnie excels with limitations," said Christian Dumais, 28, who was in the crowd that night. "Losing the drummer just made him more creative."

MediaWhore played eight songs. Shrouded in cigarette smoke, the audience of about 100 was a mix of boldly lipsticked women in vinyl miniskirts and tattooed men draped in chains and piercings. Everyone seemed to be wearing big boots. They nodded favorably when Plastik shouted lyrics such as "God has his gun to my head" as the Zapruder film played on the screen behind the band.

One of the audience members was Martin Atkins, the impresario of an industrial music label in Chicago. Saletto was keen to know what he thought.

"Mikee told me Atkins really enjoyed what he heard."

About the series

"Transitions" is an occasional series exploring turning points in people's lives. The stories -- a judge's investiture ceremony, a widow moving from her apartment to an assisted living facility -- focus on those decisive moments when lives change, sometimes for better, sometimes not. If you would like to suggest subjects for future stories, please call Bill Duryea at (727) 893-8457 or e-mail him at duryea@sptimes.com .

On the Internet

To check out Vinnie Saletto's sound and read about his musical trials, visit www.screamingsound.com.

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