Bio
Simi #
Rusty grew up out West, mostly bouncing between his family homes in the San Fernando Valley, the Los Feliz area, next-door to Hollywood. Rusty and his brother and sister lost their mother to cancer when Rusty was 13. Rusty only has faint memories of his mom but can still recall a beautiful, kind, music-loving soul who wanted her kids to grow up to just be good people. Rusty’s single dad struggled with a lot of life circumstances, so they moved around to lots of different rental houses, an apartment, usually larger houses with roommates, and mostly in Simi Valley.
Rusty tried a few times to take formal piano lessons from his dad, but he didn’t apply himself, always giving in to the forces of distraction and the alluring intuition that just listening and playing things by ear was more reward for less effort. His dad would still always help when he got stuck or was taking a wrong turn in trying to play along with something.
Musical Influences: Jukeboxes with Joan Jett, Rush, Journey, Queen #
A Land of Neon and Buffets #
Things got pretty interesting for Rusty and his sister when the family embarked on a four-year adventure during high school years when his dad moved the family to Las Vegas to pursue greener pastures for his piano teaching and photography business dreams. Rusty’s dad was determined to make a better life in one way or another, and Vegas seemed like a good move.
This move had some unforeseen repercussions for the family, but it was mostly positive for Rusty — it exposed him to a major change in environment, local culture, economic adversity, and all sorts of things that probably never would have happened had they stayed back home. There were slot machines in convenience stores, and cheap buffets in the big casinos were a windfall to a struggling single dad, and heaven to kids who liked variety.
Musical Influences: #
The High School with an Airport #
Rusty ended up going to a vocational technical high school just outside of Vegas proper, which had programs in auto mechanics, paint and body, construction, culinary, computer science, electronics, beauty/cosmetology, telecommunications, and aircraft servicing. His high school actually had its own airstrip and helipad, along with a satellite uplink.
Rusty had always loved computers, electronics, and technology. While those had a stronghold on his desires, he elected to take the telecommunications path in this school, which was a fancy name for a “media” program. It included photography, audio and video engineering and production, and some of the other roles that go with all of those, like lighting for sound stages, video journalism, camera operation, editing, and computer-generated graphics. So it was three years of immersion in all of the things that fascinated his mind, and tugged at his heart.
A lot of Rusty’s schoolmates and neighbors were into different types of music than the white kids were mostly into “hair band” metal or synth-pop, which Rusty liked, but he was also feeling a pulling force from the sounds of romantic R&B, and the emerging rap scene which was very prolific in North Vegas, where the family lived.
Musical Influences: #
A Band of Friends #
At 16, Rusty finessed his way into a friend’s band after buying a used Yamaha DX7 synth. The band liked to call itself a “jazz fusion” band, but memories shade them as more rock with synths. There was already a skilled keys player in the band, a piano student of Rusty’s dad, and her father, the drummer, always encouraged Rusty to just go with it, encouraging him to explore the soundscaping periphery with ambient sounds.
Rusty was still a play-by-ear kind of guy and his music theory understanding was still pretty much non-existent, so he was often lost and the real keys player was often not happy with his contributions. Rusty eventually stopped going to practice and the memory is that the band eventually dissolved. Rusty still keeps in touch with the friend who was the band’s lead singer, who is still in Vegas.
Musical Influences: #
Goin’ Back to Cali #
The skills learned in that telecom class would end up being a resource Rusty could draw upon in many ways later in life, but they were mostly set aside here, changes were coming fast. First, things at home and in Rusty’s mind started getting really shaky around the middle of his senior year, and eventually Dad gave up the rental house and they moved back to grandma’s Los Feliz home in 1989.
Musical Influences: #
Rusty Finds Thoroughbreds #
Rusty didn’t stay living at “Nanny’s” for very long. His brother had introduced him to the world of horse racing, behind the scenes, as in working on the backside. The idea of earning his own paycheck, and living in relative independence as a stable employee drew him in. Rusty had some time to experience horses as a child and later through a neighbor in Vegas, and he kinda liked the farm smells, the relative “return to nature” aspect of working with big animals. For a “city boy” who deep inside, kind of hated the city, this sounded pretty good.
Rusty took to the racetrack life pretty quickly, got a job “hotwalking”, somehow bypassing the normal “hotwalking school” prerequisite through his brother’s connections, and then eventually as a racehorse “groom”, and he got to feed, bathe, brush, bandage and saddle some of the top horses at Santa Anita at the time, and some of the worst. The conditions at the track however posed a constant challenge, with Rusty’s body fighting through allergic, asthmatic response to allergens in hay and straw, combined with the thick, polluted LA air.
There were also other distractions in the racetrack environment, and it seemed like either a career dead-end or a health and psychological one. There was the issue of the pay – even if he worked his way up to barn foreman, the paycheck, at least from what he knew, was actually barely sustaining. They hook folks in with “housing”.
So eventually Rusty sought to make a change and cut a new path. He started studying the more scientific aspects of training and caring for racehorses, and started learning more technical aspects of their care and even went so far as to read and re-read books on equine sports medicine and then started riding around with and working with veterinarians. The studying was free, thanks to a horse library which was across the street from Santa Anita, in Arcadia, where Rusty lived in a “tackroom”.
Musical Influences: #
Needing a Reset #
Eventually Rusty got the notion that he needed to leave the track behind and go and work on a farm, the place where all of these equine athletes were bred and raised. Having grown up in a basically urban setting, mostly in a concrete jungle, this was going to be a big change. He researched and visited some California “Farms” which seemed to be invariably called “Ranches” out there, and was not impressed with what he saw.
There were some irrigated paddocks, but it was still essentially desert, and it looked like a cramped space to “let horses be horses”. Rusty decided that he was ready to see where the best horses came from, and more, he was ready to be away from boundless asphalt, concrete and desert. He needed to see more green. He literally needed to touch grass.
Rusty had befriended an assistant trainer in the Tom Proctor barn where he was working, and had shared his frustrations with the track life and his dreams of a change of scenery, needing to see where the good horses come from, and a place to test his knowledge and horsemanship. This friend offered encouragement and a list of farm contacts to reach out to for a first farm job.
Musical Influences: #
Roadtrip to a New Home #
Rusty was 19. He had an income which could buy food and necessities for a racehorse groom, living on the track. But he also had a small inheritance waiting in a trust from his mother’s life insurance claim which needed to be released by the estate executor, his maternal grandfather. Once that barrier was dealt with, he bought a Datsun 200SX and a rooftop car carrier, packed everything he could and planned a route through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, etc. to get to the green pastures where the good horses came from.
That trip had some weather adventures which Rusty was barely prepared to handle, but thanks to having truckers in the family, he knew to have a CB radio in the car which helped ease the struggles of driving through what started as a snow storm in Colorado, and ended as a tornado maker in Kansas. Rusty had never driven in snow, and he had never seen the spectacle nor heard the roar of lightning striking so close to where he was.
Musical Influences: #
A Place to Set Roots #
Rusty finally found his way to a motel in Lexington, Kentucky, in April of 1991, The Continental Inn. It was the first place he could find after circumnavigating one-way streets and New Circle Road, way too many times, using a paper map, and always thinking he was close to seeing a resting place, but finding himself back in “horse country”.
Within a week, he had a rental room in the nearby Idle Hour neighborhood, and, more importantly, a job, at Vinery Farm, in Midway, where he worked his way up for nearly a decade, doing everything from shoveling shit, to farm and equipment maintenance, all manner of handling and ground training, eventually serving as Yearling Manager, raising, caring for and sales-prepping several crops of those high-quality horses he’d dreamt about having some connection to.
Musical Influences: #
The Wear and Tear #
After about 7 years, Rusty came to the realization that he was again in a rut. Most people in the industry were focused on profit. Yeah, they cared about the horses, to some extent, but it was clear to him that the horses were mostly seen as numeric monetary potential, in terms of profit and risk. Employees were mostly seen and treated as a means to achieve the financial goal, and rarely, some were treated as great assets, but mostly, at least where he was, the industry was rooted in old ways and it tended to lock the help in with a lower wage, relying on offering on-farm housing as both benefit and also a hook.
Musical Influences: #
If he lived on the farm, and especially since he was a manager, he was treated as a 24/7 resource. Always on-call, vacations were not spoken of. There were some weekend getaways and opportunities for fun, usually via tagging along with the owner on something he was doing to please himself. Sometimes these turned out to actually be other ways for the owner to extract effort from the invited employee guests.
Going Back Inside #
Rusty eventually sought to get out of the farm life, at least until maybe one day he could buy a farm and do things his way. He started working as a Veterinary Tech, and also started brushing up on his computer skills. The internet was really starting to take off by the late 90s and he was starting to see that it could be a resource and an opportunity.
When he left his post as Yearling manager, there were some opportunities to bounce around at the same farm in a more professional/contractor context. He did computer networking expansions, helped, build the farm website, and took thousands of yearling radiographs (x-rays) for farm horse sales after earning the farm vet’s support and review process. It is probably a miracle that Rusty is alive today considering the risks he and those who trusted him took. He eventually took a position as a vet tech at a nearby animal hospital.
The vet tech work quickly started looking like a career dead end to Rusty. The “new guy” was exposed to risks which nobody should face and was eventually injured on the job. All was not lost as this change prompted Rusty and his employer to exploit other skills and talents which he was ready to exercise.
It was time for Rusty to “skill-up”, and he kinda met the challenge. Rusty started working in the lab, which did everything from blood cytology and chemistry panels, to culturing biological samples. He also learned to cover the pharmacy, and eventually started doing “IT” for the hospital.
Yep, ole Rusty installed network switches, maintained servers, added IP cameras so the staff and clients could check on their patients, horses in stalls, in the hospital, and via dial-up connections. This was pre-2000, but just barely. Rusty was still working there in the Y2K bug heyday, and their main system for practice management was based on COBOL. One of the epicenters of that date-related bug, so that was a tense New Years for him.
Musical Influences: #
An Actual Career #
As fun as it was for Rusty to find new avenues to be an asset, it was still clear that there were other paths which could lead to more stability and potential. He had previously worked a side job at a Thoroughbred records and data company in Lexington, but the work was boring and had some annoying aspects, but he bit the bullet and re-applied, with the knowledge that there was some headroom to grow into there, and he got a full-time office IT-adjacent job.
It wasn’t a year before Rusty was on a “programming” path, eventually doing network and systems administration. Anyone who understands how “IT” works can guess where this goes. Yep, eventually Rusty was again a 24/7 resource, on-call, afraid to take time off.
Musical Influences: #
Balance #
Eventually, through organic evolution, and “lateral” moves, a balance was achieved and Rusty could begin to take some time to focus on the treasured passions he had locked away. Music, nature, and storytelling. Some of these treasures have some dust and rust on them, but Rusty still wants to share them with you.