Keith Domescik - Acoustic Guitar Soloist

Keith Domescik - Acoustic Guitar Soloist

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Acoustic guitar soloist and vocalist, covering a wide variety of folk, oldies and country songs.

Available to play venues from farmer's markets to private parties.

16/11/2024

It’s getting closer to retirement for me as I reflect on my working career as a truck driver while still trying to juggle my life around music and projects around the house and helping others here and there. Sleep? Phhhpptt…. I get it now and then but that’s the hyper kind of guy I am. Always have been I suppose.
So playing at Bennie’s Pizza, coffee houses etc. either solo or duet with my buddy, Larry Darnell ( Crossriver), is on the agenda and elsewhere that features live music such as assisted living places or private events, I’ll be interested in as soon as I retire. I’m looking forward to hopefully in the spring/summer 2025.
Till then I’m still playing with Street Corner Serenade, The Turnabouts or Undercover as well as my church Sunday mornings. Always! Stay safe and healthy everyone!

27/07/2024

I love farmers markets! I wonder how long it would take to play every market in the country? I reckon I better retire soon! 😜😜😜

23/10/2022

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven’t posted much on this page but seems everything has gone to other pages. So I’ll share deep thoughts I’m feeling right here.
A month ago today my mom passed away and just reflecting on that day as everyone does when they lose the most important part of your life. We waited a couple of weeks to get things organized and arranged and couldn’t ask for anything more as far as family, friends, neighbors and co workers is concerned. The love and support to show my #1 fan in life was overwhelming! I can’t thank you enough, people!! I love you all too much!
For my portion of the eulogy of mom’s funeral service I’ll share with you although I think you can still see it online streaming at Kurrus Funeral home’s website. It’s rather lengthy and we apologize. 93 years of living a full life was hard to wrap up in 2 and a half hours. 🥹
Mom encouraged me from the getgo in 1965 when I expressed an interest in the guitar. Like Elvis Presley he was cool, played guitar and girls, girls, girls!! Well I think it was easier just to pick up the guitar and try to learn how to play. It took a couple of years before I figured out, you have to learn chords! Christmas 67 I learned at least 3-4 chords. 1968 mom bought me my first real guitar ( a used unknown dated Suzuki) and I still have it after all these years and thousands of dollars later spent on other equipment and beautiful guitars along the way. There was a time I sold it to a neighbor girl down the street from me when I was in my teens. In 1980 I got it back from her father who told me at his daughter’s wedding reception that if I would like to have it back. However he warned me that she tore the bridge off of the guitar after tightening the strings too much and the neck separated from the body. Otherwise he was going to throw it away. I said, “ Sure for old times sake I’ll take it back.” I did , looked it over and figured one day I’ll get it fixed. I put it away in my closet and 3 years later I dated a young lady who took it upon herself to get it fixed without me knowing it was gone. It was my surprise Christmas gift in 1983 and I was blown away. Today it still has the same strings and the tuning is dead on after many years sitting in its case in my basement. What a gift and I still thank Cathy Yates for so many years ago for sneaking it out. Who knows if ever I would have done so?
This meant a lot the day of mom’s funeral for when she first passed away I was feeling numb and depressed thinking I won’t be able to say anything without crying much less sing and playing my guitar. My Guild, mind you. But after awhile when time passed I felt more composed and ready to sing a song, but what? I thought of a couple of songs including “Spend My Life With You” but if mom were to hear it she wouldn’t know the song. So John Denver was really a no brainer which she loved to hear me sing and play. “This Old Guitar” was the choice and then I thought, “Wait a Minute!” Why not pull my old Suzuki out and use that? I did and it was a tremendous to pay tribute to my mom. The only one who believed I can make it to Branson, Nashville, Colorado to play with any of the stars! If only I could have, momma! Life went on and I never pursued those dreams but she would have supported me in any way possible! That’s the kind of mom I had, folks !
I love and miss you so much, mom and will keep on playing till they pry the guitar from my cold dead hands. I’ll sing for you till I hear your sweet voice again in heaven.

08/06/2022

Dang. Truly great music of Seals and Crofts. A favorite of Karen and I is Summer Breeze which we played at the market a couple of times. So many hits back in the 70’s with Diamond Girl as my favorite.
Larry Darnell and I have been trying to work out “ We May Never Pass This Way Again.” It’s not an easy one but I believe one day we’ll nail it.
R. I. P. Jim. ☹️

RIP Jim Seals (of Seals & Crofts)
Jim Seals, who as part of the duo Seals and Crofts crafted memorably wistful 1970s hits like “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died Monday at age 80.

Chris Willman at www.variety.com has the story:
Several friends and relatives confirmed the death. “This is a hard one on so many levels as this is a musical era passing for me. And it will never pass this way again, as his song said,” wrote John Ford Coley, of another hit duo of the era, England Dan and John Ford Coley, referring to the Seals and Croft hit “We May Never Pass This Way (Again).”

“You and Dan finally get reunited again,” Coley added, referring to his own late musical partner, Danny Seals, better known as “England Dan,” the younger brother of Jim Seals. “Tell him and your sweet momma hi for me.”

With Jim Seals as the primary lead vocalist of the harmonizing duo, they came to be the very emblem of “soft rock” with a run of hits that lasted for only about six years. Although none of the pair’s hits ever reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, their biggest songs were for a time as ubiquitous as any that did top the chart. “Summer Breeze” in 1972 and “Diamond Girl” in 1973 both reached No. 6, as did a more upbeat song in 1976, “Get Closer,” sung with Carolyn Willis.

Besides those three songs that reached the top 10 on the Hot 100, four more made it to the adult contemporary chart’s top 10: “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” in ’73, “I’ll Play for You” in ’75, “Goodbye Old Buddies” in ’77 and “You’re the Love” in ’78.

Critic Robert Christgau called the duo “folk-schlock,” but Seals and Crofts had the last laugh, or would have, if crowing with vindication was part of the Baha’i way. Both members of the duo were deeply embedded in that faith from the late ’60s forward.

The duo broke up in 1980, followed by a couple of very fleeting reunions in the early ’90s and early 2000s, which generated only one album after their original run, the little-noticed “Traces” in 2004, They never reembarked together on the kind of nostalgia-stoking package tours that would have seemed a natural for an act with so many well-remembered hits. But neither member showed a particularly heavy interest in chasing the limelight after the 1970s.

John Ford Coley shared his thoughts at length in a Facebook post. “I spent a large portion of my musical life with this man,” he wrote. “He was Dan’s older brother, (and) it was Jimmy that gave Dan and me our stage name. He taught me how to juggle, made me laugh, pi**ed me off, encouraged me, showed me amazing worlds and different understandings on life, especially on a philosophical level; showed me how expensive golf was and how to never hit a golf ball because next came the total annihilation of a perfectly good golf club, and the list goes on and on. We didn’t always see eye to eye, especially as musicians, but we always got along and I thought he was a bona fide, dyed-in the-wool musical genius and a very deep and contemplative man. He was an enigma and I always had regard for his opinion.

“I listened to him and I learned from him,” Coley continued. “We didn’t always agree and it wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always fun but it definitely was always entertaining for sure. Dan adored his older brother and it was because of Jimmy opening doors for us that we came to Los Angeles to record and meet the right people. … He belonged to a group that was one of a kind. I am very sad over this but I have some of the best memories of all of us together.”

For several years in the late ’50s and early ’60s, both Seals and Dash Crofts — who survives his partner — were members of a group that bore little stylistic similarity to their later act: the Champs, although they joined after that band had recorded its signature hit, “Tequila.” Seals played sax in that group and Crofts was on drums.

James Eugene Seals was born in 1942 to an oilman, Wayland Seals, and his wife Cora. ““There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Seals told an interviewer of his upbringing in Iraan, Texas. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.” Jim became transfixed by a visiting fiddler and his father ordered him an instrument from the Sears catalog when he was 5 or 6. In a 1952 contest in west Texas, Jim won the fiddle division while his father triumphed in the guitar category. His little brother, Dan, later to be a pop star himself, took up the stand-up bass.

Jim took up sax at age 13 and began playing with a local band, the Crew Cats, when rock ‘n’ roll broke out in 1955. The shy musician joined up with the more outgoing Darrell “Dash” Crofts, who was two years older and grew up the son of a Texas cattle rancher, inviting his friend to join the Crew Cats as well. In 1958, the offer came to join the Champs, who’d recently had a No. 1 smash with “Tequila.” They stayed with that band till quitting in 1965.

The pair moved to L.A. and joined a group called the Dawnbreakers. Their manager, Marcia Day, was a member of the Baha’i faith, and the house they shared on Sunset Blvd. was full of adherents as well as secular members of the local rock scene; in 1967, several years before having their first hit, both Seals and Crofts converted.

Abandoning their former instruments for something more folk-rock-friendly, Seals took up the guitar and Crofts learned the mandolin. Their first three albums as a duo, between 1969-71, had a sweet sound but went little-noticed. They tried cutting “Summer Breeze” earlier but didn’t come up with a version they liked until their third album in 1972, which they named after the track. It caught on at radio, region by region. Seals told Texas Monthly about noting the sudden shift when they arrived for a gig in Ohio: “There were kids waiting for us at the airport. That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon. Prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.”

After several more major and minor hits followed, including “Diamond Girl,” wrote Texas Monthly, the duo had their own private jet yet “would come out and sit at the edge of the stage and hold firesides about the Baha’i faith with curious fans. In 1974 they played the California jam, along with Deep Purple and the Eagles, in front of hundreds of thousands. When Jim pulled out his fiddle for a hoedown on ‘Fiddle in the Sky,’ throngs of sunbaked hippies clapped along.”

The duo stirred controversy in 1974 by recording an anti-abortion song, “Unborn Child,” as their album’s track in 1974 in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision. The belief that abortion was wrong came out of their shared Baha’i beliefs, and they released it over the objections of their label, Warner Bros.

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