Click here to have a listen to some recent recording projects recorded in Garry’s basement and read a bit about the people involved.

In addition to being Loose Change’s guitar player and backing vocalist, Garry is an executive at a Montreal based software company. He was born on August 29th in Montreal, where he was raised, educated and still lives.

Outside of the band he also regularly plays around on the piano and sometimes drags out his bass. He has a banjo that he used to play a bit (he bought it for $20 from some guy who probably wanted to buy drugs…) ”They give you the best deals” ;-)

A bit of a techno-nut, Garry’s got equipment up to his eyeballs and a small recording studio in his basement. Though he’s only got 2 hands, he’s got at least a dozen guitars and 7 amps; from a “practice-while-watching-TV-and-driving-the-family-crazy” 10 watt job, to a 100 w Marshall half stack. Mixers, mics, multi-track recorders, effects, compressors, equalizers, vocal pitch correctors (for Sherry ;-) and keyboards complete the equipment roster. On practice / recording nights there are usually a few cold Cervezas Corona close by in case the band gets parched.

There is also Cookie, Garry’s family’s 12 pound, jet-black toy poodle with a white pinch. Cookie has no apparent eyeballs, invisible due to his unkempt, unshorn, Rastafarian look-alike coat. Cookie greets the band at the door and perches proudly on Sherry’s lap while she plays piano.

Garry’s musical influences are many but the Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Police, U2, the Eagles and early Bowie take the top spots. Sting is still a favorite for his song-writing, showmanship and textures. Garry is a big fan of Dominic Miller, Sting’s guitarist. He thinks Dominic is a gifted player and quite under rated. Players like Clapton, SRV, Winters, also figure among his favorites. Garry’s seen Colin James many, many times and never tires of his music.

There aren’t many songs (at least “the hits”) from all of those artists that Garry doesn’t play. He’s had perhaps 10 formal “lessons” in his life...and picked up the rest on his own. Garry was 12 years old when he got his first guitar as a Christmas present (he really wanted drums but the family lived in a flat). Back then he was picking up tunes like “Guantanamera” !. It wasn’t until junior college before he really started to learn how to play.

Garry was a real “late bloomer”, in his 30’s and settled in his real “career” before accidentally getting hooked up with a drummer (his widowed father’s girlfriend’s son…got that? There will be a test.). He simply didn’t know any players before that. A couple of years and several band incarnations later that drummer’s wife happened to be working at one of the clubs where Sherry was a Karaoke host. You can guess the rest.

Garry was very lucky to have been born with a pretty good ear and a motivation to learn the guitar by himself. For literally years, he would figure out the guitar parts by playing whole albums on his bedroom boom box and singing harmonies to his favorite songs. “It’s a lot easier today”, he says. “Now I just buy guitar magazines or find stuff on the ‘Net ”.

This boom-box-repetition learning technique gave him the ability to pick up most rock tunes very quickly and commit them to long term memory, pulling them out again much later. This is handy when a drunken patron hollers out that he wants to hear “The Weight”, or more obscure stuff, like the Eagles “Teenage Jail” (from an album called The Long Run. He can still play that from beginning to end to this day.) “Back then, with ‘vinyl’, it wasn’t as easy to skip over songs”. When those requests come in (usually at around 2 AM on any given Saturday night gig), Garry might call a quick huddle with his 3 other band mates and they’ll often surprise the dude (they’re almost always dudes) with a respectable rendition of his request. “It’s good enough for that drunk guy, anyway”. Improvising on the fly versions “live”, Garry says, is one of the reasons for the “Loose” in Loose Change.

Besides a’scratchin’ and a’pickin’ at the “geetar”, Garry might sing main vocals on anywhere from a quarter to a third of the songs at a gig, depending on Sherry’s mood. He admits that he sucks at remembering words to songs. His musical “ear” sometimes at least helps him get close to the timbre of the original vocal performance. He says, “I do a better Tom Petty than Tom Petty”.

Garry, rarely takes life very seriously. He typically likes sarcastic humour, witty exchanges and silly rhetoric. You might hear him say stuff like :
“it ain’t a party until the underwear starts flyin’” or
“sometimes it’s better to sit still and look stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt” or “if I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head”.