Terry Jacoby has worked as a freelance sports writer and editor in Chelsea and Dexter, and his name may be familiar to fans of Chelsea’s Sounds and Sights music performers. Jacoby has a talent for putting words together, and now you can hear them set to music with the release of his first CD called “Scrapbook of Your Life.”
He says the message of the album is: “Show me all the empty pages in the scrapbook of your life.” And, he describes the CD as “a long conversation I’ve been having with myself.”
Jacoby’s band is called Rummler and features Greg Shamus from Grosse Ile, MI. on guitar, Mike Paulin from South Lyon on guitar and vocals, and Bill Elliott from Tecumseh, who is the bass player and adds harmony to the vocals. The drummer is Nick Hura, who also sings and plays guitar.
Jacoby, who is a native of Rochester, N.Y., went to college at Eastern Michigan University. That’s where he met the band’s namesake, John Rummler.
“The real inspiration of writing and recording my own CD was John Rummler,” says Jacoby. “John and I founded Terry and the Pirates in our college days at EMU. He was not only a band mate of mine but one of my best friends in this world.”
When Rummler was diagnosed with cancer, Jacoby wrote the song “Standing Again” with some help from Rummler, who laid down some riffs on a digital recorder. That was more than 10 years ago.
“I was lucky enough to have saved them, and we were really lucky to be able to pull them off the digital card and use his tracks on this song,” says Jacoby. “That’s the real accomplishment of this CD.”
Rummler passed away from cancer at the age of 39. The CD has taken five years to make and during that time the band experienced the death of Keith Mitchell, the owner of Red Lava Studio in Dexter, who was a friend and influence on the band as well as the engineer and producer of the CD.
It took several years to complete, but the band had a studio built in Wyandotte where most of the songs on “Scrapbook of Your Life” were recorded. Only one of the songs, “Second Honeymoon,” was recorded in Dexter.
Cuts include the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” which Jacoby says is about infidelity, as well as what he calls Bob Dylan’s response to that song, “4th Time Around.”
“That’s the beauty and magic of music,” said Jacoby. “We often times hear what we want to hear. We speculate. We assume. We wonder. We question. But most of all we relate. We put ourselves in another person’s shoes and think how we would walk-or run-if that was me driving the car. Would you have followed her up the exit or ‘veer onto the highway and into the night?'”
The band’s debut album is described as a combination of rock, pop and country.
More information is available here.
