Good Times
Los Angeles, November, 2025.
I started this website in the summer of 2021. In 2020, I retired from my job at the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC after 35 years and moved back to my birthplace of Los Angeles. There’s something about your 60’s and 70's that makes you look back: It’s Legacy Time.
This whole thing started as a memoir. Ostensibly, I would focus on the period 1979 to 1987, when I came to Washington, DC from Los Angeles and formed a rock band called Acrylix, during the New Wave/Punk Rock scare of that period. Once I got down to writing, however, it wasn’t so easy to fit everything into a neat timeframe, and so this thing expanded like a balloon.
My granddaughter was born in 2019, and second one in 2023, and so like a good citizen I filled out a family tree; they would want to know their roots. But although it was a useful exercise and I was able to put ancestral names and places down on paper, I found that I really just wanted to talk about me, me, me. That meant talking about music: the music that influenced me as a youngster and the music I wrote and performed over some 40 years.
My initial thought was to print out a document, whatever I had written, and send it around. My children could read it or not, or later, or whatever. Then I thought hmmm maybe others would be interested, especially friends in DC, so I would publish a book. But I wasn’t sure that was it either – I had seen others publish actual paper books and aside from the thrill of seeing it in print I wondered out loud whether people actually buy books. Besides, after packing up and moving all my belongings from DC back to Los Angeles in 2020, I was trying to get rid of books.
I finally thought, instead of paper what about something electronic, with links to music? Bingo! Through the wonders of modern science, I can put it on the Internet! My bequest to family, rather than some handcrafted dining room table from the Old Country, will be music audio and video files.
So, here it is, a blog and electronic depository for all things Ken:
Writing (Mental Anguish of a Would-Be Rock Star) is the memoir, my thoughts in blog form - reflections on a life that's still going on. It was doled out in weekly chapters from May through December of 2021, and then as the mood hit me, culminating with a trip to the Deep South in April, 2023, plus other stuff when the mood hits me.
Once I got settled here in LA, I started recording new music (see the Bandcamp links, above) - first by myself using Garage Band on my laptop and singing in a closet, and then with real musicians at a studio in Santa Cruz. The Music tab contains links to my latest music, and a sample of released and unreleased music from the 1980s and 1990s: New Wave bands Acrylix and Shocko Bottom, and my solo material (Laughing Sam, Ken Moss Experience, etc.) done through 2013 - some polished, some raw. Also check out Glenn Kowalski's website for 7 Door Sedan, which (with Norman van der Sluys and Josh Singer) was a big part of my life from 2007 until 2020, when COVID 19 put the big kabosh on everything and I moved back West.
Under Photo Album, I've posted photos and random thoughts, again as the mood hits me and my monkey mind allows.
You can contact me and I'll put you on The KME List.
I hope this brings you joy. I certainly feel fortunate to have been able to do this during the and post(?) pandemic.
As David Bowie said, I'm happy, hope you're happy too.
As Louis Prima said:
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by as quickly as you wink.
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
And as I said: These are the GOOD TIMES.
Ken Moss