Christopher Leighton has crisscrossed the United States more times than he can remember.
It all started when he was about 5 years old. His father, a computer programmer, took a job out in California and moved the family from the Bronx to the West Coast. They lived there for about 10 years until his father accepted a job with the U.S. Senate in the computer department and the family headed back east, this time to northern Virginia. The one constant in Leighton”™s life was music. A baby grand accompanied the family on their moves and Leighton “banged around on it.” He had an ear for music, but didn”™t really want to play the piano. So, his parents bought him a $50 guitar and enrolled him to take classical guitar lessons. But this was the era of Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Uriah Heep; Leighton wanted to play rock ”™n”™ roll.
At the library he found a book on guitar music, which happened to feature chords in the back of it. He was in heaven. The first song he taught himself was “House of the Rising Sun,” a ballad about a life gone wrong in New Orleans.
When college time rolled around, Leighton was off to Drake University in Iowa. But college, like classical guitar, was not to his liking. He took his musical skills, now honed by constant practice, to the masses ”“ the bars of Des Moines. He hooked up with another guitarist, Bob Cooke, who owned a 12-string guitar. The duo took turns playing each other”™s guitars during sets that featured the folk rock music of Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin.
A listener one night, a keyboardist in a band, approached Leighton and asked for his name and phone number. About a month later, the man called Leighton, explained that the band”™s guitarist quit and asked if he would like to join his band. Leighton agreed and traded in his acoustic guitar for an electric Gibson SG, a “solid body ”¦ that weighed a ton.” He was now the guitarist and lead vocalist for Freeway, the house band at The Pines, a club in Des Moines. Six nights a week he and the band played cover songs of everyone from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Santana and everyone between. While living in Iowa, he also studied with Don Archer, a music theoretician who taught him jazz and harmonic techniques. Leighton also worked with the Iowa Arts council, teaching as well as performing from libraries to detention facilities. Then it was time to hit the road; first with the band Kriss Kross and then the Scott Smith Experience. He played hotels and clubs from Tahoe and Las Vegas to Atlantic City and the Poconos. He dealt with sometimes less than ideal sleeping quarters that included rats and a mysterious dried red liquid that looked a lot like blood on the walls of another place that he dubbed the Charles Manson Suite.
After three years on the road, he met up with his high school sweetheart and the two married and he left the traveling behind. He continued to play at clubs and worked part time at several jobs from painting to delivering The New York Times. “Musicians always have to supplement their incomes.”
The marriage ended in divorce and Leighton started playing with a corporate/wedding band and also worked as trainer in the support centers of companies such as Lucent, 3com and U.S. Robotics. After doing some work for Value Electronics in New York City, the owner called and asked if Leighton would be interested in heading the IT department. He agreed and moved to Scarsdale, where he would meet his future wife, Lidia Wusatowska, a general contractor. A few years later, “the IT bubble burst” and he joined his wife”™s company, C&L General Construction Inc., now based in Mahopac. The firm recently completed construction on Joseph Massaro”™s home, situated on an island in the middle of Lake Mahopac. And it is not your ordinary home; it”™s an original design by Frank Lloyd Wright that includes a 200-cubic-yard cantilever floor slab. Not unlike the neck of Leighton”™s Fender guitar strung with wire, workers had to stretch steel tendons and pour concrete to create the unique structure.
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And all the while this was going on, Leighton was going further with his music, creating a CD titled “Positive II.” Every musical note and vocal belongs to Leighton, who crafted the compositions in his home studio. He put out a CD last year, but describes it as “very primitive.”
“This one is fully produced,” he says, and listening to it, it”™s hard to believe he did it all by himself, from guitar to keyboards to synthesizer. The songs cover blues, country, New Age and, of course, a bit of rock ”™n”™ roll. He also includes a song to his wife, “Lidia”™s Dream.”
Perhaps recalling a life done wrong by a city in the first song he ever learned, “House of the Rising Sun,” Leighton wrote “Return to New Orleans,” a soulful instrumental of a city done wrong by a hurricane.
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The CD is available on cdbaby.com and outboundmusic.com.
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