John T Berry:
CLASS OF 1966
Peabody High SchoolClass of 1966
Peabody, MA
Essex Agricultural & Technical InstituteClass of 1972
Hathorne, MA
North Shore Community CollegeClass of 1967
Beverly, MA
St. John the Baptist SchoolClass of 1962
Peabody, MA
John T's Story
After high school, I married Jan Astrauskas, We had 2 children who are now both over 40. Having moved out of my family home, I found myself without a piano to bang on. So I got my old accordion out of storage, where it had sat for about six years.
It was 1967 and I was listening to Hendrix, Santana, Joplin, The Doors, Dylan (electrified), Lovin Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane etc. etc.
In re-exploring the accordion I soon became aware of what a natural instrument it was for playing the blues. Everything I had learned from different experiences along the way, started falling into place. For the next few years I found myself being categorized as neither fish nor fowl. I was more of an anomaly, this accordion player who plays blues, folk and some jazz.
For me, it didn't really matter, I was too busy living life. Music was an escape into my own world. It was in that time that I started to write. I had written a couple of songs and some poems in my teens but now I was looking at life from a whole different place. As a young adult, a parent, a working class citizen of a small town in the late 60's. Some friends were going off to war others were eating acid, some were coming back from other places with strange ideas some were coming back changed or broken or not at all.
The next few years contained all the classic situations, home, family, career, ow...Expand for more
ning a small business, bankruptcy, divorce, existential crisis, re-inventing myself several times, coming to Cambridge.
Unlike the stereotype, I didn¿t come here to attend either Harvard or MIT, Instead, I came in through the back door. My first introductions to Cambridge was through the Arts & Music Scene.
Over the next twenty years I Played ¿in the street¿ in Harvard Sq., at parties and gatherings up & down the East Coast, In the subways, coffee houses, at protests & rallies, ¿ solo, duo, trio, quartet, large bands, small bands, at open mic¿s, structured and unstructured jam sessions, ¿and I gained a lot of technical experience both in the studio & on location, as both artist and engineer.
Meanwhile, in 1982 I re-married and raised a daughter. During those years, I worked at everything from cooking to driving cab and courier, I spent fifteen years marketing consumer electronics and eventually came to working as an audio technician, specializing in conferences and language translation.
For the past ten years, I have been concentrating on sharpening my skills as a producer and attempting to keep up with or at least, not be run over by The Brave New World.
I currently have a CD out, pre-viewable at CD baby dot com and a my space page in the music section listed as: John Thomas Berry (The album is titled: " Watchin the River Rise")
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