When Christopher O’Donovan was a youngster growing up in North Bergen, he wanted to learn how to play a musical instrument.< br>
So at the age of 9, his parents gave him clarinet lessons.
“I knew that I couldn’t be in a rock band playing the clarinet,” said O’Donovan, who moved out of North Bergen as a teenager, but returned home when he became an adult. “So at age 13, I asked for a set of drums. My sister Kathleen wound up getting me my first drum set, a four-piece Ludwig set. That was the start of it all.”
Soon after getting the drum set, O’Donovan was taking drum lessons and he was well on his way to a career in music.
“I took my first drum lessons from Stan Demeski, who went on to become a member of the Feeleys [a popular Hoboken band that frequented Maxwell’s during its heyday in the 1980s],” O’Donovan said. “He taught me everything.”
The Feeleys played on the soundtrack of such famed movies as “Something Wild,” with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith, and “Married to the Mob,” with Michelle Pfieffer and Matthew Modine.
After leaving the Feeleys, Demeski joined the popular 1980s punk band Speed the Plough, which gained notoriety and respect throughout the music world and had recording contracts galore.
It was 1979 when the 16-year-old O’Donovan was ready to break into the music field.
“I was playing my first real gig at CBGB [in Manhattan] and I became a regular with my first band called Grey District,” O’Donovan said. “We were just starting to get into the Punk Era, everything from the Ramones to Devo. I then did my first show at Maxwell’s and started getting regular work.”
With that, O’Donovan began a music career that saw him perform with Speed the Plough on two CDs and another band called Wild Carnation, with whom O’Donovan remained for more than six years. With Wild Carnation, O’Donovan was able to tour Europe twice.
When he’s not performing, O’Donovan has also carved out a career as a manager of tools and accessories in the heavy machinery division for Marubeni Citizen, a trading company from Japan. O’Donovan has worked for Marubeni Citizen for almost 20 years, working out of the company’s offices in Allendale.
But through it all, music always was a part of his life.
“People come and go, but the music remains,” said the 41-year-old O’Donovan. “The music will always be inside of me.”
Recently, O’Donovan joined forces with a new band, called JOSS, named after a Chinese house of worship in northern California. The lead singer of the band, Ambrose Liu, is Chinese-American and dreamed up the name of the group.
Two of the members of O’Donovan’s former band, Wild Carnation, have reunited with JOSS.
“I think we got a little stir crazy and needed something to do,” O’Donovan said. “We put an ad in the Village Voice looking for musicians and it just sort of happened.”
All of the members of the band hail from New Jersey. O’Donovan is the lone Hudson County resident. “We met and played together and we realized that we had something, even though there are some wide age differences,” O’Donovan said.
For example, bass player/vocalist Mike Pasuit is 23 and Liu is 29. O’Donovan and Ian Smit, another guitar player, come from a different era of music, with both musicians being over 40.
“It gives us a whole different viewpoint,” O’Donovan said. “We’ve created an atmosphere that has worked out very well.”
JOSS delivers a different style of music that O’Donovan says is hard to distinguish or classify.
“One of our last reviewers called us ‘very spooky Twin Peaks-like music,’ ” O’Donovan said. “We run the gamut of what we play. People just have to listen to it and they’ll decide. We’ve been pretty popular on college rock stations and have been getting requested around the country.”
JOSS across America
JOSS just played gigs in Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as shows in Iowa and Massachusetts. Locally, they have played Maxwell’s and Uncle Joe’s in Jersey City. This month, JOSS has had two shows, one at Pete’s Candy Store in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and another at the popular Café 111, also in Brooklyn. The group has also just released a CD entitled, “If Not for the Hovering,” which can be purchased on all of the Internet record sites like cdnow.com and amazon.com. It is also featured at Barnes & Noble, as well as Tunes in Hoboken.
“We’re not starting to venture out,” O’Donovan said. “This is definitely the most fun I’ve had with a band in a long time. We get along great and that’s a big part of it.”
O’Donovan hasn’t given up on his association with Wild Carnation either. They have a new CD that will be released later this year, called “Super Bus,” that was recorded a while back, but is finally ready to make it to the record stores.
Needless to say, it’s been a wild journey for a local guy who got his start with the clarinet.
“Unfortunately, my sister [Kathleen] passed away recently,” O’Donovan said. “She’s the one who got me started with the drums and she was at every one of my shows. I owe a lot to her.”