Walter Tore’s Spontobeat takes the RPM Challenge 28 steps further

It’s not Walter Tore’s intention to belittle any other musician participating in the 2009 RPM Challenge. But for a man who says he records an average of 300 spontaneously composed CDs per year, recording one in a month just isn’t much of a challenge. That’s why Tore’s one-man band Spontobeat has set a goal of recording 28 full-length CDs during the month of February—one album per day.

As of Feb. 10, Tore said he had already completed 14 CDs and expected to easily exceed his goal for the month. But that doesn’t mean every CD will be a masterpiece. Tore’s approach of spontaneous creation leaves little time for post-production work. As soon as he finishes a disc, he looks forward to starting over again with a clean slate. He said he can’t imagine spending an entire month perfecting a single CD.

“I’d be bored to tears,” Tore said during a recent phone interview. “It often intrigues me how people can put so much effort into a song. I just, I don’t know, I couldn’t do it because there’s too much coming out.”

By mid-month, around 2,300 participants from around the world had signed up for the 2009 RPM Challenge, each vowing to write and record 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music in February. A resident of Granville, Ohio, Tore is taking part in his third RPM effort. He made a total of four bluesy Americana albums during the 2007 and ’08 challenges.

On his RPM profile page at www.rpmchallenge.com, the 52-year-old multi-instrumentalist claims to have performed more than 1 million spontaneously created songs. (He now admits that may have been a slight exaggeration. That’d be 20,000 songs per year for 50 years… OK, maybe not a million.) Throughout the course of his long career, he has never performed the same song twice, instead improvising new beats and lyrics each time he sits down to play.

“To me, art is a refection of your heart, where it is at that given moment in time,” Tore said. “Once your head starts working, you just killed the heart side, and now you’re on the commercial side.”
By day, Tore is a high school special education teacher. He typically gets home from work around 3 p.m. and plunges directly into his basement studio to start recording. He takes a dinner break at 6 p.m. and then marches back down to the music lab, recording until around 8:30. He spends the next couple of hours hanging out with his wife of 30 years and their dog. He’s usually in bed by 10:30.

The routine is so automatic for Tore that he can’t envision doing anything else. Music has long served as an impenetrable shield against the assorted hazards life has flung at him. As a child growing up in the “Sopranos” land of northern New Jersey, he was regularly exposed to extreme violence. He witnessed a mafia hit at the age of 9, he said, and narrowly avoided several scrapes with the mob. 

When Tore was younger, he typically played music for 10 to 20 hours every day. It was a necessary escape from the lurid visions that otherwise plagued his mind. “Every time I stopped, all that heavy crap came back on me and I couldn’t handle it,” he said. 

Tore’s parents were not supportive of his musical pursuits. His father, especially, opposed his artistic impulses. But his father’s resistance only made Tore that much more determined to play music. “He was so strong about me not being a musician that I was gonna be a musician no matter what. I didn’t care if it killed me,” he said.

In the early 1970s, Tore began playing in what he now describes as a pre-punk band, gigging at working class bars around New Jersey. As the lead singer, he would frequently dive off the stage, sometimes breaking bottles or pitchers and rolling around in the glass shards.

But Tore’s spontaneous style never meshed well with full bands, he said. Other band members would get frustrated with his penchant for improvising lyrics and melodies instead of sticking to the songs they rehearsed. His insistence on never repeating the same song twice also squelched any chance at a record deal.

The one-man Spontobeat format enables Tore to indulge his artistic whims. He plays a bass drum and high hat with foot pedals, and strums a guitar or plays keyboard with his hands, all while singing and blowing a harmonica on a neck rack. As soon as he starts playing, a familiar feeling of euphoria floods over him. He traces this feeling back to the first time he saw legendary bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins perform live.    

“All I wanted was that feeling, man. I wanted that feeling. I didn’t think about money, girls,” he said. “I think it has to do with that feeling that allows me to tap into an endless universe of music. If I start telling myself what I’m gonna do, it leaves.”

Tore doesn’t know where his songs come from, but he believes he possesses some kind of musical telepathy. One night, he said, while playing an almost empty club in Houston, he started improvising a song about a man dying of cancer. A woman entered the bar during the performance and immediately rushed the stage, weeping. She said her husband had died of cancer hours earlier, and something inexplicably drew her to the bar on her way home from the hospital.  

Although Tore remains obscure to the general public, he has garnered a reputation in certain elite music circles. He has performed all over the world and has lived everywhere from Oslo and Brussels to Austin, New York and San Francisco. He has performed with an array of established musicians, including regular jams with recently deceased drummer Jimmy Carl Black (The Mothers of Invention) and saxophonist Bobby Keys (The Rolling Stones). Earlier this year, he won first place in the Bushman World Harmonica Video Contest, filming himself in the same basement studio where he is now recording his RPM discs (check out the video on YouTube).

But Tore has given up on making a living with Spontobeat. He views his music neither as a career nor as a hobby, but simply as a way of life. “Music, to me, has nothing to do with business,” he said. “I don’t own any of my songs. I don’t own anything with my music. If I try to own them, the feeling disappears.”

Tore’s undying compulsion to create endless music makes him a perfect RPM artist. He’s even getting his developmentally disabled students in on the action, recruiting them to draw illustrations for his CD covers. But long after this year’s challenge has come and gone, Tore will still be playing countless songs in his home studio, improvising tunes about whatever jumps into his head.

“Life is a song,” he said.