Gene Gardiner: Press

Country And Western Artist Plunks Down A Down Payment On Fame.

Gene Gardiner is excited and nervous.
After years of writing performing Country and Western Tunes, his first professional recording will be released over about 1,600 radio stations this week end.
" I've jumped in with both feet" he says."And I can't turn around now."
Gardiner who lives in Alexandria Township "says he had difficulty landing a recording contract with a large company so he sunk $8,000 dollars into starting his own music publishing company, ENG, and a record label ENG, comes from Eugene N Gardiner, his full name.
His promoter in Nashville, Gary Bradshaw, works with other recording artists on independent labels. He marketed Gardiner's first single to Bullet and Cash Box "play lists"_periodical lists of newly published songs subscribed to by radio stations: radio programmers choose the songs from the lists that will be aired over their radio stations.

Gene Gardiner And the Illegal Tender Band won Best Guitars in the first round of the contest Here in GarageBand.Com on 11/April/2007 Holding and going lower 175 to 392 score.
Come check out his hystory with this Band!

Our music is on www.jango.com! It is an internet world wide radio network that is playing Don't Wait Too Long by Gene Gardiner and will be playing all future releases from Gene and the Illegal Tender Band. You can join free of charge and just call up Gene Gardiner to hear it there or the song name to get the radio stations to play it. Right now Love Me Tonite is close to being released.

Illegal Tender Sounds Like Trouble, But It’s Really Good Stuff


Gene Gardiner is a local musician who has been performing in the country rock genre since the early1990’s with his first hit recording “Don’t Wait Too Long.” Back at the beginning of Gene’s singing career, he was living in Bloomsbury, NJ and worked with other local musicians to create the first Illegal Tender Band. Back then, people who listened to them perform compared their style to a well-known band, The Eagles. Today, Gene is living and working out of the Belvidere, NJ area and has revived Illegal Tender with new musicians and a bit more of a southern rock sound.

“After several years of dealing with some personal hardships in my life, I’m on the threshold of making a comeback with the boys from Illegal Tender” he says. “And we’re ready to deliver on a whole new set of songs… newly written, and newly performed.” Although it has been several years since Gene and Illegal Tender have performed as one, Gene has remained active in song writing and has produced several solo recordings under his personal label, ENG Records, and his publishing company, ENG Entertainment. (ENG comes from Eugene Noel Gardiner, his full name.) People around the world from the US to Canada, from the UK to Germany, and the Philippines to Australia have taken a real liking to Gene’s music. Currently, the jango.com website is reporting Gene’s highest listening rate for his worldwide airplay right here in the US, in the state of Texas. Anyone interested in catching Gene’s sound can listen to “Don’t Wait Too Long” by going to www.jango.com and looking up Gene Gardiner under the category heading of Country.

One of the new songs that Gene and Illegal Tender have pulled together is called “You’re Not Around.” Gene began the lyrics for this song in response to a lost relationship he experienced in the not too distant past. “One night, the heartbreak got so bad the words and music just seemed to pour right out of me… along with the tears” he said. One of Illegal Tender’s other members, Steve Clar (the lead guitarist), worked with Gene to refine the lyrics and melody found in this song. It was a true labor of lost love. And that’s what makes Gene’s music so popular, it’s based on real life experiences and emotions. And Gene believes that his job as a performer is to have his audience feel the same emotions he felt when he wrote the music. “If I can’t get them to feel it, then I haven’t done my job… If I cried when I wrote it, I want to see people in the audience cry when they hear it.” For Gene and his fellow performers, that’s what the art of music making is all about.

Gene grew up in a musical household. His father, Arthur was an electrical engineer for RCA who specialized in designing audio speakers and communication relay systems. He was gifted with perfect pitch. His mother, Alice, was an accomplished musician who had attended Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ for four years and sang in the Master Work Chorus and with the Sweet Adelines. She instilled in Gene during his early years the importance of “sharing the art.” Gene’s mother believed that if someone had the gift of music creativity, they need to share it with others for their enjoyment, not for the purpose of getting rich and buying a big home. In order to instill in Gene this sense of higher purpose, she enrolled Gene in a year’s worth of vocal training at Westminster Choir College. During that year and others to follow, Gene and his mother would practice together in the kitchen doing harmony parts for shows being put on by the Middlesex Presbyterian Church, while his father would keep time by tapping a pencil on the kitchen table. “Believe it or not”, says Gene, ‘that’s where my country rock style was born.” “Compared to my mother, with her formal operatic voice and singing style, I was always self-conscious about the way I was singing; but everybody seemed to like it.”

At the point where Gene began to express his interest in pursuing a career in music, he encountered resistance from both parents. They constantly told Gene that music is tough business, and it’s next to impossible to make a living. May times they tried to convince Gene that he’d be better off pursuing a career in Engineering. However, Gene’s interest in music was so strong, that he found it next to impossible to resist. “It was like a bad itch that constantly needed to be scratched,” says Gene. Finally, he ended up making a bet with his father that he could get something on the charts. Arthur thought his son had gone off the deep end completely; but from that point forward, Gene worked non-stop to make it happen. Fortunately for Gene, he found a partner who shared in his dream and did everything in her power to help Gene reach his goal. It took a number of years, but it all came together one night at a battle of the bands session on a small farm outside of Philadelphia. Gene was singing to the crowd from the back of his pick-up truck when Jody King (a country music performer with connections in Nashville) and his band noticed Gene. Jody was so impressed with Gene’s ability, he asked Gene if his band could play back-up for Gene. That night was the start of a life-long relationship that provided Gene with his first splash in the music industry. With Jody’s guidance, Gene was able to make the Nashville connections and get his music on the charts. In May 1990, “Don’t Wait Too Long” made the Indy Bullet Chart in Texas, and the Cash Box Chart in Nashville. Needless to say, Gene collect on his gentlemen’s bet with his father. But to boot, he hit the Top forty listings on the chart then!

So, what’s Illegal Tender up to these days? For starters, Gene and his bass guitarist, John Dowbachuk (from Somerset, NJ) are working together to crank out songs as fast as they can. So, on a day-to-day basis, Gene’s routine pretty much consists of song writing, practicing new guitar techniques, and getting together with the band to work on the music. And in his spare time, he’s typically out and about scouting for new gigs to play. “If getting a good gig were as easy and quick as writing a new song, we’d be on a roll by now,” says Gene. With an ample supply of music to play, the band is on the hunt for opportunities to showcase their talent. According to Gene, it’s easier to find limited performance opportunities for himself, than it is for the entire band. The challenges facing the band in gaining momentum stem chiefly from a slow economy and the lack of discretionary spending on musical entertainment. They’re hoping the readers of this article will take note and make contact regarding their interest in having us perform. Gene says the best way to reach him is via e-mail at gene@genegardiner.com.

If readers were to attend an Illegal Tender performance, what might they expect? As Gene likes to say…”some pretty amazing stuff.” That’s because of the talent that exists in each and every member of the band. Each member has been hand picked to fill a specific niche in the overall sound. For example, there’s Steve Gorduke and Steve Clar both playing dual lead guitars. Gorduke, brings a country rock style similar to Dire Straights , while Clar brings a southern rock style similar to Leonard Skynard. In combination, the two will be bring out the heat and fire in Genes music. And then there’s Guy DeAngelo, the band’s drummer from the Bethlehem area. He’s a “music industry player” who is known throughout the industry and actually writes instruction books for drum training at all levels. Just like Gene, Guy finds it difficult to put down the drum sticks at the end of a day. He’s so into his craft that he often plays until he drops. And altogether, there’s nothing Illegal Tender would enjoy more than showcasing their combined talents for an audience.

On the radar screen is a new album entitled “You’re Not Around.” Songs in the works for that album include the featured song, “You’re Not Around,” “Where My Heart Lies” which is a song about a marriage proposal that includes a unique 12-string lead guitar part, and “Belvidere” a fast, rocky sounding song about a friend who got lost looking for his girl and ended up in the town of Belvidere, where he decided to stay. Another song to be included in the album is “Walking In My Dreams,” which is about a dream involving Gene’s first wife, who passed away on Thanksgiving Day back in 2000. Between now and the release of this album, Gene and Illegal Tender are going to start playing shows in the area. They are also contacting local radio stations for air time on some of their songs. Because it takes one to three months to up load songs into the online stores, Gene is going to make their songs instantly available through his mySpace site (www.myspace.com/genegardiner), which is equipped with special download and payment capabilities. In order for anyone to follow the progress of Illegal Tender going forward, Gene will continue to provide updated information on his www.genegardiner.com website. A “Links” section on that website will connect to other sites where music downloads will be available.

This story was writing by Jay Bitsack

Gene Gardiner's musical journey goes from Belvidere to Nashville
Published: Saturday, March 19, 2011, 10:31 AM
By Warren Reporter The Warren Reporter

Gene Gardiner
Story By Bill Nutt
He’s a Philadelphia native who used to play in Ohio and now lives in Belvidere. But if country singer Gene Gardiner had to pick a place where his songwriting career began, he’d had to select an unlikely spot: Greenland.

While a member of the U.S. military in the late 1960s, Gardiner had to spend a tour on a base in Thule, Greenland. “It was isolated, remote,” he recalls. “It was just my guitar and me.” There he wrote his first composition, an instrumental called “The Rock.”

From that humble beginning, Gardiner has developed into an accomplished performer whose songs have charted in Texas and Tennessee. He is a member of the Country Music Association, and thanks to the Internet, he has fans throughout Europe. Nonetheless, he still has time to play local gigs, including occasional performances at Thisilldous in Belvidere and other surrounding venues.

Though now labeled a country act, Gardiner’s musical interests started with rock and roll. “When I started playing guitar, I was into 1950s rock,” he explains. “Then I worked my way up to Jimi Hendrix, and then into southern rock.” He still cites such bands as the Eagles (whom he praises for their “harmonies and pretty chords”) as the model for his sound.

After his time in the military, Gardiner played bass in a group called City. “We were a high-powered rock band,” he says.

Gardiner’s career as a singer-songwriter actually started in 1981, when he was working on a song called “Hearts to Blame.”

“I had writer’s block toward the end of that song,” he admits. “Then I met Steve Gorduke at a studio in Milford. He had the kind of guitar sound that I had been looking for, and he could play anything.”

Over the course of the 1980s, Gardiner worked on his craft. He is particularly proud of a song called “Love Me Tonite,” which was inspired by a Linda Ronstadt concert he saw at the Rutgers college in New Brunswick New Jersey. “On the back of the concert program, she wrote about how lonely it was on the road,” Gardiner says. “That gave me the idea for the song.” He has since re-recorded the song as “Love Me Tonight” in more of a rock style.

In 1990, Gardiner’s song “Don’t Wait Too Long” reached independent music charts in Texas and Nashville and hit the Top forty on one of the charts then. He continues to write and record songs, which he posts through his web site, (genegardiner.com) and which are available for digital downloads.

Gardiner has a digital studio set up in his home, complete with a 16-track recorder. He notes with pride that he plays a rare 12-string Fender Stratocaster. “When I saw that in a store, I just went, wow,” he says. “I hit a G chord on it, and I bought it on the spot. I’ve never seen another one like it since.” They are collectors items now!

Gardiner works with a core of musicals friends including Jody King (whom he credits with getting him inroads in the Nashville music scene) and the guitarist Steve Clar from Clinton.

The music business is difficult for independent artists such as Gardiner. “The economy definitely makes it difficult,” he says. “Record companies are a lot more careful about who they sign. They aren’t willing to take a chance on an unknown artist. They expect you to get something going on your own. That’s the big thing. You have to prove that you’re determined to make it.”

Gardiner hopes for that level of success, but he feels that his priority to make his own music on his own terms.

“Fame may come, and you may not know it’s there,” he says. “The important thing about music is that it’s yours, and that it has your fingerprints on it.”