By Bruce Barton

Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier

Silicon cowboy writes lament of heartbreak dot-coms

By day, Los Altos resident Rick Glaze is an investment manager with his own successful firm, Glaze Capital Management. Off-hours, he’s a songwriter, a favorite hobby of his for some 35 years now.

Until now, Glaze kept these contrasting interests separate. With the recent CD release of “Silicon Cowboy,” Glaze, 52, weighs in on life in Silicon Valley, filtered through his country-western sensibilities fostered growing up outside Nashville.

The first three songs, “My Dot-Com,” “Virtual Love” and “Oscar Hammerstein,” comment on the darker side of the Internet culture that had people coming in droves to Silicon Valley in search of easy money. The lyrics convey humor and wit; but delivered with Glaze’s earnest singing, they come across as melancholy, too, as if Glaze is sympathetic to his characters’ predicaments.

“I think the dot-coms will go down in investment history like the tulip mania years ago,” Glaze said last week. “People were building these dot-com Web sites up to astronomical levels.”

When many dot-coms crashed and burned, Glaze’s business was affected, too. “I said, we need to write something about this - this is really impacting my professional life.”

Enter David Pace, a Santa Clara University photography professor who met Glaze while the two served as board members of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Arts. They struck up a songwriting partnership that resulted in the three Silicon Valley-themed songs.

“The first one was hard,” Pace recalled. “Once we established a pattern of working together, the ideas came a lot faster.”

The results were lyrics like this chorus from “My Dot-Com”: “My dot-com done come and gone/the wheels came off and it didn’t take long/all that venture capital’s spent/and our Web site didn’t even make a cent.”

Or this bridge from “Oscar Hammerstein”: “Oscar’s IPO went out without a hitch/the stock shot to 200 just like a rocket ship/he put $7 million in a little bungalow/he bought two BMWs and a cottage in Tahoe/he only paid with credit/you see he couldn’t sell just yet/a minute little detail that he would soon regret/a little later on that month, the stock crashed down to 4/Two weeks later they gave up and closed the doors.”

The remaining nine cuts on “Silicon Valley Cowboy” are classic relationship songs with titles such as “Loving You,” “If You Lost Somebody” and “Don’t Try To Hold Me One Last Time.” The tracks are mostly acoustic guitar driven with some vague rock influences. Another standout track is “Beach Down In The Islands” with lyrics influenced by “The Pelican Brief” and featuring a rumbling rhythm with some tasteful steel guitar playing.

Glaze is clearly excited about his CD release, which is available on the Web, naturally, at www.rickglaze.com and www.siliconcowboyonline.com. Outside the Web, the CD is available at Los Altos Card & Party on State Street.

The San Jose Mercury News, deeming itself “The Newspaper of Silicon Valley,” also picked up on Glaze’s CD with a positive mention in its “Inside The Valley” column last month.

“I see it having some potential locally, because the lead songs are about our local area,” Glaze said. “I’d get a big thrill if people would want to own it and play it.”

Glaze won’t quit his day job, but given his enthusiasm for songwriting and his new CD, he’s likely to keep his hobby, too.

Glaze and his own Virtual Wafer Hot Band are scheduled to perform June 23 at Borders Books in San Mateo.