- Welcome to our place, our time on this edition.

The personal look at Bruce and John Hornsby brothers who combine their writing and performing talents to produce award-winning popular music.

Also, a look at artist Vicki Bruner and the distinctive style that makes her artwork unmistakable and unforgettable.

Here is your host, Vianne Webb.

- Thank you for joining us.

I'm Vianne Webb.

Two things stand out in the backgrounds of Bruce and John Hornsby.

The first is the Hornsby family's long time and enduring ties to our region.

Bruce and John come from a family of Chesapeake Bay Waterman.

Father Bobby has worked the Oyster Harvest.

The second thing that stands out is the Hornsby Brothers love of music, which they learned as children.

Their great-great-grandmother was a concert pianist.

Their great-grandfather was the director of musical education for Enrico County Schools.

And the brothers as youngsters watched and heard their father play in a group called Bobby Hornsby and The Octane Kids.

All of that is background in the present as every young person in Hampton Roads knows Bruce Hornsby and his band The Range have become one of the most popular and admired musical groups.

Now in front of the public brother John writes many of the lyrics for the songs together, the lyrics and the music reflect and celebrate our place and our time.

We're going to talk with the Brothers Hornsby and see and hear the band play from a live concert and in music videos.

Tempe Fist begins with a profile and interview with Bruce and John Hornsby, - Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

Their debut album landed in the Billboard's Top 10, a single the way it is hit number one.

And Bruce and his band won the 1987 Grammy Award for best new artist for this Williamsburg native.

However, all the attention is nice, but what's best is coming home, home to family and friends.

Bruce and his brothers, Bobby and John are close both philosophically and musically.

In fact, it was older brother Bobby who played in a string of rock and roll bands that encouraged his young brothers to come on board for Bruce and John.

Bobby Hornsby was the catalyst.

- He had bands around the area, had a, a band called Love Minus Zero named after an old Bob Dylan song had another band called The Soul Solution.

Soul Music was just the big thing around here.

Everyone wanted to sound like Wilson Pickett or whoever, Otis Redding.

So he had these bands and we just kind of got brought along with it.

We had a band called The Fourth Dimension.

I was the guitar player and he was the organist and we'd use his, we would, we would play these gigs and we would do great just because we had Big Brothers Equipment.

The other bands had these little Lafayette six inch speakers, and we'd have these huge fender basements and showmans and, - And my mother then took that a step further.

She became involved with this national, kind of a patriotic moralistic group called Up with People - In junior high school.

The brothers formed a production company called Zappo Productions, and they published a periodical called Piano Monthly.

- My friend Chip DeMaio, who was a, whose dad was a local silversmith for Colonial Williamsburg, he came up with Zappo Productions, who knows why, but it was basically our company that booked the worst bands we could find and tried to get them.

We tried to get them jobs and John came in on it a little later.

- I came on in sort of in the promotion end of it.

By the time I came in, we started kind of expanding our repertoire and advancing into other media.

- So you were kind of the advanced man and you sort of led the way, I suppose?

- Well, yeah, but these guys taught me how to, well, we wrote a magazine where we would bill our own bands.

We would, you know, hype them.

- It was a, yeah, it was a big puff piece on any band we had.

And now you can find it in the Rare book Archives of William and Mary Library, which is really, are you serious?

That's the best, that's the most hilarious part of the, the legacy of Zappo.

- Bruce's piano driven pop music is rare in an age of synthesizers and electronic keyboards and its success somewhat surprises him because he didn't really take up the piano until his late teens.

- I so somehow discovered that we had this great piano in the living room and just started jamming on it.

I guess you'd played, you used to play piano and what you, you said that I got kind of impatient with, impatient with your, - Well, we, we, we'd get together, he played guitar, if you remember, and we'd wanna play Elton John songs like Country Comfort or a marina off of that, one of his early albums.

And Bruce would say, come on, play more of this sort of jumpy, you know, interesting syncopated style.

And I would just kind of long was good at the right, right.

We had that going.

Yeah, kind of an alternating bass note, chord thing, and, and it didn't quite make it, so I, that's my explanation of how he became more interested in the piano.

- Well, also really for me, I, I don't so much remember that as, as much as Bobby.

Once again, our older brother went away to school in Connecticut and he got turned on to so much interesting new music that we never heard around here, like Elton John and Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, all that sort of stuff.

And so he would turn me onto these, these new groups and most of the stuff that I really liked was the piano or the piano oriented stuff like Elton John, Leon Russell.

He brought home this record Tumbleweed Connection.

I'll never forget riding down the parkway to our cousin's house in Yorktown and, and my brother Bobby putting on this tape of this new album, tumbleweed Connection with this sucker.

You know, I just, it just hit me, you know, that was a song called Amina, that's the one that I remember really getting to me.

And then Leon Russell, all the old Joe Cocker, you know, all that called it more gospely sort of rock and roll.

So I just gravitated toward the piano just 'cause I loved the music that I was hearing that was more piano oriented.

- When Bruce realized that he wanted to get really serious about piano, he enrolled at the University of Miami, the alma mater of many of today's top fusion players.

He spent days in practice rooms perfecting his craft.

While at the university, Bruce made the acquaintance of a guy who would find a home in the band.

- How do you know about Molo?

- Well, I've - Been, you know, yeah, yeah.

John Molo, the drummer has been with me since 77 when I graduated from college, came back up here to put together a band around Tidewater.

He was a, a friend of mine, a schoolmate at University of Miami, and we've been together ever since.

- Bruce headed to Los Angeles at the suggestion of Doobie Brothers Megastar, Michael McDonald, who caught the Band's Lounge act at Hampton's Steak and a restaurant in December 78.

John graduated from Stanford University and stayed in California to work odd jobs and write songs with his brother.

It proved a successful collaboration all the way through John's graduate work at UVA law school, because many of their ideas for songs come from experiences growing up as kids in Virginia experiences in a family whose roots go back to a legacy of waterman on the Chesapeake Bay - Growing up in this area.

It's, it's a very rich, you know, rich and of course folklore and just stories.

I don't know, it just, it's, we get a lot of ideas from this area.

- I think one of the neat things about our parents is their background.

Dad comes from a little fishing village, Seaford, Virginia, and then they, his family moved to Yorktown and so he comes from, his family was, were watermen, clam diggers and oystermen.

And so he comes from that very rich background and my mother's family is originally from New England and she grew up in Richmond where they were involved in more of this kind of traditional Virginia upbringing, the nice schools and the, and the nice debutante debutante balls and both.

So we got the best of both worlds aren't we really did.

Yeah.

So that's kind of a nice experience to have grown up with.

- The brothers feel strongly about striving for something different.

They aren't willing to settle for music that sounds like everyone else's.

John admits that setting that kind of standard makes it hard for a lyricist to be instantly creative.

- I'm not one of those songwriters, and I don't, don't think there are that many really lyricists in my case, who are inspired, who are writing down the road and all of a sudden are struck with the inspiration to write a song, a great, something snaps in your mind.

- Bruce and John know that as their careers blossom, the opportunities for privacy and quiet time will become less and less.

That's why the appearance of the band at Hampton Bay Days last summer meant so much to them.

They had come home, - The wild one was Bay Days, like 60,000 people there.

That was, that was, that was the greatest.

And so what was it like?

I mean, it was just a thrill.

That was the sort of thing that you always dream about.

- You know how some people say when this finally happens to them, I knew it was gonna happen all along.

- Yeah, no way.

- Did you?

- Absolutely not.

I mean, we are very fortunate.

I've got a lot of good friends who are very talented, who have been kicking around trying to get deals.

I mean, some more intensely, some more directed than others, but still a lot of really talented musicians that have not gotten their break.

And so we're just, we're just lucky.

- Very fortunate today, - I mean, we were intense about it.

I was pretty driven about the whole thing, more so than most of my friends, but I still have some that are as driven and have not been as fortunate.

So, you know, I see that, and I, and I know that I've seen that through the years.

I've been in LA for eight years now, and I've seen a lot of that.

I just know how difficult it is.

There's probably, you know, a hundred thousand bands trying to get record deals.

RCA signed about four artists last year, so there you go.

There's the odds - For Bruce and John Hornsby.

The success has been a long time coming and they've had the generous support of family and friends along the way.

They readily admit that the whole process has been worth it, that they've worked hard, that they feel there is a freshness to their music.

But as Bruce says, it's also a crapshoot in this business, and the dice has fortunately rolled in their favor.

- Thank you, Tempe.

Fifth, we'll see and hear more from Bruce and John Hornsby a little later on, we'll see the complete music video, the band produced of the song Mandolin Rain.

Every week at this time on our program, we list for you some outstanding events coming up the next few days in Hampton Roads.

Here are our choices this week.

Many people have a hard time finding the right words to describe the art of Vicki Bruner.

Witty, controversial, outlandish, improbable are a few of the words people have resorted to.

Vicki Bruner grew up a Marine Corps brat, living in many different places the last dozen years in Virginia Beach with her husband and two children there in the kitchen of her home.

She cooks sometimes, but more often can be found, creating sculptures and pictures that yes are hard to describe, but that command our attention.

David Ferraro prepared this profile on Vicki Bruner.

- When people describe my work as caricatures, I don't like it, I guess because it was described like that for so many years, but the influences there.

I don't know really how to describe my work.

I know it's, it's a real strong style.

I mean, people can see one of my paintings and they know it's one of mine.

- The style of Vicki Bruner's work is difficult to pin down, but unmistakable, the Virginia Beach artist is now enjoying critical and commercial success after years of effort.

- I have drawn ever since I can remember.

It's always been something I did when I was a little kid and I've always just loved to do it.

I started drawing, I guess you could say more seriously by the time I was in high school, and I was very inspired by several cartoonists back then.

Basically, Rick Griffin, who had mur, the Surf and Surfer magazine.

He was my idol, and that's how I really started getting into cartooning.

And at that point I wanted to be a cartoonist and have a little cartoon strip.

My style just really still has evolved from I think wanting to be a cartoonist.

I think probably the basic change for me and the best thing that I ever did was just stop painting for a while completely.

And I worked with soft sculpture for about seven years, and I think that kind of loosened me up and just gave me a different perspective on things.

I would take canvas and like cut out the figure and then have it stuffed and I would paint it just like I would would a painting, but I was working a three dimensional surface.

- The soft sculpture was popular, but after years of making bird watchers and women on roller skates, Bruner was ready to move on.

- I just finally just got burned out, you know, from doing it for seven years.

I felt like I was doing the same pieces over and over again.

And then I also at that time, had my first baby, and that was such an ordeal and such a mess.

It was just all over the house, so I figured that was a time to make another transition and go back to painting or drawing.

- The soft sculpture was gone, but the characteristics apparent in that work, the sense of humor, the exaggerated figures, the outlandish subjects, the sense of the improbable remained apparent in her new work.

- Just these crazy little things running around in my mind.

That's where the, the ideas come from.

I just start working and the ideas come, they just start flowing.

A lot of times I will think of a title and think, wow, now that would be something really funny and really neat to, to draw.

And so I've worked that way.

I've worked both ways.

I work with acrylic, paint, watercolor.

I use a lot of geso in my work to get texture.

I work with colored pencils.

I usually have a nail handy to go in and scrape and get a lot more texture.

I water the acrylic down quite a bit to give it that kind of loose watercolory feeling.

And I usually mix the watercolor and the acrylic together, which I don't think too many people do, which gives me a lot of different color combinations.

Right now my kitchen is the studio and I work right in the middle of the kitchen and it just, it works fine for me.

There is a lot going on, but that for me helps me.

- Bruner's work has evoked strong response and occasional outrage.

Some illustrations for a Virginia pilot ledger star article on women's lingerie brought her some notoriety - And they said they just wanted me to illustrate some of the different kinds of lingerie in the article, which I did.

And it was fun.

I thought it was a funny piece.

The paper liked it, but there was a lot of, a lot of people that did not like that piece and were very offended by it.

I don't know if it was so much the size of the women in the underwear or the combination of seeing oversized women in underwear in the newspaper, but many people were offended by it.

One woman was shocked that they would run something like that.

That was a publication that was coming into her home and her children saw it and she was just very upset about it.

I could, I take criticism fairly well.

I think anyone who is an artist or working with the public, you have to learn to take it because you know you're constantly being critiqued or being reviewed and it's not always good.

It's not, I'm never probably real easy to take, but you just have to say, oh gee, that's just one person's opinion.

- Like most young artists, Bruner shows her work at outdoor shows and galleries.

A recent show at the Cudahy Gallery in Richmond have brought out the public and their opinions.

- Well, I love the new colors that she's using and I really like the imagery and I love all the, the, the graphic marks and scribbles.

I love the sense of humor.

I love everything about it.

I just - Can't get used to this.

What do you think?

- She's a free spirit.

I feel that she really does with this is what it looks like to her.

She really doesn't care what it looks like to you.

This is her interpretation of what she sees at the very entertaining.

- Her sense of her sense of humor is just outstanding and her sense of color is just, just absolutely wonderful.

- I know, I think they're real inviting pieces.

They're not intimidating - Because they don't ask you to take them very seriously right up front.

They're clever.

They're very clever, and she has a marvelous wit.

It's all that's, that's, that's the first impression that's wit, - While the public tries to define Vicki Bruner's work in its own terms, it continues to make it popular.

Of 16 paintings mounted in this show, 11 sold that very evening.

- I do what I do because I love to do it.

I love to paint and that is why I paint.

It keeps me off the streets.

- We have the had the pleasure earlier of meeting and interviewing Bruce Hornsby, singer songwriter and Grammy Award winner, together with his brother John, who writes lyrics for Bruce and the band, the Range as promised.

We're going to see and hear now a complete music video with Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

This song was written by Bruce and John together, and it's called Mandolin Rain.

- What You Listen, but there's moments that so strong the and that's listen to.

- Next week on our place, our Time, we'll profile two people who've played a great role in helping us understand the past.

We all share in Hampton Roads We'll profile Audrey and Iver Noel Hume, authors filmmakers, and formerly curator and director, respectively of archeological studies at Colonial Williamsburg.

We'll also recall a time when Hampton University served as a school for Native American Indians who left behind a fascinating pictorial record and music Next time from two of the finest classical players in our place, flutist, Debra Cross and Harpist Elisa Dicken.

Till then, I'm Vianne Webb for our place, our team.