There's a reward for the man who tries,
What a glittering prize, glittering prize.- From "The Prize," by Nyk Fry
If he'd grown up in a different time and another place, Nyk Fry figures he might have been - in his own words - "a Ritalin kid." He admits to always having been a bit hyper. He entertainingly chats up a storm, refuses to be pigeonholed by others' expectations and at times turns productively manic.
Which helps explain "Timeweaver," among other things (including an unpublished science fiction novel). With strategic support from friends and family, Fry wrote, performed, engineered, produced, had manufactured and is distributing the ambitious new album through his own Salt Lake-based Dreamfree Productions.
The icing on the cake came this week when "Timeweaver" was the aural centerpiece at a Hansen Planetarium CD release party. Fry's creation - mingling instrumental fantasias, progressive rock and tidbits of contemplative conversation - was given the full laser-show treatment normally reserved for the likes of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles.
The general public will next get a chance to sample the sounds and sights at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 8, at the planetarium, 15 S. State. Tickets are $5.50. More shows may be added.
With only a week - and by putting in a couple of all-nighters - laserist Scott Frederick and Digistar operator Aaron McEuen pulled together the program - a feast of pastel Spirographic beams, startling strobes, visual aids and smoke effects, spinning through "Timeweaver" beginning to end.
"It's a big record," Frederick said after the first show. "It's sonically very big."
Added McEuen: "The in-stru-men-tals are superb for Digistar," the computerized planetarium star-projection system. "I'd like to do some demos for the public to show what Digistar can do."
Fry, 27, is an engaging young Utahn who happens to have a British accent.
Born in Boston, raised and schooled in England, he visited Utah four years ago, discovered an affinity for the place, returned and married Lisa, "a Utah girl." His hometown is Tadworth, south of London, but home is now Salt Lake City.
"I'm galactic, that's what I am," he laughs, explaining his peripatetic roots.
A sound engineer-producer-musician at Ken's World's Best Studio, 3196 S. Washington St., he's also worked on a variety of other projects. These range from the LDS-oriented musical work "A Day, a Night and a Day" to a Marie Osmond Christmas show, miming keyboards in a pretend-band for a recorded soundtrack. Fry landed that job a month after moving here, hobnobbed with gracious celebrities and felt like he'd made the right decision.
"I called my mother and said, `Mom! I'm going to be on TV!' She said, `Yes, but are you eating properly?' "
His education is in science and art, so making a mark as a musician seemed a startling development to many who knew him, he says.
"I was told at about the age of 8 that I'd never be a musician," he recalls. He couldn't hold a note while singing, so training in that direction was considered un-prom-is-ing.
That didn't stop him. He discovered he loved everything from Vivaldi to Hendrix, so contrarily he took up the electric guitar and music to take him "who knows where."
Fry maintains he's always come at things from unexpected angles. If you know where your weaknesses lie, sometimes you can overcome them, he says - a de-ter-mined optimism that also comes through in a few of his songs. He didn't have perfect pitch as a child - but understood what perfect pitch was.
And he always felt different. Drugs and alcohol held no attraction to him, but the world of rock did. The teachers probably thought he was headed for trouble, Fry says, "because I was a guitarist in a rock band and had really long hair. . . . I remember walking along the corridor and hearing the wind through my hair."
He didn't want to be predictable and therefore battled stereotyping. "I'd be a musician - and I'd study chemistry. I'd be perhaps a writing person, and I'd stay in at break-time, like a nerd, to write - but I'd be on the rugby team.
"I think if we'd been in this country, I'd be a Ritalin kid," he says, referring to the medication prescribed for hyperactivity. "I'd always be asking the teacher the other question," i.e., the unexpected one.
He went on to higher education, progressing academically and taking up acting as yet another interest. Then, in 1988, after visiting relatives in Maine and Michigan and a friend in Utah and returning to England, he acted upon an impulse to return to the Beehive State.
"I had to do it," says Fry, who is LDS.
His work since helped lead up to "Timeweaver," a project "that took over 10 years to create and four months to record."
Most of the recording he did after hours on his own at Ken's World's Best Studio, partly owned by Ken Goetz, whose late-night profound thoughts as "The Distinguished Thinker" - taken from a 3 a.m. conversation - help link the "Timeweaver" tracks. Fry also lavishes praise on other musicians who contributed guitars, percussion, strings, sax and vocals to his pet project and hails the work of his brother Gareth (also now a Utahn), who chipped in with the handsome design of the final package.
The final hurdle - actually financing the album's pressing - was resolved almost miraculously.
"A friend of Ken's came in and had a fuse that needed testing," Fry says. "I was just doing a tape dub at the time. He said, `So, you've finished your project.' `Oh yeah,' I said. `You listened to it about two months ago.' An hour later he agreed to finance it."
The friend was businessman Ray Hearld, listed as executive producer on "Timeweaver."
They had 1,000 CDs made, 250 tapes and 96 T-shirts splashed with the word "Timeweaver."
"If we sell them all he'll get his money back," Fry says.
Meanwhile, the musician is already three-fourths of the way into yet another album, "either in demo form or brain cells." And he hopes his work leads to the movies.
"I do want to be considered for movie soundtrack stuff, because that really does attract me," he says.