Robert Ingebo

I was twenty years old. By that time, I had built up several years of professional musical experience playing in rock bands. I realized that I lacked the training to achieve my full potential as a musician, so I auditioned at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM). CIM was the third-ranked music school in the country behind Columbia and Julliard. The reason CIM was so highly respected is because the members of the Cleveland Orchestra, who were world-renowned at the time, were the teachers of the music students at the school.
Fortunately, I passed the audition and was accepted into CIM. My piano teacher was Yoshiko Murakami, the assistant concert pianist for the Cleveland Orchestra. I studied with her for two years and then dropped out because I got tired of playing Classical music.

I used the knowledge I had learned in my music theory classes to compose my first electronic music album titled “Sketches in Ambience”. I never could have written that album without the knowledge of music theory I learned at CIM. That knowledge allowed me to invent a new style of music. I had become a composer as well as a songwriter.

Fantasia was a well-established nightclub dance band, playing the medium-level nightclub circuit in the Cleveland-Akron area. It was a secure job, and it paid well enough to support my family. It was the next step up for me in my music career. Much to my relief, I passed the audition and became their new keyboard player.

After a couple of years, I, Larry Wagner the bass player, and Larry D. the drummer, realized that Fantasia would never break out of the medium-level nightclub circuit. We felt that they were holding us back from playing the top-level nightclubs, so all three of us quit the band and formed Goodfoot.

We needed a new lead singer and a new lead guitarist to fill out the band, so we auditioned a few experienced nightclub musicians from the Cleveland-Akron area who were looking for work. We ended up hiring a better lead singer and a better lead guitarist as well.

Even though we had achieved our goal of creating a better band, we had a big problem. Fantasia was well-established and had a lot of gigs. When we told our booking agent that we had quit Fantasia and had started a new band, he said he couldn't book us into any nightclubs because the club owners had never heard of us.

After going three months without a gig, we were on the verge of breaking up and going our separate ways. Because our agent knew that we were dead broke, he finally took pity on us and booked us into Youngstown's hottest nightclub. He said if we didn't go over, that would be the end of Goodfoot.

When we played our first night at the Youngstown nightclub, which was on a Monday, the place was practically empty. To our surprise, the word got out very quickly, and by Wednesday night, the nightclub was packed full of people. It stayed that way every night for the rest of the gig.

After the gig was over, the nightclub owner called our agent and told him that we were a hot band, and that it would be to his financial advantage to book us into as many nightclubs as possible.

Shortly thereafter, our agent booked us into all the nightclubs we could play. During the entire five years I played in Goodfoot, we only went one week without a gig.
A year later, we had reached the point where all the local nightclub owners recognized Goodfoot as being one of the top dance bands in the Cleveland-Akron area. By that time, we had performed at all the top-level nightclubs.

We were booked at least a year in advance, and most of the nightclubs had a line of people waiting outside the front entrance every night just to get in to see and hear us perform.

We had finally made it to the top of the local nightclub scene and we had become so popular that each member of the band had their own fan base. We had become local celebrities.

I quit music for what turned out to be many years because of an illness I was battling. I finally began to recover in November of 2016. On May 29th of 2017, I was well enough to create my first YouTube channel and uploaded two of the four albums that I had written.

From that moment on, I restarted my music career. Since I had never produced a music video before, it took me some time to learn how to do it using a video editor and other software.  Now I have a channel that is very professional.

Now, I am not only a songwriter and composer, I’m also a music video producer. My goal is to continue songwriting, composing and releasing music videos until I die. I have about twenty unreleased videos and am currently writing a new album of Funk Rock music titled, “Music You Can Feel”. I should have that album finished by the end of the year.
This edited music biography was written by Robert Steven Ingebo, president of FRI Corporation, the Funky World of Robert Steven Ingebo LLC and Robert Ingebo Author LLC.