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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Echo Park, Earth
Posts: 197
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grew up in the 80s (born 1976) surrounded by classic rock circa 1965-69 (parents' record collection) and classical music on public radio ... rejected classical by age 12 or so in favor of 50s rocknroll - Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, early Elvis, all of whose songs I tried to learn on the guitar ... on from there to early Stones ... late 80s / early 90s I picked up my first electric guitar(s) and discovered Jimi Hendrix, Phish, Jane's Addiction, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Mudhoney, and also Buddy Guy ... gradually also John Coltrane, electric Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Tim Buckley, Fred Neil, and African musics (Olatunji, the Mahotella Queens whose guitarist was unreal) ... Also during this time started to think of music as a) vehicle for meditation b) energetic / mystical force, which ideas didn't really develop until around the time I discovered funk (Meters, Sly, early Funkadelic) and dropped out of college (not that the two were related, but they happened around the same time - 1997) ... spent a lot of time listening to Zappa (mainly for the guitar playing and the concept-art games) and Marc Ribot, then formed a band in backwoods Vermont which really worked at refining our ideas of "energy music" etc ... we still play together occasionally ... music as a force for good, and all kinds of theories as to what makes "good" music (not genre ideas or even taste ideas, but a quest for the real cosmic nut of what makes a musical energy useful, positive, helpful, curative, etc ... we never figured it out, for reasons which are probably obvious ... though the thought process continues to this day in mutated form) ... five years later I moved to Seattle where I got into more current sounds of guitar noise and astmosphere: Acid Mothers Temple, High Rise, Comets On Fire, Six Organs Of Admittance. Also studied Beefheart kind of closely. Played TONS of improv shows, hour-plus jams, with a huge array of different bizarre people who no one has heard of. Some of these were really wonderful, some were so-so, a few were crap, but none of it was dull. Played bass in a couple of "we're going to be rock stars" bands and got fired from one and the other broke up and reformed without me (I used to play along with the flashing streetlight outside the practice space and ignore the drummer ... the drummer loved it, the band leader not so much) ... played lead guitar in a potentially great rocknroll band that broke up due to ego derangement just as we began to be on the threshold of minor regional popularity. Began leading my own bands and playing "solo" acoustic shows ... began studying Les Rallizes Denudes, Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan (and collecting live shows by all 3) right around this time. Followed girlfriend to Los Angeles (2007) ... musical taste has not evolved hugely, except for a minor interest in Squarepusher, Muslimgauze, Amon Tobin, Wagon Christ, et al, brought on by a roommate in Seattle ... Mainly now I bounce around between all the aforementioned stuff and get deeper and deeper into smaller and smaller aspects of it all while playing solo shows, band shows, and guitar and bass in several different groups... Sometimes I like to drive across the country with the radio set to scan and hear something different every 8 seconds (even if it's static!) ... sometimes I just listen to the neighbors, or the cult across the street, or the cat
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