A little background

When I was a kid, growing up in the middle of upstate New York, it was the pre-internet boom.  Sure, we had the beginnings of the net back then, but two things were essential to keep in mind:

1. I was much too young to actually understand the intricacies of the net, especially back then when it was much less user friendly, and
2. Dial up.  That's right, LOW speed internet, with a shoddy connectivity.  No streaming anything back then.

So that left me in the dark, as compared to today, when it came to musical interests.

From early on, I loved music in general, and it's been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember.  From the beginning, I absorbed as much as I could, starting with the music my parents loved, and branching out from there.  My dad was a classic rocker back in the 60's and70's, although he may not see it quite that way.  He was big into bands like Zeppelin, Sabbath, and the like, with branching taste into more mainstream music like Boston and even the Beatles (although he insists he only liked them once they hit their psychedelic phase, around the White Album).  My mother, on the other hand, was a huge Pink Floyd fan, and was the first person to introduce me to bands like Heart - which makes a lot of sense to me.  Nowadays, she's just as likely to be listening to Clay Aiken, which breaks my heart, but what can you do?  The point is, basically from the cradle, I've had parents who took their music seriously, and have (or, at least once had) a real passion for the art.  I was fortunate to have their influence to prevent me from becoming a mindless acceptor, who allows the top 40 hits to dictate their musical tastes.

Things continued well as I grew older, as I became involved in band as early as allowed, and became a proficient Saxophone player.  This gave me a new perspective on music, as it showed me what possibilities lie on the other side of the recording process.  However, I never took it very seriously, and never pushed myself to take it anywhere.  This would become a trend in my musical life, as I would go on to pick up a multitude of instruments, becoming passable at them all, but never truly mastering any of them.  Such is life.

In high school, I began to step away from the tastes of my parents, and begin to develop my own musical tastes.  Unfortunately, as I said earlier, I didn't have the methods available to me then that many kids do today, and was largely limited on the exposure I had to new music.  I was confined by the radio, as it were, and found obscurity as well as I could - even then, the music snob - but unbeknownst to me, the music I was delving into was mostly out of availability, rather than a true love of the genres.  I was listening to stuff like Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, Korn, Static X, Mudvayne, etc.  It seems obvious now that that isn't what I really wanted to listen to, but to the 15 year old me, stuck in the middle of nowhere, it served as an ample soundtrack to my rebellion from my isolated and insular surroundings.  When I started to dig deeper into that type of music, I found my interests developing into bands like Sevendust and Tool - bands with a bit more layers than those which were considered the mainstream - or at least the comparative mainstream.

I consider the first day I heard Rage Against the Machine to be one of the major turning points of my life.  It was the first time I heard a band with something real to say.  Something more than "I am full of angst," someone making music today who had a real message, a real motivator for making their music other than sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.  Sure, bands had come before with the same political fuel, but Rage managed to strike me at exactly the right time, with exactly the right sound.  They changed the way I looked at music, and in turn, the way I looked at myself.

I devoured everything they had to offer, and continued to do so until graduating from high school, and setting my sights on college.  It was there where I consider my eyes and ears to have been truly opened.

TBC...