The Nature of Hemispheres, part 1

I have in my head a multi-part dissertation of sorts about music, it's function, it's current status, and it's possible future as I see it. There's a possibility that you won't entirely like everything I have to say. You might not like anything I have to say and that's fine, you can get your own blog and tell all eight of your friends what a cock I am. It's not exactly cogent or cohesive
at this point. It's just kind of rattling around up there. It's something I've more or less spent my entire adult life (up to this point) reconciling. Maybe the thing to do is start with a little background which might give you a bit of insight into my perspective. It also might, I hope, help me to decide where to go from there. Note: some of you will likely know a good bit of this, depending on the length of our acquaintance, I kind of doubt anyone person knows it all though. I'm a little curious to see what all I can remember.

I was born a poor black child. Musically I started as a guitarist. I started playing guitar when I was fifteen. I had only been interested in music for a short while before I became interested in being able to reproduce the sounds on the albums I heard and enjoyed so much. My first guitar was a real piece of shit. It was free but still a real piece of work. It belonged to one of my relatives (I don't even remember which one now). It had essentially been rotting in a basement for something like 300 years. When my mother put out word that I was interested in a guitar someone remembered the existence of this old thing. I think it was made by a company called King (that might have been my trombone). I have no idea what year it was made or what it's model number might have been. I just know it was a guitar, and it was made of wood, presumably.

None of this mattered a whit, I began playing in earnest. I didn't take lessons. I just knew a guy that attended my church who played. I talked him into showing me a few basic chords. I took those 3 or 4 chords home and practiced them until my fingers ached, which on this particularly ancient guitar didn't take long. Nevertheless, I continued playing relentlessly until I learned the chords that my friend had showed me. I can actually remember which chords they were and the song that went with them. The chords were G, C add9, D, and E minor. The song was, "Every Rose Has It's Thorn," by Poison. This isn't something I admit to many people so I hope this demonstrates the depth of my commitment to my readership. Both of you.

[Quick Aside: For the record, I hate that song, it embodies everything about hair metal that I also hate (sorry Lisa). But I didn't have such refined ideas about what music should or shouldn't be at the time and was simply thrilled that I could play along with a recording of professional (I'm told) musicians.]

I couldn't even begin to estimate how long I spent perfecting that one song. To this day, I can play a pretty damn mean "Every Rose...," I just don't. I don't even teach it. After I learned that song, I conferred with my 'teacher,' of sorts about others songs and he clued me into a great truth which has stuck with me ever sense. Those four chords are everywhere in popular music. My next project became a nightly ritual of me sitting in front of my sister's radio and listening to a local rock station and doing my best to learn the songs as they went by in one sitting. I never actually succeeded and played a song straight through on the first hearing. What did happen, though, is that I began to recognize those chords without having to play them on my guitar. This was my in-road into ear training, a fairly arduous part of musicianship. While this was happening, I began learning new chords and even some licks and riffs on the guitar; which, fortuitously coincided with my discovery of heavy metal.

My first favorite metal band was Metallica. This was not long after the release of the Black Album. A commonly held turning point in the music of that particular band. I still remember watching the video of Enter Sandman. I want to say I saw its premiere on MTV, but that could be the meds talking. Suddenly there was this angry, volatile, dark, and pretty spooky music that really appealed to me. It's not like I had a rough childhood or had any great reason for being drawn to this music socially. I just really liked the music. For the longest time, I didn't really pay attention to the lyrics. Delving into Metallica's previous catalog I found a veritable treasure trove of music that I dug and my parents hated. From there I branched out into all sorts of other bands: Megadeth, Pantera, Black Sabbath, and a host of others. I began devouring this stuff and built up for myself a fairly sizable catalog of songs I could play on the guitar. Admittedly, I never really had the look of a heavy metal fan and most people were quite surprised to learn of my devotion to the genre. This actually continues to this day. I had a student come in to a lesson just a couple of weeks ago and mention off-handedly about wanting to learn a Marilyn Manson song but that she didn't "figure I was into that." I promptly picked up my guitar and shot off into a chorus of "Beautiful People." The mix of shock mingled with disbelief on their faces is still delicious.

[Yet Another Aside: Between writing that last line and this one I have eaten a paczki. For those not 'in the know,' a paczki is a polish custard-filled pastry roughly the size of a softball and wielding a calorie payload sufficient to power a nuclear submarine.]

To this day, I cite heavy metal as the first music I played or wanted to play. (While writing this post I am listening to an iPod mix of Black Sabbath, Rob Zombie, Static X, and Sevendust.) Time passed and I continued playing music, all by ear at this point. Slowly but surely my tastes began to broaden. As I was, then, an active member of my church, contemporary Christian music became a major part of my musical diet. I became very interested in gospel artists who also happened to be excellent guitarists: Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael Card, and Wes King most notably. So began my stint with Tapestry.

Tapestry was a (in the grand scheme of things) medium sized blip in the gospel music scene of Northern Alabama during the 1990s. It was, largely, the remnants of a youth church choir who enjoyed singing together and working on music together. It was essentially a modular bank of 8 to 12 singers which was capable of performing entire choral sized numbers or splintering into smaller ensembles and soloists. My cousin was a long-standing member of the group. Somehow I ended up their sound guy. I traveled with them on their short tours, mixing their sound during shows and running their tape and CD machines (few of the songs were played live). This level of involvement in gospel music may come as a huge shock to many of you. Indeed, it is true. The vertigo is understandable though. Sometimes I look back and feel like I'm looking back at someone else's life. The pinnacle of my involvement in this genre of music culminated when I actually served as an opening act for Tapestry at their, then, annual Christmas concert. My set consisted of three horribly sung Christmas songs, some inexcusably tight jeans (wholly inappropriate for a worship service, at least in that kind of worship service), and one self-arranged rendition of Carol of the Bells for two guitars that was okay.

This was all before I was seventeen years old. Much of this was happening at once, I'd spend my week hanging out with friends and learning a Black Sabbath song. That same weekend would be spent at church or on a one-out show with Tapestry mixing contemporary gospel music. I've always sort of had a duality in the music I play and listen to.

My senior year of high school I joined a garage band of sorts. We didn't practice in a garage and we were never fully a band but "a living room ensemble of 2 guitars and a piano" is an awful lot to type. Anyway, these guys were both songwriters, are still quite successful songwriters; so I was riding in pretty esteemed company. As such, they got me into the singer-songwriter movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I owe them both an eternal debt for introducing me to Jackson Browne. All three of us could sing so we did a lot of songs by the Eagles; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; that kind of thing, along with some originals. We did a few newer songs we liked as well. I got my first taste of getting to scream vocals in our version of STP's Creep. We mostly played coffee shops and what-not, our largest gig was to serve as the intermission act during the daytime performance of our school's beauty pageant. The coolest thing about that was that I got to sing the words 'Hell Yes' in front of the school when we covered Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance." My mother was in the crowd, she was very proud.

This was also when I started playing electric bass. This was another turning point for me. The other guitar player was (I can say without reservation or any malice) worlds better than me as a player. So like many bassists, I got my start playing bass because I was the worst guitarist in the group. I soon grew to love it and have considered myself a bassist rather than a guitarist for several years now.

This essentially took me up to college. It would be ludicrous for me to try and cover my college days (where my musical experience became even more disparate and eclectic) at the end of this post. So I'm breaking this up into to multiple posts. I'll try to wrap this up tomorrow. God, I hope I didn't bore any of you too terribly much. If I did, just go back and don't read all this.

-Kroy has gone offline

I’m burning diesel burning dinosaur bones

[edit: I know, I'm wholesale stealing Tycho's end-post conventions. I figure if I'm going to steal I should do so from the best. It probaby won't be the last.]