I've been obsessed with music all of the 46 years of my life that I can still remember. I actually grew up around a very musical hippie family. I was around to see many of the current genres of music that dominate the world in their infancy. Though I have some strange ways of looking at music and they evolved that way over time.

My earliest songs I remember liking when I was very young were Jesus Christ Superstar, Rhinestone Cowboy, and Hound Dog. Very quickly after that I'd love some of the Looney Tunes songs.

I was immersed in an environment almost constantly about music. I heard The Beatles very often as that was definitely my mother's favorite band. I heard a lot of Joni Mitchel, Cat Stevens, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steeley Dan, etc.

My step-father who came into my life at age 4 and would go on to adopt me and raise me was in a band when my parents got together. My uncle was also in that band. It was in Texas and they were called the No Names and were apparently fairly well known. I know they opened for American Blues before that band went on to change their name to ZZ Top and I know they did a lot of Beatles cover tunes in addition to other things.

My dad and mom playing guitar around me and singing was an ever present thing. They also really liked me singing Puff The Magic Dragon. :)

The interesting thing is I early on definitely had my own tastes. My mom loved Jesus Christ Superstar but, really the fascination with Rhinestone Cowboy and Elvis Presley's Hound Dog was totally my thing.

I hadn't really begun to think about WHY I like music and what draws me to music at these ages. I will get into that, and this is a lengthy post as a lot of it is the weird path I took to music.

When I was 6 years old and we had moved to Basalt, Colorado (not far from Aspen) my mom took me to a disco in Carbondale, CO that was open on Saturday afternoons for little kids to go and dance. I heard a lot of Village People, Beegees, and many other popular disco tunes at the time that all of us little kids would oscillate between dancing and playing some of the first stand up video games. (likely pong) I remember a song I really liked was I Was Made For Loving You which is a song that Kiss fans shake their hand at disgust as a sell out moment that briefly existed for Kiss. Yet, that was the song from Kiss I liked when I was 6. So I kept telling my parents I wanted a Kiss album. They bought me Kiss Alive II which doesn't have the song I like. The song I liked is from the album Dynasty. Well beggars can't be choosers, I listened to a lot of Kiss Alive II, and I fell in love with a lot of their other songs.

That was my path towards my love of hard rock, and what would later be encapsulated in heavy metal. I liked many things during those early years that would not fit into those categories. I liked some Billy Joel songs and especially liked his song Its Still Rockin' Roll To Me. I also listened to some Queen then, but it was mainly the stuff that was popular at the time. I did however, find that it was the HEAVY/HARD stuff that appealed to me.

Looking back I have no doubt that some of that was due to the situation. While my parents were great there were several incidents of Substance Abuse, and from about 10-16 years of age Alcoholism dominated their and thus, my life. We had moved to a small town with a winter population of around 300, and a summer one of around 15000. It managed to keep 3 bars in business all year long, and more in the summer time. When I wanted my parents I'd often walk from one bar to the next until I found them. They stopped drinking half way through my Junior year in high school and it made a dramatic improvement in all of our lives.

Yet my love of heavy music thrived in that 10-16 year range. Now I am going to actually talk about a popular topic in music.

Emotion

It is popular to talk about emotions and tell people to USE THE EMOTION. Yet predominantly these are sadness, love, and happiness. I've noticed in hindsight that people like to pretend anger, fear, and other emotions such as thrill seeking/adrenaline seeking do not exist. They do, and they are just as much a part of our lives as the others they say to USE IN THE MUSIC.

Heavy music generally taps into these emotions. Yet when it comes to music these are emotions people like to pretend do not or should not exist. Music should be always about sad, or happy. I disagree strongly with this.

I firmly believe that music (especially heavy kind) saved my life, and prevented me from potentially ending up in prison. I was sometimes depressed as a child due to the alcoholism I lived with. I was often very angry. I tended to bottle that anger up and a few times that nearly caused me problems. My outlet valve for anger and sadness both was music. I could blast some heavy music and be angry and the anger would become part of that music, and I could forget about my own anger for awhile. It kept me from going nuts. So contrary to popular negative opinions it was the heavy music that kept me from going out and beating people up, and acting out, and being aggressive. I could be aggressive while listening to my music but it was purely in the form of head banging, air guitaring, air drumming, lipsyncing, etc. It hurt no one, and it helped me.

Deep Low Powerful Aggressive

Early metal I noticed it was the deep powerful chugging rhythmic songs that went all the way back to some Black Sabbath songs (I didn't actually hear until much later) that appealed to me. For me hearing that stuff made my blood boil, and made me feel like I was a viking about to jump off my ship and go into battle, or perhaps like people in a big football game might feel right before the HIKE. I was ready for the adrenaline, the battle, the power. That rhythmic power chugging would churn inside my body and it would make me feel powerful like I was a super hero and had mystical powers. Yes, this is not really what I thought, but it is the best way I can describe the sensations.

This is what drew me to metal.

Training Our Ears

I remember the first time I heard AC/DC. Someone told me I should listen to Back In Black and I am very glad they told me this, as I still consider that their best album. I loved it. Yet I could not tell for the life of me what the vocalist was saying. Then a strange thing happened. As I listened to it my ears and mind got used to it and I began to easily understand what he was singing. It is much like learning to hear past an accent. It is simply mental training.

I still employ this technique today. I'll try to listen to new things multiple times to see if I might suddenly train my ears and learn to appreciate it. Why do I do this? Well some of my favorite music of all time I did not find appealing the first few times I heard it and then there would be a shift in understanding and soon I'd absolutely love it. It has happened to me enough that I still use this technique to try to appreciate music.

I do recall I gradually was getting interested in the complexity of the music. I wasn't yet playing an instrument, but something was making me gravitate towards much more complex music. I even started also listening to classical sometimes of my own free will. I'm not actually sure what was going on in my mind back then, but it was something. MTV was in its beginning and was popular and it was music ALL DAY long. It was good. It was a place to discover a lot of new music. I knew I was different than most people and my taste were different.

Rap

I'll admit I thought break dancing was bad ass as it came on the scene when I was in that early teen phase or right before it. So I was there to see it as something new and exciting. The Rap itself didn't do anything for me though. That is partially because by then the LYRICS and VOCALS of a song had started becoming like spices for me. They could make a song taste better to me, but if the music wasn't interesting then that spice was meaningless. In the early days of Rap the music was about as simple as it could get. It was simple beats (very simple), with some record scratching (which was new), and occasionally a very small amount of keyboards. The novelty things for the music then were the accompanying break dance, as this was the only music people break danced to then, the rhythmic rhyming vocal style we call rapping, and the record scratching. That was pretty much RAP when it came out. Oh and also Controversial lyrics. :)

So me tuning into the instrument side of the music there really wasn't much meat for me to grab onto in early rap, so it did not appeal to me. I also read a lot and would dabble with writing. I was pretty good at coming up with rhymes so I wasn't overly impressed. Also, as far as the controversy, attitude, etc in lyrics. I was listening to metal. It had all of that too. Punk was also big there, and it also had that.

I still am not a fan of most rap, but occasionally I like it. It doesn't touch the buttons for me that music needs to touch. I do think people that can spit an impromptu made up rap on the spot are pretty bad ass though. :)

And whether it is the case or not for me Hip Hop was basically a few things. A melding of rap vocals, with some pop vocal styles, and more musicality in the instruments. So I like what is called Hip Hop quite a bit more than what comes to my mind when I think of Rap. Remember, my concept of Rap was formed when it first appeared. I realize that some of it is more than that today, but most of that I simply consider Hip Hop.

Oh and I did see Ice T and Body Count in concert, and that was pretty fun. Yet that is Ice T rapping over the top of metal. :) "Body Count, Body Count, Don't you know body count's in the house, body count's in the house, Body County, Body Count" I still very distinctly remember that with some powerful metal rhythmic chugging behind it. I liked that. ;)

Metallica

I was in school in Gunnison, Colorado by the time Metallica was discovered by me, and I kind of forced it down the throats of everyone around me. I didn't discover them until Ride The Lightning came out and someone visiting had told me I should check out that album. That album rocked my world... changed my obsession and look at music by a huge amount.

Metallica would continue to be my favorite band for around 13 years. The songs were faster and far more technical. They were fast like punk, powerful like metal, and not just simple three chord progressions like punk. I liked it. A lot. It would begin my true music obsession. I was also hugely obsessed with Cliff Burton the bassist for Metallica (before he died in a bus crash). I wanted to play bass. I had a friend I worked with where I washed dishes and he was a cook. He was skilled bassist and a good 8 years older than me. I asked him if he would teach me.

Guitar

I had to bring an instrument and all I had available was one of my dad's acoustic guitars. So that is what I began to learn on. I was 16 or 17. After awhile, I didn't really want to learn exclusively bass anymore. In fact I fell in love with guitar. I'd continue to practice, take music classes, and even be a dual physics/music major when I first went to college due to my love of playing guitar. I also composed my first electronic music on a Commodore 64 in 1988. This used sawtooth, triangle, and pulse wave form instruments. So I was learning to compose and appreciate music and sounds that were not metal, and were not guitar.

Technicality

One thing that appealed to me was skill in playing. I loved insanely good guitar players, and insanely good bands. I greatly appreciated songs that took me weeks to master as opposed to the popular songs I could master in a few minutes. My statements then were that if I had to play that easy stuff all the time I'd likely get bored performing it. Where as something technically challenging really worked my mind, my fingers and pushed me.

So I had a technical obsession. This continues to this day. Though it is far from my only approach. The music I tend to listen to the most tends to be very technical in nature. I tend to prefer Progressive Rock, and Progressive Metal over just about any other style of music. Though I love and listen to a lot of stuff outside of those labels. Those just happen to be the types I tend to repeatedly gravitate back towards.

I even played in the college Jazz band to learn that. I also taught myself some classical guitar. I even had some chances ot play quite a bit of bass, as two of my roommates for 3+ years were bass players. They were also often technically inspired so I heard a lot of Michael Manring, Bill Sheehan, and other insane bass players.

Music Appreciation

What all of this history lead up to is my current understandings of music appreciation. My mind feels different when I am slinging poetry as

Hive account@chaospoet than it does when I am talking philosophy and science. This mental state also can apply to music. Depending WHICH perspective I approach music with it can greatly impact whether I like/enjoy something or not.

I love watching people PERFORM music regardless of the type. I'll watch anything live.

In college I had moved onto an Amiga 2000 which I used a tracking program named MED which would let you lay out different digitized sounds, tweak their pitch, build patterns, and write some intricate music. This is a scene Moby was actually in before he became famous. I wrote 100s of songs that way. It only allowed 4 simultaneous sounds at a time, so you did a lot of juggling. Later on OctaMED through some wizardry raised that to 8.

I heard music I didn't like that I thought was a joke, and said "I'm going to write some of that, to prove to you how simple this shit is" and I did. Yet it did not have the expected result. Instead of convincing the person that kept subjecting me to it that it sucked, it had the opposite effect and made me respect it.

That too became a technique. If I didn't like a style of music I would often try to write some of it. I would either learn why I didn't like it and be able to explain in detail (which rarely is the outcome) or I would learn to appreciate it.

I began to view music in two categories...

Music I can respect for the composition and arrangement aspect
and
Music I respect due the sheer insane technical ability it takes to perform it

They are not mutually exclusive. In some cases you can find both.

Most people in society don't like the technical stuff. There is far too much stuff going on. Yet that is why I like it. It challenges my mind to keep up with it. Stuff I used to have trouble keeping up with often sounds like it is in slow motion today as my mind has adapted to listening to really fast technical pieces and analyzing them. It is much like learning to understand the vocals on AC/DC.

This is who I am musically, and the odd way I view the musical world.

I tend to enjoy music one of two ways and they are mutually exclusive. I have to flip a switch in my mind to go between them.

I just enjoy the sound and atmosphere and the mental pictures painted, which I suspect is how most people enjoy their music.

I picture myself performing the piece with friends. I picture me playing the guitar, keyboard, drums, etc. I picture myself singing it. Yet with my music background this makes it so when someone does something insanely complicated it really stands out.

The Exceptional

Why does watching insanely skilled people excite me?
Why does listening to insanely technical music excite me?

I can answer that by asking you some questions.

Why does looking at a sculpture in a museum excite you?
Why does watching a break dancer or skilled dancer excite you?
Why does watching a skilled fighting match excite you?
Why does watching the super bowl excite you?

Are you excited in any of those things because they are doing something not that difficult?

I suspect the answer is NO. You look at those things because they are not something that just anyone can easily do. It takes innate talent, a shit load of practice, etc.

Most popular music is very simple. It is kind of like handing a person some crayons and paper, and within a year they are the number one artist.

Why? I think it is because unlike fighting, dancing, etc that involve us moving our bodies and doing things ALL of us have experience with and know when something was insanely challenging or not, most people don't know shit about that aspect of music, and or playing musics, and to a degree different styles of singing.

So they don't know that they are applauding pretty basic music. They may not even like (usually don't) the truly technical stuff, because unlike our bodies they have not learned how to see/hear what that person is doing.

One of (I have many) my favorite bands is Dream Theater. Every member of that band is exceptionally skilled, they are so good that traditionally they'd each have their own band and be the STAR of that band. These guys however, stay together and write some of the most insane music you're ever likely to hear as a group. I watch them and my mouth involuntarily sags open as I picture myself trying to play ANY of the instruments in that band. However, they are too much for many people to get. I sometimes refer to them as a "Musician's band" The average person comes to listen to a band performing and making music they themselves do not make, and a band like Dream Theater is the type of the band that OTHER musicians go to watch and appreciate.

If you made it this far thank you for your time. It was a long one I know. Yet, it is a lot of material about me, music, and how I look at things.