Meet the Geeks

When it comes to playing music, I have a fair amount of insecurity. It still feels like a fallacy when I say that I am a musician. I see musicians as true royalty. They create emotions and feelings, or more properly, turn our own emotions and feelings on. They concisely shape stories, crafted in small dense time capsules of 2½ to 5 minutes long. Each of these songs have the ability to take you back in time, to key moments in our lives, awakening all our senses in pure recollection: your first crush, your first rebellion, your first adult moment, your first win, your first loss. The pure craft of creating all of those moving parts and making them fit together into that perfect song that can purely capture a single moment in your life, is pure genius and pure madness. Am I a musician? I sure hope so, but those are lofty heights. (And please don’t get this confused with the other “musicians” out there that are created, packaged, produced and put out there, that have all of their pa...

During the year 1983 something was happening. This guitar player named Eddie Van Halen had been making headlines all over the world with his band Van Halen. However, in our neck of the woods, stuck with AM radio, we’d never heard of Van Halen. Glen Campbell, Anne Murray, and Gordon Lightfoot were all the radio would give us. When Van Halen’s 1984 came out, it revolutionized the music industry. Seriously. In our neck of the woods, the album broke open what we could listen to the radio. I mean Kiss never got radio play. But Van Halen was getting a lot of radio airplay. And a lot of other bands were getting airplay too. All of a sudden, hard rock was now being made available to the masses. Music with searing guitars, monster drums, pounding bass, and wailing vocals was now on the radio and I couldn’t be happier. Kiss had been my only island amidst all that AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) that saturated the airwaves. Now I could take my pick. It was my brother who glomed on Van Hal...

Imagine this: Ronnie and Jeanne's house, some time in the 70's. A bunch of the cousins are playing along in the main area. The adults are chatting in the kitchen, having tea and coffee. The half-and-half French/English hybrid sing-song (and loud) chatter in the kitchen of the adults. The older cousin Randy was rarely seen. He would be in his bedroom, door closed. Kids are playing, laughing, playing, and carrying on. Then, a low rumble from Randy's room, slowly building, and then the music. Despite the door being closed, and all of the noise in the house, that sound cut through everything to me. What was it? What was that sound. I had been raised on a hell of a lot of Beatles and Ventures thanks to dad. Dad had an old tube amp record player stereo. He would plug in his bass to it and play along to those records for hours on end. I love the Beatles still to this day, and in later years would jam out more than my share of Ventures music. But this sound--- I reco...