I was lucky as a kid because my father had a cool record collection...not huge but diverse and those blues records just really appealed to me. Everything was in there, blues, jazz, soul, classical, novelty records like Hot Rod Lincoln, and of course rock 'n' roll.

(this version of Hot Rod Lincoln)

Partly I went for the blues guys because I just thought their names sounded so cool...I mean at that age living in a suburb of Boston I just could not believe there were really people that existed named Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and John Lee Hooker. I wanted a name like that.

I remember putting 45s by Big Maybelle on the turntable when I was just a little boy. I loved Big Maybelle and I don't think there was another child in the state, outside of my brother, that even knew who Big Maybelle was. Sadly, I feel like Big Maybelle is basically forgotten now. I mean listen to Big Maybelle shake that thing and then tell me how I could ever recover from this:

I mean I think a lot of what you fall in love with is a matter of what is available to you at that time. I had no big brothers or sisters so I was mainly introduced to music through my parents, grandparents (they had a collection of mind blowing 78s!), and uncle.

My mother was an Elvis fan and so I got to hear plenty of Mr. Presley too. I discovered The Beatles through my uncle, a musician, and was thrilled when I was in elementary school they showed Yellow Submarine one weekend in the school auditorium as a free matinee.

Later I remember going to see The Blues Brothers movie and it was a revelation because I had never seen John Lee Hooker perform (only knew his photo from album covers) and when he shows up in the film my brother and I nearly jumped out of our seats. Needless to say, we were thrilled with seeing Ray, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Cab Calloway too...but we had seen them all on television here and there. John Lee Hooker was a total mystery until we saw him in The Blues Brothers.

I would, of course, end up listening to The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Who and loved them all. My next real huge obsession that happened around my freshman year of high school was Van Morrison. I could not believe I had not found or paid attention to him until then. I proceeded to rapidly collect every record he had made up to that point and made regular trips into Boston to the shops that sold bootleg records to collect those as well.

Basically, I think I fell in love with plenty of the same stuff that everybody else did because it was so easy to get exposed to rock 'n' roll records but I think the blues, jazz, and soul stuff that I loved as a kid influenced which rock 'n' roll I fell in love with.

The 1980s was the worst decade for me because the rock and pop of the time just did not sound right to me nor did it sound particularly well played. So, on all those nights where we were "cruising around" or hanging out and playing music my friends constantly gave me crap for listening to "old" music...stuff from the 1970s and before...and wanted to hear "new" music. This inevitably meant U2, Billy Idol, The Psychedelic Furs, The Fixx, which was all tolerable but I just did not love any of it. Then late one night the television tuned to MTV a video for Welcome to the Boomtown came on and from the opening guitar I was hooked:

It helped too that they looked exactly like my friends and I. Leather jackets, bluejeans, boots and t shirts. They were not covered in makeup, wearing spandex, jumping around like clowns or stupidly posing in the video. These looked like guys I would be hanging out with and doing things I might be doing...basically, driving and wandering around the city and watching oddball shit on TV. The guitar and David's singing were great. The lyrics were excellent. I had a record I could play with my friends that was not recorded prior to 1980.