Song of Myself

Before I really get started here it'd be helpful to give a little info about my life and the great love I have for the music and artists I cherish so deeply.  I'm a 23 year old from Rhode Island.  I'd like to say that most of my involvement with music comes from making it but mostly I'm just a professional admirer of other people's work.  For years I dabbled with the drums but these days my kit sits untouched gathering dust in my basement.  I've also been messing around on guitar lately, trying to teach myself a few songs.  My main focus is writing, something that can be immensely rewarding on good days and endlessly frustrating on bad days, which are most days.   I tend to jump between poetry and prose but I've also been trying my hand at songwriting.  Anything that can't be sung I just call a poem which means that most of my "songs" are poems.  How I found my way to the musical goldmine that I've been listening to is an interesting story.  Growing up I didn't think much of music beyond what played on the radio.  My parents are by no means audiophiles even though my dad's a musician; he plays electric and upright bass.  Even so, he was a strictly by the book musician having been taught to read music and playing mostly classical and big band stuff (not that there's anything wrong with that).  For most of my childhood my music collection consisted of little more than a few cds i kept in a shoebox, mostly of artists who were big at the time.  It was a friend of mine who grew up listening to vinyl and playing in bands who helped steer me towards the treasury of great music I've been exploring.  I started by listening to the popular rock bands and artists who've ensured a timeless place in pop culture and history: among others,The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Kinks and a few of the other royalty of Rock.  Dylan and The Beatles especially became my twin tour guides, showing both a way forward and backward into the foggy realms of music and culture.  My friend helped to round out my research into British bands by adding less recognized but just as heavy hitting bands such as The Dave Clark Five, The Yardbirds, The Animals, etc.  From there I moved onto heavier British blues bands, namely Cream and Led Zeppelin; the golden gods of rock.  With Dylan I began listening from his folk roots as the unwilling prophet of the protest movement but soon discovered that his mid-sixties work, paticularly the electric trilogy (Bringing it all Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde), was a veritable treasure trove of mind warping poetry and surreal imagery blasted into the brain along with some of the most ferocious guitar licks ever played.  Once I entered Dylan's twisted circus world, a fun house mirror version of our own, I never forgot the characters I met.  In the next few years my musical journey took me through the key places and periods highlighted on the map.  I made my way to San Francisco to hear Bay Area Bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe & the Fish jamming all night in grand ballrooms full of swirling lights.  Then onto LA and the Sunset Strip to hear the chiming, jet age sound of The Byrds, the dark, jazzy hypnotism of The Doors as well as the gruffer folk-rock of Buffalo Springfield and the garage groove of Love.  Soon enough I was deluged by a veritable waterfall of bands and artists pouring out from the cracks of every major music scene.  There are plenty of other bands deserving of mention but I'm afraid this listing would begin to turn into a book.  Bottom line is that the bands mentioned above and a hundred others just as worthy of praise were instrumental in shaping my views of the world and providing me with a boundless universe of outlets for expression and thought and continuously force me to look at the world in new and fresh ways, taking everything in and spitting it back out in the shape of a song.