PART TWO: In which our hero finds the great Misty Mountains, Pigs, “fusion” and… (gulp).. wimmin
So, where were we? Ah, yes…
The albums began to define his young life.
Then, during our boy’s freshman year of high school, like shots of pure electric emotion into his ripe, open cavity, and representing nothing less than the otherworldly magic of the eternal; pure and absolute potential, came..
Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
And like countless other suburban adolescents before and since, the discovery of this particular body of rock and roll legend, and (far most significantly) music, was tantamount to an initiation into the most hallowed of halls for the young listener.
Immediately sacred to his burgeoning heart, it was life-altering.
He had been driven to pick up the guitar somewhere between the tender ages of ten and eleven years old.
(Flashback)
He would never forget it. It was on one specific day at school that he was hit fast and hard with the overwhelming urge that he had to learn guitar; the single greatest thing he could possibly imagine.
Luckily, his mother had an old nylon-string “folk” guitar from her younger days in the Village in an old, dusty cardboard case in the basement.
The minute he got home from school that fateful day, he ran to get it. And his life would never be the same.
(End flashback)
But it was later, in the adolescent discovery of these classic rock giants, that…
he began to truly experience the inextricable connection between listening and playing..
..which, as he would come to learn, would extend directly into writing.
This was when and how the next chapter of his musical education commenced – hours and hours and hours of sitting on his bed, playing along to Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, and, by junior year of high school, Jerry Garcia.
Slowly but surely, the medium and structure of both the modern song and the rock album – as complete art forms – came to fully inhabit the boy’s emotional and psychological interior.
The latter years of high school brought him into a near-total obsession with The Grateful Dead, as well as the beginnings of a deep and intimate relationship with the songwriting of Paul Simon.
And alongside these came the first attempts at writing original songs of his own.
College brought the discovery and deep excavation of the canon – mostly rock and roll, but also the late 60’s and 70’s jazz / fusion giants.
All The Beatles’, Stones’, and Bowie’s masterpieces of the 60’s and 70’s were ingested, digested, pored over, again and again, until they became part of his cell structure.
These coupled meaningfully and intensely with the seminal late 60’s / early 70’s proto-fusion of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, and Herbie Hancock’s masterpiece Head Hunters.
His first real, “pro” band happened there, at the University of Michigan, and he felt for the first time what it was like to be in a room jammed with sweaty people, all there for one single purpose:
To exhalt, to connect with something throbbing and powerful.
And he felt, for the first time, what it was to be part of the catalyst of whatever that thing is.
Also – significantly – during this time came the first taste of heartbreak, in violent waves, one after the other, at the hands of first love.
And accompanying those waves, thankfully, were Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Van Morrison’s immortally sacred and salving Astral Weeks, and Peter Gabriel’s masterpiece of torn relationship, Us.
Listening, over and over again, heart rent open from the agony of first love’s ending.
Listening, and feeling on many nights that it was the only thing keeping him alive.
TUNE IN TOMORROW (yes, you’ll get the email) FOR THE THIRD AND FINAL PART of The Only Listening Boy in New Jersey, in which our boy FINALLY SEES THE LIGHT!!
And once again, you can DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE GIFTS RIGHT NOW if you prefer. (You’ll also have one final chance to get them tomorrow..)
See ya then!