From the top!

i got the music in me

I heard music and it didn’t make me dance, it made me want to know who made these sounds and how these sounds made it all the way to my little existence …

1980

The radio was always on in my house … at some point the family’s Realistic cassette recorder with built-in condenser mic found its way to me – some of my earliest memories involve this wonderful piece of electronics and at some point I got my hands on a cassette tape on which to record whatever that little built-in electret condenser mic could detect!

1986

By the time I started Grade 6 at St. Patrick’s School I had the itch pretty bad – I’d been to a lot of family and public events – weddings, mostly, and all of them had dancing and the dancing was facilitated by a wedding band. Despite being a hobby on the side on weekend nights to make extra cash, these bands were serious about their craft. They brought in their own PA equipment and lighting, knew all the newest hits from the radio and of course all the favourites from the past. These guys were serious gear-heads: guitarists with a rack full of outboard effects units, drummers playing a 9-piece “concert” kit with at least as many cymbals, etc – you get the picture. Their sound was loud and clean and I thought it was just the best thing in the world to pull up a chair in front of one of the massive PA speakers and just take it in – feel the wind, the force of that speaker pushing air … and I wasn’t alone – my cousin Fabio was there with me … Gabe from school was there too. Fabio had a drum kit handed down to him by his uncle … Gabe had one too – his older brother (who played in one of those wedding bands) got it for him. Now it was impossible to deny it – I needed my own drums … I needed ’em bad!

1989

Led Zeppelin III was all I played for a week straight … most of the time I’m fast-forwarding to get to Celebration Day because I was so happy – I joined a band! Bush parties happened in the wooded area that started at the end of my street and that is where “SkyWalker” (some guy who joined in on our pick-up football games at St. Pat’s) introduced me to Chris Carlone …

1993

Mike & Chris had to figure out what they were going to do for the independent study unit in Writer’s Craft and I suppose nothing made more sense than going with the weirdest shit they could think of. A rock-opera based on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis would do just fine! Die Verwandlung was a masterpiece then and is a masterpiece now in its latest format: high school musical!