Music and family

 For this blog I interviewed my dad, some background information on him is that he was born on June 2, 1960 in Raleigh North Carolina, he's a computer programmer, and a long time hobby of his has been collecting vinyl records from thrift stores and ripping them onto his computer.

When asked what his earliest experience with music was, my dad said it was hearing Mama Mimi (his mom my grandma) practice piano on Saturday mornings. He also said he remembered gospel music his dad listened to, his dad being a preacher. Having to be in church 3-5 days a week caused him to drop the gospel music, but ever since he was little he says he has love Chopin, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff because of Mimi (she had a masters in piano something he can't remember). He also noted that later in his childhood he liked the Monkees because of their TV show, and he also really liked the Beatles. Despite his mother's best attempts he disliked Lawrence Welk. I remember being subjected to his favorite shows as a kid, specifically Batman.

When asked what his first experience playing music was, he told me about piano lessons with Mimi, he didn't go too into detail saying that he hadn't retained all the information from her lessons but once he got to where he could play ragtime Mimi told him he didn't have to learn anymore. Fast forward to middle school in the early 1970's, he joined band and picked up the saxophone, which he said at the time didn't influence his taste in music very much. What did was his friends Eric and David who introduced him to Yes, specifically the Relayer album. In 1972 he was living in Irmo and had the chance to see the original band play Relayer on tour but his mom wouldn't let him. He says he still regrets not sneaking out to go and that Gates of Delirium from that album is still a favorite song of his (I agree it is an absolute banger). It was around this time he also started listening more to artists like: Aretha Franklin (RIP), The Who, and the Moody Blues, and an absolutely massive amounts of others, but these ones including yes were his favorites (these songs below are some of his favorites by those artists and they are complete bangers).

After talking about middle and High-school band, my dad brought up completely on his own the bands he was in in the 80's and 90's. In the very late 80's/ early 90's he started going to Columbia local jam sessions and when I asked him who introduced him to them he told me it was a saxophonist he met in the Camden community band who's name he cannot remember. Shortly after starting going to these bands he made lots of friends specifically his friends Elliot New and Tom Sarratt. They joined up with some other musicians to form a big band called "Nat-King-Kong" which he said was "fun, but tried to be too commercial", and he decided he preferred to just sit in with them every once in a while instead. The band that was actually semi-successful and is still around today (without him) is the blues band "Elliot and the Untouchables" where he played saxophone (mainly tenor) and keyboard. He said this was when he really started listening to artists like T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and John Lee Hooker because he wanted to emulate their styles more. He also wanted to make it known that when he "took a lead on sax, he wanted to sound more like Aretha than anything else". here's him taking a lead on tenor.

There is just way too much here for a blog post so I'm gonna cap it off at that, but he's one of the coolest people ever and ya'll should know that.