I think it's interesting that so many folks define themselves by what they listen to. Growing up it used to be one of the first questions you asked someone you just met. I see that most people grow away from this tendancy as they get older, but for me music has always been such an important part of my life. With nearly eight hundred albums in my collection, I think it's safe to say that my musical interests are varied. For the most part, I'm an old punk rocker kid. But punk (or Alternative as it was called before 1992) in itself is incredibly diverse, and I've gotten into just about every aspect of it at one point or another. "What happened in '92?" you ask. Nirvana screwed up my music scene pretty well. It's not that I'm angry with them for getting huge. I'm angry with the music industry for co-opting anything that smelled like them into the flavor of the month and making it all inaccessible to the average kids everywhere. In 1988 I saw Social Distortion in a small club with about three hundred other kids. By the mid-nineties, Social Distortion was playing arenas. There's something wrong when punk rockers get their music played on network television, and I hear musak versions of old fight songs in the mall. I miss the days when you could meet the bands before the show because they were playing in a club the size of a house (and sometimes in a house). It's still possible with a lot of hardcore bands, but how long is that going to stay underground? But I'm really never happy, because the flip side of the coin is what we're going through now, sugar-pop, brainless, boy-band, diva crap. So I spent the last couple of years going backwards. Instead of picking up the new stuff, I went back in time and sought out the influences that shaped everything. Bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Parliament, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, The Who... You can sift through my whole collection if you'd like. If you have any recommendations based on the other stuff, please let me know.

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