Aaron's Musical Journey, part one the early years.

    My life as a musician. I have a confession to make. I was given the gift of music and I have been very selfish in not sharing myself with the world. That all is going to end soon starting with me sharing this story with you. 
    My early experience’s with music started with a Fisher Price record player that had a blue, a green, a yellow, and a red record. When I was five I had earned an allowance. We went to the Montgomery Ward and I had found something I wanted to buy with my allowance and that was Peter Criss of Kiss solo album. Something about that green tinged album cover with that face paint really spoke to this boy from Southern NM. I think I wore out “Thats the kind of sugar papa likes”. My dad went to Germany for a couple of months when I was a kid and he sent me this tape that had some German music and the Mexican hat Dance which I still find peculiar, I think it reminded him of home.  These 3 things started a love affair with music that would fill my lifetime. 
    My teen years. I was raised Lutheran and with that comes a time where you go through some stuff and when you are done you are confirmed. Because the church was not on our route home and I had no way to get there except by bus I started riding the bus to church. On this new bus I made a new friend. He asked me to his house as I had about an hour to kill. We went into his room and he pulls out the electric guitar. This guitar was the coolest damn thing I had ever seen and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one. I remember going to the music store with that promise we all make. I swear mom I am going to take playing an instrument serious. You will not be wasting your money. Please please, please, please. So we got the guitar and then if I was going to be serious I needed to take guitar lessons. Growing up in a place like Las Cruces NM this is a tricky situation. There are many types of guitar teachers I have discovered throughout the years. There is the super cheap I need to be able to buy bread today guitar teacher. He can teach you a power chord and all of your favorite songs in power chord format. There is the dictator, you will do things my way or the highway. I don’t care that your hand, back, shoulders, legs are different from me you will play the guitar the way I do. There is the well meaning guitar teacher who is only lacking in the knowledge you are receiving because he doesn’t have it either if he did he would give it to you. And there is the zen teacher. I would say my guitar teacher was the well meaning teacher but he lacked some knowledge. He taught me how to listen to music and improvise as those were his strengths and one thing every teacher will pass on is his strengths. Well one thing I did not know how to do was to read music and the lessons on this were very confusing. So I heard about jazz band at my local high school. I was ill advised and this was not the place to go to learn how to read music. My high school band teacher must have been going through a rough time as an individual and high school afro bad attitude Aaron was the last thing some one like this needed. Needless to say I didn’t participate in band anymore after one bad afternoon. However I still had my outlet of my band Insanity. You can listen to us here. Life's Insanities We were a five piece band that played original music and a few cover songs. Apparently they wanted to play a lot of cover songs and a few originals because there were secret meetings and I was told the band was breaking up. I was cool with it until I was invited to a gig of theirs and saw that it was all the same guys minus one. Me. So I handled that as all good teenagers who just graduated high school do. I started working on cars, drinking and doing drugs heavily for about 3 years.  Next week the twenties.

Leave a comment