Ep 40: My Music History Part One

Prompted by a recent conversation at a show, in this episode, John shares his music history, beginning with his childhood influences, early infatuations with music, and how he won an art contest that would allow him to buy his first guitar.

Transcript

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You are listening to the Gig to Live Podcast. Welcome everyone. I'm John Foles and I'm a full-time working musician. This podcast is about building a music life that holds up over time. It's practical, enjoyable, sometimes uncomfortable, but it's always about helping you stay in the game and actually enjoy the life that you're building. We'll meet some wonderful working musicians from time to time. So whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this for years, you're in the right spot. This podcast is for you. Hey everyone. Recently, someone asked me about my music history and how I got started gigging. And I was happy. I was pleasantly surprised. I usually don't get that question. Sometimes people will ask, you know, I'm sure you've got this. They ask about our influences, favorite bands when we started playing guitar or keys or drums or whatever we play. But they specifically asked me about my music history, which I thought was a great choice of words. And I gave them an abridged version. And then I thought, you know what? I think it might be fun to do an episode where I let you get to know me a bit, and I give you more of a timeline and the things that got me to where I am today doing what I'm doing, doing music full time. So I hope you enjoy this episode and find some camaraderie here. It was fun for me to think through the things that influenced me and uh to give you an outline of sorts. You know, I mean it's gonna be like watching a reality television program. So I don't know how into that you are. I don't know if you care, but here it is. I'm just gonna put it out there. My fascination with music begins with my mom. She wasn't a musician, but she had a really pretty voice, and I remember her singing songs to me constantly. I'm sure she got it from her mom, who also sang to me constantly. It was how I was soothed as a child. It's how I went to sleep. Uh, it was how I was told that I was loved. At least, you know, that's what I remember. I remember feeling the most loved when, you know, my mom or my grandma had my head in their lap, scratching my back and singing songs. Songs were in the air when my mom and my grandma were present. Mom used to sing to the radio a lot when we drove around. Uh, she went through a real conservative period when I was about 14 until the time I was maybe 20. And music wasn't a huge part of her life then, but those early years were way different. Mom and dad were hippies. Mom didn't embrace drug culture like my dad, but she loved music. She loved the music of the culture. There was always music. My dad plays a huge role in my music love, but I'll get to him in a bit. My earliest memories are the women in my life. When I was about three years old, my mom wanted to learn to play guitar. She never did. I don't know what stopped her, but I remember her borrowing a guitar from her friend Joyce. And Joyce eventually just gave her the guitar, if I remember correctly, because it was always at our house. I have a very distinct memory of sitting with my mom and that guitar and making sounds, plucking notes, strumming strings, and my favorite thing to do was holding my finger on a fret while picking a string and sliding my finger up and down. You know, whoop-hoo. And then, you know, when Steve Miller band came out uh with uh the Joker and it had the little whistle in it, I used to try to emulate that on guitar. Whoop-woo. It was the slide, it was the ascent and the descent. And the greatest skill I can remember my mom teaching me beyond that was how to play the major scale. She learned how to play it, and then she taught me, you know, do, re, mi, fa, solati, do on every string. It was super clunky. We sang the notes as we played, but that's my early memories of guitar was playing with my mom. My dad was also a huge music lover, more than my mom, actually, but my memories are with her first. Uh, dad was a huge vinyl purchaser. His collection was insane. And he showed me how to put the album on the turntable. He let me play whatever I want. I'm surprised. He just let me have at it any album I wanted, I could, I could play. He wasn't worried about them being scratched. He wasn't worried about them being left out. I mean, he taught me how to take care of them, but he really, when I was super young, let me play his albums. My earliest memories were playing Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart, Abraxis by Santana, and the soundtrack to the musical Hair, Johnny Cash live at San Quentin. Uh, side note where my uncle Don was incarcerated, but that's a different story. Bluesbreakers with John Mayle and Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, everything Van Morrison had released on vinyl up to that point. My dad was in a band. He was the lead singer. I never saw them play live. I wasn't allowed to go to those venues, and according to my mom, uh he shouldn't have been allowed to go to those venues either. I'm pretty sure they were all topless bars, but I remember the band singing and playing music in my living room. My first experience with a gigging band was in my living room. As a matter of fact, the guy who led the band, his name was Gig. And to this day, I don't know if that was his real name or a nickname. I should ask my dad, actually. Dad was always singing, he still does. Mostly he makes up words and does parodies of songs on the spot, or he finds a chorus that he likes to sing and he sings it on repeat. Uh dad also loved a lot of music that my mom didn't enjoy, so I was exposed to different kinds of music with mom and dad. Dad loved Bob Dylan, dad loved Frank Zappa. Grandma and Grandpa didn't have a lot of vinyl. They had some, mostly eight tracks, mostly Country, Dolly, Johnny Cash, Charlie Pride, Charlie Rich, Glenn Campbell, Loretta Lynn. I wore those eight tracks out and I loved it. And I also regularly watched the TV show He-Haw with grandma and grandpa. Grandpa loved Hank Williams. I can still smell his pipe tobacco mixed with the scent of sawdust in his garage while he was listening to songs like Jambalaya and Take These Chains from My Heart and Your Cheatin' Heart. Man, those are good memories. Later in life, I would have a reputation for not liking country music, but that really was not true. What I didn't like was fake country music. I didn't like hearing people sing with a twang, and then I'd hear them talk, and they didn't have an accent at all. It didn't seem real to me. It didn't seem true, but man, I love that old country. My first album, the first one that I could call my own that wasn't a Disney album or a kid's sing-along album. I mean, I remember I had a 45 of the theme song from the Triple R ranch of the Mickey Mouse Club. For those of you that know what I'm talking about, I mean, that was a long time ago. But outside of that, the first album that I ever owned was an album by the Partridge family. I was infatuated with that show. I was about two and a half years old when that show first aired, and I'm pretty sure I watched every episode in real time. Throughout my childhood, I wanted albums for every birthday, records for every holiday. I started to become a collector of sorts at an early age. And one record in particular changed some things for me. And I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be a professional singer. The album was Eagles' greatest hits. I was in love with the melodies. I was in love with the harmonies. And that same year, the Eagles released Hotel California, and I doubled down on my commitment. Singing for my family at family gatherings was the norm. My older cousins on my dad's side would often make uh like a makeshift stage for me on the living room table, and they would have me stand on it, and I'd sing songs to them. Every time we got together, uh, my nickname was Binky, and I can still hear them saying, Binky, sing a song, Binky, sing a song. My favorite was Best of My Love by the Eagles. I can't tell you how many times I sang that song for them. My dad was a yacht refinisher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Uh, but they decided on a change of pace in the 70s, and my mom and dad bought a bar with my dad's brother. And mom and dad would tend that bar while my brother Phil and I would lay in the back of the haunted bar. That's a different story, and we would watch a black and white TV, you know, whatever UHF channel we could get in at the time. But we often turned off the TV just to listen to the jukebox. And sometimes we would sit right by the door so we could hear the jukebox in the other room. And I can still hear the songs on that jukebox in the bar. Every once in a while, they let us sneak out and drop a quarter and pick songs. And people would sit at the bar and they'd see these two cute little blonde-haired kids coming out, and they'd give us quarters, and we would use people's quarters to pick songs when we came out of hiding. Um, Elvin Bishop's Fooled Around and Fell in Love was my favorite pick on that jukebox. And to be honest, I play that song in my sets today, and people absolutely love it, and I love playing it. I'm taken back to that bar every time I play that song. Uh Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville was a favorite at the bar. And it was probably the most played, unless I was the one dropping quarters. Uh, I also had an infatuation with the song Afternoon Delight. Again, I loved the harmonies. Uh, it was around this time that I also discovered Columbia House Records. I don't know if you did that. I don't know if you're old enough to do Columbia House Records. You got 12 records for a penny. And the only commitment was to buy like six records, and in some cases it was eight records, I think, at regular club prices over the next two or three years. Or they just sent albums to your home and they uh they made you pay for them, whatever they sent. It was like the the album of the month. I was so excited. I ordered 12 albums from all different genres. I I can still remember uh Peter Frampton, Jim Croce, Neil Diamond, Steve Miller Band, Sean Cassidy, Barry Manilow, The Carpenters, Hart, Helen Reddy, Journey. I was all over the place. It became an issue though, uh, however, in my home when Columbia House sent albums at the regular club price, and I didn't have the money to pay for them. So my mom got in touch with the company. I can't remember if she wrote them or she called them and told them they allowed a nine-year-old boy to join the club, and she refused to pay for any albums at regular club price. And it went away. I guess Columbia House hadn't figured that they had a glitch in the Matrix at that point, at that stage in the game. They didn't say that a minor couldn't enter into a contract and be held liable. So I was off the hook. I got a few free albums. In 1977, my mom and my dad picked me up from school, and they told me we were going shopping for a new vehicle. They bought a brand new 1977 Green Volkswagen Westphalia bus. And my dad told them to put it uh to put in their top-of-the-line stereo system. And so they did. And a CB, by the way. Uh, mom and dad then told us that they were taking us on a trip around the United States in that bus. And we were going to look for property and a new place to live. They wanted to get out of the San Francisco Bay Area. They were selling their portion of the bar that was in the town of Crockett. They sold it to my dad's sister. And then dad took me to Tower Records, and he told me I could pick out any cassette tapes that I wanted for the trip. So I still remember what I got. Rod Stewart, The Who, Rita Coolidge, Boz Skaggs, Fleetwood Mac. It was the album entitled Fleetwood Mac, by the way. Leo Sayer, Pablo Cruz, Van Morsen, The Eagles, of course, Dan Fogelberg. My dad wasn't a huge Fogelberg fan, but I liked that folky sound. Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, my dad loved them. Leon Russell, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles. I I couldn't believe that I had my pick. And we bought one of those cases to store all of our cassette tapes in. That soundtrack from that US trip is in my head to this day. We came back to California after, you know, like three, three and a half months on the road. And I entered fourth grade in Grass Valley, California, not far from where we started out. That's where my parents bought a piece of property. I met some great friends. I'm immediately, the first kid I met, his name was Michael Hill. And Mike is my best friend to this day. Michael loved music as well. And he'd been exposed to some bands that I hadn't heard yet. And man, I gobbled it up. Rush in particular, he was a huge Rush fan. And that was something that my dad did not have Rush on his radar, so I wasn't introduced to that until Michael. By the fifth grade, I lived and I breathed music. My friend Michael did as well. I was already forming my taste about music then as well. I liked music that seemed melodic and singable. I liked that more than what some of the kids were listening to at that time. Kiss was huge at that time, but honestly, Kiss was lost on me at that point in my life, even though they were super popular. I got it. I thought some of the songs were fun, but I wasn't out buying Kiss albums. I was buying albums that told good stories. We had vinyl listening parties in my fifth grade class because my teacher, Mrs. Reeby, was the absolute coolest. Some kids brought in uh albums from Molly Hatchett and Kiss and Ted Nugent and Judas Priest. And while I appreciated some of that, a lot of the uh a lot of that, and I actually even enjoyed some of it, I was way more into the music that I don't know how to describe it. It grooved a bit more. And even though there was a big disco is dead movement then, too, a disco sucks movement, I still love some of the disco stuff. Even even the Rolling Stones were getting played at the roller rink because Mish You sounded disco. It had that disco funky bass line. I I did start to get into a lot more of the heavy rock as as fifth grade slipped into sixth grade. Uh the summer in between was full of bands like Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, ACDC, Moore Zeppelin, and a band called Gamma. Uh, an interesting thing happened in 1979. A really sweet woman invited my brother and I to church, and we loved it. And I was introduced to a whole different culture than the one I grew up in. And believe it or not, the culture had some really cool music if you knew where to find it. And I haven't enjoyed church music for quite a few years. Something happened to it around the late 90s that turned it into a machine. And I won't get off track here, but uh the innovative bands that were in Christian music early on pretty much faded away. But in the late 70s and for the next couple of decades, you could find some pretty amazing innovative Christian music. And this was the culture I was in now. I was living in that culture and I ate it up. Um, to be honest, I was living in two music worlds from the time I was about 10 years old. I had a youth worker friend at church who introduced me to all the cool Christian bands that parents and churches hated. Uh, and some of the musicians had been banned from their churches and they were having their concerts picketed, and I ate that stuff up. In 1981, MTV aired. I was about 13, I was 13. Uh I couldn't believe what was happening at that time. I mean, if if you were there, my goodness, uh, you were glued to the television every time you you could be glued to the television. Now, my parents couldn't afford cable, and that's how you got MTV at that time. So every time I went to my friends' homes or my cousin's home, they had cable, and I was in front of MTV. The first video that I was enthralled with was a song called Stop Dragging My Heart Around. It was time by Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks. I was way into Tom Petty after that. Way in. I was I was all in. I liked him up to that point, but I was all in then. And especially because then, you know, the video gave every teenage boy a chance to have a crush on Stevie Nicks. Uh MTV influenced my music life and every Gen Xer in huge ways. The visual took music to a new level for us. And seeing the bands that we loved play music, it blew our minds. It was like having a concert in your living room. I was first asked to sing in front of people in church when I was about 11 years old. So a couple of years before, someone heard me sing in church. They told the pastor, you know, they just heard me singing one of the hymns as I was standing in church, and they ended up telling the pastor, this kid has a voice. And so they asked me if I would like to sing on a night when the the youth group was uh, I guess they called it leading the service. They didn't really lead it, but it was, it was all uh it had huge youth involvement. And I sang a song that they requested. It wasn't my favorite, uh, but it was pretty good. It had a good melody. It reminded me of some of the music that I was hearing on like community uh radio uh in our in our town that older people listen to. But you know what I found out? I found out that day that I loved singing in front of people. And I really wanted to learn now how to do something with it. And I really wanted to learn how to play guitar, especially when I got to be about 14 years old. I mean, I really wanted to play. My parents couldn't afford one, but my neighbor, his name was Jim, he was my dad's stoner friend. Uh, he loaned me a Fender Strat copy and an amp. Both of them, the guitar and the amp, were made by Silvertone. Oh man. I wish I had that combo today. I would crank up that guitar through that amp, and I would make noise at every opportunity. And it was this tube amp, you could smack the top of it, and it sounded like thunder. Man, I had so much fun with that. And I I learned to play a few chords, but I still wanted to own the guitar. And then the neighbor asked for it back. He told me I I could keep the amp, by the way, and I kept it for years. He said I could keep the amp, but he wanted the guitar back. So I started thinking of ways that I could earn money, but nothing was going to make me the kind of money that I needed fast to buy a guitar. I mean, I was making cookies for the neighbors. They were paying me to bake cookies. Uh, I got paid to babysit, uh, I got paid to take care of the neighbors' chickens. Uh, but it was going to take me a while. And I knew it was going to take quite some time to earn the hundreds of dollars that I was going to need to buy a guitar. Well, one day I was listening to the Christian rock radio station, and they announced that one of my favorite bands was coming in concert to Sacramento. And the local radio station, which was at that time KYLO, I think it might still be around, but a different format now. KYLO was sponsoring a concert, this concert, and they were holding a contest. And the challenge was to create a banner that said KYLO Welcomes Petra. That was the name of the band. There were no rules on how the banner was supposed to look, other than that. It had to say KYLO Welcomes Petra. The best part, the best part, was the winner of the contest was going to win a colored television set from one of the local appliance stores. Oh my gosh, this sounds so that thing you do to me right now. Well, I thought if I could only win the contest, I could sell the television and I could buy the guitar that I wanted. And the guitar that I had my eyes on was a copy of a Fender Stratocaster, and it cost less money than a real strat. The guitar company was Mako. They had actually been sued by Fender for almost exact replicas of their guitars. And some people today will even say that the Mako actually sounded better than the Fender Strat at that time. Well, the Mako Strat cost about $400. Colored televisions, like the one that I had the chance to win, went for about $500. So I told my grandma Jackie that I was thinking about entering this contest, and she told me if I won, she would buy the television from me because they wanted another television for the den. Yeah, there was a room called The Den. And I couldn't believe my ears and the possibility of what could happen. So I decided to go big. I had to win. I talked to all the guys that were my friends. We were thinking about starting a band, by the way, and I asked them if they would help me create the banner so I could get my guitar. Because while we were starting a band, none of us owned instruments and none of us knew how to play at this point. So they all agreed to help with this art project. And my vision was to sew three queen-size bedsheets together and to create a huge piece of art using liquid embroidery pens. And I sketched this thing out. I imagined the first sheet was going to have the artwork of all the band's album covers to date. And that was the one that was going to say KYLO. And then now this was a huge deal. Petra's album covers were beautiful pieces of art themselves. So that sheet would also uh, I mean, it was intricate. It was, it was crazy intricate. The middle sheet would be the entire back cover of their album that was called Not of This World. That showed the band carrying cables and band equipment uh in uh in a kind of a there was a a diamond minefield of sorts, if I remember it, with guitar spaceships flying overhead. And that was going to say welcomes. And then the third sheet was going to say the name Petra, but the name Petra was going to be carved in a mountainside and the rocks would be crumbling. So huge vision. I sold the vision to my grandma Jackie and to my mom, and they both agreed to buy the liquid embroidery pens for me and the quote unquote band. Although I'm pretty sure Grandma paid for them all because the pens themselves probably cost about a hundred bucks at that time for as many as we needed. And my mom and dad didn't have that kind of money. Grandma also provided us with the sheets, and grandma also helped me sew those sheets together. So now the canvas that we had to work with was a little bit over seven feet tall, and it was 25 feet long. Well, my friends Peter and Mike, they were brothers. They had a huge home with a big tiled dining room and kitchen. And we were able to work on the banner at their home. We worked on that banner for days on end. And I drew it all, I sketched it all out, I told them what colors needed to be filled in. The finished product was absolutely stunning, and we felt really good about our chances. Hey, thanks for listening to my music story. We're gonna have to do this thing in two parts. So this is officially the end of part one. I look forward to telling you the rest very, very soon. Until then, stay creative, stay after it, stay hired. Let me live, let me live, let me live.