Down the Musical Rabbit Hole : How I Got Here

To get started, I thought I'd share a little about where I come from, musically speaking, and how I got to where I am today. I'll start from the moment I really started to seek out music and feel its power. Thanks to the internet, I can pinpoint the exact day it all began. It was November 19, 1995 and I was 12 years old and in seventh grade. I know this because this was the first night of The Beatles Anthology that aired on ABC. My grandparents were visiting from Rockford, Illinois and my whole family piled into the living room to watch. My grandparents and parents were both discussing how big this band was, and my first thought was, why hadn't I heard of them before? My family had never discussed the Beatles and I found it incongruent that they were all discussing them as if they had been their favorite band all along.  Looking back, I love the irony that among the footage I watched was their famous Ed Sullivan Show appearance, which had introduced them to millions of Americans in 1964. Here I was, 31 years later, discovering the Beatles myself through the same television performance my parents had watched when they were around my age.

It was about this moment I knew I needed to learn how to play guitar. My first question was, who else was making music in the 1960s and how can I hear it? My main source of music information at that time was the music store, which was a Music Trader store in downtown El Cajon, Ca. After I'd do my Saturday chores, I'd usually ask for one of my parents to drive me there. The first CDs I would buy would be The Beatles' Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, The Grateful Dead's Greatest Hits, Jimi Hendrix's Live at Winterland, and Led Zeppelin's IV. My interest in all this music from decades before amused and bewildered my parents, and made them recall what music they liked from that era. From my mom I got introduced to James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and Neil Young, and from my dad I got Elton John, Boston, Steely Dan, and Emerson Lake and Palmer. By the end of middle school, what stuck most was the Beatles, followed by James Taylor and Neil Young (essentially in that order). I loved how chords were formed, how the Beatles would play a major chord and then its minor chord (what I now know is called a parallel minor) and how James Taylor would play all those hammer-on notes and use a capo, and how Neil Young would play those minor chords (those stuck out to me for some reason). It was chord melody that I really loved, I wasn't that crazy about trying to play the Jimi Hendrix solos or the overdriven Led Zeppelin guitars (although I loved how that music made me feel, especially Jimi Hendrix's Hey Joe). I wanted to play the whole song on my own and the acoustic guitar allowed me to do that.

After high school my uncle on my mom's side turned me on to Wilco and their documentary on the making of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart had just come out. I found Ryan Adams around the same because everyone was talking about how he filmed a music video for his song "New York, New York" four days before 9/11 with the World Trade Center towers behind him in the shot. Throughout college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo my favorite two bands were Wilco and Ryan Adams. A kid who lived in the dorms with me during freshman year was in the computer lab in my senior year and I was reading an article on Ryan Adams and he says "you're still into that guy?" I had so many bootleg CDs and interviews of him it was embarrassing.

After college I saw a Ryan Adams performance on YouTube with Emmylou Harris singing a song by Gram Parsons, credited as one of the early pioneers of country rock, and started to check him out. Gram was a country music fan and he covered many country singers’ songs like George Jones, the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard, and was in the Byrds for their country-fied album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I'd started digging into these bands and singers and suddenly I realized I was becoming a country music fan and a steel guitar fan. This was around 2007. It was in 2008 I met Patrick Conway, who was a San Diego kid who grew up in the hardcore scene and wanted to start a country band. It was around Halloween and he was having a party at his place at 3944 3rd Avenue in Hillcrest, which was a famous sort of band house in the hardcore scene in the 90s. We jammed all night and I joined his country band The Western Set that night. I had been playing around with a dobro (resonator) guitar for about a year before that and started playing that with the band, as well as lead guitar which I had little idea what I was doing at the time. Within a year I bought a pedal steel and was off and running. I'd continue to get deeper and deeper into old country music from then on, and haven't really stopped since. I'd play and record pedal steel with many bands and still do. Country music and pedal steel occupied most of my musical attention for years, but another interest had been waiting in the background: Hawaiian music.

I'd always wanted to learn Hawaiian music since I started on the steel guitar because that is where it comes from. I'll write more about that in future posts but the steel came from the Hawaiians in the late 19th century. When I decided to make music the focus of my life in 2021, I learned a few Hawaiian tunes from the old country pickers. Specifically Buddy Emmons, one of the creators of the modern day pedal steel, had an album with Shot Jackson, the first mass producer of the modern pedal steel, and they did some Hawaiian tunes. I learned these by ear on the dobro and tried for a couple years to get others to join me. I did not have success there. It would start up with some people and dwindle and lose momentum. It wasn't until I had a foot injury in the spring of 2024 and I had to stop playing pedal steel because it hurt too much to press the floor pedals, that I decided to learn how to play the actual lap steel guitar. People are surprised to hear that it is very different from dobro and pedal steel. In some ways it is actually harder. I'll also probably get into that in another post. I want to focus on the lineage/progression of the instruments and styles I am into and play.

I knew of a legendary country steel guitarist from the 1950s named Jerry Byrd, who later in life devoted himself to Hawaiian music and eventually moved to Hawaii to teach lap steel. He wrote a comprehensive instructional book that I figured would be a good place to start. I ended up learning about 30 songs from that book, which gave me a foundation in Hawaiian steel guitar. Around that time a fellow steel guitarist Rick Schmidt introduced me to a computer program called Band-in-a-Box. I'd make backing tracks to practice to and my girlfriend suggested I see if I could do solo gigs playing Hawaiian standards. She thought that San Diego would be an ideal place for this and that no one else was doing it. Long story short, before long I was playing plenty of gigs at tiki bars and Polynesian events. It's now been two years and the opportunities have come so quickly. I've held residencies at local tiki bars, performed at Tiki Oasis in both San Diego and Arizona, and had the opportunity to play with the renowned Tikiyaki Orchestra. I'll be performing at the Golden Tiki in Las Vegas this December, and just yesterday I booked my first fly-in performance at the historic Mai-Kai in Florida.

My introduction to the tiki music scene opened up yet another world of musical discoveries. Through it I've become interested in surf rock, Middle Eastern rock, lounge music, crime jazz, exotica, and all sorts of other styles I might never have encountered otherwise. What fascinates me is how these seemingly unrelated genres intersect, borrowing from one another and evolving into something new.

Looking back, I can see that my musical interests have always developed this way. The Beatles led me to the music of the 1960s, which eventually led me to country rock, traditional country, and the steel guitar. The steel guitar led me to Hawaiian music, which has now introduced me to an entirely new collection of musical traditions and sounds.

I have no idea where this musical rabbit hole will take me next, and that's probably what I love most about it. My hope is to use this blog to share some of these discoveries, explore the histories and connections between the music I love, and hopefully learn a few things from others along the way. If any of these subjects interest you, I'd love to hear your thoughts, recommendations, and stories in the comments.