What are your roots

[Cliff Rogers]

I grew up in the bush in Central Western Queensland & went to a little one teacher school.
My grade 7 teacher had an acoustic guitar that he would play when we had a music class, we would all sing along, that was HEAPS better than the bloody recorder.
He was good, he could play a good variety of sing-a-long stuff which was inspirational.
Every chance I got, I would ask to play his guitar & he taught me a few chords.
His old guitar was getting a bit out of shape & hard to play so he bought a new one.
He took the neck off the old one & glued it back on at a better angle & restrung it & when it was playable, he gave it to me.
That was 50 years ago this year.
The next year I had to move to town to go to high school so I was able to start guitar lessons.
The teacher was a Nun & she taught good old sing-a-long stuff, folk, Bob Dylan, Beatles, CCR & country.
By the end of the 2nd year I was playing bar chords & had managed to borrow an electric guitar & amp.
The next year I joined a band, we played lots of CCR stuff.
Some time during my 4th year of playing I could finger pick Neil Young's 'Needle & The Damage Done'.
Then I saw a kid 3 years younger than me who had only been playing for a bit over a year play it better than I could.... bastard.
I kept & played that old guitar for 5 years.
It got handed on & I don't know where it ended up.
I still have my first electric & the first acoustic that I bought once I left school & got a job.
Come to think of it, apart from that first one that I handed on, I reckon I still have every other instrument that I have ever owned.... all 26 of them.
Anyway, 50 years later & I am still learning.
I play 6 string acoustic & electric, bass, Uke, baritone Uke & bass Uke.
I can't read music, sheet music is just tadpoles hanging on a clothes line to me.
I can play fairly well by ear, first I figure out the key & then work out the chords.
I play mostly rhythm or bass but I still manage to do a fair bit of finger picking.
I like chords, lots of them, 3 chords are boring.
I like blues, I took a 3 chord 12 bar blues & turned it into a 13 chord 12 bar blues & then added some finger style as well.
I am really enjoying the bass, I have had one for almost 19 years but only got serious about 6 years ago.
I play in 2 bands & a Uke group.
Rhythm in the bands but can fill in on bass if required & bass in the Uke group.
The bands are Gypsy Swing & Blues.
The Uke group is hum & strum sing-a-long, a bit of anything & everything.

Guitar tragic.

[fender3x]

It has been really interesting reading through these. Thank you for sharing your stories!

Like many, my mother tried to get me to play the piano at a young age, but it didn't take. I spent a couple of years trying to learn the trombone. At about 12 I wanted to learn the violin, but my mother thought I'd never have the dexterity and wanted me to try the cello. I didn't like that Idea, but decided to try the string bass, which I played in the orchestra at school for the next 6 years. I was never all that good, and my dyslexia kept me from being able to read the music, although I really tried. I also sang choirs, ensembles and eventually bands. Within a few months of playing in the orchestra, the school music teacher offered to teach me electric bass, and it was off to the races. I soon discovered that a kid with a bass, an amp and a bit of voice could be in a band, even if the kid was not a very good player. Still true ;-)

A couple of years later I got injured playing American football and had to stay home for a few weeks. To fill the time, I learned to play a guitar that my mother had given my dad. it was a horrible high action, steel string piece of junk...but it made my fingers tough. Every since I have had basses and guitars around. I have never been a great player, and in bands I have always been the bass player, and usually a singer as well.

I have always been drawn to blues and blues oriented music. I am not sure where that came from. No one else I knew listened to it growing up. I listened to a wide variety of music, but the bluesy stuff is what has called out to me, and the most recent band I was in was more or less a blues bar band. That's been a while.

I think the builds were a way of experimenting, and also getting my equipment in shape while the kids were little and I could not justify the time to play with a band. Starting to look for the next band now. I don't think I'll ever play seriously enough to give up my day job, but it's even more inconceivable to me that I could give it up.

[blinddrew]

We always had music in the house growing up, but my parents were much more interested in classical music. I think there was one 'Best of the Beatles' album (never really liked them), One 'Best of the 60s' (which had the usual mixture of excellent and less so), and a best of Simon and Garfunkel (which I always loved - Paul Simon is undoubtedly my longest running influence).
Going to boarding school was what opened the door to what else music had to offer. There were about 60-70 of us in the boarding house, and a few tape-to-tape recorders, so we recorded every chart show off the radio on Saturdays and whenever someone bought a new cassette it was duplicated within an inch of its life!
Apparently we were killing music... :\
The first 7" single I bought was Rock Me Amadeus by Falco, my first cassette was a slightly-more-respectable Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police.
The Police, The Pogues, The Cure, The Clash, The Cult, Dire Straights, The Men They Couldn't Hang were probably the core of my early teenage years, accompanied by some more heavy stuff from the likes of AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Van Halen; as well as some more pop stuff from The Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics and Ultravox.
Round about this point I bought my first guitar, a Westone Thunder 1A I think. That was a cracking guitar. I started off with the blues, as a lot of people do, and whilst I never got the heavier side of blues, the early delta-style stuff still gets me.
When I first heard REM on a documentary on the TV it blew my little mind, Green had just been released and it was pretty much everything I wanted music to be at that time. They weren't well known in the UK at the time and it took me a while to get hold of all of their albums. Then Out of Time came out and everyone went nuts for them.
Round about that time I started listening to a few more southern hemisphere bands. As well as some of the South African lot (Mango Groove, Stimela, Boyoyo Boys and anyone else who'd been on Graceland) I found a few Australasian ones: Split NZ and Crowded House, Things of Stone and Wood, Men at Work and Midnight Oil. My mind was blown again by the Oils.

When I was 16 I sold the Westone to upgrade but ended up spending the money on vodka in the space of a month.
I still have regrets about that.

And that kind of parked my music for a while until I got to Uni where I met a Chinese chap who remains one of the best and most creative guitarists I've ever worked with.
The first night we jammed it became immediately apparent that he was many times the guitarist i would ever be so I took the singing role. Which was interesting as our music teacher at school had described me as the only person he'd ever met who couldn't sing.
But it gave me an excuse to stick to the chords and that worked for both of us! Round about this time Radiohead released The Bends and Counting Crows released Recovering The Satellites. Guess what happened to my tiny mind?
With Frank we formed our first few bands, but with people moving in and out of Uni none of them ever lasted that long. Eventually I moved to Holland for a bit and he moved to Australia. I think he's still running a very swanky Chinese Restaurant near the Sydney Opera House.

The next phase (which is pretty much the current one) was moving to York around the turn of the century. By this point I'd pretty much settled on being a singer-songwriter and I was playing a lot more acoustic than electric stuff. My flatmate at the time introduced me to Tom McRae and I introduced her to David Ford. Since then you can add Josh Ritter, Gregory Alan Isakov, to the influences list, along with a few more experimental acts like Public Service Broadcasting, Bon Iver and a fair bit of Scandinavian music.
It was in York that I had my brief dalliance with the business side of music. A recording studio in Leeds had moved to York and hooked up with a promoter to start up a record label and they were looking for local acts. I was signed along with a duo and a couple of bands. Sadly the business plan didn't really extend beyond 'play gigs, sell CDs' and the promoter didn't really live up to his end of the deal so we weren't getting gigs, and everyone stopped buying CDs...

So now I do this stuff for fun. I'm still not much of a musician, but I think I'm a reasonable song-writer and I'm improving as a recording engineer and mixer. That's where the bulk of my music time goes now but I'm still fronting a band that was gigging reasonably regularly until C-19 hit. We're just finishing up our second lockdown video now.

[WeirdBits]

... I sold the Westone ...

I know your pain. Selling my Thunder I (not the A) is an endless regret *sob*

[Simon Barden]

but I'm still fronting a band that was gigging reasonably regularly until C-19 hit.

You've found success using an under 20-minute cassette tape formula?

[Sonic Mountain]

[blinddrew]

You've found success using an under 20-minute cassette tape formula?

Extensive surveying reveals that 19 minutes is as long as any audience can tolerate us.

Is that 'success'?

[Simon Barden]

That's 4 minutes longer than the supposed average length of people's fame. So I'd say 'yes'.

[blinddrew]

I know your pain. Selling my Thunder I (not the A) is an endless regret *sob*

Sorry, missed this first time. Yep, cracking little guitar. But checking up I have misremembered. I also had the 1 not the 1A. There are a couple of optimistically priced ones on ebay!