A lot of people ask me what music I listen to when I'm away from 104 the X. Honestly, the answer isn't really that far off from when I'm on 104 the X. I do listen to lots of different types of music, some of which wouldn't be appropriate for the X, but I also listen to a lot of stuff that you normally hear on the station.
I started listening to music at a very young age. I distinctly remember recording old Genesis songs on a boom box and walking around "rocking out" as a small tyke. My earliest memories of music was listening to stuff like that, or Boston and Kansas and Rush. Classic rock type stuff. My first record (yep, record) was Michael Jackson Thriller. I was also a big horror movie fan as a small child (not real sure how I convinced my parents to let me watch that stuff). My favorite movie was Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives. Alice Cooper did a few songs in that movie, and I thought it was the coolest thing. Music about horror! Wow! Looking back, it seems a bit disturbing, but it did get me started on the music trail. I hunted down Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits on cassette and listened to it over and over again. It had "School's Out" on it and what kid wouldn't like that? So I can thank Alice for getting me really hooked on music.
From there, I got into the music scene of the late 80s: Motley Crue, Dokken, Guns N Roses. GN'R was actually pretty pivotal in bridging me from glam metal to music with a bit more substance. I distinctly remember hearing Nirvana coming out and being pretty intrigued, but I bought Use Your Illusion I on cassette instead of Nevermind. From GN'R, I moved to Alice in Chains and lots of heavier stuff. I started getting into Megadeth, Flotsam&Jetsam, Extreme (ok, they weren't that heavy), etc. Then one day, my friend introduced me to Dream Theater. Their unique approach of mixing metal and progressive rock really appealed to me and I started looking for similiar bands. For years, Dream Theater, Queensryche and Fates Warning were my "Big 3" bands (funny that years later they ended up touring together and I didn't see it). My good friend Jay and I would seek out other progressive metal bands via mail order catalogs. Sometimes we'd find cool bands(Conception, Nevermore!), sometimes it'd be ripoff clone bands with no heart. No one could really touch those three for me, though. Jay and I worked at KFC, and we'd rock out to stuff to keep our sanity or to make other people lose theirs.
Jay also started getting into really heavy acts, including Carcass, which was my first forray into Death Metal. Listening to Heartwork today, it may not sound so heavy, but back in the day those vocals were freaky. We also read crazy stories about what was going on with the Norweigan black metal scene, and Jay ordered some of that stuff like Mayhem and Emperor. It was cool to play and freak people out, but I never really could get into much of it. Somewhere along the way, I got a Strapping Young Lad CD called City, which to me was the perfect CD to play at the end of a long day at KFC dealing with stupid people. It was a super heavy mix of industrial and metal music from the mind of Devin Townsend (who I had known previously as the singer of an album by Steve Vai). It was fun to scream along to that one. Plus, I had heard Devin sing on a Rush tribute album and thought he had a very cool singing voice (as opposed to his screaming voice in SYL), so I became very curious about this Canadian dude. We saw SYL at a little club in New Orleans and Devin proceeded to cuss everyone in the venue out. It would later come out that Dev was suffering from bipolar disorder and shortly after the SYL tour, he ended up in a mental institute for a bit. For some reason, I wasn't really turned off by Devin's stage presence and I promptly sent a money order to him in Canada to order his Ocean Machine: Biomech CD, which was said to be more melodic and progressive than SYL. Unfortunately, the Canadian post office went on strike at this time and it took FOREVER for that Cd to arrive.
In the meantime, I also started getting into some lighter music. I think I was going through a lot of doubts about what I was going to be doing with my life, and for whatever reason I really got into Marillion Misplaced Childhood and Clutching at Straws. Marillion was a prog rock band out of England that had a hit back in the 80s with a song called "Kayleigh" but hadn't really done anything in the US. Their original singer, Fish (this is NOT where I got my name from!), had left the band and been replaced by Steve Hogarth. Their music was quite different than anything else I was listening to as it had almost no traces of anything heavy whatsoever. I also really got into their Afraid of Sunlight CD (on which Hogarth is the singer). It was real mellow, atmospheric stuff with cool lyrics. Fish had put out a solo CD around that time which was produced by a dude named Steve Wilson, lead singer of a band with a funny sounding name: Porcupine Tree. I sought out a couple of Porcupine Tree CDs, which at the time were hard to find. They were The Sky moves Skyways and Signify, both of which are quite different than the P-tree sound of today. Very Pink Floydish, but also containing some modern touches like drum loops and touches of electronica. They would later change into more of an English-pop band before incorporating more prog metal elements to become who they are today. I would become a big fan of Steve Wilson and all his various projects (Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No Man, etc).
Also, somewhere along the way, I ended up quitting KFC and working at Blockbuster with my friend Keith. He was really into Mike Patton and Faith No More and used to always play that stuff. Even though ironically Mike Patton was probably far more popular than anything I listened to at the time, it was also the hardest for me to get into because it was so darn weird. But eventually his talent won me over and I became a big fan. To this day, the Mr. Bungle show in support of California I saw in New Orleans is one of my favorite concerts ever.
Around that same time, I also got the debut CD from Chroma Key. It was the project of former Dream Theater keyboardist Kevin Moore, but sounded nothing like Dream Theater, but I liked the strange vibe and unique lyrics. I also got a strange CD from a band out of England called Anathema. The CD was Alternative 4 and it was creeeepy but cool. A year later, their Judgement CD came out and I was really into that one!
So I was developing my musical tastes at both ends of the spectrum: heavy and light and experimental. Most of the stuff I listened at that time leaned towards the depressing because I was trying to figure out how to get out of the crappy jobs into a cool one.
So then I got a job at a college radio station and I started listening to lots of "alternative" (I kind of hate that term) music. I was exposed to a lot of stuff that I would have otherwise not listened to...I learned a lot about that style of music.
...And then I graduated and moved to New Mexico, where I worked at three different stations, the formats being oldies, country, and Light Rock. It was another learning experience but my appreciation grew for some country and oldies stuff.
Finally, I got the job at 104 the X and continued to learn and appreciate lots of different types of music. I'm bombarded with lots of new stuff to listen to on a daily basis. Lately, I've gotten into Ours, Eisley, 30 Seconds to Mars, and some more. But to this day, I still rock out to all things Dream Theater, Kevin Moore, Anathema, Steve Wilson, Mike Patton etc.
