I got my first radio job in 1997 at this tiny jazz station in Lansing, MI where I grew up. They played “contemporary” (err… smooth) jazz during the days for all the state workers and at night it was all “straight-ahead” jazz, and late nights it was the blues (and I’m not talking about the classics… it was mostly modern, urban, white blues for weekend warrior types). I was 20 years old and already had a fairly wide lexicon of knowledge about jazz. My first few months I mainly got stuck doing the smooth jazz and blues shifts so it was absolute torture for me to open up the mic and try to sound somewhat enthusiastic. Didn’t I say I was huge music snob?

After a while the program director, bless her soul, gave me the evening jazz host slot 5 nights a week. I was a very happy young man. But not without caveats. The station followed playlists that where generated by this software that I can’t remember the name of based on what was in “heavy” rotation, followed by classic cuts, and other newer jazz cuts that the music director liked.

The problem was neither the music director nor the program director knew the first thing about jazz. Some of the playlists they generated were totally ludicrous… paying no attention to flow or how songs would segue. So I did what any self-respecting music snob would do… I would strategically ditch certain cuts on the playlist and play songs I deemed as worthy of listeners attention. It was great fun as I knew I’d never get caught because they wouldn’t know. Remember I said they didn’t know anything or even listen to jazz? But I think in reality they actually knew what I was up to but never said anything because my sets were really good.

I scored a ton of killer jazz records from that place that I still have to this day.

So the point is I love music and snobbery isn’t necessarily such a bad thing as long as you’re nice about it. Now that I’m a little older my snobbery has mellowed considerably. I’m just a lot more diplomatic about my musical likes and dislikes.

As I said, I love jazz… mostly stuff from the hard bop period of the 50s through the lovely sounds of Blue Note Records in the 60s and 70s. I also adore the early electric hybrids pioneered by Miles Davis and his acolytes. There is so much great jazz out there in the world and listening to all of it is a lifelong journey. Even if you think you’ve heard it all some nugget from the past will somehow find you and completely make you reassess everything you thought you knew about the canon of jazz. Perhaps that is why I like it so much. Even with all the fluffy sub-genres that have popped up there is still an equal amount of ground breaking music being created by musicians following in the footsteps of the greats.

I really got hooked on music in general in the late 80s. I happened to be lucky enough to grow up across the street from this guy named Harold Pugh. He was a few years older than me and he introduced me to what was then referred to as “alternative” music. He hipped me to bands like REM, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and countless others via records and MTV’s 120 Minutes. He also got me started playing guitar. He had this beautiful 1967 Gibson ES-335 that a friend of his let him have on extended loan. I was over at his house practically everyday checking out his record collection and playing that Gibson. He never seemed to mind. Another important thing he introduced me to was computers. He had what was at the time the coolest computer you could have, a Commodore 64!

I am so thankful that he set me on the path that I still follow to this day. I should call him and thank him sometime.

However when I saw My Bloody Valentine on 120 Minutes on a hot summer night in 1991 it was all over. I became a lifelong shoegazer. The sound of Kevin Shields’ Fender Jazzmaster crashing through the tiny speaker on my Dad’s TV was the sound of heaven to me. This led me to all of the British shoegazer bands of the time.

Not much has changed as I still listen to all this music (take a look at the Last.fm record covers below for proof) and it’s still as fresh as it was back then. Perhaps it’s a little nostalgia but it seems this period from the early to mid 90s was the last great period in rock music. It all seemed to come to a crashing halt when Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. Shoegazing was ridiculed by the press, “alternative” became a commodity and a fashion movement, alternative music became synonymous with corporate as major labels started gobbling up any band that fit the mold. I guess “grunge” should be included here. But where I grew up no one really listened to those bands, at least not the college kids.

There was this amazing record store in downtown East Lansing across from Michigan State called Wherehouse Records. All the dudes that worked there were seriously into all the shoegazer bands… they got me to buy so much stuff that I wore out from repeated listening and had to buy again. All the local bands where plugging their guitars into delay and reverb pedals copying the atmospheric and hazy sounds coming from across the pond. The grunge thing was kinda slow to catch on in East Lansing. It’s ironic that I now live in the birthplace of grunge.

I was coming of age and I guess I never really grew up. Sure I discovered many many awesome bands since then but my first love has always been the shoegazer bands from this era.

I play a Fender Jazzmaster, I have scads of pedals, I put reverb on everything… it’s what I do.

There are still tons of bands chasing those sounds these days too… some more derivative than others. But, as the hippies at Evergreen might say, it’s all good. It’s the sound I like and I’m sticking to it. In fact there are probably more second and third wave “nu-gazers” than there were initially.

Some of the first wave bands are even getting back together, like MBV and Swervedriver… could Ride be far behind?

If you ever want to know about shoegazing, I’m your man…