Ok, I play bass. I've been doing it for 10 years or so. It's what I do, it's what I'll do, and maybe one day I can make enough money playing to pay the bills so that I wont have to have an over-workin' under-payin' job. My musical career started in 1986. The grade was sixth, I played upright bass in the school orchestra. In that one year, I learned half of everything I needed to know about playing bass. The other half would come a few years later... The orchestra teacher the best i could have had. She had a passion for playing that I think rubbed off on me. I owe her a lot.

When I got into 8th grade, I figured that since I could play the upright, I could also play the electric bass. I was right and wrong. I could wail on the upright, but I couldn't play the electric for nothing! But that wasn't my fault. All the songs I heard on the radio and on MTV had these horrible bass players. They would play ONE frickin' note for every change in the song. I then got into Led Zeppelin, and man, that guy (John Paul Jones) was all over the bass! In the next few months, I learned to play every song, note for note on the first four Zeppelin albums, but something was still missing in my playing. Then one summer while in San Francisco, I went to see one of my favorite bands, fIREHOSE, play (in case you live under a rock, that was Mike Watt's post-Minutemen band). After seein' Watt workin' the low end like he did, things started to fall into place.

Basically, my playing was missing me. I could play other people's stuff and my stuff sounded just like theirs as well. so, I just got out there and played. If it felt good, I played it. At the same time that I was starting my musical enlightenment, I started playing in the school jazz band and getting into Sonic Youth. Jazz band let me do my own thing, 'cause 95% of it was improvising to a cord change. And Sonic Youth told me that it was ok to color out side of the lines. The missing half was now there.