When you get pure joy out of 'being' rather than 'doing' or 'seeing ' that's when you realize how big and unexplainable some things are and being a dad is one of those very few things.
My dad was very fun and very adventurous and from a formative age I learned to value men who would do things on a whim.
As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general well I have thought about other things throughout the years.
Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I'm a dad and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.
I didn't really hear any other music other than what my dad was working on until I was 12. My recollection of hearing other music was that I liked some things that I heard but I always thought 'Where's the rest of it?' It didn't have the same amount of detail or instrumentation or imagination in the arrangements.
I liked a lot of the things other people liked - Jimi Hendrix The Beatles Van Halen AC/DC - but if I compared it to my dad's music there just seemed to be elements missing.
And you know my dad would show me some things sometimes but the best things that I got to do were to actually see really good players play up close. That gives you an idea of fingering and technique and what not.
Well Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.
I knew that I needed to do something that I desperately loved. There was a period where I did question if it was acting because I knew that I would be making things hard on myself. I knew that there was going to be a little bit of a hullabaloo because of my dad being who he is and all that.
I am an obsessive garage cleaner - my wife and the neighbors make fun of me. I remember that my father was the same way and now when I'm out there unearthing things in the garage I realize I am becoming my dad!