The Answers are Due Back in Two Weeks

This originally appeared on my old blog but if you haven't read it, it's new to you. It gets at the roots of my music nerdiness.

For about two years, for most of 1990 and 1991 I was rarely allowed out of the house. Why? Mostly because as a kid I did stupid things and got in trouble. My father, tired of getting calls from school about me, kept me on a tight leash. I went to school, came home, and that was mostly it, the only other place I was allowed was the library and I went as often as I could. My local library in the early nineties had limited resources and of course no internet yet but it did have something that changed my life, microfilm...thousands and thousands of microfilm cartridges that allowed me to read decades worth of music periodicals.

As a teenager I considered myself pretty musically savvy but I had very little sense of musical history. I knew my favorites of the day backwards and forwards but at 16 my musical history sense didn't go far; I knew that Velvet Underground influenced the bands that I liked and that Lou Reed was the singer. I knew Bob Dylan's Greatest hits Vol. I and II like they were old friends but not much more . It was through the library's periodical index that I first read about The Modern Lovers and The Stooges; it was where I learned that Devo was more than just "Whip It" and where after seeing on MTV News that a guitar player named Johnny Thunders had been found dead in New Orleans I went to find out about the New York Dolls.

At the time I didn't realize quite what I was doing. I thought I was just passing the time until I could go out with my friends again and drink beer behind that same library, but I was doing a lot more, I was setting in motion a passion for music knowledge that has never stopped. Eventually I did get out again and I managed, for rest of my teens to not get caught doing anything stupid but I never stopped going to the library and never stopped learning more. Of course it's easier now, thanks to the internet, I can learn in minutes something that used to take hours of work but I still research and seek out new things with the same passion that I did back then. It's been years since I pored over microfilm and then headed out to find some record mentioned in an old magazine but every time I drive past the library I think there's a kid somewhere who feels like there's more than what's on the radio and TV and is determined to find it. Thankfully, it's out there waiting to be found.