Hello

Hi,I'm Marcus from the American South. I've been lurking on and off for about a year now and appreciate the insights and openmindedness of many of the posters here.

I grew up (in New Jersey) hearing my mom's Beatles, Stones, and John Denver records. I think the Beatles were my very first favorite group. I remember a friend of mine getting into ACDC in my elementary school days and I thought they sounded horrible. I didn't take much of a liking to "noisy rebellious" stuff early on. I remember thinking Toto was really great at the time (yikes!)and that "Cars" by Gary Numan was punk rock because my cousin told me so. And then in middle school, I got way into Men at Work (funny to see he post about Business as Usual!), Hall & Oates, and then the "harder" stuff like Def Leppard and Quiet Riot.

Then, one fine mornin', I put on a New York station. You know, I couldn't believe what I heard at all. Seriously, I started listening to WNEW out of New York and was blown away by all the cool 60s rock they played at that time. Hendrix, Dylan, and *60s* Who! It sounded so fresh and most of it was very new to me. It made me realize what a bunch of crap I'd been listening to. I started raiding my uncles' record collections that had some of the heavier 60s music that was lacking in my mom's collection, stuff like the Velvet Underground, the Mothers of Invention, and Captain Beefheart, and of course lots of Who -- my absolute favorite at the time. It's funny. Back then I thought of VU as an American Who because of their use of feedback and noise. I thought they sounded awesome, so alien and mysterious, and I had no idea at the time how huge their influence and legacy was.

Then in high school I went through huge obsessions with Bowie and Dylan and held onto an "I hate 'college' music" stance for a while. Then my eternal college boy uncle gave me a tape with XTC's English Settlement on one side and This Mortal Coil's It'll End in Tears and those albums led to many new obsessions for me and a melting away of my anti-college music sentiments (and where did those come from anyway?).

So,here I am now, still very much in love with music and always finding new things to get obsessed with, yet always having the old standby's to fall back on. I'm long out of college now and working as an editor and I've written about music on occasion for an independent magazine. I'm thinking about getting back into it again.

I'm currently downloading The Magical World of the Strands at the recommendation of a current ILM post. I was a little disappointed with the Cardinal album, and so far the Strands seems to be the better of these two lesser-known chamber-pop classics.

Anyway, as cheesey as it may sound, I think my life really was saved by rock and roll.

Greetings to all,
Marcus