A Quote by John Denver
My activities were centered around school and football and church and senior high fellowship, and I got together with a couple bands and started playing parties, proms, stuff like that. It was the music that really worked for me.
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I didn't do any football stuff when I was a kid... Mostly baseball and basketball the whole time. That's all I did. I played football starting in seventh grade. As I got older, I started playing a little bit more. Then in high school, I really fell in love with it.
I didn't try out for bands when I was younger. I got into guitars intensely a couple of years into playing so much by the time I was graduating high school I was accepted into Berklee College of Music.
In high school, I listened to The Jam, stuff like that, a lot of English bands, really. And then I got into anarcho-punk bands that nobody had heard of.
When I got fired from coaching, I started coaching high school because my son played. I realized real quick that high school football is in trouble. There's no budget. A lot of kids have got to pay to play, and every year, coaches are getting out of the profession. Kids aren't playing like they used to. It bothers me.
When I was a senior in high school, I worked at a theater where they hired New York actors. And they told me about 'Backstage,' and so I got my school in Pennsylvania to subscribe. And there was an audition for a tour of 'The Sound of Music,' and I got the job. Deferred my admission to college just to go on tour.
I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.
I've got all of the old school vinyls from the '70s - even further back, like the jazz music in the '40s, '50s, '60s. Then I've got all the '80s stuff underground, hip-hop when hip-hop really first started. The '90s stuff. All of the good stuff, because I'm really into music, and it helps me create new songs now.
In the 80s there weren't so many bands around and nowadays there are a lot more bands around. I think sometimes there are too many bands. But there are a lot of interesting young bands around. They are not really playing the classic metal stuff, that's up to the old bands.
I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
When I started playing the bass, I became kind of fascinated by it and started investigating various styles of bass playing, and I was really struck with funk music, mainly American funk music - Stanley Clarke, Funkadelic and that kind of stuff. That comes out in a couple of songs like 'Barbarism Begins at Home.'
Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.
Michael Sanchez and I grew up in New Jersey, not far from here, playing soccer together. When I was in high school, I worked to start an organization to help senior citizens, which I learned a great deal from.
It was all kind of a whirlwind at the beginning. I didn't really realize that I had a special gift from God. It was probably towards the end of high school in my senior year when things really started to come together and I realized that I had more potential and that I could do this as a career and that the Olympics were a possibility.
I grew up in the church, and I always kind of knew Bible stories and knew the Sunday school answers, but when I was a freshman in high school I joined youth group, and that's when I started to see radical love; that's when I started to see what Christian community is supposed to look like and what fellowship is supposed to look like.
My childhood was limited to mostly gospel music. We didn't have, like, a lot of records in our house, you know. It was like my grandparents who raised me. They were pretty old-fashioned in their religious ways, so it was like church, church, church, school, school, school.
For me, growing up in New York, it started with Elvis Costello and the Clash and then got into louder things like Bad Brains and Stimulators, because those were, like, the local bands. Then I started getting into bands from England like the Slits. I remember seeing Gang of Four at Irving Plaza; that was a really big show for me.
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