"Man! You dig music out from under rocks."

    That's what a friend of mine told me once as he shook his head and took a disgusted drag off his cigarette.  

    That sort of sums me up and has been what I have been doing ever since.   

    I grew up in Memphis Tennessee, a place that witnessed the birth and death throws of several musical genres, be it a stop along the blue highway, Elvis, rockabilly or Stax soul.   Yes, although I was quite young, I remember vividly the death of Elvis. Ironically it also marked the same year that punk rock took Europe by storm.

    You had your rednecks and then music geeks like me who were not interested in the latest 38 Special record. My friends I grew up with didn't get it. I obsessed on mostly on prog rock from the 70s, 80s new wave and what influenced them.

   People from the North or elsewhere always think people from Memphis only listen to country music and are shocked to learn that I had heard of the Velvet Underground, Echo & The Bunnymen or the Stooges. There is a whole underground dichotomy to the city.  Memphis Tennesee's FM 100 was the first radio station in the United States to spin David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust album.

 In the late 80's, with some encouragement from a high school buddy, I took my musical knowledge and record collection to the local community radio station, WEVL FM 90 and created my own show entitled Dr. Zodiak's Modern Musical Mayhem and played what few records they had lying around there and threw in what I had. So you could tune in at drive time and hear any new wave record, Black Flag, Descendants, Ramones, Love & Rockets, Cure, New Order etc etc. It was literally the only outlet in the area where you could hear this kind of music.

  My friends said it sucked because it was too underground. The indy rock types that mostly moved there from other large cities said it was too commercial. To me that meant It was a success. From there I became more interested in creating a better music library and became music director. Since the station programmed most all genres of music, I became exposed to them all and carry most of that knowledge.

   Meanwhile, I broke many new bands that were unheard of at the time they came out such as Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Beck, Pixies & Stereolab.  This went on roughly from 1988 to 1995.

    I then took a job in Denton, Texas to open my own record store called Vibes next to the University there.   It was a culture shock in the fact that most of the students there had heard of the same music I listened to. That job lasted five years and it was a great record store that was a lot like the movie High Fidelity. The music industry went into a crunch and I bounced between management of a couple of more stores.

   As you can see, I finally opted to do it myself.   No more corporate overlords who hop around like Mickey mouse in the magic kingdom or record company execs who do the same.

      Me, I like a little bit of all musical genres. I tend to gravitate toward Goth new wave and old punk.   

     Here you will find lots of interesting oddities that I dug out from under a rock.

 Me In My Goth Days LOL