INFLUENCES

The first record I ever bought was Little Richard’s Greatest Hits, on cassette. I was in the 5th grade and I’d seen a public television program about early rock n’ roll and heard Big Mama Thornton sing "Hound Dog", and it drove me crazy. I went out looking for her at Tobin’s drug store and came home with Little Richard instead.

The last thing I bought was the new Wilco live record. I was in Sebastopol, California between shows and there’s a great little record store there.

In between times there was my Dad singing along with Don Williams and Gordon Lightfoot in the car; Bob Dylan and John Prine spinning on the lonely high school turntable; the Beatles and then the Stones; the Smiths, the Cure, the Violent Femmes, various bad haircuts; Bill Camplin playing Sultans of Swing with a pedal steel player who’s dead now; Greg Brown singing about Iowa, love, sex, death, and fishing; a book of Kenneth Rexroth poems from my anarchist cab-driving uncle; a dubbed tape of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass boys I found in the breakroom when I worked for the UW Grounds Dept; Misters Steinbeck, Hemingway, and McCarthy, and my Mother’s King James Bible; Townes Van Zandt’s Live & Obscure every night at bedtime for a couple of years; Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever cranked in my brother Jack’s pickup truck on the first day of river fishing in the spring; Neil Young’s Comes a Time a windfall in the glovebox of a little white Mazda B2000 I bought for 300 bucks (the muffler fell off while I was test-driving it); Chris Smither’s pointy Italian shoes supplying the notes he didn’t play while he sang out all that sweet pathos; Satin Sheets taped from an LP, with the warp and hiss of the turntable still on it; Richard Buckner’s Devotion and Doubt in the aftermath of a cocktail party I never left but just got tucked into with my shoes on and wound up with a new girlfriend; all those old blues guys: Sonny and Lightnin’, Bigs Bill and Joe, Mississippis John and Fred, Blinds Willie McTell and Johnson; Frederick Remington’s paintings; solo Monk and the Blue Yodeler; Hank and Johnny and old George Jones; Miles and Coltrane and Stan Getz, Keith Jarrett and even a George Winston tape I got obsessed with; Bo Ramsey swinging his cowboy hat side to side; Ted Hawkins on a late night drive from Billings to Seattle; Peter Mulvey singing Time by Tom Waits for some nice little old ladies in England; The Gettysburg Address; my wife singing a love song. It’s all in there and everything else too.