My name is Mike, and I like to draw, play guitar, fix computers, and help people use them. I was born in 1973 in St. Paul, MN. My parents were always playing great music, so I was brainwashed by that at an early age. When I was in my early single digit years, I discovered a guitar case under my dad’s bed (and the guitar inside of it). My fingers weren’t strong enough to fret notes, not to mention I had no idea what fretting notes was to begin with, but upon plucking the open D, G & B strings I discovered that I could play “Taps”. At that precise moment, a lifelong obsession with the guitar began! A year or so later, my sister told me about this one band called KISS. They wore makeup and spit blood and fire onstage… and they played GUITARS! That sealed the deal, the guitar was for me.
No other bands mattered to me until a few years later when the Stray Cats came along. Next came the hair metal movement, shred guitar, learning about Frank Zappa, The Ventures, Leo Kottke, Chet Atkins, the list goes on and on… I loved it all!
I spent my first few years playing guitars of the air, tennis racket, and broom variety. My brother Chuck was gifted a deluxe plastic Dukes of Hazzard guitar for his 3rd or 4th birthday. We shared a bedroom and that thing mysteriously (*cough cough*) ended up in there. Nobody was around when I was rocking out to my records – I closed the bedroom door, put the needle on the record player, and was transported to being onstage with KISS at Madson Square Garden. That thing was a fuckin’ sweet upgrade from air/broom/tennis racket guitar. At least it was the right shape and had “strings” on it. Even if they were plastic and served no purpose other than to look like strings.
In 1986, mom asked me if I was interested in guitar lessons. An amazing guitar teacher named Peter Bergman recently moved into the house on the other side of our backyard fence. For the next several years I took lessons from Peter every week, plowing through the Hal Leonard beginner books, moving on to the Berklee Modern Method books, Segovia scales, classical pieces (all of which Peter presented to me as we went along), and my main interest at the time: rock and roll. Have you ever heard of someone bringing 2 guitars to a guitar lesson? I did that. After I bought my first electric, we’d focus half the lesson time on classical guitar and the other half on electric.
By the time the mid-1990s rolled around I started figuring out how to get the music I was hearing in my head on to tape. There was a lot of idea buildup at that point. Most of it was crap, but the hamster wheel of ideas kept on spinning. In addition to drawing inspiration from movies, tv, and a ton of other bands/artists (including those mentioned above), I have a thing called synesthesia. It makes me “see” colors in sound – something I always assumed was built into everyone’s brains until about 10 years ago when someone told me what it’s called, and that it’s not very common. It makes songwriting more of a combination of playing guitar and painting.
And then there’s drawing, which I love as much as playing guitar and have been doing long before (at the time) I discovered the guitar. My earliest memory of holding a drawing utensil in my hand was when I was probably 3 or 4 and my mom found me scribbling on the upholstered dining room chairs with one of these:
Oops, sorry mom. We only had so many chairs, so it was pretty much paper and markers after that.
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