The Awakening - What's all the fuss about?

When I was a 12 year old boy in 1980 I had an experience while listening to Bob Dylan’s first, self titled record that would change my life forever.  My father, a prolific songwriter in his own right handed me Bob’s debut album and told me to go take a listen.  I had just received the best Christmas present I could have been given;  my first Turntable, AM/FM Stereo, 8-track and tape deck console!  What happened next  is almost indescribable.  Many years later I would learn from watching an interview with Dylan that Buddy Holly had done the same thing for him when he was a kid.  Bob had seen him live as a teenager and as he got close to the stage he was sure that Buddy looked him right in the eyes and connected, transferring some kind of mystical power! 

 

That was almost like what had happened to me although I only heard it through Bob’s record.  It was magic alright! It was manna from heaven or hell or somewhere I did not know but it was and is very real!  I refer to it now as my "awakening".  Those songs reached inside me, grabbed me by my soul and lit it on fire! I’ve never been the same since.  I don’t believe I was “the same” before.  I heard someone say once of Lyle Lovett, "He's not like the other children", and that was and is me.  I know my soul was waiting for that moment to signal me and tell me I had a way all my own and it would become an adventure beyond measure that I would chase for the rest of my days.

  

I would soon fall in love with the other records my parents had laying around the house.  Albums by John Prine, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, David Alan Coe and The Beatles and many more.  I was still just a boy but knew I had to get a guitar and a driver’s license and hit the road.  I knew it was going to take time and a lot of work but the cat was out of the bag!  Then, shortly after hearing Dylan I heard Robert Johnson and B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and T-Bone Walker, Hound Dog Taylor and Sam “Lightin’ Hopkins, the Allman Brothers Band, and I was hooked for life!  I was consumed with the Blues and learned I had to get to Clarksdale, Mississippi and find out first hand what happened to Robert Johnson.  The man sold his soul to the devil to play and sing like that?  Really?  Wow!  I had to know more and I became the youngest Blues musicologist anyone ever saw or at least that’s what I thought.

 

My love of the music and dream of performing it on the road would take me on the adventure of a lifetime, from New York to New Orleans, California to the Crossroads and as Billy Gibbons from the band ZZ Top would say,

  “All points in between”.