Previously Unreleased

I was 5 years old when I recieved my first record player. It was one of those small silver ones with three lights in the front that flashed along with the music. I mostly used it to play my “Snoopy versus The Red Baron” and “Batman” 45’s until I turned 7 and I asked my mom for some records for christmas. That snowy december morning when I ran to the tree and opened my gifts to find 3 albums was the day my life changed forever.  Motley Crue’s “Theatre of Pain”, Dokken’s “Tooth and Nail” and Iron Maiden’s “Live After Death” were my first 3 “Grown-up” LP’s and I would end up playing them (along with some KISS albums I bought for 50 cents at a garage sale a few weeks later) till the grooves were gone. When I was 14 I bought my first CD player at Record World (I love irony!) and with it my first 2 cds (Warrant’s “Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich” and Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel”). I almost immediately atoned for that musical transgression with the purchase a week later of my second pair of cd’s ever (Led Zeppelin IV and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”) and on that day my true musical education would begin. I have purchased over a thousand albums since that day and I still feel the same sense of excitement I had back then as I open the packaging and insert the CD hoping to hear something that I’ve never heard before, feel a way that no song has made me feel yet and learn all over again how music can transport you to another place. I love music and I love the power that it represents, the ability to bring people together, the ability to spark such strong feelings, the ability to start spirited debates and the ability to make someone feel like they have something that is theirs and theirs alone although in reality it belongs to everyone.