Over to your right (About Me: MFM) is a snippet of a bio about who I am, in a few choice words due to limitation of space. If I had the space to jot exactly who I am this site would be boring. So, my trek with this blog is to describe who I am through the passion I've developed and have for music. This might get strange but I can always fall back on the fact that while getting my start, I was but a boy: a child. [halo]((((TING!))))
I grew up in the small town of Midland, Texas. 7 kids to a struggling mom and her sort of new husband. He married my mom when she already had 4 children. They had 3 others to make the seven. But where I got my musical roots was first from my mom, (mom #1) and then from a lady whom I love so dearly, I call mom #2.
(Mom #1)
Mom #1 would sometimes rush into the house with a 45 and put on the record player. (the record player became a Turntable after the TV and radio were no longer attached) I remember one song, "Mr. Big Stuff", by Jean Knight. "Ohhoyeah... Whoo!... Mr. Big Stuff... Who do you think you are?..." I remember not REALly liking that song because I could tell it wasn't my type. But it made my mom dance and when she was happy, she was dancing and this made me happy. She worked so hard and got very little pay: this happens to most maids and back in the day, we were po. My dad drank all of his money until the 3 were born. From days like those, which didn't come as often as I would have wanted them to, I began to surrender to music she liked. This opened me up considering music's affect on people. No, I wasn't thinking those exact words back then, I was just remember the experience of watching people around music. When I look back on those days this is what I was what I was witnessing. Call it the Pied Piper's Effect, except also on adults and not just children. We moved from a shack to finally a house, where we lived on after I went off to college. In that house was where I learned about artists such as, Dionne Warrick, Burt Bacharach, The Temptations, B. B. King, Green Onion, The 5th Dimension, Jimmy Smith, Bobby Blue Bland. You know Bobby really traumatized me. My mom loved him so much that I thought she would run away with him and leave us in that house with our sometimey-Dad. But where I think I got my real passion for music was from mom #2.
(Mom #2)
My reason for saying is that mom #2 gave me a choice as to what type of music I liked. My aunt Doris. When I say her name come the flood of days when she would tell me about how black people can do anything that anybody else can do, they just have to be educated. I had never heard this from #1. When she told me this I remember stopping and thinking about what she said. "...and you can do anything, too, Michael." I don't hate my mother. I just realize that it takes a village...
Aunt Doris would kept me while mom worked, their schedules where different so everything worked out. Heck, I was a kid, and all I wanted was my record player.
One day, me and my aunt Doris stood in front of her door, while she tried unlocking it, and holding me at bay. All I thought about was that aqua colored record player that sat on the floor. From there, I would walk in, ok, I would run in and sit in front of it, turn it on, SHE would put a record on it, and as long as I didn't touch it, I could watch it play all day long. Aunt Doris exposed me to BT Express, James Brown, Roberta Flack, Barry White, Areatha Franklin, Isaac Hayes, Kool and the Gang, Stephanie Mills, Phyllis Hyman, Randy Crawford, and The Emotions.
(Mom #1)My mom got wind of my being exposed to different music from my Aunt Doris, and she began allowing me to choose music for myself, just as long as it wasn't nasty, as she would put it. So, I would buy The Emotions, (everything they put out), Michel Jackson, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, The Police, Tom Tom Club, Lips Inc, Janis Joplin, Thompson Twins, General Public, Howard Jones, Toto, Chic, Rene' and Angela, Sugarhill Gang, and Cheryl Lynn. I remember my mom not liking two artists I would always listen to: The Emotions, and Cheryl Lynn. To this day I don't know why but my speculation would hone in on jealousy of better sounding music than hers. (just laying that on the table and I'm walking right out)
(Jr. High, High School & College)
School played an enormous part in my musical exposure to Rock, R&B, Jazz and Polka. The artists that I remember so well are Heart, Queen, ELO, Exile, Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell, Beethoven, Bach, Kansas, Led and Zeppelin. I was in the band for all 8 years of my junior and high school life. But what would always plague me is what the kids would say to me about my musical choice. Allot of them didn't like me because of it, and they were harsh critics. Some only hung around me after they had exposed me to their music choices and when I wanted to play my choices, they hit the road. But I had no idea that this life I lived was getting ready for something real cool, really sweet, and often controversial: standing up for my musical choices. That's a pretty brave thing to do when today people lose friendships for such pettiness.
And there were days when I would purposely go to Sound Warehouse and other music stores, to just help people find their favorite artists, or song. I remember this one incident where I ove-heard a couple talking and questioning about a song that I knew all too well. The song was "Am I Dreaming?", by Atlantic Starr. I just butted in and mentioned to them that it was Atlantic Starr, and that the reason why she, the wife. could not think of the group is because the group had two lead singers: Sharon Bryant being one first lead singer, followed by Barbara Weathers. I had to look up the 2nd lead singer, I knew it was Barbara but was uncertain about the last name, plus I never really liked the group after Sharon left the group. I don't know what they were thinking, maybe like psycho (((((Twilight Zone music))))). But they thank me and seem to think that I worked there. What would give them that idea?
AT&T launched a commercial that allowed viewers to make up a word best describing them. My conjucted word best describing me is:
(NOTE: I just had to tell this story because it will explain so such of the How's and Why's about this site and its direction)
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