It would probably start out with some comedy bits. I remember listening to comedy albums before I started listening to music. Cosby, Carlin, Jonathan Winters, Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Mel Brooks, Bob Newhart, some real random stuff, like this one my grandma had called Laugh of the Party and she would do this routine where two women with proper accents get talking about going to Ceylon and get smashed on port. That stuff had a huge impact on me. Huey Lewis would be in there, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, early HipHop : Rob Base, Heavy D, B-Boys, De La Soul, Tribe, Public Enemy.
Then Bob Dylan. I probably discovered Bob Dylan like teenagers discovered Dylan thirty years ago. Vinyl record alone in my bedroom. There's probably not any other way to discover Dylan, once you hear him for the first time it's all the same, BAM, either you're in awe or you're looking for something completely diffferent. It was Like a Rolling Stone, over and over again, it was literate, it had timing , his words weren't arbitrary, it was like the comedy albums. Tomorrow is a Long Time, All Along the Watchtower, Idiot Wind, Isis, Tambourine Man, Masterpiece. Then the Band - my Dad was a huge musical influence on me. Everything up to now was from my Dad - the comedy albums, the Motown, Dylan, everything. Mom's stuff was always sort of playing in the background: Billy Joel, Elton John, Daryl Hall and John Oates, I know all that shit. Then, one day, I remember being in the car when Chest Fever I think came on the radio and my dad turned it up and afterwards gushed "man, it just doesn't get any better than that" and I thought "what, who? What have you been holding out on me?" Long Black Veil, Atlantic City, Country Boy, Basement Tapes. That's my bread and butter. That's where I'm home
I remember seeing Dave Matthews Band in the fall of 95 and I got super into them for about two years and then I just jumped headfirst into the Grateful Dead. Someone gave me a bootleg of theirs in high school and I remember it being too mellow for me at the time, then i saw them the summer after I graduated high school at RFK stadium, in 95 and I got progressively more into them until my sophomore year in college when exploring music became a group effort and we all needed a steady diet of music to smoke weed to: Dead, Phish, The Band, The Allmans with some Tupac, Talking Heads and Steely Dan thrown in for good measure here and there, reggae, etc. That musical scene proved hard to get out of and I picked up on some non-jammy shit here and there but at the time that scene was still pretty good: MMW, Strangefolk, Percy Hill, DBB, Viperhouse, etc. HipHop reappeared for a brief second with Mos and Kweli's joints but I mostly stayed immersed in jam world until I heard Wilco.
I was living in Ithaca, in a cabin about 8 miles outside town, when I picked up Being There on a complete fucking lark. I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I heard jeff tweedy's voice - in my car at the intersection of Buffalo and Rt. 13 heading East, on my way back from Best Buy where I bought the album. It's been as torrid a love afffair with a band as I've ever had ever since. They opened me up to a whole new scene of music which I've been happily sifting through ever since. That's where it would wrap up.
P.S. This was my cabin home outside Ithaca:
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