Overture

It was at some point around the end of 1981 that I'd suddenly found myself starting down the road that would eventually turn me into a full-fledged music geek. Before that point, I'd been through countless intense streaks of interest dating back to my childhood: the kind of 1-2 year fixations that completely seize the imagination, dominate all free-time, and temporarily reset all of the goalposts in your life. Whether it was general medicine, herpetology, meteorology, astronomy, or paleontology (the latter was the one my parents thought was the most adorable, judging by how often they asked me to recite the word to their friends), these new studies would usually have me completely under their spell only until the next -ology reared its head, usually after a trip to the local public library.

With music, however, it was different: instead of simply reading about the subject as was largely the case in any field of interest I had come across before, I could also experience it firsthand simply by turning on my parent's stereo and listening. A couple of years (and hundreds of hours of listening time) later, my adoration for the form had grown by leaps and bounds, superseding every other interest I'd ever had before. By the time I'd graduated high school, I knew I had to work in the business, somehow, even if it was only a temporary stop until I found a "real" career. After a few months of trying, I finally got a break and started working at the Record Den. 18 1/2 years later, despite a couple of points where I was halfway out the door, I'm still there.

In the middle of the 1990s, I was presented with the chance to write about music professionally on a part-time basis, and I jumped at it. For the nearly three-years following, I was employed at the Cleveland Scene, which covered all kinds of music on a national and local level every week. I had a great time seeing shows, listening to CDs and (in a handful of instances) talking to artists either on the phone or in person. While the pay was even worse than working retail (even for a “senior writer”), I could at least say that I had a job doing two of the things that I was best at in high school: listening to music and writing.

One problem with being born when I was is that I often get the distinct impression that I just managed to grab the tail end of the good times, right before they gave way to the bad. With Scene it was no different: the paper was bought out at the end of 1998 and transformed overnight from the best music paper in town to the kind of corporate owned, sensationalist faux-alternaweekly you can (and do) find syndicated in every city across the country. The central editorial core of Scene made a go of starting up a new replacement paper, but our financial support disappeared a few issues into our run before we'd even had a chance to figure out what the new paper was going to be. Disheartened, I reluctantly let writing go and concentrated on my burgeoning responsibilities at the recently-independent and re-launched Record Den (our original mall location had also been the victim of a faceless corporate takeover, but this is a long story for another time).

A few more years passed, my personal life changed almost completely around me, and one day out of the blue, a friend and ex Den co-worker of mine e-mailed to ask if I'd contribute to his just-launched music blog, 45 RPM. As I quickly found out, I had never lost my hankering for this kind of thing, and following the site big put on ice only a few months afterward, I had started thinking about setting up another foray into writing about music, this time in my own forum. After a hell of a long time dawdling about and re-thinking the original concept, you are now looking at the final result: The Cantaloupe Machine. The idea for this place initially was really nothing special: just another of the seemingly million mp3 blogs that exist on the net. Over time, that idea began to change from simply putting up songs willy-nilly into more of an ongoing essay kind of project, with the subject centering on music and life and how the two have uniquely intertwined in my case.

As the title of the previous post may have indicated to you, there will likely be an editorial bias or slant here or there towards all-things Pink Floyd, and since that band more than any other sealed my fate as a music dork forever, they remain an inescapable force in my life. Rest assured, however, that The Cantaloupe Machine will also concern itself with everything and anything else that strikes my musical/writing fancy. Whether it's heavy metal, blaring techno, towering walls of dissonance, or twee indie-pop, The Cantaloupe Machine is all about the tones that make me tick, regardless of their origin or whether they happen to be distributed by a soon-to-be-extinct multinational conglomerate. As they say at the home of the immortal Queensland Salad (the closest to culinary perfection that man has yet achieved), "no rules, just right."