Music Is Beauty, but it's also Pain

Welcome to the first installment of my music blog. This is mostly a place for me to vent frustrations about music and my path to a career in music that fell a little short. I'm sure I'll probably have about 2 people read this blog, so it doesn't really matter. Music has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. I've definitely had my share of wonderful experiences as well as heartbreaking experiences concerning the painful and beautiful world of music. It wasn't until I was about 12 years old(that was about 18 years ago)that I really discovered music and fell in love. I started playing guitar at that time on a purple yamaha rgx-110 and taking lessons from my first formal instructor Dave Trammell in South Texas. Unfortunately I didn't take the lessons seriously and hardly practiced, so needless to say I sucked for awhile. It's really too bad because Dave was a great guitarist and teacher and I did somehow learn a few things from him that I've taken with me as a musician. He would teach me how to read music a bit and taught me how to play songs by his favorite group The Ventures(all instrumental surf/rock group), The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Quiet Riot, Bachman Turner Overdrive, John Denver, and many other great classic artists. The first band I started was back then in Mcallen,Tx and we changed names, we were at one point Amnesty and then finally the Black Cheese. It consisted of me playing guitar and singing very poorly, a friend named Randy on "lead" guitar playing very poorly, Jesse attempting to play keyboards poorly, and another guy(I forgot his name) playing upright bass poorly. We were horrible and mostly just played crappy riffs and sort of "jammed" never really writing any songs or covering anyone elses material, but we were passionate and had fun from what I can remember. I was listening to a lot of Metallica, AC/DC, Black Sabbath(Dio era), Alice In Chains, Joe Satriani, Exodus, Albert King, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Danzig, Cannibal Corpse, Savatage, Megadeth, Body Count, etc... at the time and none of my attempts at music sounded like any of those great musicians/bands. I learned my first taste of "beauty" in that first year of playing guitar and my first band in that I could have so much fun playing music badly and also sitting around for countless hours hearing great music that was fresh and new to me that blew me away like Albert King, Metallica, and Joe Satriani. And I also experienced my first "painful" experience in music when we moved away from south texas the following summer and the band had to break up and I had to lay the mighty "black cheese" to rest(hell, we were this close to signing a major label deal.....yeah, right). Until the next segment, enjoy music for what it is and remember music is beauty & pain.