Rusty's Musical Manifestation
by Rusty Zinn
I was born in Long Beach, Ca. 1970. My first musical
memories are riding in the back seat of the car with my
Mom driving to the Laundromat with the radio on. I
remember hearing The Stylistics and the Spinners. I
didn't know who they were at the time but I sure recall
the songs and still love them today! I used to think that
the lead singer from The Stylistics was a woman and it was years later when I realized that wasn't so. Sometimes I wonder if maybe my comfort with singing in very high registers could be attributed to listening to those songs on the radio. Not long after that my Mom started playing me Elvis Presley. Elvis was Mom's favorite. I started digging into her 45's collection and spinning sides by Fats Domino as well as Elvis and others. I had a Donald Duck record player where his arm was the record arm with the needle on it. He! He! Anyway, I scratched the hell out of those records ...... sorry Mom!
So, I was very keen on listening to music. I had my ears wide open to everything. My folks also used to listen to the Wolfman Jack show and he'd play all of the oldies from my parent's teenage years and so I was exposed to all this soulful Doo Wop. I would say that to this day that the romantic vibe in that genre has had a huge impact on my musical creations. A hopeless romantic I've always been and will always remain. Sam Cooke was somebody I also admired and still do so to this day.
When I was about six or seven I used to beat on empty coffee cans that my mom would give me. She encouraged it a lot and soon I wanted to be a drummer. I can't remember exactly what age I was, I think I was about ten, but my mom bought some drums from a neighbor down the road. It wasn't even a proper drum kit. It didn't come with a bass drum at all. It was a mismatched snare drum, floor tom and a ride cymbal, but I beat them to my heart's content and eventually incorporated a bass drum and a hi hat and took some drum lessons. I even played drums in the school band in junior high and my freshman year of high school but Mr. McElroy was frustrated with me because I was resistant to learning to read music but he couldn't say a whole lot because I'd hear an arrangement and could copy it with ease, so my performance was always top notch! To this day I cannot read a lick of music and am sometimes regretful about that!
There came a time when I got turned onto The Beatles and that turned my life upside down. I eventually collected all their records and became a bonafide Beatles freak! By the time I was seven, my folks moved to the Santa Cruz area and we lived in the mountains outside of town in a little place called Bonny Doon. There was nothing ,no post office, no gas station, no grocery store, nothing, just trees and mountains, creeks and plenty of wildlife. It was a rural existence. My parents taught us to work for our own money if we wanted to buy ourselves things, so I used to work in the summers
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