Welcome fans of rock! I am Chris Williams and this is my little web space for my thoughts. I am a rock fan and like playing guitar in my spare time.
Like most people I listened to my parents’ music growing up, mostly country and adult contemporary. When I was ten years old an elder cousin of mine turned me onto rock music for the first time. He was a big fan of AC/DC, KISS, Alice Cooper, and Cheap Trick and listened to them all the time. Over the course of a summer of hanging out with him my musical tastes began to mirror his. I got my own copies of albums like Back In Black, Destroyer, and the Dream Police. My mind had officially been opened to a much wider musical world.
About a year later I discovered Van Halen’s 1984 album and the hits Panama and Hot For Teacher set my mind on fire. I knew it was music from the same family as KISS and AC/DC but it was a different branch entirely. There was so much power and aggression and a beautiful fun to this music that I went out in search of the rest of their albums. And I became a fan for life.
This of course led directly to my interest in playing guitar. I bugged my parents incessantly and that Christmas I got my first guitar, a cheap white Harmony Stratocaster copy. The action was so high I could have probably sliced cheese with the strings. I started to play and I also started to save my money. Six months later I traded that Harmony and one hundred dollars to a guitar shop for a used mid-80s made-in-Japan Squier Stratocaster.
And I’ve been playing ever since.