Jackie Greene

Greene grew up in Placerville, a small gold rush town in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. Asked how he developed such eclectic musical tastes in such a rural environment, Greene replied, "That's a funny story. Our television broke, and there wasn't much else to do but ride dirt bikes or throw water balloons at the neighbor's house, so I went into the basement and I found these crates of my parents' old records. I found their old turntable and wired it up -- I was pretty handy as a kid, and the first record I played was The Genius of Ray Charles. I developed this obsessive love of blues, folk music, old rock 'n' roll. What was happening in the music business then was Britney Spears and boy bands. My friends and I weren't into that, so we raided all of our parents' record collections.

"We had this old piano in the basement that was really out of tune, especially the white keys, so I learned to play mostly on the black keys, in all these weird keys. My dad had an old acoustic guitar that I started playing about the same time. Eventually I started focusing more on the guitar because it was hard to attract girls playing the piano. Focusing on the guitar is a pretty easy decision when you're 16."

Greene started writing songs during his high school years. "I really started getting serious about it when I heard Tom Waits for the first time,'" he said. "My parents had these old two-track recorders in the basement, and I started playing with the two of them, recording from one to the other, kind of ping-ponging back and forth. It sounded really awful, but it was fun. Pretty soon I bought one of those four-track Tascam Porta-studios, which I still use today to make demos. I used to make these little five-track CDs, burn them myself, and sell them at coffeehouses. Later on I just kept doing it, but on better equipment."

When he decided to pursue music seriously, Greene moved to the nearest large city, the state capital, about an hour away in California's central valley. "Sacramento is near and dear to me, but I moved there just because it was the closest bigger town. I was playing there a lot. I remember playing the Torch Club happy hour from 3:30 to 7:30 or so and taking an hour break and then going over to the Blue Lamp and playing with my band at the time, which was just a trio, until one or two in the morning. We'd do that three nights a week. Then on the other days, I would have some other gigs. That's all I did."