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AR: Actually, it helped even more than that.

BiTS: [Laughing]

AR: It directed you towards your real instrument. No, well, that's how I started to play. I hadn't
really played before. I'd played piano in grade school and then stopped with that and it was towards
the end of high school that I found the harmonica book and I studied it over the summer and
worked on bending and things like that and then
when I went back to school, I was playing in the
hallways and just trying to learn basic things about
it. It was around that time that I started to learn

about the idea of different genres of music like
blues or jazz or gospel. I'd never thought about any
of that either. I just knew some pop and old rock
and roll and stuff. That had to be defined for me a
little better and then when I first heard Muddy

Waters, that really defined the blues for me at that
point.

BiTS: And that was with who as harmonica player
then?

AR: Well, Muddy Waters had passed in 83, so this

was 87, 86, I started to play, so another student
gave me some tapes. In fact, I didn't know that
Muddy Waters was a single entity, a single person, I
thought it was the name of a band, as in Muddy
Waters. He gave me some tape cassettes of I think mid to late Muddy era, so James Cotton was on

one of those, Jerry Portnoy, not a lot of the earlier stuff at that time, so I'd say James Cotton and
Jerry Portnoy were two of my favourite influencers from those recordings and there was Howlin'
Wolf on one of those tapes as well and that was my introduction to that whole sound.

BiTS: What was it about the sound that really attracted you?

AR: It attracted me first of all, it attracted me so strongly. I have to say that because a lot of things
can attract you, but this was more like an epiphany. First of all, it was music that felt both
important and made me feel good, and at that point, I'd recognised Bob Dylan's music as being

important, but it made me feel like shit! Crazy because he was so judgemental. This music wasn’t
judgemental, it was very welcoming and loving. It was about feeling good and it made me feel
warm, and I was constantly cold in those days because my parents wouldn't turn the heat up in our
house and so I loved music that made me feel like I was warm and made me feel good about spicy
food and things. Yeah, the overall sound of it, I hadn't learned how to take it apart and understand
the group dynamics and the instrumental parts and arrangements, but something about it still

speaks to me that I can't even explain. There's the whole sound of people listening to each other
and being in love.