John Wilson chanced to discover the concept of playing music firsthand at around age 8 on an early afternoon typically occupied by cartoons and the adventures of boyhood in San Jose, California.  His older brother had left behind his beginner's folk guitar with all of two strings and gone to school.  John found that any strings at all meant sounds, and in that first brief sitting, a primitive version of Jingle Bells took form.  The next tune to be meekly plucked out on that guitar would reflect his first knowledge of music with an attitude - the KISS rock anthem "God of Thunder," probably four years later.  That momentous experience, then simply filed away in his memory, was likely a touchstone for the plunge into music to come.

John's family moved to Austin, Texas when John was 14.  On a visit with relatives in Louisiana at age 13, he unearthed a long-abandoned six-string acoustic from a bedroom closet.  His spirited aunt and uncle encouraged him by making it his birthday gift!  They added to it a book of ten Beatles songs with guitar fingering diagrams.  Driven by the memory of hearing his brother's daily Beatles listening in the next bedroom for a few years, he countered the physical pain of constant playing, and even his teenage inattention was no match for brazen, eager curiosity.  The open country air of southern Louisiana began to sing.

At age 18, over a decade after his first moment with a guitar, the one from Louisiana had long worn out.  John got his first apartment and had acquired another,very used acoustic guitar.  Now four-years infatuated with 80s hard rock music, he began trying to emulate the powerful chords that comprised it.  Within a year, a lifechanging experience had occurred, and a new zeal took form, which would shape the rest of his musical life.

*more to be added later*