Music Banter - Who Is Your Music "Hero"?

This is a tough question to answer. I've thought about this a lot...

Nobody could touch Anton Newcombe's songwriting in the mid-90s, but he's a fairly loathable person. For that matter, Elliott Smith was a genius and a virtuoso in every sense of the word, but his drug habits and mental health issues plagued him even at his best times. The only musical person I really admire for his convictions is Frank Zappa, and his music doesn't really appeal to me anymore. I certainly have many idols, but there's only one particular person whom I could call my "hero"...

Mike Watt. His incredible stature in music notwithstanding (being one of the greatest electric bassists ever with songwriting in seminal punk band Minutemen & subsequent work in fIREHOSE and the Stooges), Mike is an amazingly literate and surprisingly down-to-earth guy. Probably one of the hardest-working musicians, between recording punk operas with analogues to James Joyce's Ulysses and still jamming econo at the age of fifty-four. Not to mention he's dedicated everything he's done since 1985 to the memory of D. Boon. Never (to my knowledge) a habitual drug user, narcissist, asshole or anything less than a genuinely good dude trying to make a living off his bass.

And I don't even play bass guitar.