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AllTheWhileYouChargeAFee
Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Kansas City
Posts: 1,178
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Hey, I really like this guy's bio. Great dedication!
Wiki sez ...
Quote:
Early life
Born in Sydney, but spending the majority of his life in Perth, Western Australia, Parker's father is from Zimbabwe and his mother is from South Africa. Parker grew up with a passion for music at a young age. Parker's father "played a lot of music as a hobby" and was a "big part of [Kevin's] musical upbringing". His first experience playing an instrument was accompanying his father on guitar, "I learned guitar by playing rhythm guitar to his Shadows leads. He wanted to play Shadows lead riffs, because he loves Hank B. Marvin, and he got me to play the chords in the background." Parker's father also played music by The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Supertramp in a cover band, which Parker believes was where he "got [his] love of melody", which has been a significant part of Parker's music. Parker also recalls "amusing [him]self by singing along to the vacuum cleaner when mum was cleaning." Parker's father later purchased Kevin his first guitar.
At age 11, Parker took up the drums, just like his brother, and later was making "excessively melodic music from about the age of 12 to 15", which was "really weird and repetitive and almost genre-less", by recording his drumming and overdubbing guitar and other instruments in lo-fi experiments. Speaking about this Parker said "I’ve always recorded music. When I was 12, I used to set up two tape machines and multi-track myself. First, I’d record a beat on the drums, then, I’d play that tape into another tape recorder while playing keyboard; then I’d take that tape and play bass guitar along with the drums and keyboard. I’d keep adding instruments. I did that for a long time until my dad bought me an 8-track, and then I continued recording music by myself, even if I was in other bands at the same time." This hobby turned into an obsession for Parker who was "just doing music all the time, I never did any homework, I'd just spend every night in the garage recording music." Parker got his first eight-track recorder at age 16.
At age 13, Parker met fellow Tame Impala member Dominic Simper in their high school music class, whom he found a musical connection with. Parker and Simper started off playing covers of Rage Against the Machine, Unwritten Law, Sunk Loto and Korn songs, along with Dan Debuf, who is now a presenter on Nova FM. In his late-teens, Parker discovered the many '60s and '70s psychedelic rock artists that would have a huge influence on his music, saying that "I got into bands like Cream and Jefferson Airplane in a big way, and loved the sound of their recordings. My friends were listening to bands like Brainticket and Demon Fuzz who opened my eyes to different ways of constructing songs. The Beatles way of singing vocal lines often crept into the recordings because they are so unique, whereas the elements we take from those other bands are usually common among a few other bands we listen to."
By the time he was 18, Parker was "playing in the pub scene" and at the time was writing "heavy 70's-style almost prog-rock songs, like Blue Cheer".
Parker later had a job as a law clerk, delivering court documents in Perth. It was here that he would mentally write songs in his head amidst the boredom. He would later quit this job.
Parker's father always warned Kevin about getting into the music industry. "My dad always warned me not to choose music as a career. He got quite worried and said "if you do music as your job, as the thing that puts food on the table, then it will instantly ruin its magic, it won't be mysterious and fun anymore, it would just be like work"." Parker believed what his father had told him and he went onto university for a while, studying engineering. "I wanted to please my dad in a way. I had no idea what I wanted to do, because I didn’t enjoy anything other than music." Parker said "I hated it, and one day I decided to change to astronomy. I knew that I would be poor and I just wanted to do whatever was fun." It was here in an astronomy lecture that Parker saw a slide that he would later paint and turn into the artwork for the Tame Impala EP. However, Parker couldn't give up his original dream. "I was at uni, and a couple of months before we got signed, I had submitted to the reality that I wasn’t actually going to be a famous musician and I should just get on with my career. So that was when I started to knuckle down and actually do stuff at uni. But at the same time, I could never passionately give my attention to anything other than music. Like, it was a disease. I would not be able to listen to a word in lectures because I’d just be thinking about my new song."
On his way to his last astronomy exam, Parker was contacted by Modular Recordings who wished to sign Tame Impala to their label. Upon hearing this, Parker turned his car around from the exam and drove home to pursue his first love, making music.
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