Greetings to all “Great Southern Brainfart” followers and readers! I’m honored to have been asked by Don to contribute to his excellent music news and blog page. I hope to be adding some interesting content in the coming months including album and concert reviews, as well as some of my own personal footage from the shows I attend.
I originally grew up in the Capital District of upstate New York where I spent the first 20 years of my life. I’ve been writing music criticism and obsessing over my favorite bands since I was just 10 years old. I cut my teeth reading various US music trade magazines at the time such as Billboard, Rolling Stone, Creem and Hit Parader. I would later find myself getting much more impressed British and European music scene through Kerrang and NME. This inspired me to start writing my own album reviews and honing my own perspective on hard rock and heavy metal music (for starters).
I’ve also been playing the guitar for most of my life and would consider myself to be more than competent in that department, but I’ll allow others to be the judge there. I’m currently playing with the Atlanta based tribute band, Slack Sabbath. More recently, I’ve been enjoying the new adventure of learning the bass guitar, which provides me yet another window into the music I love. Being a musician certainly provides a bit more insight into the music I’ve been writing about.
Some readers might know me from my work in the Black Sabbath fan community. I was originally the webmaster and creator of the Black Sabbath Live Project (formerly at www.sabbathlive.com). That was largely a research project to create an accurate listing of Black Sabbath’s past gig dates. As I got deeper into that, it became an even larger database which included known audio and video recordings, as well as pictures and stories from each show. (An archived version of my site can be viewed here.)
Running Sabbathive was quite an adventure as I communicated with people from around the world and amassed a collection I’ll never find time to hear or see every minute of. During that time, I was also granted the opportunity to compete in a trivia contest against Ozzy Osbourne on the Jimmy Kimmel Show in May 2005. I also corresponded a bit with Geezer Butler, who kindly gave me passes to see Heaven & Hell in Chicago back in 2008.
I had to abandon ship after nearly 10 years once it became a bit too demanding to balance with the demands of my career in I. T. I am still the Tour Dates guy for Black-Sabbath.com, which is Joe Siegler’s long running fan site for the band, as time allows.
Another interesting aspect of my life in music has been my work in concert videography. I started filming bands back in 1994 and always felt I had a knack for knowing how to capture a live show. I’ve done this mostly as a hobby through the years, but have been blessed to capture some really great shows for posterity.
Recently, but I’ve been a bit more active than usual with this work and really proud that quality of my work continues to improve. Much of my work can be viewed on my YouTube page, but I’m still slowly dripping out all of this footage I’ve done through the years. I may do special features about some of my work on this blog, as well as writing reviews and continuing to produce new content.
My favorite bands would include Black Sabbath (obviously), Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Rainbow, Rush, UFO, Michael Schenker, Metallica, Megadeth, Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, Uriah Heep, Savatage, Yes, Fates Warning, Annihilator, Accept, Budgie, Dio, David Bowie, King Crimson, X, Trouble, Blood Ceremony, Blue Oyster Cult, Heart, Fleetwood Mac, The Pretenders, Alice Cooper, Concrete Blonde, Johnny Cash, Neko Case, Kate Bush, Robin Trower, Tom Petty and Gram Parsons. Well, just for starters…
Anyhow, I’m really stoked about the opportunity to collaborate with Don on these pages and hope that I can provide something interesting and complementary for everyone to enjoy.
– Rob Dwyer
About The Author
