Do you remember your first record? Your first concert? Your favorite artist from when you were that pizza face in sixth grade? Well this isn’t about that. This Long and Winding Road is about three artists/records that impacted/influenced you over the years – you as a musician, Rob Barbato, bass player/singer for California band . So letap talk about your road.
“You go to a Dead show and see all the people who go to all the Dead shows, and everybody’s really nice, and I’d forgotten about that. In high school, when I was becoming a musician and wanting to be a musician, those shows were huge for me.”
7 Years Old
“The ‘La Bamba’ soundtrack, and the movie itself, are the reason I play music. I was really young, like 7 years old, and it was like a PG-17 movie, and I begged my parents to take me to see it. Then I bought the cassette, and I remember the way it smelled. I could lip-sync to the song and pretend to play the guitars. Los Lobos played all those versions, and they were great. Later on, when I moved to Los Angeles, I was working at a recording studio and I met Lou Diamond Phillips. And I told him, ‘You’re the reason I play music,’ and he said, ‘Wow, that makes me feel really weird.’ He was totally taken aback by it. I watched it again recently on Netflix, and he’s not playing guitar. But when I was little, I was like, ‘Ah man, he’s such a great guitar player!’”
16 Years Old
“I got really into the Grateful Dead at that time. And that just opened up tons of other music from folk to bluegrass and jazz and psychedelic rock and all sorts of other stuff. Those records are really big for me, and so was trading tapes through the Internet. The Internet had just started, and my parents had just bought a computer. And I’d send blank tapes to somebody else, and they’d send me the same quality tape with a show taped onto it. It was a really cool community, and then I fell out of it for a period of time. Once I got older, I rejected a lot of that stuff in favor of new stuff. But a few nights ago, I went and saw a couple of the remaining Dead members in their new band, Furthur, and I saw them at the Greek Theatre and went with some friends and had a great time. The show was so awesome. A couple years ago, the Dead with Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann played at the Forum in L.A., and the show wasn’t all that tight. But this Furthur one was great.”
29 Years Old
“Even though I played in the Fall, I wasn’t the hugest Fall fan before joining the group. But after joining the group for that time, I’ve become such a fan of Mark E. Smith’s. I’ve learned a lot from him and his attitude playing music and making records. Itap also something I can separate myself from and see it as a band, and all of those records of his – ‘Perverted by Language’ and ‘Hex Enduction Hour’ – are just amazing. We played with him from 2006-2007, and we made one record, did a live record, and we toured the new record with him. It was pretty amazing.”
Darker My Love plays the Fillmore Auditorium on Wednesday, opening for Band of Horses and Admiral Radley. Tickets, $35.25, are available via .
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Ricardo Baca is the founder and co-editor of and an award-winning critic and journalist at The Denver Post.
