Dale Jones
	My brother and I were raised by coyotes in a junkyard. I'm sure of it. It would really explain a lot. There so many things we learned in that junkyard. Here's one: There are no two objects in the universe that can't be misused with each other to make a tool. Even now, though I spend most of my life in the software world, when I need to make a program do something that it's refusing to do, I automatically scan my environment to see if there are things lying around that I can make a tool with. That junkyard is still there in The Dalles, Oregon and my father still owns it, but it's just a shadow of what it was. Originally I was going to be an astronaut. Then I heard The Beatles. Exploring the universe can wait. I did all the things that you were supposed to do in the Seventies. I also studied music and made a living playing rock and roll for ten years. But you can get tired of drugs, loose sex, and sleeping until noon. I urge you to try it. In the eighties I studied computers and bidness and the computer thing stuck, but bidness had to go. I plodded along throughout the rest of the eighties and early nineties taking one or two classes a term. I couldn't quite fit in all the history or English classes I needed for either degree, so I wound up with a Bachelor of Science in Arts and Letters (PSU '95). In my senior year I managed to win the Clark Award, which gives English geeks at PSU sweaty palms. (If you want, you can read the paper that won it if I ever get around to putting up on the site here.) The coolest thing about winning the Clark Award is that Rebecca Wells, who wrote The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, was the guest speaker at the award ceremony and I got to meet her. She was really nice, but I didn't think the movie wasn't very good, which is too bad because the book was a hoot. I was married and did the whole bourgeoisie thang with houses and cars and furniture. I raised a daughter. That life imploded. As my grandfather would have said, "it went the way of the dodo." I can't complain. I got a GREAT recipe for mashed potatoes and a fantastic daughter out of the deal.  XOXO Emily! I also got the house, in which I now live with two cats and a dog in an inner-city neighborhood in SE Portland, Oregon. I have rehearsal space and a studio there in which I get to play music with people that I've known most of my life. It's been a great ride so far.
Influences	Musically I've been heavily influenced by fifties country: the Sun Records artists, Elvis, and the Bakersfield sound by artists like Buck Owens. Underneath all that is the gospel music we sang in church. I grew up in a conservative spin-off of the Southern Baptist Church which didn't believe in having instrumental music in church services. So they sang four part a cappella gospel hymns. I listened to four part a cappella gospel hymns before birth. And, until about a week after I graduated from high school, every Wednesday night and twice on Sunday I went to church and sang four part a cappella gospel hymns. (Did you get the part about four part a cappella gospel hymns? In church?) I didn't get that much from going to church, but I sure got the music. Guitar-wise, I grew up listening to Chet Atkins and Les Paul. I've studied and played a lot of Leo Kottke, but I don't perform any of his stuff anymore, nor do I practice it with any idea of playing it for anyone but myself; It just makes it easier to get in touch with my own songs. Other players with a lot of input are Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page, and George Harrison. I'm in awe of players like Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani, but I came of age before they hit the scene so they never had the impact of the people above. I studied music in college as well, but that was just for polish. I sang and studied a LOT of jazz, but I never really got the hang of soloing in that style, although I go there for ideas. I listen to classical music and I can play some Bach pieces, but all that does is help me play my own stuff better. Beneath all these influences and infinitely more important is the music that was played around the house as I was growing up. Both my mother and father play guitar and my aunt plays accordion. My grandfather also played guitar and he told me his father would sit on the front porch and play the banjo while the "grass grew up to the rafters." My family gave me my musical wings and I'm forever grateful to them for the gift. My literary influences, like most English writers, start with Shakespeare and the Bible, with imagery courtesy of Dante. Whenever I get into a bind I start ripping them off; Sometimes whole cloth, but usually by shamelessly paraphrasing them. On top of them are Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and some of the Beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg.
Best Musical Moment	I had just gotten a new guitar and I was showing it to my grandfather. I played the opening line to Jimmy Rogers' Waiting for a Train, and he started singing the song, because he was crazy for Jimmy Rogers. This was in the early seventies and we were divided by generations, and the Civil Rights movement, and the war in Viet Nam and a lot of other stupid things that I can't even remember now. But at that moment time stopped, and nothing else mattered but the pure magic of the music we were making together.