David TausI can remember sneaking downstairs at the precocious age of 3 to listen to Peter and the Wolf on the nice record player that I wasn't yet allowed to touch. I would sink into this really big armchair, eat cereal, and listen to that record over and over. I especially liked Grandpa's bassoon. So from as far back as I can remember, I've always dug listening to music. It didn't take long to move from playing records to playing with records, although my first scratching experiments would come at the expense of Vivaldi and Brahms.
My parents put a violin in my hands at the age of 6, and Mr. Suzuki taught me how to Minuet in G, Go Tell Aunt Rhody, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Violin felt too forced upon me at that young and ignorant age, and I never took to it as I might have had it been of my own free will.
Violin lasted about four years. During that time, I endured torturous car trips with my mom and sister singing along to their Broadway showtunes tapes. 
Even the reactionary back then, I'd switch the radio on as much as possible. It usually ended up bein a top-40 station broadcasting sample items from the mid-to-late 80's music drought. I'd yet to encounter the really good stuff, but it was better than showtunes.
I moved on to pencil-drumming in seventh grade literature class. My parent-teacher conference that year consisted of Mr. Guten insisting to my mom that I should start up with drum lessons. So off I went to study with a percussionist from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra every week. Pencil-drumming became much more frequent as my paradiddles and ratomocues took nice divots out of the covers of The Outsiders and Animal Farm. Every Thursday afternoon, my drum teacher would tell me stories about playing frat parties when he was 14, and wrested my attention away from Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Bel Biv Devoe, and Run-DMC with the likes of Ellington, Basie, Buddy Rich, and Louis Armstrong. I did't quite know what to do with it all at the time. Sometimes I still don't.
High school rolled around, and hoping to supplement a serious Beastie Boys fetish, I picked up with the Nicolet High School Symphonic Band. The percussion section, realizing that we were not really percussionists but actually 'drummmaz,' took to writing our own drum cadences for marching band, improvising our parts, and receiving untold dirty looks from both the far-too-prissy flute section and Mr. White, the band director.
We nevertheless managed to pull off top ratings for playing cool tunes like 'Sabre Dance' and 'A Time for Jazz' at the Wisconsin State Solo & Ensembe Festival two years running. During my sophomore year, we drummmaz took a field trip to see Stomp when they came through Milwaukee. It, to this day, is one of the most innovative, inspiring concerts I have ever seen. After Stomp, I was changed forever.
In between sitting in with my friends' band The Primarys and starting to poke my head into some smoky, illicit local music venues, I managed a road trip or two, one of which took me to see Phish play in Champaign, Illinois in November, 1996. Again, I didn't quite know what to make of what was given to me. I knew enough to pursue it further, and followed that band and their music up and down the country in the coming years.
I went off to college in the far-away land of Rhode Island, and entered a world of infinite musical possibility.
The Northeast was brimming with so much good music, and my horizons expanded geometrically as a result. I had picked up a guitar and begun to teach myself the ins and outs of the contraption, My freshman year roommate and I would jam far into the night, to the extreme dismay of our neighbors. Most of them never got past how we managed to fit a full drum set into our small dorm room. Sometimes we'd wonder ourselves what the hell we'd be doing with a fully-loaded 5 piece Pearl Export with 5 super-shiny zildjian cymbals in the middle of our room. But, as we reasoned then, you make room for what's important.
Impromptu jam sessions on guitar, drum, pot, pan, garbage can, and anything else we could find proved fruitful as I put it all into practice junior year with a troupe of beat houds in "Step Real Hard," our own collegiate take on Stomp. In these years, I'd begun to consume more and more music of all kinds like it was essential to life itself. I still haven't eaten my fill, but I have packed enough away now to confirm my collegiate suspicicions: music IS essential to life itself. Between the extraordinary campus concert series and Lupo's downtown, I drowned myself in the likes of Medeski Martin and Wood, Ben Harper, The Roots, Wilco, Black Star, Ani DiFranco, Cake, Ladysmith Black Mamzabo, Del Ray, and still more Phish, who paid a surprise visit to Providence in April of 1998.
My guitar playing culminated in many wonderful performances at campfires at YMCA Camp Minikani, where I spend my summers since I was 9 years old. There I learned that there really is no better crowd than a whole lot of kids, and that music exists within a community, which is just as important as the notes that may be played.
The Minikani community carried outside camp, as co-counselors and friends took to the road to celebrate New Year's 2000 in the Florida Everglades. Back East, I played a series of open mic nights around Providence, but mostly at the Underground, a local bar where I worked as a soundman. Working at the UG introduced me (quite literally) to bands such as Addison Groove Project and Soulive. It was the brink of something greater. I'd noticed the warning signs and chose to ignore them. My cd collection was getting impossibly big. I'd spend the wee hours pulling music down from Napster. I bought an electric guitar. If I wasn't careful with this music thing, I knew it would take over my life. Maybe it already had. But maybe it wasn't so bad if it did.
The end of college placed me in a corner of the attic of a big yellow house in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. At the Chowdahaus, as we came to call it, cd collections of impossible size converged into a cross-pollenation of musical ideas that swept from traditional Irish 'seshun' to the newest in jazz/funk, and everything in between. Here I met Tim, Live Live co-creator and ephemeral Idea Man, and late one night, we hit upon the kernel idea that would later become Live Live. After a little bit of research, a modest proposal, and some hefty planning, Live Live was launched on January 29, 2002.
By no means is this the terminus of my musical path. This is a little project to keep me off the streets and out of trouble, and to contribute what I can to the live music community from who I have taken so much. Live Live is a celebration, a haven, a place to turn to find friends in fans, and learn about some of the people who make the music that could very well change your life for the better.
What you see here is the current incarnation of Live Live. It is only going to be as good as its contributors want it to be. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and am always looking for people like you to join in on it.
Ever so often, I step back in amazement as to how this little seed has grown, because it really has shot up quickly. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for taking an interest. I hope you dig.