I went to high school with Richie Castellano and all the rest of the Band Geeks he does the cover vids with. It was only for the 9 months I lived in Staten Island, but that was such an important period of my development. Richie and all the Band Geek kids were already monster fucking musicians, I was a freshmen and they were seniors. Richie’s got the “Bohemian Rhapsody” vid that went viral about 20 years ago, but he actually did that originally in ‘98 and performed it live using a backing track he made himself of the choir section on a 16-track reel to reel machine.
It kinda messed with my head because where I went to school previously, I was the only musician I knew of and then I go to this new school that has a Guitar class that’s filled with musicians who could absolutely wipe the floor with me. I came out of there thinking the majority of musicians were at their level by the age of 18, then learned the total opposite is mainly true as I got older. I don’t know WTF was in the water over there around that time, but there was a good 7-8 of them that were all on or right around Richie’s level of musicianship. Pretty fucking crazy.