Touring will take world-renowned guitarist Richie Kotzen to South America and Europe this year, but the stop he's most looking forward to takes place this weekend in Wyomissing.
"I'm really, really looking forward to this one," said Kotzen who will perform at the The Works in Wyomissing on Friday at 9 p.m. "I grew up right on (Route) 422 until I was 20, and I haven't been able to get back for reunions or anything, so that's what this will be for me."
Kotzen graduated from Daniel Boone High School in 1988 and left shortly thereafter for the West Coast to start his music career as a guitarist. His parents, Richard and Georgene, still live in Berks County, and his sister lives in New Jersey.
Growing up in Berks, he got his start in music, forming a garage band with a friend when he was in seventh grade and playing in both the jazz and marching bands in high school.
"I wanted to play guitar in the jazz band," he remembered. "But to do that I had to play in the marching band, too."
Problem was, guitars aren't part of a marching band.
"So they had me play the bass drum," Kotzen said. "I never wanted to play it, so I didn't really learn it. I just ad-libbed my parts, and everyone put up with my poor drumming because they wanted me in the jazz band."
Other bands have wanted him since then, too, including Poison, with whom he toured in the early 1990s in support of "Native Tongue," and Mr. Big, with whom he made five records from 1999 through 2004. Throughout it all, he's put out solo albums, bringing his discography to more than two dozen albums and making it very difficult to cull his songs for a 90-minute show.
"I've been making records under my own name since 1989," he said, "so I've had a lot to pick from."
Occasionally fans will suggest songs he's long forgotten.
"People who are familiar with my work will ask if I'm going to play (a particular song), and I forgot I ever wrote it," he said. "There's a lot of music."
It's hard to characterize Kotzen's music, though, except to say that it's a hybrid of the music he heard as a kid. It's influenced by soul and blues, he said, thanks to growing up near Philadelphia.
"That's the music I listened to growing up," he said. "The Philly radio stations played a lot of soul, and I liked the music of bands like The Spinners. But I also listened to classic rock."
The music he writes is filtered through those experiences, and it's further solidified by playing all the instruments on his records.
"I write everything on my records," he said, including on the recently released "Peace Sign." "Once in a while I'll hire a session drummer, but mostly I'm playing drums, bass and keyboards, too. It's just something that evolved over the years, because I've had the luxury of being able to record in my own studio."
His current studio is in the garage of his Hollywood Hills home, and the music he creates sounds very organic - not at all like it's produced in a studio.
"I record it to sound like that," he said. "When you listen to a lot of recorded music, it's the same 10 seconds of a drum piece that's just looped over and over again. When I record, I play the drums for the whole piece from beginning to end, so I'm playing off myself. I hear the whole song as I'm recording it. I'll record the drums, then the bass, then the vocal track."
Music and lyrics come to him in a variety of ways, so he always keeps a recording device with him. Once, he started to write a song in the moments before taking the stage for a concert in Italy.
"And I dream a lot of my songs," he said. "Three or four songs have come to me while I was sleeping."
Kotzen said it's also been a bit of a dream come true that some of his old friends from his high schools days are contacting him about the upcoming show.
"This will be like a reunion for me," Kotzen said. "I'll see my best friend from high school. I've heard from some people that I remember riding go-carts with. Now we're grown up with kids of our own. This is going to be my way of getting back there and seeing everybody."
E-mail Tracy Rasmussen: weekend@readingeagle.com.
