That is a cool story, PPG. I love Ricky, too.
I'm older than you and was busy with a young family when all of the stuff you listened to was coming out....so those were not my prime record buying years! I've never even heard of shoe-gaze, LOL!
But we share a love of country music. Looking back I would have said heck no, I don't like country when I was a kid. But I sure liked Glenn Campbell, Roy Clark and Buck Owens on TV, and I was a fan of Southern Rock, Poco, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, etc. So the seeds were sown at a young age.
What turned me onto "pure" country was a friend of mine whose taste I really respected. He wasn't a musician, but I really liked listening to records with him--he had lots of Garcia, Miles, Weather Report, Steely Dan, etc. One day he played Willie Nelson sings the Kris Kristofferson songbook or something like that. Wow, I was hooked from the get go, that led me to Merle Haggard and all the other usual suspects.
If you like 80's Ricky you probably are already a fan of Vince Gill (I forgot all about how I missed him when he was in his prime when I posted my reply to this thread!). What a combination of vocals and guitar playing. I got to see him for the first time last summer and was completely blown away. "These Days" is a record (or 4 records actually) that I listen to often.
I just googled shoe-gaze: "a style of rock music characterized by a sound in which the distinctions between separate instruments and vocals are blurred."
Doesn't sound like my taste, but I've been wrong before
