He's performed alongside such talents as Wynton Marsalis and Mel Tormé, and worked as personal assistant to jazz great Dick Hyman. He's toured nationally and internationally, landing everywhere from Paris' Bilboquet Jazz Club to Los Angeles' Playboy Mansion. He's been featured on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, and the soundtracks for The Aviator, Ghost World, and Boardwalk Empire.

But in the early 1980s, says jazz aficionado Dan Levinson, he couldn't even convince friends to listen to the music he loved.

"I was taking records out of a library in Santa Monica," says the 48-year-old Levinson, "and landed on a record that RCA Victor had put out called The Best of Dixieland, and the last track on it was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's recording of 'Livery Stable Blues.' It was the first so-called 'jazz record' ever issued, in 1917, and I was absolutely blown away by it. I couldn't get enough of it. And I just assumed that when I played it for all my friends, they would feel the same way I did.

"So I played it. I said, 'Listen to them! Listen to that sound!' And I remember them saying, 'Oh, God, turn that off. What is that screeching noise?' And I said, 'That's the clarinet ... .'

"These were the same people who went to rock concerts and had music blasting in their ears, but they couldn't listen to 1917 jazz. They just looked at me. 'What happened to Dan?'"

Buzz Osborne said that some concepts for the Melvins' 30th-anniversary tour - which stops at RIBCO on July 18 - got nixed.

Photos from the Rock the District concert in the District of Rock Island on June 29, 2013, headlined by Theory of a Deadman and also featuring 3 Pill Morning, Candlelight Red, and 3 Years Hollow. For more work by Matt Erickson, visit MRE-Photography.com.

If you're an amateur guitarist hoping to turn pro, particularly one with an affinity for blues rock, you could certainly choose lesser talents to emulate than Kenny Wayne Shepherd. The 37-year-old musician, after all, has been already nominated for five Grammy Awards, has won two Blues Music Awards and two Billboard Music Awards, and was once named the world's third-finest blues guitarist by Guitar World magazine, with only B.B. King and Eric Clapton ranking higher.

If, however, you're an amateur guitarist who feels that the world of professional music will forever be out of reach due to your inability to actually read music, don't let that dissuade you from following your dream. It turns out that Kenny Wayne Shepherd doesn't read music, either.

"Yeah, I still play by ear," says Shepherd, who unofficially began his career as a self-taught guitarist at the tender age of seven. "I used to have to sound songs out one note at a time until I got from the beginning to the end of it. It was kind of a tedious process in the beginning, but you know, it's gotten easier over the years. Modern technology is a big help now, because I can just record things on my iPhone, but yeah - I just play what sounds good, and then I just have to remember it."