Rich Shapero was born in 1948 in Los Angeles. In grammar school, he read Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. “It attempted to envision a higher human state,” Rich says, “which captivated me at the time, and still captivates me.”
When he was nine, his third grade teacher introduced him to Leadbelly. Rich loved the “heart and muscle” of the music, and badgered his aunt and uncle into buying him a guitar. By the time he was fifteen, Rich was crafting music in earnest. His passion for American roots music broadened and deepened. He discovered Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, and a slug of other pre-war greats.
In 1965, Rich started college at Berkeley. He majored in English lit, finding heroes both within his coursework and outside—William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Machen, Walter Pater and Henri Bergson. “All of those writers were important to me because they saw our everyday world as a veil, behind which a world more profound, more alive, and more real, was waiting to be discovered.” And music played a role. For all of these writers, the rhythm and melody of language gave it “the power to transport us into the emotional domain of an unseen world.”