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Music and How You Found It
I’m fairly new here and not sure what the rules are about content. I get that center-right, as this site is advertised, implies politics, but my mind ran contrary to the fate of the Republic. I’m thinking right now about music and how I came upon the stuff I like.
For too long all I heard on the radio was gaga, or googoo. My formative musical years were dull, like most people in high school during the eighties or any other time when a palate was presented to you by someone else. DJs had an iron grip on what we heard. There were good songs, but formulaically so. I had my predictable rebellion where I listened to Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and The Grateful Dead and considered myself cultured in the small sphere in which I inhabited. But I was buffered.
Then I went to camp.
My 12-year-old self, along with a cadre of compatriots, were roused daily by a pre-recorded reveille blasted through a WWI surplus speaker system. The entirety of Monteagle, TN, could hear it and no doubt they hated us for it. But we were kids. Nothing woke us up. So our friendly councilors, armed with a boom box, made sure we got up.
They would play at maximum volume songs I had never heard before. The Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun,” UB40’s version of Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine.” These were get-the-hell-out-of-that-bunk songs played at crummy side table shaking volume. You do not sleep through a Gordon Gano rant.
What struck me was that I had never heard either song before. I thought I was pretty savvy for a pubescent know-nothing, but here was a world of cool sounds that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know about.
I think one of the counselors was named Kevin. Probably Kevin. Anyway, I asked likely Kevin how he found these bands. They weren’t on the radio. Billboard said nothing about them. How did you get hold of this? He told me that when I got back home I needed to find an independent record store and simply ask the clerk what I needed to listen to.
In the mid-eighties, Odyssey Records on 6th Ave. South in Birmingham, AL had the honor of employing a guy who got suspended from Shades Valley High School in December of ’67. At the time, Shades Valley was a catch-all for students around the metroplex. If you were in an unincorporated area, you went to Shades Valley. It got a reputation because if you got kicked out of anywhere in the area, you went to Shades Valley. It didn’t make a lot of CVs. That said, the place has made a U-turn. They have a program within the school that is somehow a separate school that shares the same campus and WaPo ranked them 9th among America’s most challenging high schools.
That guy got suspended because he put the flag at half-mast when he heard that Otis Redding died. You can imagine that when I came in and asked what I should be listening to, per my camp counselors instructions, I left with an Otis Redding’s Greatest Hits album. My listening life has never been the same.
I’m not claiming any esoteric library. Most of what I listen to is pretty accessible by today’s standards, but stuff you would have only known about in the ’80s because some weird kid had a t-shirt.
Otis isn’t the punk or alternative that I listen to more often than not, but I’m now a sucker for Motown and Atlantic Rhythm and Blues. Always will be. That suspendee turned me on to so many other bands — Pixies, R.E.M, Sex Pistols, The Pogues, Linda Ronstadt and Warren Zevon by extension, and so many more. My kids can sing along to most Supremes songs. I got approving looks in the hardware store checkout line when my son sang along to the piped-in “Ziggy Stardust.” On a whitewater trip, my seven-year-old made friends with the river guide because of The Joshua Tree.
I’m all over the place musically, but I can track my tastes back to a 17-or-so-year-old camp counselor and a really nice guy with a mar on his permanent record.
Life is odd.
Published in General
I listen to a lot of things. At work it is either classic rock (60s – 80s) or country & western if I’m documenting or debugging. Classical when I’m designing. Jazz in the evenings, or classical. Sometimes I just start bingeing on some sub-genre or composer. Ennio Morricone came up a few nights ago – “The Ecstasy of Gold” and others. Frequently I will seek out instrumentals: “would you cut back on the caterwauling please? I’m trying to groove to that riff.” I guess that probably explains my antipathy to both opera and rap. Opera because the singing gets in the way, and rap because the words are all there is.
I wore the grooves out of Houses of the Holy, my second LP. Today if Led Zep comes on the radio I give it about 45 seconds then flip to another station. It was great music, it just hadn’t aged well. Doors same same.
PS: Abbey Road was first. And still one of the best.
I have to confess that I have started to listen to opera only because I enjoy “Endeavor” on Masterpiece Theater and he plays opera records when he sorts out crime data. I’m kind of a sucker for such things as dictated by stories. Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories have me wanting for a sandwich stored in a jacket pocket. Ian Rankin’s Rebus books demand that I eat a “Fish Supper” and I’m not even sure what that involves, but I make fish and chips and have a Scotch just to settle accounts. When Cary Grant and soon to be royalty Grace Kelly eat cold chicken in To Catch a Thief, guess what I want.
This is just to funny to not mention, but I had a Houses of the Holy t-shirt at the camp I wrote about. We had weekly dances and a councilor asked if he could borrow my shirt. I said sure and never got it back, but I didn’t care. Years later, I’m a groomsman at his cousin’s wedding and I haven’t seen him since. First thing he says to me is, “About your shirt…” and what followed was a tale of innocence lost.
I had the good misfortune to come of rock n roll age (whatever that means) in AZ in the later-mid-70s. We had an ‘album rock’ station, a ‘hard rock’ station that was formerly a bubble-gum pop station (KUPD, get it?), and a proto-alternative station that quickly died on the vine. Rock slanted a little to the Eagles/Southern-fried axis until…M. T. V.
Suddenly: New Wave, Synth Pop, and other aspects of British reconquista. I couldn’t get enough – particularly since we didn’t have cable.
Musicians had to come up with
erpersonas and performances pronto. Sure there were stage shows and television appearances before, but the camera was now part of every song and new musicians needed to stand out; as with the advent of ‘talkies movies’, there Videos were and remain fascinating things – many age even faster than the music they accompany – those outfits, that hair!It’s always funny how these things either hit you or they don’t. I think Plastic Beach is my favorite record of theirs, but it’s a close call – I’d probably tell you that whichever of their first three I’d listened to last is their best.
When I first heard the bell waves that creep upward and down throughout the song, I was just floored.
Did anyone take greater advantage of that emerging media than Duran Duran? Like or love, they were on top of things.
I’ll hear Johnny Rivers’ cover of “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” and that will lauch me into a spate of honky tonk piano tunes.
The things you forget. After reading this I said, “Alexa, play…” Thank you. So good.
That sounds like a blast, but I’m so far away and my vacation slots have been filled with kid friendly stuff. Tip a glass to me when you’re there if that’s your inclination. Have a great time.
Also, as for contemporary music goes, there are a bunch of artists that people might not know are still at it. Aimee Mann, Weezer, Built to Spill (if anybody even knew about them to begin with), and my favorite, Elvis Costello.
For me it was my new step-dad’s love of jazz. I listen to and buy jazz almost exclusively now, and I am much improved by his example(s).
And, I would argue, literally popular.
As a party game, name a singer Elvis Costello hasn’t done a duet with. That guy is absurdly prolific.
Anyone that gets a cult is destined to be devalued. I don’t much like those guys either. Pretentious and unpleasant.
I received an unsolicited email from an outfit that sells audiophile grade audio files for download. I had never heard of this composer or the pianist. The audio previews are pretty good quality — I played them through my stereo right off my laptop. The recording was all rags written by a living composer (William Bolcom). I left it for a couple days, then one of the pieces stuck in my ear and almost the same time I ordered both the music files and also a couple books of the composer’s piano music, then not long after the CD and iTunes files so I could listen to the tunes on all my platforms. This music has been seriously fun both to play on my keyboard and listen to. RB always asks me to bring the CD’s when we go on roadtrips. Spencer Myer the pianist really makes this music fun.
Edit: Corrected artist name and added YouTube video.
Endeavor is the “prequel” to Inspector Morse. It tries to explain some of what made Morse, an Oxford graduate, as “a character whose talents and intelligence are being wasted” in solving local crimes. The newer Endeavor is a good show, but has many modern “woke” ideas inserted into his career. Each year, Masterpiece Theater gets worse, with the recent Jane Austin’s unfinished book Sanditon being unwatchable.
As for Opera, it is for many an acquired taste. Yes, many plot lines have holes, and the musical gems are sometimes too short relative to the sung dialogue, but where could you get great music, and for many early operas, a dance too. The Broadway musicals of the 1940’s – 1960’s stack up well with classic operas up to the Puccini era.
Oh man, love this topic.
I was raised on a small island in Casco Bay Maine in the 70s and going into the 80s.
Only thing we got to hear was what was on the radio, which was very limited. Every now and again, I’d be able to go into town, (Portland), and would go to the record store to buy some stuff if I had any money. When I bought Black Sabbath “Masters of Reality”, I knew I was a metalhead at heart.
Then the 80s came and EVERYTHING got horrible… Foreigner was once a hard-rocking band, Pat Benatar, etc… Hell even KISS had a disco-type album. PAINFUL to listen. The hardest thing on the radio was Judas Priests’ “You Got Another Thing Coming” and that was only played on the radio at late nights. UGH
Anyway, my parents split and I move to the DC with my dad in the mid 80s.
Was sitting outside a Little Caesers in Wheaton, MD when my friend put this on and immediately I was like, “Where Has This Stuff Been All My Life?” Was like the clouds opened up and I saw the light for the first time.
Nowadays though there is SOOO Much stuff out there and easy to get via Youtube I can’t keep up.
I just came across these guys the other day. It’s such a wonderful time to be alive indeed!
Related to “how you found music” a friend now teaches opera at a major music school. But his childhood didn’t include a lot of classical music. He did enjoy musical theater and only later realized that opera is a form of musical theater. So he started loving opera, and enjoys making opera accessible to people who do not have an extensive classical music background.
A friend of my brother used to pick an album almost at random from a small record store about once per month. That’s how we encountered Badlands (self-titled album and Voodoo Highway), The Scream (Let It Scream), and Circus of Power (Magic & Madness) — all Southern rock blended with early 90s rock and grunge.
More recently, I occasionally hear something in a TV episode (usually at the end) and look up the song. That’s how I discovered Susan Enan and the song “Half Acre” by HEM.
I’ve even learned about a few songs from video games. But more often, in that regard, the soundtracks interest me. There is no more relaxing music than the Elder Scrolls soundtracks by Jeremy Soule.
The soundtrack for Everquest 2 was actually composed by a student of John Williams named Laura Karpman. She also scored Chocolat and other Hollywood films.
But MTV was alright in the days of Headbanger’s Ball. That’s how we found Testament (The Ritual), Corrosion of Conformity (Deliverance), King’s X (self-titled album) and other bands in the early 90s.
I had a middle school church youth group leader who turned me on to André Crouch. This, in turn, led to an interest in soul/gospel/funk, which allowed me to bypass the disco all my friends where listening to.
Then I heard “Message In The Bottle” by The Police, and I got into what would eventually be called alternative. music. I was in choir in high school and college, which accounts for my love of Beethoven, and my dad owned a truck stop in the 70’s, which explains why I like country. Oh yeah, and once hair metal hit in the 80’s, I decided to ignore it and go back to the roots of rock n roll, which led me to Muddy Waters and Albert King and eventually Robert Johnson.
And then in 1986, KEYX, a small station way outside of Phoenix started playing “alternative” music, and all of a sudden, I realized that I was not alone in my musical tastes. They were playing the Cure! And Love and Rockets! And The Smiths! On the radio! KEYX morphed into KUKQ, an AM station that was in-town, and the alternative scene in Phoenix really took off. Bands would come into town to tune up their sets before playing the clubs in L.A., and I’d go see The Pixies and Soundgarden and The Beat Farmers and JFA and Phoenix’s own The Meat Puppets in small little clubs, usually around Arizona State University.
And then there was Q-Fest, the precursor to Lollapalooza. Epic bands, small venues, great times.
You sure picked a topic that gets this community going! As a small kid, my dad bought me a turntable that looked like a suitcase, and bought me my first Beatles record. He’d haul home used albums for me, Elvis (I didn’t like), Alvin & the Chipmunks (I liked), so it started there. In my grade school, we were treated to a field trip to Heinz Hall (Pgh) for a classical concert – I was hooked! It sounded like the background music to make favorite cartoons like Bugs and Daffy! My friends’ older siblings gave us their “old” stuff, like the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits, and was hooked on British bands. Enter hard rock, so add that to the list. As I got older, jazz entered the favorites column, along with Big Band and Movie scores – yes John Williams! Any kind of classical – just one thing…….no country!!
Fast forward to finding a CD at the local book library sale of Willie Nelson – loved it. Since then I’m game for fun old and news sounds. Yesterday at the semi-annual library sale I picked up – are you ready…..? The Music of Eastern Europe (all classical – comes with a map and a pocket translator), Reflections of Chopin, Music of the Caribbean – the New Islanders, Compact Jazz with Sarah Vaughn, A Troubadour’s Christmas by Bill Schustik (who?!), and Les Chansons De Paris (French music)! And to think it all started with Alvin and the Chipmunks!
PS… I also added two more Daniel Silva spy novels to my collection yesterday!
Now that reminds me of one of my own finds. We were on our honeymoon in Tronno and went into a Sam Goody. We were looking around, my wife with purpose and I more randomly. I came across this CD with this cover:
I may have had no idea what it was, but I had to get it. It was my best discovery. These guys are great fun. There is more to the story, though. They are Newfies and don’t come to the US or sell in most US outlets (or didn’t back in those days). A few years later, we were visiting the Stratford Festival in Ontario. We stopped into this record/CD store. The guy had never heard of them. At this point, we didn’t know if they were a one-off or what. But the guy tried looking them up. He finally called a store in the next town over (Sebringville) that specialized in Canadian artists.
We heard his end of the conversation:
“Hi, Judy. I have some customers here looking for albums by a group called Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers…”
“You’ve heard of them? You actually have some? Oh, alright, I’ll send them on over to you.”
Well, we motored on down the road and picked up several more albums. By this time, some of them also had a Web address on them. Since then, we have seen the band twice live, both times in Canada.
I had to rely a great deal on Dad’s album collection.
Back in the 60s/70s, radio stations weren’t so targeted. You could hear Led Zeppelin and John Denver on the same station, back-to-back. My tastes always leaned towards the more commercial, but still somewhat eclectic.
I’m doing my best to instill the same mix in my kids, so I’ve got my 13-year-old listening to a lot of “my” music. He got an electric guitar for Christmas, and the first thing he wanted to do with it was learn the riff from “Smoke On The Water.” We’ve got tickets to see Billy Joel in concert this summer, and I took him to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra last fall (His first words when the concert ended were “That was fantastic!”).
That made me sad. I laughed, but it made me sad.
The good thing about Endeavor is that it has an endpoint. In the first Morse book the main character is fun from a reader’s standpoint, but he is a jackass. He’s rude and unforgiving to a point that makes you wonder why he doesn’t have more bruises. In Endeavor, the character starts out as a nice but frustrated guy. They do a wonderful job of complicating his life and disillusioning him. It’s Breaking Bad in a sense. You know what’s happening to the character but watching him travel toward his fate is so interesting.
I have to thank my awesome father, with his epic music collection on vinyl, CDs, and other formats. I think you could literally talk about bushels of CDs. He still likes to get me music.
I kind of owe my friend the pastor for introducing me to video game soundtracks, my friend Silence for introducing me to power metal, and a guy named Krow for introducing me to Synthwave. Aside from that Pandora Radio has not only kept me awake through lots of boring work, it has kept suggesting new bands to me.
He was my hero; bought the first one and never wavered until he lost interest in writing tight songs and went for mid-tempo baroque constructions that lacked his usual melodic gift. It’s a dismaying feeling when you buy an album of your favorite artist, and track after track fails to grab you. Same thing happened with Squeeze.
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. ;) And also demonstrably wrong. Metal went into its poofy-hair phase, yes, but New Wave was sharp, and if you liked synth music, the golden age was just beginning.