My Music History

I've been doing FaceBook for the past few weeks. It has its appeals, but the flow of updates is so constant that everyone just does quick and fluffy stuff. I still prefer this format for meatier topics. For instance, a lot of people post "Top Five" lists, but they lack detail and story. It doesn't mean a whole lot to know someone likes something; much more interesting is knowing why.

What follows will be disjointed, somewhat episodic, full of gaps, and possibly out of chronological order, but every so often I ponder how I ended up with the musical tastes I have. Here's a recollection of some of my musical influences, as time, emotion, and memory have distorted them, in three-and-two-quarters movements of increasing length and importance:

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I can't for the life of me remember ever going to the library for storytime or anything like that, but I know we had lots of different music in school, Sunday school, and that kind of thing. And my parents were both teachers and read to me a lot and did other "storytimey" things. I do specifically remember one record of kids songs that I listened to quite a bit, with titles like Tie Me Kangaroo Down, On Top of Spaghetti, and I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.

And my parents directed a church camp every summer until I was seven. Lots of campfire songs, both Christian and otherwise.

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Four-part harmony was a big deal in our Mennonite church, so I grew up singing hymns and other things there. It was a natural extension to take the choir option in middle school and I followed that track all the way through. Choir all through high school, including the select one as I got older. In the end, despite my shyness and discomfort on stage, I did two years of junior college on a vocal music scholarship. Show choir wasn't really my thing, but I did it, as well as the jazz and renaissance group. I even remember some avant-garde stuff. Had some social crossover with the drama group and watched a good deal of music theater.

I haven't really continued any of that since leaving juco except a taste for renaissance music. And I'm afraid I never did get fully competent at reading music.

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My dad was passionate about country music, and that's all I ever heard on the radio growing up. It's all I really knew of popular music. He had a collection of records from his earlier years, but I don't remember him pulling them out much. I do remember the pride he took in converting his college athletes to country.

I can't remember how old I was, but one time when we were traveling we checked into a hotel really late. Someone switched on the TV while we moved our luggage in, unpacked, and started preparing for bed. I got to see a couple minutes of The Cars' Shake It Up and thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard. I went through a big Cars phase later in middle school, probably directly related to this moment.

In maybe sixth grade I remember one time while we all waited in line for lunch someone was taking a poll for the school newspaper or something. The question was favorite song. I think I answered Alabama's Mountain Music. Everyone else around me said Styx's Mr. Roboto. Everyone. It was an epiphany moment. Until then I knew other music existed, but I thought everyone had diverse tastes and listened to lots of different things with little agreement. At that moment I realized all of my peers had a shared interest in music that I wasn't getting. Soon after I asked for my first clock radio and discovered radio beyond country.

For a period I worked every night to stay awake until midnight, when the radio station would play Michael Jackson's Thriller. It was the thrill of my day. My parents got me one of those old-style, single speaker, recordable cassette players. The Thriller album was the first music I purchased with my paper route money, and I listened to it over and over.

My second purchase was Yes' 90215. I listened to it even more.

Eventually I decided to join the BMG music club. To start you'd buy something like 1 or 2 albums and get 10 or 13 free. Then each month they'd send you the selection of the month unless you opted out, with lots of deals for buying other things. I showed my catalog to a peer with my initial selections circled. I learned from his reaction that Spandeaux Ballet and Air Supply were not the way to go if I wanted to connect socially. I ended up buying hundreds of cassettes that are still sitting in cases out in my garage. Some were the Van Halens and other popular things and some were my offbeat tastes as I experimented with lots of different things.

As the oldest of three and with country the only popular influence in my house, it took a while for me to discover things that weren't on the radio. Eventually, through the help of friends with older siblings and a few older friends of my own, my exposure was broadened to things like older Yes, Styx, Queen, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and some of the music from the 70s. I think Peter Gabriel's So was the first album that had me discovering older music on my own, both all of his previous solo work and a lot of Genesis. Now that I think about it, I knew much more of the synthesizer music than the guitar variety.

One thing I quickly discovered about myself was I got bored with hearing the same music over and over. If I didn't want country, my only radio options in the Wichita area were pop or classic rock. Even though I got a good dose of both, they ended up being quite repetitive. I much preferred my disparate mix of cassettes.

For the longest time we didn't have cable, so I missed the advent of MTV. If I'm remembering correctly, one of the stations would play an hour of videos every Friday at midnight and I watched that whenever I could. It was awesome.

Eventually in high school we got cable and I did lots of MTV. Often at night or other times when the rest of the family wasn't around. I eventually realized it was much like radio, however, playing the same mix of songs over and over all too often. In juco I discovered the middle-of-the-night alternative rotation. Alternative! What a whole new world. I was in love. If only there had been something like the Internet to expand my still-living-at-home world. I got lots of little bits and loved what I saw, but it was much too infrequent.

One of the fun things from MTV was Dr. Demento's Top 20 Most Demented Video Countdown. Most of it was quirky parody music like Wierd Al, but this one song really stood out: Don't Let's Start by They Might Be Giants. I had recovered somewhat from my BMG addiction and learned not to buy anything unless I'd heard at least two songs I liked. It wasn't until Birdhouse In Your Soul made the radio a couple of years later that I could be sure I was in love and allowed myself to really discover TMBG.

I kept up with radio, MTV-then-VH1, and other popular music through my 20s, always interested in new things, but I wouldn't call anything since early college really formative. The Internet has been a huge blessing for those in small towns and other places without a music scene, but I am just old enough to have missed out on that when it counted. I find as I get older I'm less interested in new things (although always on the lookout) and mostly happy to dwell in my oldies and their recent releases.

And my radio time is now devoted to sports talk or audiobooks. I'm officially old.

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I've known since sometime in high school were I ever to start a band--which I have absolutely no interest in doing, but still--the name of the band would be Neanderthal Bard. We'd tell stories with our songs and poetically keep the oral identity of the community just like the bards of old, just with more aggressive music.

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And, finally, my Top Five:
--Peter Gabriel
--They Might Be Giants
--Juno Reactor
--The Violent Femmes
-- . . . OK, there's not a fifth selection on the same tier as those four. There is a ton of music I love, but none that I revisit quite as often or as lovingly as those four. Early 80s Genesis, 80s Police and Sting (Wrapped Around Your Finger still calls to my teen-wizard-wannabe more than anything else), Boiled in Lead, Weezer, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Stop-Making-Sense-Talking Heads, M.I.A., Califone, Mozart, and many others, but nothing else worthy of calling Top Five.