Music into which I am

I know I had a recent post about concerts, but because music is important to me I decided to write a post about music in general.

As a kid most of what I listened to was kid's music like Raffi and Disney songs that I had on LPs. For those of you that don't remember, music used to come on dinner plate-sized disks made of vinyl. They were known as an LP because they rotated slower than a 45 or a 78. If that doesn't make sense, then you are not in my target market.

Anyway, my parents also had record collections into which I would occasionally delve. I recall my dad having some Beatles, several Chicago albums, the Beach Boys, Bee Gees, and a Burton Cummings album that I liked.

Around about 1983/84 I remember starting to get into watching the music video shows. The one I remember was called 'Video Hits.' Back in those days it was mostly new wave and 80s pop, but I didn't know any better. Maybe that is why I have always been such a big Devo fan.

During that same time, as those who were there know, one artist eclipsed all others on popularity; and that of course was the king of pop himself, David Hasselhoff. Just kidding, it was actually Michael Jackson. At school there were at least 20 kids running around in red faux-leather jackets that were covered in zippers. I never had one, but my best friend at the time, Chad Alexander (I wonder what ever happened to him), certainly did. I credit Michael Jackson for Weird Al Yankovik's meteoric rise to fame during the mid 1980s. It's profound to think that without MJ's 'Beat It,' we would never have had 'Eat It.'

By the time I reached the age of 11 or 12 I began to develop a rudimentary sense of the types of music I enjoyed. My family drove to Disneyland in the summer of 1989 and one of the tapes (a tape was like an LP, but a lot more messy) we took with us was some 'best of' Beach Boys compilation. I listened to it over and over and memorized all the songs, and even started learning some of them on the piano, because everyone wants to hear Beach Boys songs on the piano.

In Grade 7, one of my friends was selling a couple of portable CD players for really cheap. My family had never had a CD player, So I shelled over the $40 and shortly afterward my parents bought me 4 CDs:
-The Righteous Brothers, Unchained Melody
-The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
-The Beach Boys, 20 Golden Greats
-The Monkeys, Best of the Monkeys
Having only 4 CDs, I listened to these 4 albums A LOT. I really liked the Beatles album, so I subsequently bought a couple of others including Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Rubber Soul.

As I went through Jr. High, my tastes in music began to be more heavily influenced by the radio and of course my peers. It was probably around 1991 or 1992 when I first began listening to popular music on the radio to any significant degree. For some reason it seems that there was a lot of dance music that was popular on the radio. Maybe I was just listening to the wrong stations. I just barely missed the whole 'hair' band era (I would have to re-discover it later). This was also the beginnings of the 'grunge' phase.

I first heard Evenflow by Pearl Jam and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana on the radio. At first I don't think I thought too much of either of them, but then when I discovered Columbia House (10 CDs for 1 cent) I decided to get what I thought was 'cool,' which was a lot of this new Seattle-based music. It turns out I liked it, and I ended up listening to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden a lot during that early 90s period.

During my senior year in high school (94-95) I started getting into some of these new 'punk' bands like The Offspring and Green Day. At the same time though, I was actively discovering Classic Rock' for the first time. I went to a Rolling Stones concert in 1994 and quite enjoyed it. I also started to get into older stuff like Pink Floyd, Neil young, Led Zepplin, Eric Clapton, and Rush. At the time it difficult for me to explain to people what kinds of music I liked because it wasn't cool to like classic rock and punk and alternative grunge rock.

I got a guitar when I was 15 and this probably had a significant impact on the kinds of music I listened to. Some of the first stuff I tried learning was Nothing Else Matters by Metallica, Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chile Peppers, and Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne. I ended up getting really into Ozzy and Metallica both of whom I saw in concert in '96. This only complicated things because now I was into punk, grunge, classic rock, and metal.

For the last half of 1996 I lived in Pennsylvania with my aunt and uncle. My cousin Nathan was really into Punk and Hardcore at the time, and so I drifted in that direction; but at the same time I still stayed into everything else. It was during this time that I also got more into the band Bad Religion. Gregory Walter Graffin, Ph.D, who is the lead singer of Bad Religion, is well known for his large vocabulary and poignant commentary on social and political issues. I felt that I could identify with most of the issues he sang about, and so for a time they were my favorite band.

Needless to say, once I became an adult, I no longer had the ability to adapt to new things or know what was cool; so I am more or less still only into the music that was cool in the mid 1990s.

That's not entirely true. I have got more into Raffi again lately.