Rudi has taken the concept of the meme and turned it into a memoir on his personal music history. And he has passed the torch on to me to do the same.
Some people would give lazy, impatient readers a hyperlink to jump down to the survey at this point. I am not such a person. Scroll down yourself if you’re that impatient. Otherwise, journey back in time with me…
Growing up, I can’t remember a time that wasn’t filled with music. Some people nowadays play music for their babies in utero, hoping to raise smart children. My parents played music all the time because they loved music. I think we grew up pretty smart, so I guess it was a side benefit anyway.
We listened to all sorts of music in our house — country, Mo-Town, folk, pop, classic rock, disco, classical… We were exposed early to the Beatles (whom we liked) and to Bob Dylan (whom we didn’t). Dad has a recording of me (maybe when I was five?) and Josh (who must have been two) singing “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.” I believe there also is a recording of us doing “Put the Lime in the Coconut.” I can remember him later trying to arrange a family a capella version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” while we were driving to pick up our Friday night pizza once.
When we got up in the morning, the radio went on. And something was playing on the stereo pretty much until we went to bed. We fell asleep to music (I, in particular, liked a Sesame Street recording called Good Night, Bird and, later, a Kenny Loggins album, Return to Pooh Corner).
Dad had a system wired through the house so he could listen uninterrupted to the same music in the dining room, the living room, and the den. He had a separate sound system — which included my Uncle George’s reel-to-reel player — in what used to be his dark room. The deck had outlets and speaker shelves for his outdoor audio set-up, which was really just a boombox that he set up to provide surround-sound. There were radios in the kitchen, the bathroom, and all the bedrooms.
Josh and I had our own record player in our bedroom and our own set of records.
Even our tv watching was music themed — from Band Stand with Mum to The Muppet Show to The Mandrell Sisters, The Patridge Family reruns, Jackson 5 cartoons, and Donnie and Marie. Fame was a particular favorite of mine.
I don’t remember John Lennon being shot, but I recall Mum crying when Harry Chapin died.
I remember my first musical angst was brought on in fourth grade when I felt peer pressure to like Michael Jackson‘s Thriller instead of the John Denver and Harry Chapin I preferred. Little did I know that while I would one day come to know most of the words to the songs on Jackson’s famous album, that I would still be listening John Denver and Harry Chapin all these years later. (In fact, we watched a the John Denver wildlife concert on WETA Saturday night.)
When I was in middle school, I bought a stereo at a church sale for a dollar. It came complete with a turn table, a receiver, two speakers, and an eight-track player. For those of you who are my age (or younger), an eight-track player is the predecessor to a tape player, which is (for my really young readers) the predecessor to a cd player. If you don’t know what a cd player is, you’re too young to read my blog.
I don’t know what record or tape I first spent my own money on (Mum might), but two of the earliest that Josh and I bought (sometime in middle school) must have been Christian hair band Stryper‘s Yellow and Black Attack (the record itself was blue translucent vinyl) and Cher‘s eponymous album.
High school brought my first concerts — at Lake Compounce amusement park. The first was Tiffany (I still have the huge concert tee and sleep in it periodically), with New Kids on the Block opening. The second was New Kids as the main act.
I headed to college in 1992 with a brand new cd player and one cd — Enya‘s Watermark — both gifts from my folks. I think REM‘s Out of Time might have been the first cd I actually bought, but I don’t remember. I discovered Tori Amos my freshman year through an appearance on David Letterman’s show. Kim brought the Indigo Girls to my attention my junior year, the same year Eric gave me a greater appreciation for James Taylor. (I bought us tickets to see him that summer at Hartford’s newly built Meadows amphitheatre — our concert preceded the actual inaugural concert by a few days and our inside “seats” were actually folding chairs.) Danny introduced me to Dar Williams my senior year.
And since then it’s been a little of this, a little of that. I’ve been to Newport Folk Fest, Lilith Fair, Falcon Ridge, and New Haven Folk Festival. I’ve seen Paula Cole at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Erin McKeown at a House o’Muzak (now Hear at the HOMe) house concert, Bob Dylan at Jones Beach, Vance Gilbert at a house concert in what used to be a church, John Mayer at the Oakdale, and David Wilcox at a church on Cap Hill. I’ve seen Richie Havens in Middletown, Odetta in New Haven, The Nields in Hartford, Joni Mitchell in New York, Paul McCartney on Long Island, James Taylor in Virginia Beach, and Simon and Garfunkel in D.C.
So it’s always a mix of new and old, pop and folk, mainstream and indie. And that’s good. But overall what matters is that I keep listening and sharing and singing along. And that you sing with me.
One of my favorite monologues in television history comes from The Monkees, the reruns of which I watched as a teenager. It’s from an episode where Peter Tork accidentally makes a deal with the devil to give up his soul in exchange for the ability to play the harp and make beautiful music that made people happy. The quote is from Mike Nesmith’s defense of Peter:
No, you didn’t give him the ability to play the harp. You see, Peter loved the harp, and he loved the music that came from the harp and that was inside of him. And it came … it was the power of that love was inside of Peter. It was inside of him from the first. And it was that kind of power that made Peter able to play the harp and you didn’t have anything to do with it at all. Don’t you understand what that means when you have that inside of you? What comes out. If you love music, man, you can play music. If people say I can’t carry a note, I can’t say, I can’t sing, I’m tone deaf. But nobody’s tone deaf and if you love music you can play music. And all it takes is just love, because, baby, in the final analysis, love is power. That’s where the power’s at. And you want to tell me that you gave it to him but I know different, because I’m a musician.
And, with that, I give you the meme:
Total volume of music on my computer:
My iPod has 3.84 GB of music on it — 881 songs or just over 55 hours of music. (Rudi and I also have about 1,500 cds between us, which is how I still listen to most of my music. I downloaded weeks’ worth of music onto my computer at Wes, and it was just too painful to lose it all when I left, so now I just have a day’s worth of music on the work machine and mostly just tune in BBC Radio via the Web or Grassy Hill Radio via iTunes.)
The last CD I bought:
The last CD I bought would technically be Phil Roy’s Issues + Options, my June selection from Ronald’s Record Club. The last CD I went out and bought intentionally would be Bruce Springsteen’s Devils and Dust, a birthday gift from Gramma to Rudi. The last CDs I bought for me were two used Oasis Acoustic compilation discs. I bought all three of those at Turn It Up in Northampton, Mass.
Song playing right now:
On Virgin Radio’s iTunes feed during the final editing process: ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” The Killers’ “Somebody Told Me,” The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” and The Callings’ “Wherever You Will Go.”
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
The first one is a listen-to-a-lot song, but the rest are songs that I have strong associations with.
- “The World Ain’t Slowin’ Down” by Ellis Paul
- “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” by Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand
- “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill
- “Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard” by Paul Simon
- “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie
If, like in Ally McBeal, we were going to pick personal anthems, this would be mine. It never fails to leave me dancing and singing along (although I sing silently when on the Metro) and smiling. And it never fails to leave someone else smiling as they watch me do this in public. And we all need a little more of that in our lives.
We were performing the play Send Me No Flowers the night in middle school when my dad’s mom died, and this was one of the songs that was played during the intermission. I think of her whenever I hear it.
This was my prom theme and I will forever stop what I’m doing when it comes on the radio. For the record, I had a perfect time at my prom with my best friend, Danny. We danced a lot that night.
My senior year of college, I started dating Rudi, who is a big Simon and Garfunkel fan. I borrowed a Paul Simon cd from Rebs and played it for several weeks with my door open (my door was always open in college). One day I turned around during “Mother and Child Reunion” and Brian was standing there. Meeting Brian led to my coming into the darkened Blackstone living room one night to hear him play his guitar.
“You can come in,” he said. “But you have to sing.”
I’m not a good singer, but that wasn’t a sufficient excuse for Brian. And it shouldn’t be. Because music makes us happy and unites us and helps us deal with emotions that are bigger than we are.
Eventually it became a large group of us. Brian and Rudi would play guitar, as would Jeff if he was down visiting Brian. ECN would add his melodic whistle (which surprised Brian the first time Eric did it). The rest of us would sing. We took turns picking songs.
We don’t have a broad repertoire, but we can handle most popular James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel songs (including Paul Simon solo works). We also include a good number of Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, and the occasional Indigo Girls, Beatles, CSNY, and Kansas tunes.
“Me and Julio” is the song we do best. We all sing loud. We join Eric on the whistling. Rudi and Brian strum loudly. It works. And it works well.
Dad played this song every Thanksgiving when my brother and I were growing up. (Chances are he probably played it before we were born, too, but we weren’t around to hear it then.) Josh and I hated the song — it went on for half an hour! So when we got our own bedrooms, we used to close the doors and play our own music when Dad started the song. So he responded by waiting until we were driving home from Gramma and Grampa’s (usually a 10-minute drive) and playing the song in the car’s tape player. So we retaliated by stealing the tape before the next Thanksgiving. The flaw in this plan, of course, is that Dad owned the song on record and could just make himself another copy.
But as many things our parents do that annoy us when we’re kids, this quirky behavior grew on me as I got older, and now I joyfully wait for it to come around on the guitar and join in on the chorus — loud and with feeling. I actually listened to the words — and realized that Mum and Dad had tried to give me a key life lesson here: if ever confronted with a friend’s messy house, do not throw all their garbage over a cliff because you will just have to pick it up again anyway and it will prevent you from being drafted.
Hmmm… maybe that wasn’t quite the lesson I was supposed to take away from the song after all.
Oh, wait, I remember now. It’s that “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.” Come on, join in the movement with me. Now seems like an awfully good time to sing it, don’t you think?
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Well, I will pass this to people who can respond in the comments section here (unless they want to surprise me by telling me they have their own blogs and would like to respond there):
- Dad, because I always brag about his broad musical tastes to people who lament their own parents’ lack of interest in anything recent.
- erik, because he has his finger on the pulse of the music scene, even though he no longer works at Sony.
- Karen, because we were just talking about her musical collection the other day and because she plays Debussy and Chopin so beautifully I used to sit on her doorstep just to listen way back when we were teenagers.
- Rebs, because she had the best collection of cds of the cwm in college and I’d like to know what she’s thinking about music and listening to today.
- Josh, because he, too, lived through “Alice’s Restaurant” and his musical tastes are also good, albeit different from mine.
How about you? Would you like to play, too? Jump right in in the comments section.
I promise to write about my life music, since I think about it a lot and finally figured how to work the 1812 Overture into the story, but you would be remiss not to mention the first 3 concerts you attended which were with the whole family. All three were PPM, one at Yale, the Christmas one at Carnegie Hall, and your first Wolf Trap concert and your meeting Mary Travers. There was also a Mannheim Steamroller Concert which may have been the final all family one was in New Haven.
Comment by DOD 06.15.05 @ 12:06 amJust remembered. Your actual first full family concert was at the University of Oregon. Loretta Lynn et al played. One of the performers was Cal Smith who had the top country song at the time. It was titled “Country Bumpkin.” Although you were quiet for almost all of the concert, you did feel compelled to choose the middle of Smith’s performance of the song to announce your presence. Your mother quickly provided nourishment and cut your singing career short.
Comment by DOD 06.15.05 @ 12:34 amNow Dad is remembering your vocal presence at concerts…I want to note that your very first concert (you won’t remember it – you were in utero) was John Denver at the U of O! You enjoyed it, kicking with the beat!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment by Mum 06.15.05 @ 12:36 amWow, what an interesting yet difficult challenge. Like you, Sprite, I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t music playing at our house. My parents had a record player upstairs that was piped into speakers downstairs so that we could listen to music throughout the house. A wide variety of music was played on that stereo, from my Disney records, to classical music, to folk music, to rock, to new age. Inevitably, the record would get stuck and we’d have to run upstairs to unstick it, but it was definitely worth it. One of my fondest memories from that stereo was dancing around the living room lit by Christmas tree lights with my Uncle Dave to the Nutcracker. We also had a reel to reel player hooked up to the stereo. I know we used it lots, but the only thing I can specifically remember listening to was the original Star Wars: A New Hope Soundtrack (and especially the cantina band song.) I loved it dearly, even then.
My first radio was a little am radio that didn’t get the best reception if I didn’t have it in just the right spot. It didn’t matter, though, because I loved that little radio. I listened to it constantly. It was a big deal when we got a tape recorder that I was allowed to use (I remember that you had the same one, Sprite.) If a song came on the radio that I wanted to tape, I’d run over to the tape recorder, and carefully hold the little radio up to the mic on the recorder until the song was over. The tapes were fuzzy and inevitably there would be background noise, but I thought it was the best thing ever. I still have some of those tapes. I don’t listen to them, but they make me laugh. I still like most of the songs (Billy Joel, Kenny Rogers, and a random selection of people that I don’t remember but still like the song.)
Unlike me, T.K. had a stereo record player that was all her own. (Jeremy and I had a little kids record player we shared, but it didn’t really work for any of the records we might have wanted, so we didn’t get any. Most of the records we listened to were Disney read/sing along versions of their animated movies. We also for some reason had a 45 of “The Candyman.â€) We would dance together for hours in her living room. She had Quarterflash, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the Police’s Sychronicity, Chicago 17 (I think that was the number), Flashdance, the “Mickey†45 and a TV theme song record. She also had a Laura Brannigan 45 that we loved until it was tragically broken (something we both still clearly remember the horror of.) I’m sure she had others, but those are the ones I remember most. For whatever reason, we really loved the TV theme song record (though Quarterflash was a close second.) I don’t remember what was on it except for the Greatest American Hero, which was our favorite. We had a little dance we would do over and over again to that song. The music I heard on her record player was vastly different from the music I loved at home, but I still liked it. It was also around that time that T.K. made me my first mix tape. They were all songs from her records, and she was really goofy during the tape (singing along, making funny voices, etc.) I would listen to the tape for hours, and I still have it (much to her embarrassment.)
I remember when my mom borrowed a “boombox†from work (or something), and I got to tape songs from the radio directly to the tape recorder in the system. It also had a FM radio. I thought at was the slickest thing in the world, and I made many tapes while it was at our house (Rock Me Amadeus by Falco is the only thing I remember for sure taping. What a silly song.) Then it had to go back, and I returned to my little AM radio.
My parents had to get a new car and it was a very exciting time for all of us because it had a fancy new feature besides the AM/FM radio (the old cars only had AM)-a tape player! They joined Columbia House or some such thing to get some tapes, and we were soon able to loudly sing along to Simon and Garfunkel, PPM, Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, the Everly Brothers, the Kingston Trio, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, the Beach Boys, and others. On longer drives, we would take turn picking the tapes. I thought it was the greatest thing.
I don’t remember how old I was when I got my first “boombox.†It had a not one, but two tape players built in a FM radio. I was in heaven. Actually, now that I think about it, I think I got my first tape walkman first, and that was when I bought my first pre-recorded tapes. I can’t remember what my first one was, but it was either Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven on Earth, Debbie Gibson’s Out of the Blue, Tiffany’s first album, or a Whitney Houston tape (don’t remember the name.) I also continued to tape stuff off the radio, and I would borrow my parents’ tapes. I gradually got more tapes, including Paul Simon’s Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Volume 1, some other Belinda Carlisle albums, and REM’s Green and Out of Time.
When CD players first came out, my Auntie Paula and Uncle Dave gave my parents one for Christmas. They also gave them some CDs. I think that they were all new age type of music-Mannheim Steamroller, Ray Lynch, Kitaro, Yanni, etc. We were all so excited. Eventually, the records started being replaced with CDs (though not even close to all of them. My parents still have a large collection of records and a turntable.) We still had the tapes for the car, though, and I still bought stuff on tape for my room.
T.K. went to France for a few weeks the summer after our junior year. While she was gone, I raided her tape collection. She had an album called Wonderland by a little group called Erasure. All it took was one song, and I was hooked. They are now one of my absolute favorites, and I have everything they’ve done. I even saw them in concert once in NYC with Erik (thanks, Sweetie!) Erasure also helped me discover that I love “Brit Pop.â€
Eventually my parents got a stereo with a built in CD player, and I bought their original one. It hooked straight into my boom box. This is when my music collection really started to take off (thanks largely in part to cheap Tower Records sales and gift certificates from my Auntie Paula and Uncle Dave.) I can’t for the life of me remember which CD was the first one I ever bought or was given as a gift. The first true “stereo†that I owned was a high school graduation gift.
In high school, TK and I went to our first concert-Richard Marx. Later on, I went to what is still one of my favorite concerts, Paul Simon’s Rythym of the Saints tour. He forgot the words to one of his songs (much to his embarrassment) and had so much fun playing You Can Call Me Al that he did it again. Since then, I’ve gone to a variety of concerts. I’ve seen the Indigo Girls many times, went to Lilith Fair with Sprite (another one of my favorites, and Sprite and I had a blast. Thanks, Sprite!), went to see REM in New Haven by myself (thanks for letting me borrow your car, Rudi!), saw John Gorka a couple years in a row where we were so close we could talk to him, and many others. These days, I tend to be pickier about what concerts I go to. I guess I’m getting older and I don’t like being out as late (not that I don’t stay up just as late at home.) I like the smaller venue concerts, and really go for the folkier concerts more than the others.
Rick has introduced me to a bunch of singers that I didn’t really know before, including Geoff Moore, Cindy Morgan, Sarah Masen, and others that are really too many to name. he has also reintroduced me to old friends like Billy Joel, and I now know that there are some “country†artists that I can actually enjoy (though I’d probably wouldn’t pick to listen to them on my own.) Sure, our tastes definitely differ (he can’t stand some of my music, like Ani Difranco, and I can’t stand some of his, like Celine Dion), but overall our music collection has melded quite nicely.
Over the last 13 years or so, I’ve picked up new singers from a variety of places. TK brought me John Gorka (one of my favorites, and many thanks to Sprite’s Dad for letting me borrow John’s Out of the Valley on CD before I had any John CDs of my own!), the Story, and Laura Love. Sprite brought me October Project and Dar Williams. Erik brought me a expanded appreciation for Brit Pop. Sprite and Eric brought me JT. Rudi reintroduced me to Paul Simon’s stuff before Graceland. I found Grey Eyed Glances from Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought…†(I’m forever grateful that I decided to click on that because they’re now one of my favorites.) We discovered Willy Porter and Riley Armstrong when they opened for other singers. Fernando Ortega was found by a chance listening to the radio. Paige came from one of those listening stations at a store. Bebo Norman, Loreena McKennitt, and David Walburn were both heard playing in stores. I still love good soundtracks (Pirates of the Carribean is one I have trouble taking out of my stereo once it goes in, and I’ve lost track of the number of Star Wars CDs we own.) My friends and family are still my biggest influence on my music collection, and I’ll forever be “musically obsessed.â€
Now that I’ve rattled on and on (hey, I kind of lumped it all into short paragraphs near the end because it was taking so long and so much room!), here’s the actual meme. Sorry if I was too long.
Total volume of music on my computer:
Shockingly, not very much. I have a CD player in both vehicles, most rooms in the house, and at work, so I don’t use an MP3 player. As a total music junkie, I feel like I’m violating some sort of “musically obsessed people’s code.†I just don’t know when I’d use one since I don’t have any place where I’d really listen to it via headphones, and my CD players really suit me just fine. I would have killed for something like that while commuting back and forth between WA and CT, though. My CD’s still show the battle scars of being carried in a large backpack back and forth. What can I say, I couldn’t be without my music.
The last CD I bought:
La Loop by Riley Armstrong. Riley is a goofy guy from Canada that we saw open for Bebo Norman. Want to hear a recipe for banana bread set to music? Riley has one. He also has lots of wonderful songs that aren’t so goofy, and he has a great voice. You should also see him dance. It’s hilarious.
Song playing right now:
Fall to Find You by Riley Armstrong (from La Loop.) Earlier, it was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
1. “If You Could See What I See†by Geoff Moore and the Distance: Rick introduced me to this song while I was still in CT. He put it on the first mix tape he made for me. It’s a great song with great lyrics, and we now consider it “our song.†We danced to it at our wedding reception. Sure, we forgot that we were using the boom box that had problems with the CD if the volume was up too loud, so it sounded like Max Headroom (thus making us crack up and end it early) but it was still special.
2. “Only Living Boy in New York†by Simon and Garfunkel: It has long been one of my favorite S & G songs, but when we started having our sing alongs in college, it became special. Rudi and Brian would always make sure they played it, and I’m not sure how crazy anyone else was about the song, but we sang it every time. The last sing along we had at Conn before I moved back, Brian and Rudi played it for me, and I don’t think I sang much with it because I was sobbing through the whole thing. Even now, just thinking about that night makes me choke up because it meant so much to me (and still does.) I don’t sing very well, but no one cared. We all sang loudly and happily, and they were some of my best college moments. I miss those sing alongs.
3. “Going to the Sun†by David Walburn. We discovered David while we were in Glacier National Park for our honeymoon. We heard his “West for America†CD playing in a gift shop, and loved his voice. David is a local singer from Whitefish, MT, which is by Glacier. Every summer, he plays nightly concerts in the park. Unfortunately, we missed him while we were there. We’re now kicking ourselves about that. We bought the CD, and it quickly became a favorite, and we now have all his CDs. I have also spoken to him on the phone and found him to be a very nice and humble man. I wrote him a “thanks for your beautiful music†letter when I was ordering one of his CDs for Rick’s birthday a few years back. David responded by writing a return letter, and including a free copy of his then unreleased album Montana, which is all about his love for his beautiful home state. This song is on that album, and is about Glacier, so it’s extra special.
4. “Big Red Boat†by Grey Eye Glances: It’s almost impossible for me to pick a favorite GEG song, but if I had to, this would be the one. I adore it.
5. “Sleep†by Riley Armstrong: If I had to pick a theme song, this would probably be mine. This song has such lyrics as “sleep, no I never get enough, always waking up tired…†He also sings about “today I get to eat cereal†as though it were the best thing in the world. Since I eat cereal every morning, this is also rather appropriate for me.
Five (or less) people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Well, I’m not sure who all reads your blog, Sprite, and you said Erik already, but I’d be interested in reading Brian’s, too.
Comment by Rebs 06.21.05 @ 7:44 pm