Both Sides Now

My recent comment about nearly splitting up with my then girlfriend over a Side 1 vs Side 2 issue drew a very heavy response, or should have. Let me explain. Early in our relationship, she the habit of putting on albums without regard to the side so, as often as not, you’d get side 2 first.

We didn’t actually split up. I did call a lawyer, who pointed out that since I wasn’t yet married, he wouldn't be needed. He added that he didn’t think the issue fell under “irreconcilable differences”, anyway, and offered the services of his brother, a psychiatrist.

So I may be in the minority regarding the seriousness of this issue, especially with the advent of the CD. But if vinyl ever makes a comeback, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The problem stems from an assumption (held predominantly by women who just don't take these things seriously enough) that songs are just thrown on a record in random order, so it doesn’t matter what side you play first. This, of course, is patently absurd. Vinyl has always been labeled Sides One and Two, or A and B. Yeah, I know that some artists have put out records that are labeled “This Side” and “That Side”, or some such thing, as if to obfuscate the whole issue. Well, they’re kidding themselves. One of those sides was meant to be side one. You know it. I know it. They know it.

Let’s not even get into song sequence. (Oh, why not? I can just hear the artist now, figuring it all out: “Hey, now, that one would sound better first, and this one would make a boffo ending, and here’s an almost-as-good ending so let’s put that at the end of side one, and, well, that one isn’t great so lets put it after the great one, and we’re gonna have a mini intermission so we’ll need an opener for act 2... You see? It just can’t be helped.)

And what if you played “Tommy” out of order? Thanks to you, a fairly normal kid would end up going blind, deaf and dumb. Do you want that on your head?

I’ll even take it a step further and say that Elvis Costello was wrong when he labeled the sides to “Get Happy!!” He got it backwards. Just listen to that album on vinyl (what do you mean you don’t have it? Go get it, and meet me back here.) and tell me that “I Can’t Stand Up” isn’t the album opener. “Love for Tender” is a classic side two opener. “Hi Fidelity” and not “Riot Act”, is the album closer. I’m boycotting the CD. Yeah, Elvis, you heard me.

Wasn’t the whole point of the invention of the CD to prevent women from pulling this kind of nonsense? Now if you want to start with Side 2 you’ll just have to read the CD player manual and program it that way. Just won’t happen.

And did you ever think that the whole toilet seat issue might just be the male response to the LP issue? Ladies, I’ll make a deal with you. You put on the side of the record I like, and I’ll make sure you see the side of the toilet seat you like.

Most Awful Bands, or, It’s Not You, It’s Me

Up until now, I’ve studiously avoided taking cheap shots at anyone, unless I thought there was a good laugh in it. But my wife tells me that it’s time I learned to direct my natural negativity outward, and, instead of just gracing my own family, share it with the rest of the world. There is something to this. We all have a role in life, and mine appears to be to make those around me miserable. Why not use modern technology to reach my full potential?

And it serves a higher - or at least more practical - purpose. It may not be enough for you to know who I like. Also knowing who I hate completes the picture, and it ain’t pretty.

And if you find that we have the same lists, but that yours is titled “Greatest Bands Ever”, maybe I don’t have that much to say to you. Better that we both know this sooner rather than later. Let’s at least save one of us some time.

Now mind you, these are not artists that I’m merely lukewarm about. There are plenty of those, and it’s nobody’s fault - we’ve agreed to be just friends. I’m talking about artists I despise - artists that have so thoroughly gotten under my skin that I simply must say something or explode. When one of their songs comes on I cannot be held responsible for my actions. These are the Susquehanna Hat Companies of music.

Plus, these guys have all made a ton of money, so really who cares what I think? It’s not like my bashing them means a damned thing. They’ve made many people happy, and have thus made the world a better place. But they sorely challenge my egalitarian instincts and tempt me to conclude that people (not you, of course) have no taste. (This coming from the guy who likes the Flaming Lips…) When I reveal my true feelings for these bands to my friends, I get the looks that are usually reserved for that guy on the train who shouts that the CIA is controlling his thoughts.

And there are easier targets. I could mention Barry Manilow, Celine Dion, Michael Bolton, etc, but they get under other people’s skin, too, so my comments are unnecessary. Not liking them is like saying that you don’t like root canal. Just get in line.

So here goes a short list of artists I can’t stand. If I go to hell, this is what’s on the jukebox:

Journey:

First off, I can never forgive Steve Perry for “Oh, Sherrie”, which I first heard when my clock radio alarm went off at six am one morning. And yes, I had to go to work that day anyway, but the very first sound to rouse me from my slumber was Steve Perry shouting in my ear “Shoulda been gone!” What is this, “Full Metal Jacket”?

I know it’s really a Steve Perry record, but it may as well be a Journey record. Same melodramatic keyboards, same overwrought guitar licks. Journey is the epitome of the “rock (but not “‘n roll”) band”. They probably consider themselves too cool for country music, but will try to sound like a symphony orchestra for cheap melodrama if they can. They’re hardly the only ones in this regard, but I wish they’d just come out and admit that they’re a Vegas act at heart.

And just how high was Steve Perry’s voice before he hit puberty, anyway? In the last episode of “The Sopranos”, I was rooting for Tony to get shot, if only so that a stray bullet might hit the jukebox.

Asia:

These guys did their damnedest to prove that the type of music I loved just didn’t exist anymore. They represent the absolute nadir of early 80s rock, which is really saying something. They chased me from commercial rock stations, for which perhaps I should be grateful. They rocked like John Phillip Sousa and swung like Emerson Lake and Palmer. The singer should have gone into opera. At least they had the decency to go away in record time.

Rush:

I can’t fault the musicianship, but I have never heard anything even remotely enjoyable by these guys. It may be because Geddy Lee sounds like Elvis Costello played at 78 rpm, which can be fun, but only when it’s my thumb on the turntable.

I know a few people who love these guys but I…just…don’t…get it.

Meatloaf:

Not powerful, just loud. And the tunes just aren’t as good as the singer thinks they are. And at the risk of sounding prudish, I find “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” to be incredibly vulgar. He seems like a nice enough guy, though. I wish him great success in his acting career.

Foreigner:

I will admit to the existence of two decent songs by this band, but the singing is strained to the point of constipation. They are without a doubt the blandest rock and roll band in history. If you like these guys, let’s just talk about sports.

REO Speedwagon:

We were having a barbeque a few years ago, and I had “Elastica” playing in the back yard. Not real loud, mind you, but it was there. The next door neighbor, who was about a decade younger than me, must have taken offense, and started blasting REO Speedwagon in response. I found this more hilarious than annoying, since the young ladies from Elastica played with more testicular fortitude than los speedwagoneros. When they placed an ad for a singer, it must have read: “WANTED: Really lame white guy.”

Styx:

Another alarm clock incident, but this time I was pleasantly awoken to the sound of a folk duo playing “Come Sail Away”. Not bad at all. No Dennis DeYoung freaking me out with his high voice. No over the top climax. What a relief. Another band that would get its ass kicked by the Monkees in a street fight.

Boston:

Take a scoop of each of the above mentioned ingredients, add extra bombast, be sure to remove any soul that may have accidentally gotten mixed in. Place it all in a blender. Throw blender away.

Lionel Ritchie:

Nice sweater.

I could complain about hair bands, I suppose but perhaps that’s because I have less of it than I used to. I’m sure that there is some good music in there somewhere, but to me it’s the aural equivalent of a bunch of guys looking at themselves in the mirror. I’m obviously not the target audience, though.

There. I’ve gotten it off my chest. I feel better now.

Now stop looking at me like I pushed Mother Theresa down a flight of stairs...

CD Hangover

Okay, okay, I know it was wrong, but I did it anyway - twice. At AA (or is it AAA?), they say that a slip is not a fall, but what about two slips? Am I officially off the wagon? Was I ever on it? It doesn’t matter. I needed a fix and I got it. I bought some more CDs.

I’d been clean since December, when I got four CDs for Christmas (actually five, if you count the one that was a two-fer). I usually try to work them in as gifts for birthdays or holidays. But this time, I offer no rationalization - I didn’t come from a broken home, I wasn’t abused as a child - I just buy CDs.

As if we’ve got the room. The big CD rack I bought not that long ago is just about full now. Does this mean I finally have to consider, gasp, pruning? No, of course not CDs. Family members.

And if you want to be technical about it, that CD I got in February counts, too. That was when I got “Are You Experienced?”. My son plays guitar and, well, he should know more about Jimi Hendrix, right? So it was for educational purposes. Just don’t mention this to my daughter. She likes show tunes.

But let’s just say that the first real slip was a BMG (let’s call them Enabler #1) order last month when we got six CDs. Now that may seem like a lot, but not when you buy into the whole logic of “the offer”. This particular one was a “buy one, get the rest for a buck each (plus shipping and handling).” So when you do the math, for each CD you buy, you come out more and more ahead. By now I should be a millionaire.

BMG is constantly tempting me in this way - every week a different enticement, each one harder to resist than the last. I do notice the occasional sucker offer - like “Buy 10 CDs and, well, get those 10 at full price (plus shipping and handling)”, but damned if I’m not tempted anyway. I know I can quit at any time, but that just wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the family.

So you’d think that would hold me for a while. But I couldn’t wait, not even for BMG’s state of the art order processing system, which has cut the average wait time from the 6-to-8 weeks of my childhood, down to 6-to-8 days. Not good enough - I had to have new music immediately.

Then I had an idea, which led to slip number two (or three). The way I figured it, this whole “educational” angle had a little more life in it. Since my son is now of record buying age, like many a father before me, who might otherwise bring his son to a bar for his first drink, or worse, I decided that it was time to take him to my favorite record store, where we could spend some quality time together. This used to consist of him hanging around a couple of hours while I went through the stacks. It turns out that this doesn’t alarm him like it used to, when he was, say, five. I take this as agreement. So in my book, that makes him Enabler #2.

Of course, I know the day is coming when he’ll tell me that he doesn’t buy CDs anymore. He downloads everything now, he’ll say. In only 6-to-8 seconds, no doubt. Of course, that’s when I throw him out of the house. That should free up some space. He won’t need it since all of his music will be in hyperspace.

So I pick up a couple of CDs at the store, and my son manages one – a Green Day CD – and we head home. But before I get a chance to play them, the BMG order comes in, and now there’s a bunch of CDs lying around that I can’t get to because now everyone’s watching TV, and my son’s listening to his Green Day CD.

So I go up to the bedroom and try to listen to them while reading. But you can’t really hear new music when you’re trying to comprehend what you read. I try anyway - at least until the third song, when I fall asleep. I do this every night for a week, and by now I’m pretty sick of those three songs. My wife comes up with the novel idea of starting with the fourth song, which only serves to remind me of how we nearly broke up early on in our relationship when she put on side two of an album before side one. It’s a matter of principle, I say. The exact principle doesn’t immediately come to mind, but I do mumble something about how you don’t start reading a book in the middle. I couldn’t say “watch a TV show” because we do that all the time.

So when everyone else goes to bed I go back down to the living room and put five CDs in the carousel player. I sit down on the couch to let it all wash over me, but soon find that I’m much more comfortable lying down, and by the time that third song rolls around I’m out like a light. I awake at 3am as the last CD finishes, no wiser than before, and have to get up for work in a couple of hours..

I may never hear this music.

But then, out of nowhere, on the drive to work, I hear one of the songs on the radio! How the hell did that happen? But now that I’ve spent money on it, maybe I shouldn’t be hearing it for free. I turn it off.

So I try the living room again, because for once the TV’s off, but now someone’s yakking on the phone and not fully appreciating this anticipated masterpiece. Or the fridge is rumbling, or the dog’s unclipped nails are hitting against the bare wood floor. Or. Life.

I have somehow convinced myself that by buying a bunch of CDs all at once like this, I can usher in a golden age of joy and good will. It did happen a couple of times. I’m sure you recall the great REM(“Murmur”)/Velvet Underground(“Loaded”)/Who(“My Generation”) raid in the summer of 1984, and the legendary Moby(“Everything is Wrong”)/Stereolab(“Emperor Tomato Ketchup”)/PM Dawn(”Of the Heart…”) buy in late ’97. Practically all of “why pay rent?” 1980!

But if pressed, I would have to admit that there are at least as many times when they just pile up until I get around to listening to them.

And what about these eight new CDs, you might ask? Well, I don’t know. I may have read some reviews that said they were great but alas, I’ve not had the chance to locate the greatness yet. I’ve obviously not played them enough. Come back to me in a decade or two.

The problem is that at any given moment in time, I may either want to listen to twelve of my CDs at once, or none at all. It’s the latter mood that prompts these CD trips. I don’t know why I never just opt for silence.

I guess I’ll make it through May, but something tells me that when I’m asked what I want for Father’s Day, I’ll be handing my wife a list of CDs.

I can’t be doing this. I’ve got kids to put through college. Well, for now, anyway...

About the Playlists

I thought you could use a reality check for when I rave about some record or other, so I added some play lists. They are my in-no-way-comprehensive personal best-of, comprised of songs that:

• I happen to like a lot. What else?
• Are easy to like. This is for your sake.
• Are not the obvious choices. What’s the point? You already know what you like, and that stuff might be overplayed anyway.
• I could find.

And since I can’t leave well enough alone, I broke the songs down into decades. I don’t know why. I guess I think it’ll be easier to manage, or it will give you something to get your ears around. If you don’t like the one that’s playing, just pause it and start another one.

The louder, less respectable songs are on “Rock and Roll”. I’ve segregated it so that you can go to it when you’re in the mood. I do when I’m pissed off about something.

I moved the stranger songs to a list called “Weird and Wonderful”. Try this when you’re feeling a little adventurous. And who knows, you might not find them weird at all.

I also decided to add a list called “My Idea of Easy Listening”, which is my admission that quiet music can be very powerful. You already knew that, but I may have given you the idea that I don’t like this kind of thing. Not true, and these are the ones that get to me.

Occasionally, I’ll accidentally grab a sloppy live version or mislabeled song. Let me know and I’ll fix it.

My Led Zeppelin Problem, and Yours, Maybe

There are some artists you love, some you think are okay and some that you hate. If you like them, they’re great, if you don’t, they suck. Taste as aesthetic judgment, right?

But then there are those artists who you don’t like as much as you think you should. Or you may respect their talent and acknowledge that their music is well made. But it just doesn’t move you.

Is it just a matter of taste, or something more? What if you, for some reason, actually dislike the artist? Would this get in the way of your enjoying their music? You’d think the two things were separate. I mean, can’t I just listen to the music without it getting personal? (Actually, I can’t even eat breakfast without it getting personal, but that’s another post entirely.) Apparently not. For some of us, music, like sex (now, anyway) requires that we like the person.

This is my Led Zeppelin problem, and it has strained more than one friendship. When my wife and I compare our teen years, it appears that the Led Zeppelin issue could separate neighborhoods, and even nationalities. After all, how many Irish Led Zeppelin fans do you know? (Actually I know two, but stay with me on this.) How many Italian Grateful Dead fans? (See?) There even seemed to be a correlation to your choice of recreational drug.

But to bring it back to me, just how did Zeppelin and I get to this point?

I trace it back to when I was twelve, and hanging out at my best friend’s house. (We almost always hung there instead of my house. Otherwise, he’d be writing about the Grateful Dead right now.) His big brother put on “Led Zeppelin II”, which had just come out. I’d never heard of them. When it got to all the sound effects in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love”, he made the statement that they were “better than the Beatles”, who couldn’t do this. Wouldn’t was more like it, but what did I know then? He was the one with every Beatles album. And, since older kids were the supreme authorities on everything, this was a major challenge to one of my most deeply held beliefs.

To make matters worse, their fans thought that Jimmy Page was “the best guitar player in the world”. In other words, better than Eric Clapton, who, I happened to know, was the best. The idea that some loud, obnoxious axe-man could be better than modest, unassuming Eric was appalling. (A major theme in my Irish/Catholic youth was that conceited people shouldn’t be better at something than modest people, which was why I hated anyone with a high opinion of themselves. Even Elvis Presley’s sneer signaled egotism instead of libido, which was not yet on my radar.) In retrospect, it might have been that Eric just had better press. Still, after all these years, I don’t quite get it. And when you’re twelve – which is where I am now, emotionally – these things matter.

Now let’s add the swaggering, screeching Robert Plant, who was everything I hated in a singer. I much preferred poor, moaning Greg Allman, or kind but demented Jack Bruce. And moreover, Mr. Plant must be made to answer for all of the shrieking, big-haired male singers that followed in his wake.

So for me, Led Zeppelin was the epitome of rock and roll excess. Their music was unseemly. I would never be able to defend them against my parent’s objections like I could the Beatles.

So I hoped that they would just go away, and that the world, as I defined it, would right itself. But just when the memory of their last LP was fading, another one would come out and sell millions, and it would all start over again.

It was only much later that I learned that Led Zeppelin had a reputation for redoing old blues standards and taking songwriting credit. Although these facts do serve to justify my more ethical objections to them, to be fair, I only became aware of this after I decided that I wouldn’t like them. (But jeez, guys, I think you owe some people some money!)

And on top of all of this, add their reputation for debauchery while on tour. So you can see how a tight-ass like me could really work up a case against them. The libertarian in me, however, feels that the young woman who got slapped with the fish, probably chose to get slapped with the fish. (Don’t ask.)

So they were loud, dishonest, obnoxious, leering, sexist, and remarkably successful with women. And there I was listening to the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

And their fans seemed…well, kinda dumb. This sounds awful, and obviously wrong, in retrospect, but it just didn’t seem like the Zeppelin fans were hanging with the honor students. But they didn’t seem too worried about it. They were too busy having a good time. And if that isn’t a good reason to resent them, I don’t know what is.

So, why should any of this matter?

Well, this issue reared its ugly head again when my wife asked me to add some Zeppelin CDs to our next BMG order. (It had slipped my mind that she ran with a Zeppelin crowd back in the day. And here I was thinking I had her brainwashed.) Had this request come earlier in our relationship, it would have been tantamount to her saying she wanted to see other people.

But now, the notion (buying the CDs, that is) wasn’t as appalling as it might once have been. Still, it was galling to have to guide her to the album that had “Whole Lotta Love” on it, which she thought was their first record. So I – the non fan – rattled off the songs from that record for her. (Doesn’t everybody know this stuff?)

So we got down to the business of deciding which albums to get. We already had several on vinyl, and briefly considered getting the 10-CD-complete-album-box-set-yadayadayada, but declined to pay the $80. Instead, we got four for about $25. She wanted II and IV. I wanted III. Neither of us wanted I, but we got it anyway because, well, what’s the sense in having II, III and IV if you’re not going to get I, too? It wouldn’t be right. It also helped that BMG was having one of those buy-one-get-40 sales. (Because you were going to get those 40 CDs anyway, right?)

So we’re talking the Zeppelin pantheon, more or less. And just how do these records stack up, against, say, the first four Allman Brothers or Cream albums?

Sorry fans, but “Led Zeppelin I” is rip-off central (just type “Zeppelin songwriting credit” into Google) but it has the most music, and man, they sure had their own sound. The Allman Brother’s first record is perfectly good, and it captures their emerging personality. “Fresh Cream” is the most modest of the three. It’s got excellent blues covers, but the originals could be better. I give a very slight edge to Zeppelin, for gall.

“Led Zeppelin II” is, again, a more generous album (albeit, not towards the artists they are still stealing from), and less bloated than their first. But I still prefer the high points of “Idlewild South”. “Disreali Gears” – a supposed classic – is not bad, just a little dated. A slight edge to the Allmans.

The third albums don’t compare easily since two of them are double albums - one all live, and the other half-live. But since such albums usually suck, it all comes out in the wash anyway. “Live at the Fillmore” is the classic. “Wheel’s of Fire” is a mish mosh, with weird studio stuff and loooong live stuff. It can be very silly, but it’s still fun. “Led Zeppelin III” is a departure, and not bad at all. And with all the acoustic stuff, it’s actually pretty brave. But the clear edge goes to the Allmans.

Now, call me crazy but I happen to love the “Eat a Peach”’s 35 minute “Mountain Jam”. Add to that “Blue Sky”, “Little Martha” and “Melissa” and you’ve got a very strong LP. It’s probably my personal favorite here. Cream’s “Good-bye” shows them limping off stage - the sound on the live cuts sucks. But side two is excellent – highlighted by an intense “Sitting on Top of the World” (crappy sound and all) and “Badge” (greatest guitar solo on a pop song, ever?). But you have to give “Led Zeppelin IV” its due. The songwriting is blossoming, the drumming powerful, and production, courtesy of Jimmy Page, absolutely sterling. There’s not a bad song here. It’s one of those records that I don’t love, exactly, but that I know is great. On the whole, a tie between Zeppelin and the Allmans.

Now, I wouldn’t blame you for totally disagreeing with me on all four albums. I mean, talk about your apples and oranges! But that’s exactly my point. Some of us have a preference, and I’m struggling with music I prefer versus music I know is great on its own terms. So how do I explain the fact that Zeppelin has gone toe to toe with the Allmans, who I supposedly prefer, a clearly best Cream, record-wise?

Well, I’ve come to respect Jimmy Page as a sound maker. As a producer, he used to overdo it, of course. Early on, he was always throwing sound affects into the middle of songs. Later on, he learned how to give a record a unified sound, to better effect. And he always strove to add a unique guitar sound to each song.

Paradoxically, this was my problem with him as a guitar player. He was always more sonic than musical for my taste. His actual solos could be a little sloppy, sometimes. Maybe someday I’ll hear the great Jimmy Page solo, but I haven’t yet. And that includes the little display in “Whole Lotta Love”, and the one at the end of “Stairway to Heaven”, which I think is his most Clapton-esque. I’ve heard that Jimmy Page appears on about 60% of all the English rock records between 1963 and 1966. Someday, I hope to find a really good collection of the best ones so that I can fully appreciate his talent.

But I now see that Jimmy Page was consciously trying to make rock and roll records. So he didn’t just hang out until his solo came, like Clapton would. Jimmy Page is all over his records, playing lead, rhythm, acoustic, twelve-string, banjo, mandolin, all in the service of making the end result distinct from start to finish. And that counts for a lot.

And just how did this abrasive band could come up with such beautiful songs as “Thank You”, “That’s the Way”, “The Battle of Evermore” and “Going to California”? Man, the snob appeal of looking down on a supposedly loud, stupid band wore off pretty quickly.

But, not to worry. It’s not like I’m standing around with a Zeppelin CD in one hand, and an Allmans CD in the other, unable to decide what to play. That's what your 5-CD-carousel changer is there for - to get you through such crises. Besides, I’m probably listening to something else altogether now. (Except for the next month or so, since the BMG order just came in.)

When I was a kid, I wanted to believe that you couldn’t be good at something unless you were nice, too. So it’s been hard for me to admit that you can admire or respect someone you don’t particularly like, but it’s time for me to admit that Led Zeppelin has earned a place in my CD player.

So I think I’ve finally made my peace with the blimp from hell.

No Accounting for Taste

Dark Chocolate:

When I was about eight, I bit into one of the greatest chocolate bars of all time - a Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate. I had gone to the local candy store like I did most days and, for whatever reason, on this day I noticed them. Instead of getting the usual milk chocolate bar in the dark brown wrapper, I decided to try this other one in the brighter orange wrapping. Maybe there’s something to judging books by their covers, because I immediately became hooked. I guess I was so used to the smoother taste of the milk chocolate, the sharper taste of the dark chocolate jumped right out at me.

Over the next couple of months, I’d go to the candy store regularly and buy a bar of Special Dark each time. And as I did, I watched the number of bars in the display slowly dwindle. The owner of the store told me that he wouldn’t be ordering more because I was the only one buying them. So in the limited universe of an eight year old, a portal had suddenly closed. I somehow survived this tragedy, and learned to keep my eyes open for the dark chocolate pieces whenever an open box of Russell Stover’s presented itself.

And today you can get ten different types of dark chocolate, with the percent of cacao right there on the label. The Cadbury Royal Dark is quite good, by the way.

Nothing as Bad as Buddwing:

Then there was the summer in the Catskills a few years later, when one of the more upscale resorts was showing a movie one Saturday night. It was sort of an open house situation, so that those of us staying at one of the lesser places could come.

This was kind of a big deal since there were no VCRs or DVD players at the time. You could only catch a movie when it had been theatrically released, or later, in edited form, on TV. Viewing a movie outside of those circumstances was rare. And there was work involved, too. Someone had to set up and man a projector, change the reels, and keep the damned thing in focus.

I can’t remember what it was we were expecting to see – maybe “The Sound of Music” which had been released a few years before - but what we got instead was “Mr. Buddwing”. Never heard of it? Neither did any of us. It starred James Garner as an amnesiac wandering New York City. It was one of the many arty-but-realistic black and white movies that came out in the early sixties.

Being twelve at the time, I can’t say that I understood it (although seeing it again on TMC recently cleared up some of my confusion), but I did find it intriguing Not so the rest of the Irish American audience, whose natural reserve was all that prevented it from pelting the screen with food and drink. This was partly due to dashed expectations. Black and white instead of color (no one had a color TV at the time), James Garner instead of Julie Andrews, the streets of New York (we had just left them for Christ’s sake) instead of the Swiss Alps.

But the dislike was so intense that my cousin ridiculed me for not hating it enough. Apparently I said something to the effect that it wasn’t that bad. The experience became a reference point for anything bad we experienced on that vacation (“Wow, today’s lunch was worse than Mr. Buddwing.” “No way, nothing is worse than that.”)

But it wasn’t that bad.

Staying Up Late for Art:

And I found a lot of other movies like it on the Late Show.

I used to stay up on the weekends watching horror movies on Chiller Theater. A young boy may start out watching these movies for the terror, but a teenage boy begins to notice how many nubile young women are being terrorized. And if the movie that was on after it had some more nubile women, and less terror, so be it. So I came for the horror and stayed for the sex.

But there was at least as much oddness as there was sex. It was TV, after all. The local stations had to fill the hours with whatever they could find, within some obvious limits. I’m sure that part of what seemed odd was just a teenager’s obliviousness to adult themes. But there were some genuinely strange movies being shown. I began to see more movies like “Mr. Buddwing”, and even caught some dubbed versions of foreign films. After a while, I didn’t even mind if they weren’t all that risqué. So now I was coming for the sex, but staying for the strangeness.

These movies were self consciously arty, which I found very cool at the time. So I began looking for this very cool thing called “Art”, which I imagined would have a sign over it when it made its appearance. Since this wasn’t what usually happened, I began to think of it as a secret that I was not yet in on. So I was in search of something that might not have even been there, but I was sure I’d know it when I saw it.

Well, I was wrong about that - I was looking for a thing when I should have just enjoyed the experience - but I knew what I liked. And when I saw it, I knew enough to not announce it to anyone. I didn’t want a repeat of the “Buddwing” experience. These would be my own private movies, and even though a lot of their names escape me now, I hope to revisit them some day. Thank God for Netflix.

I began to think that if I kept a close enough watch on a movie, I'd catch the director throwing the art in. Maybe he’d slip it – sans the sign - into the upper left corner of the screen, so I’d try to not look away for even a second because I might miss it. I remember watching “A Clockwork Orange”, and noticing an orange on a bookshelf. Well, that just had to mean something, didn’t it? At least I think it was an orange.

So I would watch things very, very closely and, again, this being prior to the advent of the VCR, would hate being interrupted because I couldn’t pause it and play it back. One of my friends found this so hilarious, that he made it a rule to call me every Thursday at 10pm, which was when “Hill Street Blues” started.

Technology and wisdom/laziness have allowed me to relax a bit about this, but I still like to follow what’s going on in a movie. I still get annoyed with people who spend the first five minutes of a film catching up with friends, and the next eighty five minutes asking them what the hell’s going on, complaining that the movie made no sense. I equate this to starting a book on page twenty, and steadily turning the pages, whether I’m reading them or not.

I’d like to think that I’ve caught up with the rest of the world by now, having realized that missing the first minute of “Gone With the Wind” isn’t going to ruin it for me. But I do still sympathize with Alvy Singer and Annie Hall when they show up five minutes late for “The Sorrow and the Pity”.

Kooks:

It’s funny how someone can tell you a story, but you end up getting a completely different point from it than the one they intended.

Once, I was listening to two neighborhood guys talking about a third person I knew. They were saying how odd he was. To illustrate the point, they described their experience with him at a recent concert. None of them had heard of the opening band, but the two guys liked their first two songs. The third guy didn’t. The two of them didn’t like the third song. But – surprise! - the third guy did. So their conclusion was that he was kind of strange, or at least he had strange taste.

But I knew the guy, and could identify with him. And the story only proved to me that there are two basic types of listeners - those who know what they like and want to keep hearing it, and those who don’t know what they like, but know that they don’t want to hear the same old thing over and over again. I’m one of the latter, and so was the third guy in the story. We became best friends.

The Origin of WTF:

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the B-52s. It was 1979, and I was in the neighborhood bar, watching Saturday Night Live. They had already done their hit, “Rock Lobster” in the first half of the show. But now it was 12:45am, and time for their second number. They did “Dance This Mess Around”, which, as they say, separates the wheat from the chaff.

Cindy Wilson was, um…singing, about being made to feel like limburger cheese (and who can’t identify with that?). There was no melody to speak of. Just drums, bass, guitar, organ, and a lot of shrieking. Oh, and a cowbell.

When it ended, the young lady sitting next to me at the bar officially invented the phrase “what the f*ck”, as in “what the f*ck was that?” Not the good what the f*ck, either.

But I loved it. The B-52s were, at best, indifferent to what my idea of a good song was up to that point. But they demonstrated that there was Special Dark chocolate in the candy display again.

Taste’s Like…:

But no matter how cool I would like to come across in the story – that I saw what the young lady failed to see, that I was more enlightened, etc. - I know that ultimately it’s just a matter of taste. And there is nothing like comparing musical tastes to learn just how wholly separate and different people can be. For instance, there are actually some people on Earth who don’t love the Beatles. I swear to God.

On a less cosmic level, though, two people can listen to the same record and come away from it with completely different reactions. I like to think of myself as a rational person, not given to blatant appeals to my emotions. So then why is it that I can be moved damn near to tears by a simple pop song like “Never My Love” by the Association? You would be justified in thinking it sentimental fluff. And then, on the other hand, I’ll recommend some godawful noise (a technical term describing music by the Pixies, Wire, Sleater-Kinney) that would give a headache to a rabid Led Zeppelin fan?

Ah, what to mock? What to take seriously? What is cool? What has become uncool? What is fresh? What is ripe for derision? What is just not funny? What is sacred, and what’s just a sacred cow? These are the questions whose answers don’t exactly comprise our taste, but they go a long way towards explaining it. Let’s call it an outlook.

In an earlier post, I alluded to things that are technically “wrong” with a record – a cracked voice, feedback, etc –that can sometimes make it magical. This is utterly subjective, as a missed note to some people is simply…a missed note.

No Accounting:

Back in 1980, my roommate – the weirdo above - and I threw a party and invited a bunch of friends from the neighborhood. By then, we had gotten into a lot of punk and new wave music. The neighborhood was more into the Grateful Dead and Southern rock. People were far more likely to pack a local bar to hear a guy do cover songs on acoustic guitar than to go to a club to hear a new band do original material.

But we were “consensus builders”, and thought we could play music that our guests may not have heard but would still like. At first, we had them put on whatever they wanted, and someone picked “Gold and Platinum” - the first Lynyrd Skynyrd best-of.

Hey, we thought, they like guitars. We like guitars, too! Who else could we put on that they might enjoy? We tried Television’s “Marquee Moon”, which is a great guitar album and if not exactly punk rock, certainly full of punk energy.

But within seconds, we could see that they weren’t buying it. Never had Tom Verlaine’s voice sounded so choked, and the guitars so muffled. This, right after hearing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s sleek and bright sound. No wonder our guests liked them more.

I like Lynyrd Skynyrd, too, but prefer Television. I even understand why most people wouldn’t. One might think that, having achieved that understanding, I would then come to like Lynyrd Skynyrd more, too. But that’s not how taste works.

I had just become acutely aware of the vast gulf between these two styles of music, and the aspects of the Television record that were an immediate turn off to this crowd. And I might have even thought that I’d never like the Television album as much again. But that isn’t what happened. Why not? Television’s guitars sounded much rougher, and had no echo at all. They growled rather than chimed, and I preferred the growl. The solos burrowed in rather than rang out, and I found this sound more joyous than the Lynyrd Skynyrd album that was clearly meant to be so. I just didn’t happen to require the stuff that Television was leaving out. Taste again.

Caveat Emptor:

This is all meant to forewarn you that you might not love what I love. It just doesn’t work that way. You might even wonder how I could love what I love. It would be like explaining how lines like:

I’ll be on my way, ‘cause there’s another girl for me (“Western Union” by the Five Americans)

and

My baby’s got me on another kind of highway (“Hey 98.6” by Keith)

will always move me, when you might find them to be quite ordinary.

So please keep all of this in mind. You might be tempted to try one of my suggestions, and you owe it to yourself to know if the my words come anywhere near to really describing the music.

Community Music

Most young people get to enjoy music when it is generally well known and widely accepted by their peers. It’s nice to hear good music, and it’s even better when you’re enjoying it along with everyone else around you.

When was the last time someone blasted music at the beach, and you enjoyed it? This is what people remember most fondly about the sixties. It was the last time when everyone agreed what the good music was, and for once, everyone was right. There we all were, listening to the current music of the day, not at all nostalgic for another time.

I have countless memories of hearing a song come on the radio while playing in the street, and knowing it was great the very first time I heard it. “Jimmy Mack”, “Dancing in the Street”, “Up Around the Bend” are just the ones I happened to think of now. It happened dozens and dozens of time. Was there ever a song that was so right for a place and time as “Summer in the City” during July in Brooklyn?

For me, the climax of this phenomenon coincided almost exactly with the end of the sixties. My brother and I got “Abbey Road” for Christmas 1969, and listened to it continuously through that winter break. It was also being played on the radio and enjoyed by everyone else we knew. It was, for us, the epitome of “community” music.

The End of Community:

But at that point, the cracks had already begun to appear in the community. Altamont had already occurred. Then the Beatles broke up. Listeners were breaking up, too - into factions – hard rock vs. singer songwriter vs. southern rock vs. glam vs. progressive vs. funk vs. soul, and later in the decade disco vs. punk vs. rap. People were beginning to narrow their tastes to the point of actively disliking anything else. Community music continued to exist, but the communities were now smaller. And Top Forty, which had been the glue holding it all together before – a key ingredient of which was great music - began to suck more and more, until there was no longer a single place where the best of everything could mingle and be enjoyed by all. The individual communities just weren’t interested. For a lot of people, a smaller community is better anyway. Like a gang or a cult, it’s more comfortable because it doesn’t challenge you to look outside of it.

These individual communities can break down even further as people age, get married and see less of their friends. On their own, people then decide if they will move on to other things or not. They eventually get to what will be their own personal music. The fact that they might have some musical favorites in common with others their age may be more a sign of good marketing than anything else. Call it the Coors Light phenomenon.

The Only Community There Is:

And then there are those lovable people who never even figure out that their taste is less than universal. One friend who we’ve invited to family gatherings was visibly appalled at the music we had on at our daughter’s communion party. For us, it was an occasion for friends and family to get together to talk, not necessarily to dance. So we chose music that was entertaining to us and some other friends, but unintrusive. It wasn’t muzak, but it could be ignored if you didn’t like it. My friend didn’t recognize the music, and felt that parties were for dancing and so must have dance music. On another occasion, he came to the house, armed with tapes that he volunteered to put on in order to “liven the party up”. A quote. No doubt there were some people there who would have appreciated it, but I wasn’t one of them.

My friend not only didn’t understand that there were people who didn’t share his taste; he didn’t think anything beyond his taste existed. It’s like that part of the Blues Brothers movie when they go into a Western bar, and the waitress says “We’ve got both kinds of music here, country and western!” Call it the community that doesn’t even know that it’s not the only community.

I’m sure you’ve had someone brag to you that they liked “all kinds of music”, and they then proceeded to play the standard pop music of the day, and absolutely nothing the slightest bit unusual or unique. How can you know what you’re missing when you don’t think you’re missing anything at all?

My Time vs Our Time:

Some lucky people arrive at their personal music by just leaving on the radio. They like what they hear and that’s the end of it. Some others, like me for instance, are so impossible to please that it’s rare indeed when I love a song that’s also very popular. Thank god for the scan button on car radios. Otherwise, I’d have crashed the car by now.

My “personal music” is what has accumulated in my head and record shelves over the years, based on whatever I happened to be interested in at any given time. This sometimes leads me so far astray from current musical developments that the fond memories I associate with my favorite music have nothing at all to do with the whatever was popular at the time. (At the risk of sounding like a snob, it’s usually that music that provides the really bad memories.) They don’t even have any relationship to the time the music I was enjoying was released. I now remember the music I love by what is happening in my life at the time I buy it, not the time it’s made.

So in 1982 I could buy an album that came out in 1968, like “The Who Sell Out”, and love it. But the emotional association is to my life and the things that happened to me in 1982, not what happened to me or the world in 1968. This is a very special, but private, joy that you usually only share with a spouse. It’s just a shame that you can’t share it with anyone else.

And as time goes on, and I go further and further astray, my chances of enjoying community music grow dimmer by the day.

So it’s quite understandable that most of the population seems intent on hearing only their own personal music, by wearing earplugs and listening to an iPod. The problem is that no matter how many songs you can fit on it, you’re still only listening to stuff you already know about. It’s the absolute opposite of community music.

Towards a Newer Community:

I truly envy those people who can still enjoy music at the community level. I think I’m talking about hip hop in its heyday. But I guess it applies to anything that’s popular and exciting to young listeners.

And who knows, maybe this has always been the case. Maybe my memory of the sixties is just another example of a baby boomer trying to make a rather common experience seem like it was invented by his generation. Maybe there always is a community music, and I’m just not part of the community anymore.

I’m not saying that we should, at our now advanced ages, be getting together to party to the latest musical fad. I’m not even saying that the iPod is a bad thing. But it would be nice if we could just unplug our ears a little more often to hear what the other guy is listening to. And when we’re that guy, let’s not disappoint everyone else them by playing them the same old crap.

When I was in college, right before the Christmas holidays, we would have a party in the cafeteria (drinking vodka at 10am, playing cards). Once I brought a tape recorder (not even a radio) with me, and played a pre-recorded tape of stuff I liked at the time. The other guys put up with this because no one else thought of bringing a radio, and I realized that I was imposing on people at least as much as I was entertaining anyone, so I tried not to play it too loudly. But there was one guy there who asked me to turn it up. I warned him that he might not like it, but he replied, “That’s okay, it’s music.”

I don’t know where that guy is now, but he’s my hero.