History Lesson Part II

My musical tastes took a wild turn for the loud in high school. After deriding the Sex Pistols to a friend without having actually heard them, I heard them, thanks to Vin Scelsa. He played "Holidays in the Sun" and it was like a door in my brain was kicked open. Suddenly, there was a whole new world of sounds opened to me.

During my sophomore year I heard even more stuff that moved my tastes away from the regular rock radio songs I was listening to. At some point, again on Vin Scelsa's show, I heard "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground. For the uninitiated, it's a seventeen and half minute long mess of wailing guitars and droning keyboards telling the story of smacked out drag queens and murder. Then my friend Gordon played the Dead Kennedys for me. Then I started playing D&D with some older guys who played Tuff Darts and all sorts of bands from Stiff Records. Jethro Tull, Boston, even Led Zeppelin, all that sort of stuff dropped out of my music rotation.

The same time this was happening, the late, great WLIR radio out of Long Island was playing lots of New Wave and related stuff long before it made it to MTV. They also had a weekly hardcore and punk show. That's where I first heard the Angelic Upstarts, the UK Subs, Black Flag, and many, many more bands I'd become a fan of during high school.

Even more than all my friends and WLIR, it was Uppsala College's WFMU that truly turned my tastes upside down. Like today, there was all sorts of cool, far-out music on the station, but it was the two (more or less) hardcore shows that grabbed my attention. The first, and more serious, was Pat Duncan's show. The second, and the one I listened to whenever I got the chance, was Paul Cavanaugh's. Cavanaugh played a less severe mix of music than Duncan and had a studio full of characters, particularly an obnoxious curmudgeon by the name of Morbid and a Dead Head engineer. I've never been sure if they were real people or Cavanaugh doing voices. Either way, the show was a blast.

By the time I finished high school in 1984, listened to almost nothing from before 1977, the year Never Mind the Bollocks and The Clash were released. 

History Lesson Part I

My dad listened to classical, opera, and folk music, mostly on WQXR. Later in life he also listened to gospel on Family Radio. My mom didn't listen to much, but she liked musicals and country. I don't know exactly how or when I started listening to pop music, but I distinctly remember asking for and getting the Beatles 1967-1970 album for my 12th birthday. I was at my grandmother's house (which my wife and I have just moved into), with my mom, my sister, my aunt, my grandmother, and my mom's friend and her son. I played that thing to death.

By eighth grade I had started building a big record collection. It was a combination of stuff I heard on the radio, scavenged from my friend Jesse's brother's abandoned record collection, or that my musician friend, Andrew, turned me on to. Among my favorites were Jethro Tull, Queen, and, of course, the Beatles.

The little I knew about punk rock, other than fear-mongering news clips, came from a short span when WPIX radio went with it. That's how I first heard Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Jam, and Graham Parker. It was a pretty mainstream sort of punk, but it started me listening to a little broader spectrum of music - though not enough to make me buy any of those albums.

It was the summer after eight grade that I really started becoming the music nut I still am. Working as a cleaner that summer, I heard  a radio ad for Ian Hunter's live album, Welcome to the Club. I heard the opening to "Once Bitten, Twice Shy," and I knew I had to buy it. When I bought the album, I also bought Judas Priest's British Steel because of the cover. Within six months, I had several more Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople albums as well as a few more Priest albums.

Somewhere between the start of eighth grade and my freshman year of high school, I heard "Gangsters" by the Specials and "One Step Beyond" by Madness. That was enough to make me buy both albums. Slowly, my tastes, while not completely dropping standard rock radio, were changing.