So my fifty-first birthday's come and gone and to celebrate it I programmed two damn fine hours of music. Specifically, I played music from my changing tastes from about 12 years old to 32. It starts with prog and what's come to be called classic rock, mutates into punk and hardcore and finally "alternative" nineties music. The latter's a terrible catchall phrase for everything that wasn't standard radio fare.
The thing I was most surprised by putting the set together was how much hardcore I included. I didn't go to shows like my some of my friends, but it's a huge chunk of what I listened to in high school. I stopped listening to it around the end of my senior year because it was already mutating into heavy metal/thrash crossover, a sound I found meat-headed back then (today, not so much). For most of four years, though, the only radio I listened to was WLIR's punk show and Paul Cavanaugh and Pat Duncan on WFMU.
I just got to listen to the last hour-plus of this show. Despite being a little weirded and creeped out hearing my own voice, it's a great set. A few people have told me they experienced a similar musical evolution - Yes to Sex Pistols. When Vin Scelsa dropped the needle on "Holidays in the Sun" and the marching kicked in a huge switch was thrown in my brain. I wasn't cool or smart enough to hold on to the old music I'd dug and take in all the new sounds I was starting to encounter. It would take me years to kick out the boards I put up in my brain and let Yes, Tull, and Queen back in. In the meantime though, when the sound of the Pistols threw that switch, man, it was like a jolt of electricity to my brain. All the past was wiped out and soon replaced by major new things. Revisiting those times this past Sunday was invigorating, nostalgic, and more than a little melancholy, dredging up memories of friends long gone from my life and the very different guy I was at sixteen and seventeen.
Music I Like, vol 1, #8 - Happy Birthday to You
