(every once in awhile I write about the history of me vis-a-vis one of the relevant aspects of my life. interesting to anyone not-me? Dubious. But it makes for good procrastination. Check the "Brian and Stuff" label for more).
My first memory of music was from when I was 3 or 4...driving in my father's 57 Chevy (the pride of his existence at the time). I think the car was close to this colour, I can't recall. The radio was playing Madonna; I didn't register it as much at the time, but I can recall him not liking it much. I have a stronger association with that car and music from just a few years later, when at some of the old timey 50s style restaurants that they have out in LA where you get served in your car. Big bopper-esque rock n' roll jamming...this might be the first time I felt a sense for anything that is "past." I have since grown impatient of the tendency to glorify the immediate past (or, even, the ancient past, aka those who think ancient greek philosophy is worth pursuing to the exclusion of everything else), but it is hardly surprising that one feels an awe at seeing the neon traces of world I can never inhabit.
MTV was present in the late 80s, and I recall seeing a Dire Straits video once, I think...but whenever I had unfettered access to a television back then, I would always choose Mario or Zelda over Money for Nothing; drawn to worlds I could conquer over ones that felt designed for an entirely different crowd.
MTV became important to me again when I was 10, 11. Living in Portland now, I was suddenly confronted with LA for the first time; via the Chronic and whatnot. Choosing the birth town by way of hip-hop (and preferring it to actual contact), I come to my most embarrassing story about my relationship to music:
For the christmas during my first year in middle school, I received my first cd player. A quaint boombox, that would be forever marred by its time spent in beach sand, chugging along to the tune of 8 D batteries. In order to justify this device and get something aside from Z100 on the radio, I requested a cd, and my mother picked up a band whose music video she had seen me watching: Kriss Kross. I kind of liked this cd, even though I sort of thought it was childish. That reservation didn't stop me when our 6th grade homeroom class had some sort of weird party thing, and I immediately volunteered to "bring the music" to show off my new device. Cut to the bus ride home; bus trips being times for me to hide underneath my cherished Oakland A's hat (which was lost on one of these bus rides, thrown out a window by some malicious student) from the 7th grade kids who would constantly make out in the seats to my front. One of these older kids asked to check out my cd player on the way home, and I gave it up without thoughts of refusal. It got passed around, and as we approached home I began to wander the aisle looking for it; someone finally passed the cd player back, but later I discovered that the Kriss Kross cd was no longer in there! I couldn't find who had taken it, and I mentioned this to my mother...not realizing that she would of course buy me another one, when I would have preferred a different cd (the novelty of jumping up and down on my bed along to "Jump, Jump!" long having since worn off). And that's how the first two cds I ever owned were both Kriss Kross.
I soon expanded my collection, thanks to the handy deals BMG and Columbia House promoted in order to get people to order cds via the mail. I'm sure that most people went in on these at some point in their lives; you would get like 12 cds for free to begin, and had to "subscribe" to their monthly offerings, and buy so many cds at full price. The real way they'd try to make money was by automatically sending you a cd in the mail each month that you'd have to pay for if you didn't return; many corporate schemes have been entirely built around knowing how lazy consumers tend to be. But if you kept up on these deals you could sign up for BMG, do the minimum to fulfill their requirements, cancel, and then sign up for Columbia House...rinse and repeat. The first albums I picked up through these means were a mixture of r&b and just random stuff: Janet Jacket's If, Lenny Kravitz, Nine Inch Nails, Aerosmith's Get A Grip, things along those lines. I listened a lot to whatever I got; when you are coming fresh faced to the music world, almost anything sounds great.
7th grade. One of the biggest changes about that grade that really made you feel "old" was that suddenly you got to choose an elective class! Some kids went into band to torture the music teacher by playing flutes, trumpets, and the like. There were a few phys ed type electives. Chess. Things of that nature. But this newfound academic freedom hammered home something I had never really realized before; I didn't actually have any interests. I was good in school - skipped a few grades of math, always years ahead in terms of reading and writing ability, had spent a lot of my time reading up on random science stuff, so my random knowledge in the areas of astronomy, geology, meteorology, and similar sciences exciting to 11 year old nerdy boys was exceedingly high. But none of those electives really spoke to me. I found myself in the general study time elective, along with a mostly unmotivated crew. I hated this time, since the other kids in there were generally pretty dumb, and therefore of the mean variety. Even if not for my peers, we were just sitting in near silence most of the time. Depressing way to spend sunny fall afternoons.
Then one day in walked a white bearded fat man wearing rainbow suspenders, who could only be described as "jolly". He looked like a burnt out hippie version of Santa Claus. The school was starting a guitar class that he would be teaching. I had a 3/4ths acoustic guitar I had been given for Christmas, so I figured, why not? My out of placeness was confirmed when I showed up with that toy guitar, surrounded by 8th graders who started off by competing with each other to see who could play the main licks from "Enter Sandman" and "Teen Spirit" the best. I quickly purchased a used Epiphone electric guitar, and began to get immersed into classic rock. That year I attended Aerosmith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and ZZ Top concerts, and my cd collection pushed past the 50 mark.
For falling back-asswards into guitar playing, I quickly overcame the head start everyone else had. I picked up music reading far faster than anyone else, and being one of the few in a class of 30 who was capable of focusing on the sheet music at hand instead of trying to learn Stone Temple Pilot's latest sent me to the top of the class. After that year was over Mr. King had to leave Hazelbrook, but I started taking private lessons from him. By the time high school rolled around, I had picked up the bass to play in the school jazz band...but I had to play in the regular band to be in jazz band, so I switched between the upright bass and percussion. My specialties were quads (in marching band, which I loathed), the timpani, and the marimba. I've always had some weird fetish for the marimba. I don't know why.
My musical tastes in high school didn't actually change all of that much; my interest in the things I was previously interested in just grew deeper. I grew out of some of the cheesier classic rock in lieu of Zeppelin and so forth. I listened to the "main" Portland classic rock station 24/7 - literally, I would leave it on at night. It got to the point where I knew the station's rotation habits so well I would often find myself humming the song they were about to play as the current song was ending. Should I have broadened my musical horizons more? Of course! But it is hard to get introduced to things in an ultra-whitebread suburban community. The late 90s were not a good era for popular music. I even gave up playing guitar after having spent a few years assuming that it would be my future. After the band I put together my sophomore year of high school won the Tigard Battle of the Bands (we got ROBBED at our own high school's BotB, because our leadership council in all of their wisdom wanted to diplomatically give first place to the band from another high school....but Tigard's was judged by musicians and people who taught guitar lessons, and out of 4 high schools represented, we won best overall), I decided that I should give it up entirely. Mainly because it had become increasingly evident that I was drawn to academic pursuits (and debate, but that's another post altogether). I reasoned that there were millions of people who played guitar who might be better than me, but I could rise to the top of any other field I chose. So I sold my effects pedals, bass, guitars, amps...etc.
College saw the convergence of two phenomena that changed my music tastes radically:
Technology, and social standing. I suddenly was going to parties...what's more, dance parties. I've always liked to dance. Even took hip hop and ballroom dance some when I was in middle school (it is really tough to be more of an awkward kid than I was in middle school. The only way to increase my clueless isolation during that time would have been if I was a queer leper to boot). Simultaneously, suddenly everyone's music collections were available to me via the network. Before this Napster had yet to rear its head, and downloading music was a painstaking matter of getting into an IRC channel, requesting someone's shared library (usually of 100 songs or so), and then sending a request to that person's download-bot to get a particular song, which took about 30 minutes to download. I amassed about 60 songs via late nights spend doing this process (stuff like Foghat, ELO, Steely Dan...), which I was very proud of. But now I could get hundreds instantaneously, and I found myself listening to trance and club music.
My newfound interest in electronica progressed as follows: first I was into progressive house like Sasha and Digweed. I ate up the Global Underground series, and anything related to club hits of the late 90s. Not understanding this music or its roots, I chased these styles back in time to reach deep house, the direct descendant of disco mixed with a bit of techno and gospel. That took up my time for about a year, while I started exploring variants like psytrance (Infected Mushroom), and acid jazz.
My first two years I frequently attended dance parties, especially those thrown at the Shady Rill. One of the side effects of living in Walla Walla is that space isn't exactly at a premium like in many other locations. Thus, the college likes to rent some of the many, many homes it owns to upperclass folks for dirt cheap ($200/person, frequently). the Shady Rill was one of the crown jewels in the college's collection of weird houses...partly because it was only about 300 yards away from the student center, but also because it was down a tiny cul-de-sac all by its lonesome, and was surrounded by large grassy fields, trees, and a river in the backyard. It was the perfect location in a number of ways, and also a party institution at the school. It had been affiliated with theatre and debate students for years and years, and the house would get "passed down" - there'd always be at least one junior on the lease (there were 5 bedrooms), and when the seniors left, the junior(s) would handpick their roommates. It was known for its dance parties, and a counter-weight to the weak fraternity system's "get-drunk-and-evade-being-pawed-at" style of party throwing. Given that Portland and Seattle were 4 and 5 hours away, if the Shady Rill threw a party, then over 10% of the 1500 person school was going to show up. The below picture doesn't show the river, backyard, or surroundings...but the tiki torch subtly attests to the house's lifestyle (and the purple car to Eric's wackiness).
I'm on this tangent because I lived at this place my junior and senior year, and party throwing was a very important thing to me. We would do it right: enlisting frosh from the debate team to hand stuff every single student's school mailbox with our invitations, over $300 spent on booze (acquired across the border in Oregon to save on tax), 2 bartenders per hourly shift...and always a DJ. Which, when I was living there, was usually me. I worked for the Sound and Lights folks, so I would just wheel the huge amp, cd-djs, and speakers (usually along with some lighting equipment) home, set it up, and blast the hell out of the neighborhood (people across the river would occasionally call the cops, but the cops would just relay that to the Whitman security, who would send someone on a bicycle to ask us to turn it down a bit, which we would momentarily comply with. Preparing for these parties drove my music collecting to a fair amount, because I wanted to have a well rounded supply for any need or request. I took a lot of pride in our ability to squeeze in 75 or so people into our living room and hallway (the other half of the party would be outside, and in our various downstairs rooms).
I combined enjoying to DJ along with my interest in electronica with a college radio show. More than that, I got to run the electronica genre (or RPM, as it is termed), which means that all new cds in that area got sent to me to listen to, to decide what to put in the changers. Obviously I made copies of all of it, and a few bands who I love I probably never would have stumbled across otherwise (dZihan & Kamien, for instance).
After college I continued with the DJing - as a wedding and special events DJ for a crap company based out of Medford. This was a low paying job that meant spending all of my weekends driving around Oregon, looking for weird places with huge speakers and a ton of equipment stashed in my poor Honda Civic. The high school dances were horrifying (fortunately I tended to get better gigs than that), the birthdays and reunions were boring, and the weddings....would run the gambit between unbelievably fun to incredibly painful.
Nowadays, my interest has expanded to include "indie" music, although since I'm more interested in musicality than lyrics and emotions, I tend to not get into the super-lo-fi folks that aren't really inventive in their music stylings. But instead of moving on from any type of music (except for the "bad" rock and "bad" trance that I listened to when first being introduced to those larger genres), I have instead incorporated everything as time has gone on.
