A Musical History

There are a handful of things that I feel each person holds near and dear to themselves.  These are things that each person more than likely feels is a strong indicator of their individuality.  They are also things that are perhaps most vehemently defended when the caustic minded turn their drilling gaze on a person's interests.  So what are some of these precious, personal things?

What we eat.
What we drink.
What we put on our feet.
And what kind of music we listen to.

Sounds kind of silly, but I believe it's true.  Our musical tastes are our own, regardless of what some may say about finding a "false" individuality in the work of others.  It's easy to fall into the music industry's ruts of genre, and to define our musical tastes by one, two, or a few more wide reaching genres.  Rock is a common example.  I say I like rock music.  What I mean is classic rock.  And more specifically, I think of Creedence Clearwater Revival when I say this.  I don't really like the Beetles, and I think the Rolling Stones are alright sometimes.  So why do I say I like rock when in fact I don't like a huge percentage of what many label as rock music?

The short answer is that it's easy.

But when you look deeper into my musical tastes, or indeed my iTunes library, you'll see a mixture of staple classic rock, folk rock, folk music, both before and after the folk revival of the 1960's, along with blues sprinkled over everything with a distinctly American overtone.  And then you have traditional Asian music, and of course a small selection of video game music.  My iTunes library is the definition of my musical taste, not the words "rock" or "folk."

So what's the point to all of this?

The point is that I want to define where I come from musically.  Everyone's musical history is different, some more interesting than others, but I simply want to talk about mine.

In the beginning there was Creedence Clearwater Revival.  My earliest and most vivid memories of music are of listening to John Fogerty wail from the tape deck in my family's red Mercedes.  The seats were black leather, and an interesting mixture of comfort and slipperiness.  I liked "Down on the Corner", and would often sing along with the lines "Down on the corner, out in the street."  I remember one day wondering who sounded like this strange man, because I had never heard anyone talk or sing like him.  Not long after posing the question, my young mind concluded that the singer must be black.  And so for the longest time, when I thought of Creedence Clearwater Revival's music, I imagined black musicians.  Funny, considering the truth.

The family Mercedes, after being painstakingly restored by my dad.

Creedence Clearwater Revival was not the only music I heard as a child.  I unsurprisingly listened to whatever my parents listened to.  The Creedence came from my mom, who to this day considers them one of her favorite classic rock bands.  My dad on the other hand has always been a radio person, and so what I would have heard in the car with him was a lot more varied and therefore harder to remember.  What stands out is Piano Man by Billy Joel.  I liked this song too, and I think it planted a foundation for me to later appreciate piano.

The distinction between what my parents listened to is interesting to note because I think it shows the two different ways I tend to view songs.  My mom likes short, poppy songs with catchy melodies and memorable lyrics.  My dad on the other hand always tended to lean towards the long, drawn out songs that more resembled ballads than church hymns.  Both of these types of song make up what I now like to listen to.

The next big thing that happened to me concerning music was a defining moment in this part of my life for multiple reasons.  It was the mid-to-late 1990's, and the Spice Girls had just hit America.  Young people everywhere were caught up in the pop music coming from these British young ladies.  Everyone except me.  Nothing about them made sense to me, and the popularity I was picking up on, through television and other media, bothered me.  The nail in the coffin came through a fellow student in my third grade class.  Me and this other kid, who I'll call Parker, were, as I saw it, competing for being considered the "smartest in the class."  This was no doubt something I fabricated in my own mind, a fun run where someone thought it was a race.  He answered more questions than me, and usually got them right.  I was distraught.

The Spice Girls gave me salvation.  One day Parker came to school with blue hair.  He stopped answering as many questions.  He started talking more about what kind of music he was listening to.  I don't even remember if he ever mentioned the Spice Girls.  But in my mind, they were what brought him down, and in my imaginary arms race I took the lead.  I came to the conclusion that music was evil, and made you less of a person, and a more dull thinker.

Oh, the irony.

I of course still heard music.  My parents unknowingly saw to that.  But I stopped paying attention to it.  The Creedence ebbed out of the car's tape deck-playlist, and I can't tell you what our family listened to for the remainder of it being one together unit.

In the eighth grade, things finally turned around.  With divorced parents, puberty, and friends influential in less-than-stellar habits (I'm talking about laziness here, there was no foul play within my group of friends for several more years), I was needing something to put my feet on.  A rock for the waves of the unfair world to crash against.  I found it in a bowling alley.

In eighth grade gym, we had a bowling unit, during which we would ride to the local bowling alley for every class to bowl.  The last day we did this, we were allowed to buy some refreshments and put some money in the jukebox.  I of course brought some quarters, and towards the end of the time went up to the jukebox.  I was suddenly made aware of my past handful of years eschewing music.  I didn't know what any of it was.  Sure I saw names I remembered from TV, like Garth Brooks and Britney Spears, but I didn't know who these people were or what they did, outside of their stereotypical genres.  Then a dusty little vault door deep in my brain creaked open, and what came out was a catchy melody and a memorable name.

"Oh Susie Q, baby I love you, Susie Q."

"That music!"  It all came back to me.
"I bet that music is here!"  I start flipping through the pages.  Yeah, it was one of those old jukeboxes where you hit these big arrow keys to flip between giant menu-like pages of album covers.  It suddenly occured to me that I didn't even know what the band was called.  I sure didn't know what they looked like.  I thought they were black afterall!  But I kept looking.

I stop on a page.  One of the album covers catches my attention, and I look closer.  Something about that large picture of the shouting man looked right.  Something about the...  aged feel of the title text felt right.  I look over the song list.  First song was of course "Susie Q."  I was looking at Chronicle, the iconic Greatest Hits collection for Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Creedence Clearwater Revival:  "Chronicle"

I was ecstatic as I put in the quarters and selected "Susie Q."  I went back to my seat and waited for the song to play.  It wouldn't play until we were leaving (blasted shuffling jukeboxes) but as I was putting my coat on, I heard a rumbling ghost of my childhood.

 "Oh Susie Q, baby I love you, Susie Q."

I asked my mom that night about it.

"Oh yeah, Creedence Clearwater Revival.  We listened to a lot of that when you were little."  She told me she'd try and get me a CD of theirs.

John Fogerty's strange singing was not the only force to be credited for getting me to pay attention to music again.  Another much less well-known figure had an important part to play.  Around this time, there were infomercials on TV for a at-one-time popular Canadian folk-singer's Greatest Hits CD.  He wore a vest and walked in a deep fog along a railroad track running through a wet forest.  One of the scenes in this infomercial was of this man singing at a concert:

"And later that night when his lights went out of sight, came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald!"

I honestly think the only reason this caught my attention was because it caught my dad's.  He liked Gordon Lightfoot when he was younger, and I guess this infomercial causing my dad to sing out along with it during dinner made me take notice of it.  I told my mom that I liked Edmund Fitzgerald (me thinking that Lightfoot's name was Edmund Fitzgerald just made the Seinfeld joke so much sweeter later in my life) and that Christmas I received the very CD advertised in the infomercial, a Greatest Hits collection.

Gordon Lightfoot:  "Complete Greatest Hits"

The songs on this CD got my blood swirling.  From the lonesome tone to "In the Early Morning Rain", to the riveting and lengthy "Canadian Railroad Trilogy", and including of course the splendid "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," this man's music got me to thinking about what was in the words.

I would stagnate for the next few years, listening mostly to Creedence, Gordon Lightfoot and a few other traditional Asian-themed CDs.  In my junior year of high school, we had to do a music related project for our English class.  With a partner, we were to select a song that we felt held "American values", let the class listen to it, and then give a short presentation on why we felt it held "American values."  My uncaring partner let me pick the song, and I picked "Fortunate Son."  After a poor presentation (I really didn't know why or if it held American values) one of the songs I heard from my classmates caught my attention.  It wasn't awful modern "urban country", or a rap song.  It had a good melody, and piercing lyrics.

"Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own.  This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio."

I was lucky to catch the name of this artist.  Later that night, I of course ask my mom.
"Do you know who Neil Young is?"
"Yeah, why?"  I explain the project and how I liked one of the songs.  My mom immediately recognizes that I'd like Neil Young, and not long after she gives me yet another Greatest Hits CD.

Neil Young:  "Greatest Hits"

Now, the music on this CD really got me going.  It showed me that lyrics could be caustic, peering, and get under your skin.  I had never heard a song about shooting a loved one.  It chilled me a little.  And I liked it.

I listened to this CD a lot.  By now I was accumulating enough CDs that I had a distinguished "taste."  Johnny Cash soon entered the picture for me, embarrassingly from the movie Walk the Line.  I listened to the soundtrack to the movie, sung by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, and loved it.  When I actually heard Cash I stopped listening to the actors and loved the real thing.

More years would pass.  I slowly reacquainted myself with bits of music that my parents had liked decades before me. But as a whole, I didn't listen to music much. Most of my music listening was done while playing video games, a backdrop. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the details of the music, only the overarching overtones and catchy chorus's.

During my second year of college, several of my friends formed a garage band of sorts.  They all had similar music interests (alien from my own) and had recently started learning instruments.  Me, lacking an "ear" or "understanding" for music, was left out of these activities, but still hung out with them during band sessions.  Some of them took it upon themselves to "teach me" about music.  This meant having me listen to their favorite bands.  It of course did not stick.  Then one day, my friend Kevin said to me:

"I think you'd like Bob Dylan."  He later gave me three albums, albums that would eventually change my life.

The Freewheeling Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
John Wesley Harding

Bob Dylan:  "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"

Now I had known about Dylan for a while before this.  I had a Bob Dylan and Van Morrison karaoke disk.  Listening to it now, I can identify the fact that it's not Bob Dylan or Van Morrison singing on that CD.  But they did try to remain faithful to the original studio tracks.  There was "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Just Like A Woman," and "Lay Lady Lay," in addition to of course "Like A Rolling Stone."  Me and my friends made fun of it.

"How does it feeeeeel?"

Kevin, years before he would give me these three albums, called him a drunk.  My friend Joel liked Dylan, but I considered Joel's tastes to be odd.  My mom never thought much of Dylan, but recognized him as a living legend of "our era" of music.

I listened to these three iconic albums a decent amount.  The songs were hard to grasp.  "Girl from the North Country" stood out as a beautiful song.  "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" was catchy.  And then you've got the strange and eerie "Ballad of a Thin Man."  I listened to them a lot, but wasn't enthralled by them.

Around this time, I decided to try and join my friends and learn an instrument.  I bought a mountain dulcimer, handmade in Tennessee by Dolly Parton's sister-in-law.  Got nowhere with it.  I bought a key of D "Hot Metal" Hohner harmonica at the local music shop, as a backpacking instrument.  I started playing with it.  I liked it.

It prompted me to start reading more about harmonicas.  I started listening to more harmonicas.  I essentially fell in love with them.  My search for harmonica work took me to the blues.  Coincidently, Kevin was also peering into the blues.  At this time in our lives, we were both crazy for the blues.  Kevin got his hands on Son House, Muddy Waters, and Leadbelly.  We listened to Son House moan and hum, and play that slide guitar beautifully.  We were enthralled.  That winter, I could only listen to the blues.  Nothing else felt real to me.  I cooked to the blues, I played video games to the blues, I blew blues harp in the snow waiting for my mom to pick me up from the college.

Son House, at the Newport Folk Festival.  Credit goes to this man's amazing gallery.

That winter, yet another friend, Mike, offered me the "entire" Bob Dylan discography.  I accepted.  It was free music, why not?  This was the turning point.

Bob Dylan commandeered my iTunes library.  Before, I always had one, maybe two, CDs of each artist.  It was perfect harmony.  I usually just played my music on shuffle and got a good mix of music.

Now, shuffle yielded not a mix of artists, but a mix of songs by Bob Dylan.  I hated it at first.  It upset me.  My old, faithful artists were swept away by this nasally, droning voice.  It drove me nuts, but I listened on.

Long story short, after a few months things turned around.  I could only listen to Bob Dylan.  The words dug in, the harmonica parts captured me, and I marveled at the acoustic guitar.  I started listening to his debut album, Bob Dylan, and loved it.  It was real, it was raw.  Dylan would remain, to this day, a dominant force in my musical world, on multiple levels.  If I could play and sing, I'd emulate him.  If I could write songs, I'd emulate him.  I like artists that sound like him.  I like artists who've worked with him.  I find him intriguing.  But I'll speak more on that later.

From Bob Dylan, it's easy to discover a number of wonderful artists.  I'll simply list them here, and talk about them later.  From Woody Guthrie's ramblin' ways, to Joan Baez's beautiful voice and image, and most recently, the amazing musicianship of The Band, my musical horizons have opened up.  My poking into the Folk and Blues Revival of the late 1950's and early 1960's allowed me to discover Mississippi John Hurt.  Through the Traveling Wilburys I started listening to Tom Petty, and I respect George Harrison.  I want to listen to some Roy Orbison.  There's more, but this is becoming a long, long post.

I now sit proudly on a comparatively small, but rich and beautiful, and old, "taste" in music.  Bluegrass rolls, mountain music hollers, folk revival guitarists, harmonica solos, blues singer's claps, bent notes, distorted notes, clear notes, beautiful female voices, voices of men who should never sing, songs about hardship, easy life, lost love and unjust war and things I could never imagine form a growing world inside my tiny human mind.  It can only get better.

"The harmonicas play,
The skeleton keys and the rain.
And these visions of Johanna,
Are now all that remain."
     -- "Visions of Johanna", Bob Dylan, 1966