I guess I’ve had a really weird musical education.
I didn’t realize it until my band was playing a birthday party, and a friend of the birthday boy wanted to get up and play a few tunes with us. He was able to tell us the key and the chords, but he couldn’t exactly explain the rhythm or style he was playing. When he launched into the first song, it was clear he wasn’t playing a style any of the members of my band were familiar with. They struggled along with him, strumming out of sync and failing to follow the changes.
Oddly, I recognized the style. I think of it as 60’s style European/Latin, but I’m sure the genre has a real name somewhere. I realized I heard it as background music to a lot of rom-coms from the 70s and 80s. I followed along just fine, even as the rest of my band butchered what should have been pretty easy songs.
When we talked about it later, I explained about not having much to do as a kid besides watch a lot of HBO, and whatever the hell happened to be on. I heard a lot of different styles of music in all the movies I watched, from old swing tunes to blue grass to hip club songs. I grew up watching a ton of re-runs, too, and picked up a lot of weird musical styles there — Donna Reed, Mr. Ed, I Dream of Jeanie, Laugh In. And let’s not forget Loony Tunes, where everyone in my generation heard classical music for the first time! Just this morning, a friend posted a video of her belly dancing, and I recognized the music she used immediately — it was a “generic middle-Eastern” song I’d heard many times in older movies and shows. I couldn’t tell you the title or artist, but I could hum along just fine.
Above and beyond movie songs, my mom has always been pretty into music. She had quite the collection of vinyl, from John Denver to Pink Floyd to Queen to Pat Benetar. I knew all the words to Bohemian Rhapsody by the time I was 3. And of course anytime we drove anywhere, we had Casey Kasem and the Top 40 playing in the car.
In addition to my mom’s influence, my grandmother always had us sit and watch Hee Haw with her. I think I developed my appreciation for classic mountain-style country and blue grass from her. She’s a huge Johnny Cash fan, so I got that from her. I’ve never been a modern or newer country fan, I don’t care for the whining or the twanging, but older stuff that has a beat to it — I can get into that.
I heard my first World Beat while working at a coffee shop owned by a couple of wonderfully iconoclastic women. I also first heard Ani DeFranco, the Indigo Girls, KD Lang, and Tracy Chapman there, as well as all the wonderful local talent that came to play on our stage over the years, like Stuart Davis, 3 Minute Hero, Brenda Weiler, the Oxbow Boys, and the Divers. I had always been intrigued by international music, but America’s exposure to it isn’t exactly main stream, so I started seeking it out, and I found it, both traditional and modern.
The punk movement was going on when I was a kid, and it enjoyed a revival when I was a teen. New Wave happened when I was a kid. Rap gained popularity when I was a tween. The grunge movement happened when I was a teen, and the industrial movement came shortly after. Classic rock like Chuck Berry and Chubby Checker have always been part of my life, coming from every direction. I went through a heavy metal phase in my teens, a classical phase in my twenties, and recently got turned onto gypsy punk, steam punk, Irish new grass, rockabilly revival, and dubstep.
I think too many people just turn on the radio and listen to whatever’s popular in the moment, and never pay attention to all the wonderful varieties of music available from other genres, other eras, or other countries. When I was a kid, finding new music was kind of hard — you heard something in a movie or on the radio, or maybe friends had something weird you’d never heard of, but so many times, I got turned on to something off-beat that I simply couldn’t find more of. I’ve always been fascinated by music, and I love the internet for that — you can find anything, any genre, even small-time acts have a Youtube video or a website.
But somehow, even during my internet-less youth, I managed to take in all the sounds around me and catalog them in my mind. I’ve had some pretty broad musical horizons, and being in a band has only widened that.
I actually feel a little sorry for people whose musical horizons haven’t been wonderfully broadened. It’s been one of the most fun experiences of my life.
