Music • Sound • Video • Art

It is an informal tradition for me: Every 4th of July I listen to “Classic Rock” for the day. This past 4th I had a couple of insights I’d like to share…

• What I listen to today is radically different from what I listened to back then. Despite the differences in styles/genres/eras, there are clearly some themes/techniques/approaches that I appear to have always liked.
• I know much more about music and music production now compared to back then. That new found knowledge helps me to hear new things in some of the old stuff. This only increases my respect for what bands and engineers achieved 30+ years ago without plug-ins, DAWs or anything else I take for granted. (Conversely, it makes me look a bit more askance at my output given the power at my disposal.) Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd still holds up in a big way…

The rest of this post is long and sort of traces my own personal music “family tree”. It’s not exhaustive. There are explorations of some other genres like jazz and classical that I do not go discuss. Then again, those excursions have not been as extensive or sustained as the stuff I describe here.

I must admit, I wrote this as much, if not more, for myself because I wanted to get it down. If you’d like to share same, please feel free….

——-The backstory——-

My earliest memories of music (apart from kiddie albums and sing-a-longs) are of my older sibling’s 45 RPM singles and 33 1/3 RPM LPs from Motown, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. I remember my mom used to listen to the radio a lot as we drove around in the car. Songs like Don McLean’s American Pie, Carly Simon’s Your So Vain, Helen Reddy’s I am Woman, and Jesus Christ Superstar come to mind.

It wasn’t until 1975 that I bought my very own first album: Young Americans by David Bowie. (Fame was a big hit that summer and I really liked it.) That was quickly followed by (in loose order) Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Alan Parson’s I Robot, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (which was itself quickly followed by the purchase of?Wish You Were Here and later Animals and The Wall).

What came next gets a bit fuzzier. By 1976/77 I had some sort of income from household chores or minor summer jobs and I could buy more music. I was definitely a “rock and roll” kid. Everything from the huge bands of the late 70s — KISS and Bob Seger (hey I’m from Detroit), Boston, Styx, Kansas, Yes, ELO, ELP, Aerosmith and, of course, Led Zeppelin — to less obvious bands. (Anyone remember Ambrosia and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band?)

Around then I also discovered Kraftwerk (Trans Europe Express, Radioactivity, Autobahn). Kraftwerk was “different” from the stuff I was listening to at the time: First of all, they were from Germany and the versions of their music that I had were in German. (Ooooh. Non-english…Cool…Exotic.) Secondly, the aesthetic was different: Robotic, Cold, Mechanical, Heavily beat oriented, and quantized (and in 1978 no less). In retrospect I can see that I was interested in synthesizers or, more specifically, the sounds made by synthesizers. I didn’t know how those sounds came about. (I wasn’t really aware of the technology behind what I was listening to. All I knew is that some folks “played keyboards”.) Some seeds were planted at this point.

In 1979 I went off to college. (I blew two sets of speakers freshman year: One on Kashmir by Led Zeppelin and the other on the 1812 Overture…go figure.) At that point I was still pretty much into “rock” though that was changing as I hung out with more people at school. By the end of that year, it would be completely different. And mostly because of one album…

My girlfriend at that time introduced me to Brian Eno’s Music for Films…and that was a major, major, major inflection point for me. I LOVED that album. Period. It was the single biggest reason for me blowing my summer earnings on a Korg MonoPoly that next year. Why? I loved what I heard and I wanted to make more stuff just like it…so I bought a synthesizer. (Ah, the hubris…)

This album introduced an entirely new world for me and I began to explore it big time. For the first time I started to pay real attention to album credits. I would read them for the names of other people Eno worked with in the hopes of discovering music in the “same” vein. If I found something I liked, I looked at who was on the album then looked for other projects they were involved in and bought those. Of course whenever you take a “snowflake” sort of approach, the greater the degrees of seperation from the original seed, the more the possibility of deviating from the original style. (For example, Eno worked with David Byrne who worked with Bernie Worrel who worked with Bootsy Collins.)

So over the next couple of years I discovered things like Byrne/Eno’s Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Byrne’s Catherine Wheel, Talking Heads Remain in Light, Early Roxy Music, Klaus Schulze, Kitaro, Jean Michele Jarre, early New Order, an obscure Dutch band called Flue (in fact lots of obscure stuff out of Europe), etc. Also at that time, “new wave” and “ska” were riding high and things just plain got fractal with the music I was buying…. (to be continued).