Blog…Blog...Blog!... The new world order and the thought police all in one… Was Orwell right?... We ponder, maybe…
Actually in the grand scheme of things…there is no grand scheme. Just random thoughts and ideas in a time where everyone feels their opinions matter. I don’t think my opinions matter any more than yours do, but maybe somewhere along the way I’ll amuse you, give you pause to think, or maybe you will learn something that you didn’t want to learn in the first place…and will shortly forget. It’s all minutiae anyway…
Music, music I hear music…over my head I hear music [with props to King’s X]…
I have been called many things. Some I agree with and some I’ve earned. Some are just mean-spirited and some I’ve discarded completely. One that has stuck is the nickname “Rain Man”… why so? Well it’s a mixture of things. For one…the OCD that has driven my passion for music and musical knowledge has at times been overwhelming. And where Rain Man drew on the miniscule facts of pop culture [K-Mart does suck most of the time…but they have a pretty good sale on Thanksgiving morning…as long as you’re up early…] I drew on the band histories of who played with whom, who produced, who engineered, sometimes I would scan album [yes..album] covers to see who worked on an album. Truly I needed more of a life as a kid, but growing up a middle class white kid in the ‘burbs didn’t exactly prepare me for anything particular.
My wife calls me the Musical Rain Man… Now in the context of the movie, Rain Man was actually Raymond, the brother, but the name has become synonymous with the lead character who knows all kinds of unusual facts and randomly offers that information to other people…so it stuck. Now, back to my wife…She’s an amazing woman who really should just get credit for putting up with my musical ramblings, but supports it as well. She’ll also be the first to tell me, after me taking 15 minutes to explain something about a band, that she doesn’t care, and that she stopped listening about 3 minutes in, but smiled complacently anyway, and we’d laugh about it. Maybe she’s as crazy as I am.
I’m sure along the way you’ll figure out more about me…but back to blog…
Music. The calm that soothes the savage beast [or so Bugs Bunny once said]. It’s something that’s ubiquitous with every stage in my life. So after all these years of gathering useless information I thought I would find an outlet for it. So here we are. I thank you in advance for listening. The topics will change and I’m sure the rants will too. But that’s with anything.
First and foremost…I’m a reformed musical snob. How exactly would you define that? Well, it sort of goes like this… Growing up you had opinions about music, and only they mattered, and you would put down basically everything that wasn’t what you liked. Maybe it was a guy thing, but it was like that for a long time. My friends in school had the same problem, and we would promote the virtues of the technical prowess of Rush, or ponder the sheer insanity of Roger Waters while watching The Wall [on VHS of all things…], or wondering why Triumph was the most underrated band in the world when they’ve got one of the greatest guitarists on the planet playing with them [Rik Emmett really is a god by the way…]. Bands that were in our crosshairs included anything alternative, anything purely pop, essentially anything on the radio.
We’d go to concerts and buy the t-shirts, and wear them out over and over. Whenever anyone says they’re going to an 80’s party they ask what we wore back then. For us it was simple. Jeans, rock t-shirt and sneakers. Nothing fancy, and nothing really different. My wardrobe would be jeans and Black Sabbath t-shirt one day, and then jeans and Iron Maiden t-shirt the next. I do recall in 8th grade I had 5, count ‘em…5 Rush shirts, one for every day of the school week. Sadly…I’m not kidding. Now… Back to being a reformed snob… I have been a mobile dj for just over 23 years. For the first 10 years I bought every pop and radio song I needed to do a show and never listened to it much at all. It was for the business. Which was how I would explain away the New Kids On The Block cd that my friends would find in the road case. It took me a very long time to actually listen to the various radio singles and [gasp!] enjoy them. But my musical palate expanded with time, with friends exposing me to new artists, and sometimes out of sheer musical boredom, the search for that next great band. Not a perfect system, and still there are bands that I hear, that are very popular, and I think “WTH”…why? [Justin Bieber does come to mind here…] At this point, music is music. I know what I like, I know what I dislike, and it’s not a matter of the level of talent or the type of artist. Either it works or it doesn’t. I’m sure that everyone out there feels the same way. And everyone has their musical guilty pleasures, which will be a topic at a later date. Here we’ll talk about the minutiae, because Jennifer’s eyes have glossed over one too many times, and I need to give her a break every once in a while…
This is the nuts and bolts of it and it’s just the beginning…thanks for hanging on for the ride…
Thanks for listening…
J.
We also used to watch The Wall on LaserDisc. Remember those monstrosities?
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