May 31st, 2008 John
Savannah, Georgia, from 1979 to 1983 was not the best place to hear unusual new sounds that were coming out of punk and new wave bands at the time — and interesting music out of England — though I did try. Not all of it appealed to me, but some of it did — at the time, it was like culture shock. Having been raised like so many at the time on the tame sounds of Casey Kasem’s Top 40 as the soundtrack to my young life — dude, it was still a novelty to have tape decks in every car — even something like Siouxsie and the Banshees or pre-Combat Rock Clash could be a little bit of a leap in the small town south.
One thing young generations do besides embracing the now is getting cozy with the radical past and I did so alongside my friends — it was the ‘60s, in this case, and bands like The Doors and The Who and such. Hardly radical. And I was always uncomfortable with the ‘60s, honestly. I was terribly interested in The Now, and certain bands from England took edge over the ‘60s stuff — Squeeze, Nick Lowe, Madness, The Ramones. And I liked plenty of lame current stuff as well. And stuff that was somewhere in between — The Tubes were one of my favorites. They were almost but not quite not lame. And they were reviled, which makes it rebellious in a weird sort of way.
When I got to college, that was the point I began to discover — and adore — so many of the bands that had either eluded me or just befuddled me. The Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Cramps, bands like that . . . either long gone or with their best work behind them (The Cramps still had a few years in them, thankfully). I was mining the recent past.
Come the late ‘80s, though, I was less enthralled with much of current music, though I still had my intense likes — They Might Be Giants, The Pogues, The Pixies, Pop Will Eat Itself, Les Negresse Vertes, Mano Negra, Tom Waits, Kate Bush, XTC, in some ways that was the best era for current sounds for me. Other than those, the music that was REALLY moving me were sounds I discovered through Norton Records, sounds from the ‘50s and early ‘60s, sounds from a world before the Beatles.
Man, that’s a world of sound that I loved. If by the 1990s, I couldn’t care less about Nirvana or Peal Jam or any of that stuff, I was thrilled by volumes and volumes of Desperate Rock and Roll or Las Vegas Grind or the Madness Invasion or Sin Alley or Swing for a Crime. I think that music really taught me the lesson that punk had in a more recent form — the ideas of DIY and low-fi creativity, the concept of passion over talent or capability, the realities of using your guile to overcome the technology. It was great music, sometimes insane.
By the mid ‘90s, I was totally out of step with current music other than ska. I was still taken by the ‘50s stuff, but had also moved into the realms of Sinatra (who I had loved since childhood, but only as an adult really understood) and Serge Gainsbourg.
Serge was a revolutionary creator for me, he opened wide the door to French music that had been cracked by Les Negresses Vertes and the sounds of that country (up until the early 70s) really began to become my favorite pop music.
By the late 1990s, I had also come to mine jazz and a whole new world was opening up to me, one that was largely forgotten by the mainstream radio at the time (though college, in its embrace of “cocktail music” did acknowledge jazz — and people like Tom Waits never forgot it, nor did Morphine, but I never really got into them). And so I began to love Slim Gaillard and Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Jordan and Sy Oliver and Duke Ellington and Lester Young, among many others.
I also began revisiting the ‘50s — this time, away from rock and more into country. I fell in love with Bob Wills and Patsy Cline and Ella Mae Morse and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Any new music I listened to came in the form of bands like Man or Astroman and Southern Culture on the Skids — or whatever ska band I liked at the time. Oh, and Cibo Matto. Mostly, anyway. Their CDs were never as good as their initial singles. And the Evolutionary Control Committee.
You can imagine that by the time Kurt Cobain died, it didn’t mean much to me and I still don’t really get it.
As the 2000s approached, I’m still out of touch, I admit it. More and more, the music I like is tinged with foreign sounds — traditional rock music largely bores me, but this trend towards touches of Eastern Europe is exciting. DeVotchka, Balkan Beat Box, Gogol Bordello, this is my stuff. I am more out of touch with popular music culture than I ever have been and the bands that eluded me originally are even further away in my understanding of why people listen to it — REM? What? They’re still around?
I like foreign bands alot. They offer something a little different. They’re as current as I get. Stereo Total, I’m From Barcelona, Komeda, The Jessica Fletchers, lots of others.
I also like electronica, mash-ups, dancey things — the real result of the new world of technology, the sound of people having fun with sounds rather than trying to have careers. That’s the sound of the obscure, regional ‘50s rock I loved, of be-bop jazz, of the early punks, of the local level new wavers, and of bands like The Pogues and Les Negresses Vertes and Gogol Bordello, who never had any reason to believe that people would want to hear the kind of music they produced.
And so when I look back the history of my musical taste — which has been sketched out here in a vague, sweeping way, rather than getting into a lot of great detail — it’s one that’s very on it’s own road. My musical taste is entirely out of step with the world around me. But I realize that I’ve always been that way — as a young teen, when all the kids around me were into The Beatles or Heart or Led Zeppelin or whatever, I liked the Oak Ridge Boys. Nothing to brag about, certainly — not in the normal sense of the word brag, anyhow — but it helps me realize that being oblivious to what’s current and following my own musical muse and going over the past again and again and again is just my way of being.
Sometimes that means I do a lot of catch-up to things I either missed or wasn’t very interested in at the time — it took a couple solo records by Morrissey for me to embrace The Smiths, for instance and that was at the same point that while I was discovering them after the fact, Morrissey’s music, which seemed interesting to me initially, began to bore me immensely.
Anyhow, that’s the Brief History of My Musical Taste. I have no idea where it will be headed next, I get pickier with age, my sphere of interest gets smaller, more particular. I’ve always loved accordions, though. And Kid Creole and the Coconuts. There is that
Posted in The Last Visible Blog | No Comments »
I’m trying for the life of me to remember birthdays from my childhood, but can’t. Only scraps of memories, I know I had one in Shakey’s Pizza in California. I also know that for another one, for my 14th, me and several friends were going to go see “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days” and had to be driven all the way to Dayton because it was on limited release apparently, only to discover that it alternated times with another movie and, so, we couldn’t see it. Instead, we all saw the Peter Sellers version of “The Prisoner of Zenda.” Let’s just say that “The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu” is a much better movie.
