Why I'm Behind

After coming up with fewer than 10 great albums for the last five years, it’s flabbergasting to see critics with 100-long year-end album lists, or CD-Rs burned with the 300+ best songs of the year. That’d be finding time to listen to two good discs per week, and that’s not counting listening to the dross, though some of these guys (and they’re virtually all guys) seem to be rather indiscriminate. (The qualifications of what make a good album vary, of course, just like the who’s-the-best-conference-in-college-basketball argument: if it has three really great songs [teams], but the rest are crummy, is it a good album [conference]? Or does pretty good all the way through count?) What’s sick about these music critics, though, is that most of them are my age or younger, and they have a much deeper knowledge of pop’s back catalog than I.

I blame my parents.

My parents--okay, my dad, as Mom doesn’t own any pre-recorded music except for maybe Manneheim Steamroller Christmas; you can see right there that I come from the pop music underclass--possessed only one record released later than 1970 (my birth year, probably not a coincidence): an Olivia Newton John hit collection that pre-dated “Physical.” So the only stuff I had access to hear repeatedly before my teens were Sesame Street compilations, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Magical Mystery Tour (thanks, Bachelders), and a 1976 K-Tel collection of novelty hits from the late ‘50s through the early ‘70s, called 24 Looney Tunes (thanks, Settlemeyers), but no relation to the cartoon. Of these I still listen to “I am the Walrus” and the highs of 24 Looney Tunes (the lows are very, very low). But my folks didn’t provide me with a cool older sibling who might’ve brought punk or funk or even Kiss into the house. Dad had some hip records he’d bought during his college years in the mid-sixties—Another Side of Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Out of Our Heads, Live at the Apollo, Yesterday and Today*, and Songs, Pictures & Stories of the Fabulous Beatles—but these never made it onto the turntable in my earshot. I wouldn’t discover them until high school, and since the phonograph needle was defunct, wouldn’t hear them until I bought my own record player in college ($30, thanks Richardson).

I heard other parents’ music occasionally. I remember sitting in a hot Volkswagen Beetle in order to listen to the Statler Brothers for fun on the car’s 8-track (um, thanks? Wests from West Virginia) and lounging in more comfortable climes indoors, hearing the Eagles on 8-track (no thanks, Stelles), where I discovered the weird, weird manner in which these devices worked, with their four “programs.” (After the Stelles got a stereo with components, this semi-obsolete device ended up demoted to my best friend’s room, where we listened to all manner of gold in the ‘80s, Steve Miller’s Abacadabra and Toto something-or-other on 8-track, and the entire Pac-Man Fever album on 33.)

Certainly I heard the radio, but it seems that little quality material reached my ears. I’m pretty sure that the Helen Reddy version of “Delta Dawn” is the first broadcast tune I remember. Yet I am sure that the aesthetics of the early ‘seventies songcraft permeated my consciousness, even if my memory can not recall more than a handful of songs. I don’t know whether this was because I actually heard pop music when I was very young, or, the more likely scenario that I was imprinted by the late ‘70s cartoons and kids’ shows I watched, which reproduced a watered-down, second-hand version of the aesthetic (watch early japanimation and listen for the wah-wah pedal … or, on second thought, don’t). The influence is clear: my favorite source of pop junk is that decade, and I’m a sucker for recent songs produced by the Neptunes.

At age ten, my favorite song was Neil Diamond’s “America,” if that lets you know where my tastes stood at the end of the decade. By 1983, that had been displaced in my heart by the Kinks’ “Come Dancing.” I thought the Cars and the Doors were the same band. My aged clock radio then could be permanently disabled by cutting a string inside it, a decidedly fatal flaw in the face of boys’ machinations. No matter. Worst. Decade. Ever. For Top Forty, that is. I seemingly had one chance at redemption, when my dad invited an eighteen-year-old foster kid to spend the summer at our house before he left for college. He had a Columbia House Membership. And really bad taste. I was more interested in the records when I discovered he had snippets of porn stored in some of the sleeves—records he kept in our living room! After he was gone (and no doubt re-joining Columbia House at his new address) his last LP arrived in our mailbox. It was Hi Fidelity by R.E.O. Speedwagon.**

So that’s why my music nerdness pales in comparison to the professionals.

*The sleeve of this album bears the vandalism inflicted on it—with Dad’s permission, the only time I can remember him condoning property destruction—in a vain hope of peeling to reveal the butcher cover, after we heard that story on teevee in the late ‘80s.

**In a bizarre footnote, we moved fifty miles away, and he showed up as a student teacher for my math class in high school. I didn’t recognize him at first because he’d taken a different last name. He was bemused when I gave him the Speedwagon album near the end of the year.