music and family ways

[rayge]

Because it came up in the Led Zeppelin thread, and because I think that all opinions are illuminated by knowing the contexts in which they were formed, I started thinking about the influence of families, particularly siblings and parents, in our developing tastes for recorded sound.

I'm an only child: none of my many cousins was particularly interested in music, my mother was mainly anhedonic (she loved movies, but wasn't fond of musicals), my father had given up playing the piano accordion before I was born, and the records (78rpm singles) in the house growing up 1948-62) were mainly of tenors such as Mario Lanza and Malcolm Vaughan, crooners such as Perry Como, MOR Mantovani instrumentals or breezy American female vocalists such as Rosemary Clooney and Theresa Brewer. The only act that my parents - well, my dad, really - liked that I really took to was The Platters.

How about you?

[DayoRemix]

Have two much older brothers (10 and 12 years older), so my early exposure to music was through their collections, both of which were quite different. It's why I've heard some of the 60s and 70s "Rock" and R&B/funk. Assimilating these collections helped me know what I didn't like, lol. It was an interesting starting point and I did find things to enjoy and directions to follow.

The parents weren't much help. Mom wasn't really into music and dad loved JAZZ (which did absolutely nothing for me).


What became of my tastes was probably more influenced by the fact I grew up in Los Angeles at a time when radio actually had a ton of variety, music was splintering in new and interesting directions and stuff like Zines were becoming a thing. The 80s were a great time to begin a musical journey. 

[fange]

what kinds jazz was your dad into, dayo?

[DarknessFish]

My brother is 4 years older than me, and certainly had some influence on my music taste, but I think generally my taste is just the way I'm wired. Totally wired. As a kid, mum and dad would always have music on, they had more singles than albums ("Walking Back to Happiness", "Poetry in Motion", "Stupid Cupid" stick in the memory). They had The Beatles red album, but only really played the first record. My dad was more adventurous, more interested in music than just listening to what he liked. He worked back to Fats Domino, and forward to Leonard Cohen just before he died. My dad's Buddy Holly album was the first piece of music I really loved.

My brother got me into Level 42, probably piqued my interest in metal. Then when he got to college, he brought home Bauhaus, The Mission, All About Eve, and Bauhaus in particular was like nothing I'd eve heard before. It has to be said though, that at this point I was already into Bolt Thrower and Napalm Death. I was always looking for something new, something different. Like I said,wired differently. My brother never really ventured further than that, and I never got his satisfaction with All About Eve and New Model Army.

So it was never really about finding a tribe, never about kicking back against patents. Posters on this site seem to have set a lot of store by critics' opinions, but though I read NME and MM, it seemed to me they were never as interested in music as interested in defining what was cool and correct, they were short-sighted and dismissive. Zines were different, enthusiasm shone through, love of the subject all important.

Bit of a ramble, but yeah, that were me, when I were a lad.

[fearlessfreap]

Neither of my parents were into music. We had a stereo, but it was closer to one you’d get with green stamps than one the Hoffman people brag about. Still it did the job. My father had a handful of Capitol Sinatras , my mother had a couple of original cast 50’s records, I think one was Oklahoma. She also had a Beethoven’’s 9th symphony album. It was the first record I remember playing. I eventually appropriated my father’s Sinatras and he never noticed. My parents were of the pre rock generation. I was the oldest kid in the family so I was on my own as far as music went. We lived next to a funeral home and I was friends with the kids. They had high school students that did odd jobs and landscaping. They would play 8 tracks while they worked, and I heard early 70’s hard rock like Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin this way. I listened to the radio and acquired a love of Philly Soul. I also read Creem and Circus and our library which was within walking distance, had Rolling Stone. For better or worse I was pretty much self taught as far as music went.

[Charlie O.]

Both my parents loved music, though they were pretty firmly in the pre-rock & roll bag. Mom was primarily a housewife/mom, but she had a degree in music education which she occasionally put to use; she was also sometimes a volunteer choir director at church, and was very good at it, too. Their combined record collection was not a huge one, but it included classical, showtunes, swing era jazz and a bit of Brubeck and Stan Getz, and - of course - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. When I was a toddler, Herb connected with me (still does!), and some of the showtunes, but not much else; the rest came to me later, ages 5-8 mainly.

My real music educators for the first several years of my life were my older brothers, who I've written about here innumerable times. To generalize, Jim was the rocker - garage rock, early "heavy Metal" once that came along, and later Aerosmith and Ted Nugent and such. Jon liked a lot of that, too, but he brought in the soft rockers - James Taylor, America, Carole King, Neil Young's Harvest, and so on - perhaps in an effort to counterbalance his older brother, but also (as he later admitted to me) to show Mom and Dad that rock wasn't ALL obnoxious noise. He also turned me on to Yes and Jethro Tull, but he never went whole hog on prog. Oh, and he started reading CREEM in 1973, which I continued to read fairly religiously until they ceased publication fifteen years later.

I took all that on board and pushed ahead on my own.

[loveless]

My parents had their tastes (varied in their ways - they were reasonably young...mom, dad, stepdad), so there was a lot of music around when I was a kid. I grabbed whatever pieces of that I was gonna grab as a child (I definitely remember the radio being on pretty religiously in the car)...the ENVIRONMENT was musical, and if I showed an interest (Elton, Beatles, Wings, "Walk on the Wild Side"), someone would buy the record for me/help me buy it. They had records I remember liking (War, CSNY). My sister was 6 years older, and...generally her tastes were something that mostly scared me as a child (I think mainly just the precocious late 70s juvenile delinquent teens that she and her friends were was what scared me - until I was ready to go down my own version of that road 5 or 6 years later), but...much like the music that my parents enjoyed, it ALL would filter down to me in due time (hers would when I was a teen - I certainly had no early/mid 1980s notion of "No Queen, No Rush, No Zeppelin" making me kick back in defiance)...records my parents had/played (things like Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, etc.) would all find me in due time (some as a kid, some as an adult). I found some of that bygone shit (60s culture - Woodstock/Monterey on the television) fascinating. It, on some level, seemed to have more meaning than, say, REO Speedwagon or Lipps, Inc.

I do remember my stepdad playing me Jimi Hendrix when I was a kid (maybe something like "E.X.P."?) and being put off by it, but...of course when I was 12 or 13, and discovered the JHE on my own, I couldn't get enough. That seems like an occasional through line in childhood - one's parents are often not the best way into a thing.

By the time high school came along, there were friends and the beginnings of bands, concerts...that was its own portal into various areas of fandom/listening. I feel like that sort of thing carried on well into college and after, but...as Charlie says, you push ahead on your own.

Surely, at some point, you start looking for a thing that no one else can find for you. Cause it only started existing moments ago, and you didn't know you needed it until you stumbled upon it. There was a certain amount of groping in the dark in later teen years/early twenties (and, truthfully, I miss that a bit) where a band name or an album cover might seem sufficiently enticing to go in blind. Finding an increased inclination to listen to jazz of late is the closest thing I can find to recapturing that kind of buzz (there's all of these sort of promising seeming artists and titles and record jackets where I think "That's GOTTA be good!").

I've pushed more back against myself than anyone else. If I went too far down certain blind alleys in my youth/young adulthood (be it "burnout stoner teen" classicism/metal, or "John Hughes soundtrack semi-modernist new wave poptimism", or "things that call themselves pop but don't actually offer that much in the way of cheap thrills or satisfaction"), there would always be an automatic course correction in due time (I rarely saw myself doing it in real time - but, it's like someone who loves pizza, and then a pizza place opens next door, and they end up overdoing it and having to redirect).

[loveless]

Mar 2, 2024 19:31:47 GMT loveless said:

.

[DayoRemix]

Mar 2, 2024 12:12:57 GMT fange said:

what kinds jazz was your dad into, dayo?

He had a pretty decent range..From what I recall, he had some of the big names..Miles Davis, Monk, Gillespie, Coltrane, Blakey, Getz..Traditional, Bebop, West Coast Jazz, Cool Jazz..etc..

[loveless]

Granting myself permission to digress here -

Does anyone have the thing where you "decide you know what you're into" and, almost the moment you've made this declaration, the thing stops working?

I dunno - it's like having a favorite band, song, album, supposed style. You say "My favorite song is 'Surrender' by Cheap Trick, and my favorite style of music is 60s garage", and then the very next day, you hear it and find yourself completely unmoved by it?

I mean, you can come back to things, and they can catch you by surprise again, but...do you know what I mean?

[osgood]

My parents were slightly into music. My father used to play some records of "Zarzuela", the Spanish equivalent to Operetta, which I found mostly dreadful (still do). My mom was more into classical, Beethoven, Litz, Schubert, Chopin,...but that collection was rather tiny.

I have two brothers, 6 and 5 years older than me. The older had a small record collection, mostly singles, Beatles, Beach Boys, some soul, Spanish pop of the era, good stuff from the charts of the time, but he was not really a passionate music fan. I loved to play those records and still have kept some of them.

By the early 70s I started my own way, first single bought with my own money Zep's Black Dog (precisely), first LP, Imagine.

[neige]

My mum played the piano (and church organ) at sight. My dad gifted her a Bechstein grand piano around the time I was born and it was at the center of our living room. She loved to play pieces by the likes of Schubert, Chopin or Mozart. Both parents sang in a big choir. We also sang quite a lot at home, but I don't recall any records of my parents that would have left an impression - with the possible exception of this French answer to Britten's Young Person's Guide to Orchestra. The music by maverick composer André Popp is absolutely fabulous, check it out.

Piccolo, Saxo & Cie

Passeport pour Piccolo, Saxo & Cie

Most of my mother's classical music bored me a bit ("too predictable chord sequences", I recall saying), but I made her listen to not-too-loud stuff from my collection and we later bonded over Mahler, Debussy and other late-19th century composers

But I had two brothers, seniors of 5 and 6 years. In the mid-sixties, one had Rubber Soul and Revolver, the other Beatles For Sale, and these are my otherwise earliest memories of recorded music. Both brothers loved to buy music, and I followed suit starting with Abbey Road followed by Sgt. Pepper. My brothers later specialised in French chanson and opera, and folk/roots, respectively. And until they left home (and beyond), we played each other our new purchases/discoveries, and some of their enthusiasm rubbed off on me, even if, eager to be different, my thing at the time was progressive rock (in Carlsson's broad church sense). Anyway, with hindsight I do have to thank my family for the eclectic taste I have now.

[riggers]

Music was there right from the start. I've touched on this in some of my previous posts, where I somehow always feel the need to be drafting excerpts from some future memoir..

I was born on 29/08/67 and from being in my pram or trolley/stroller I remember the wireless and occasionally records going. Keith West's "Excerpt From A Teenage Opera", Manfred Mann's "My Name Is Jack", 'Whiter Shade of Pale', 'Hey Jude', 'Suspicious Minds', 'Space Oddity', Bobbie Gentry's 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again'.

The black and white days. A Little two up, two down in Gorton, Manchester. A godforsaken place then and an often hellish ghetto these days. Luckily we got out when I was about three and moved to the relatively genteel Northern Moor, on the outskirts of the 1920's 'Garden City' project, Wythenshawe.
My mum is the eldest of six siblings, so my youngest Aunties, Theresa and Angela were/are only 10 and twelve years older than me. They would often be in charge of me. I find this astounding now. Young teenagers 13/14/15, wheeling a toddler round the estate, to dangerous, pre-health and safety playgrounds and parks.
To me they were real grown ups and impossibly glamorous. They snogged pimply boys while I was on a swing or slide and talked incessantly of Bolan, Bowie, Slade and Sweet.
They would come and visit to see my Mum and me, but also to use the record player. And after about 72ish, to watch 'Top Of The Pops' in colour, at a time when most people of my grandparents generation were still happy with black and white.  I remember hearing 'Telegram Sam', 'Gudbuy To Jane', 'Blockbuster' etc, along with bubblegum classics, like 'Sugar Sugar', 'Chirpy Chirpy, Cheep Cheep', 'Me and You and A Dog Named Boo', and also stuff like Blue Mink's 'The Banner Man', McGuiness Flint's Malt And Barley Blues' George's 'My Sweet Lord' and many others. My antennae were up. I absorbed their enthusiasm and the general feel in the air. Pop music was so huge at that point. All pervasive to a kid like me. I was like a sponge.
When I was around 4/5/6 I was soaking up 'You're So Vain', 'American Pie', 'Tumbling Dice', 'Maggie May' 'Walk On The Wild Side' 'I Feel The Earth Move', 'Killer Queen', 'I Saw The Light'.. although I rarely took in who the artist was. I'm pretty certain that by then I was aware of who Elvis and The Beatles were. It's like how you can't remember being in the womb. I couldn't remember a time when I wasn't aware of some glorious musical age before I had arrived.
I heard oldies all the time. At family gatherings, weddings, school discos.. The Drifters, Everly Brothers, 'The Twist', The Locomotion', 'Baby Love', Mary Wells' 'My Guy'. These were like sacred texts from an earlier age. My maternal Grandad loved Johnny Cash. 'Orange Blossom Special' and 'A Boy named Sue' were big childhood favourites,

The early/mid 70's brought the 50's revival. I was suddenly aware of Buddy Holly, Little Richard. Happy Days and Grease followed presently.. Elvis was still a huge icon. I associated 70's Elvis with Muhammed Ali and Evel Knievel! Purely because there were occasions where a TV spectacular involving one of the above would be a must see event. Elvis-'Aloha from Hawaii', one of Ali's big fights or Mr. Knievel, jumping over a load of fucking buses or whatever. Evel and Elvis both wore white jump suits too....

Incidentally, my Mum's other Sister, Auntie Rita, who was a real looker and what may have been described as a 'firecracker' or some such at the time, witty, sharp, cheeky and able to be 'one of the lads' at the drop of a hat, played the piano, penny whistle, accordion and later, a bit of guitar, had a job as a cinema usherette and was working one night when the package tour of Humble Pie, Love Sculpture and 'Space Oddity' era Bowie, doing an acoustic set stopped off. Rita had a backstage snog with Bowie. He rang my Nan's house the next day, asking her to come to his hotel, but my strict and oppressive Grandmother wouldn't hear of it.
Just think, I could have had an Uncle Ziggy.

Instead, I got an Uncle Joe. A wiry, boozy Irishman, who Rita got together with shortly after my folks had split up. Joe taught me to drink and play guitar. He was 26 to my 13. He was steeped in Irish folk music, so at a time when I wanted to be learning Clash and Pistols songs, I was having to learn 'Whiskey In The Jar' 'Whip Jamboree' and 'The Irish Rover'. But Joe also loved the Pistols and played me Hendrix for the first time.
My first 'performances' were at parties round at theirs when all manner of ne'er do wells piled back from the pub, where I would have been babysitting my sister and cousin. I would then be given a beer and a guitar and everyone would strike up with bloody 'Fog on The Tyne' or something equally grim. But it was still pretty exciting.
Rita passed away a few years ago and I think about her all the time. She was like a second Mother to me. Only me, her, her son and a cousin play an instrument. No one else in the family, which is pretty massive, has taken that path.

I remember as a kid, compared to most families I knew, my parents had a decent stereo system. Proper separates and an impressively diverse music collection for the time. My Dad loved CSN(&Y), Neil Young, Dylan, Classical and Opera, along with mad outliers like The Kingston Trio and Marty Robbins 'Gunfighter Ballads and Trial Songs'. Musicals, Nancy and Lee.. He always said that you could like any kind of music.

My Mum had been a teenage Cliff fan. She was 13/14/15 in that pre-Fabs era. She also liked stuff like Bobby Vee, Brenda Lee, 'Shakin' All Over' and 'Runaway'. For some reason, she took against the Beatles from the start, although my Dad quite liked them and saw them at the Manchester Odeon in '63, which may have been what the Apollo was called then or might have been the Odeon Cinema on Oxford Street. As my sister and I grew up, my Mum remembered that she had liked a lot of 60's music and began to accumulate 'Best Of's of all the big names except the Beatles (although we had the Blue Album and a couple of Wings albums that my dad had bought), The Stones, Who, Kinks, Hollies, Troggs, Manfred Mann, Small Faces, The Searchers, The Byrds, Beach Boys and weirdly Status Quo. It's taken me years to accommodate into my listening early 70's boogie Quo because of my Mum. She loved them right from 'Matchstick Men' to 'In The Army Now' and had all those albums. Really fancied Francis Rossi too. Imagine? Fuck's sake Mum.

These are the things that formed me. My Dad's open minded and eclectic taste and my Mum's ability to plug into the thrill she'd felt as a girl. I remember vividly going into the kitchen, aged about eleven and my Mum was at the kitchen table using her sewing machine with The Kinks 'All Day And All of the Night' blasting and she was grinning and shaking her head like a teenager. If I wasn't already sold on this thing that had been an ever present audio monolith for all of my life, then this moment would have have done it. Later on, my Mum would become a huge Jesus and Mary Chain fan (as well as getting into stuff like the Dolls and Ramones) and I was quite proud that her and her second husband when courting in around 1990, went to see the JAMC at the Ritz in Manchester, with the Telescopes supporting. I haven't seen my Mum for years and we don't have the best relationship, but I respect her for that. Dad understood what 'quality' music was but Mum understood the power of Teenage Kicks etc..

My Mum was with a guy called Ron, from after about two years of her and my dad splitting and they were together from when I was roughly 14 to 18/19, but he and I remained friends from then until when he died, around six years ago. Every couple of weeks or so we'd get together for lunch and a couple of pints and put the world to rights.

I love my old man dearly, but because of the circumstances of the parental split, the fall out of which took years to settle, our relationship hasn't always been as I would have liked. Although seeing Crosby and Nash with him, after he had got freebies from the Bridgewater Hall, where he was working part time after retiring was pretty special. We also saw U2 together on the Joshua Tree tour in Leeds. it was genuinely nice to be at a gig with with my Dad, but his reaction to a first on the bill set by The Fall was priceless. They weren't the greatest ever, partly due to the sound and an unresponsive crowd, but I loved it. They opened with a spiky 'Australians In Europe' as my Dad scrunched his face up. Someone chucked a half eaten apple at the stage and when the song finished, Smithy picked it up and called the thrower a 'fucking idiot' and said that it 'could have had someone's eye out', Which, with the best will in the world, it really couldn't. This made it all the more amusing for me. But there's always been a musical relationship with my Dad. He likes my stuff, which is nice.

Ron, my Mum's partner from roughly '81 to '85 was like a much needed mate from the start. He turned up at my Auntie Rita's with my Mum one night, when they had first got together and straight away, we were just yapping about the Beatles or Punk/New wave records. He liked the Stranglers and X-Ray Spex. I remember going to his Mum's along with my mum and sister for Sunday dinner and Ron blasting 'The Day The World Turned Day Glo' as his old Irish Mother frowned and grimaced. He was a big fan of 'Hunky Dory', which I wasn't familiar with at that point. I vividly remember sitting round as a family watching 'Pop Quiz' and The Whistle Test performance of 'Oh You Pretty Things' was played as the credits ran. Of course, we videotaped it straight away. I always had a blank tape in if there was anything musical on telly. My Mum not so much, but the rest of us watched that clip a lot, along with bits of James Brown, The Byrds, The BBC Series 'The Rock n' Roll Years'  and archive clips from Whistle Test and the Tube. He gave me his old copy of the 'My Generation' LP (on the Brunswick label, which if mint is worth a few bob now) and told me of watching The Kinks, Small Faces, Hollies, Chuck Berry and Little Richard in the 60's and Bowie as Ziggy twice in the 70's. We saw Dylan together in 2002. He always supported my music and came to quite a few of my gigs. We always shared our enthusiasms. When I was a kid, he would find himself describing something like 'Warren Zevon's 'Werewolves Of London', quoting lyrics and singing bits to the point where I couldn't wait to hear this track. He would enthuse madly about particular tracks, Billie Joe Royal's 'Hush', Free's 'Wishing Well', Creedence's 'Run Through The Jungle', The Beatles 'Every Little Thing', Dylan's 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' He couldn't sing for shit, but rattled off reams of lyrics.

In the last year or so before he died, I did him CD compilations of Nick Cave and Tom Waits that he played endlessly in his car. He'd pick me up, the title track of 'Rain Dogs' would be blasting and he'd gesticulate towards the CD player, just smiling and shaking his head, before then saying, 'Tell you what..., bloody hell David..' and emote and enthuse the way my mates and I had done endlessly for years.

Reading this back, I feel pretty lucky to have had all those influences. It's been nice to go back over it.

[tory]

My father was already 30 by the time "Rock around the clock" visited these shores, so it's fair to say that Rock 'n' Roll passed him by entirely. He was very much a fan of Haydn, Beethoven, J C Bach (not J S) and Hymns. My elder brother and sister, much older than me, instilled a "year zero" approach to music in me from a young age as they were 16 and 14 when Punk Rock emerged. My mother hated punk rock and all that it entailed - she thought it was utterly vile and poisonous - so, of course, that just made it all the more appealing to them.

Both of them were musical in their own way - my mother had been a keen amateur actress too - and they encouraged me in Opera and Classical, but neither of those tropes or ideas made ANY sense to me until I was in my early thirties. I vividly remember going to see G&S "Mikado" at probably around the age of 8 at the ENO, and not making any sense of it at all. Perhaps that girded in me an intense and icy dislike of musicals that, again, it would take until my forties to thaw when I started to warm to the likes of An American in Paris.

My son isn't really that taken with music yet. He likes a lot of computer game music and Steely Dan if he's given a choice of what to play at the weekend. Last week after a conversation about Eminem (schoolmates are getting into him), I introduced him to A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy. Afterwards, we watched Flavor Flav's reality TV series (which is a must watch).

[harrylemon]

My Mum was 30 when Heartbreak Hotel came out. She never understood what being a teenager meant.