Music

Its a tenuous question-one that cannot really be answered. Do you mean the one bought for me, the one I asked for,the one i saved money for and bought myself,the one that opened me up, the one I fell in lust or love to, the one that my peer group pushed me to purchase , or the one that opened my ears and made me consider new places and people or the one I considered truly mine?
Its an important question though. Music is shorthand for identity. Its whispered at bars as the opening gambit to a fuck, its told to nascent friends to tell them you are a person of note., It connects you to subcultures and proves you belong. The way to answer the general question is to answer the specific questions So thats what I'm going to do-That'll tell you who i really am.

The First Album(s) Bought For Me

A series of Disney produced cassettes replete with song books bought by my mother. The Disney thing was extraneous, mostly illustrations on the packaging The songs were similar to the fairy tales told to me originally meant for adults until the references became to obscure and the violence mellowed with age. I loved the detective work in finding their origins and the visceral thrill of blood. Where are the Camptown races and joy over the Clementine Bitch dying.

The First Album I asked for.

I begged for a Dolly Pardon album when Mom took me to the city , to the bargain shop. It wasn't K-Mart . Dad had just left to go up north and I was lonely. The folks use to play COuntry when they were together and the cassette gleamed in the display case. I begged, whined cajoled and got the prize. I don't remember the album title it might have been live because I do remember the cover with a black background, and a spot lit dolly looking like the dime store diva she is.

The One I Saved Money For and Bought Myself.

Fred came over to my house for a sleep over the day I turned twelve. It was Saturday and that Sunday I was to become a Deacon, the lowest form of the Junior Priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. All that year I became obsessed with a Teen Idol and after a rousing game of tiddly winks we went to my bedroom and put on the cassette. We danced around the room jumping on the bed , digging the Tiger beats. For me it may have been the first introduction to homosex.
The girls in grade six thought the members were dreamy and I hung with those girls so my love was assumed to be entirely musical. I had enough guy friends I wasn't singled out too badly.
With the girls I would talk about how wonderful the music was, how well they sang. With the boys we never really played music. They encouraged me to say socially inapproprite things and I would say them.
The image of what the boy band meant to me has lasted, the boy band I don't remember as much as I do hanging with the girls at the back of the class or Freddie Krause and I going spastic over them in my bed room.

The First Song I Fell In Lust to

When I was 14, I went away to school to one of those reform schools in the Albertan Wilderness. Before anything there was a hike, 60 km through out the Rockies. We were standard 13-15 year olds and mostly talked about Sex and Food, but there were mentions of tv and music. Mostly it was american sit-coms and bad hair metal,but every so often some won would talk about an eccentric taste. This was the trip I learnt about Art Speigelman and Are You Being Served.
From the school there were also Grade Twelve students helping out, supervising. One of them named Harley after the Motorcycle was short and burly, often refusing to hike in anything but jean cutoffs. He would take hold of a few stragglers near the back. I was a straggler and shirtless Harley, buff from six years of hiking, canoeing,snowshoeing, cross country running, farm work and everything else that SJSA had to offer us would tell us dirty jokes and sing us rugby songs. The first one I heard featured German soliders Crossing the Rhine and even that line causes me a minor major hard on. ( The reason he sang these songs to us were threefold-they were the start of our enculturation to those rituals of all male instatutions , It kept us in rythym and i made us move faster)

The First Song I Fell In Love To

There was a student named Michael who was a year older then me and did not go on the new boy hike. He saw that the twelve years of Dylan and Baez my parents taught me were not really helpful in fitting in, so he told me to get a Walkman and he would feed me tapes. The tapes were all of the cock rock I tried to avoid, but the idea was there and there was a thrill in having contraband. He would take me for walks, I would hear the music and then when I was finished we would sit down together and talk about the music and anything else that was bothering me. we did this on Friday nights between Classes and Studies or the Weekends we could not go home. The music led to a soft gaze gentle teenage love affair.




The First Music My Peer Group Forced Me to Listen To

After Saint Johns I had a nervous break down and was committed to the Glenrose Hospital Adolescent Psych Ward. I was told that I had to socialize, so in those nine months I bought a CD Player and a Radio. The CD Player almost never got use but the radio was glued to 103.9 THE BEAR, a local hard rock station. There were exceptions to this , mostly CBC to her classical music before I went to bed. This was found one night, but instead of mocking me the Alpha Male said he did too and I was cool . For a teenager who was clinical this was not a bad thing.


The Music That Opened Me Up

I went to Student United Nations in grade eleven where I met Josh. He was a conservative and I was an Anarchist. He played trombone in a Christian ska band but was a smart kid who managed to read Lacan and Paul with equal vigour. WE grew close enough for us to chat after the camp.
I met Peter through Josh at his Christmas Concert. Peter Played Jazz and CLassical, but not the namby pamby stuff I was used to with high school concerts, there were mad noisy explorations of the last hundred years. I knew about the vangarde in art and literature. I read about it and saw some of it in Vancouver and Edmonton but until Peter this kind of music escape d me.
Here was a kid my age who could and did explain Cage,Coltrane,Stravinsky and Satie. The music he gave to me at first sounded cacaphonious. The more music I heard from Peter though, the more my ears grew and the more I felt .

Music I Identified With

I never ferociously guarded information--never felt that any music was mine alone. The evanglicalism i was supposed to feel as a child and teen towards Jesus Christ I felt about shiny new pieces of knowledge. Often Lit or art was what I showed around. Never (and still I don't) feel like I know enough about music to be anything but an acolyte. Although I may like some obscure stuff my knowledge of music is less then others.

So there it is-my narrative selected and themed towards a rather general question. The interesting thing is how little I remember of titles themselves. If you asked me about the boy band Freddie gave me , I would be stumped. If you asked me what the new sounds were on Michaels Mix Tapes I couldn't tell you. There are stories that I remember, like being at a scout camp and hearing Madonnas Papa Don't Preach on the radio. The radio was shut off soon into the song by a Scout Leader who called it Licentious. There were the Bob Dylan and Buffy St Marie Records I brought to bring your own music Fridays at music class. These little edges are the titles I remember, aside from that the Music is the village and the emotion is the Tsunami.