Restoration

Over the last three or four years, music had pretty much left my life. I'm not talking metaphorically. I'm talking literally. I wasn't discovering new artists, or interesting ones. I wasn't expanding the kinds of music I listened to. I wasn't spending whole evenings with music on instead of the television. And for sure wasn't sinking into the music and feeling that I couldn't sit still, that I had to be in it.

I grew up with music. People in my family played pianos and violins, and I even tried my hand at the flute. I would tape songs off the radio, steal 45's from my sisters, check out TOMMY from the library, and actually enjoy Guy Lombardo and Liberace when my mom was playing music for herself. I drew the line at her occasional interest in Lawrence Welk. We both chose Louis Armstrong as a favorite. On the other end, a junior pot head friend of mine let me have it with Hendrix when I was 12. I can still see him air guitaring in my living room as I sat back and experienced.

I would even badger my sisters into letting me join them when they went to drag main. I didn't join them to look cool. I went because they would play the music louder in the car than I could in the house, and because I heard songs I hadn't heard before. Mostly top 40 stuff, but I liked it.

In college, well, music was everywhere. Roommates, dances, drinking songs, drunken singers. Old record shops, new record shops, and weekend long tune taping sessions. I got pop-y. Boston, Jefferson Starship, Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick, Steve Miller Band, REO-Styx-Journey-Wagon. My close friends at other colleges were getting into or were already into harder tunes, with Blue Oyster Cult, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Ozzy, and AC/DC. Still not my favorite, but obviously something needing a bit more thought than Pop. Oh, and my interest in Frank Zappa, the Fuggs, DEVO and Def Leppard showed up then too. There was music on all the time, and I just took it for granted.

Graduate school was almost wasteland of music. Much sublime recapitulation of what I already liked. The only high spot was, yes, hair bands, pardon the pun. I got drum lessons from a guy with whom I worked for a spot as his hair cover band's only roadie. Half the summer I drummed, drove, set up, and took down. Poison, Twisted Sister, the Cult, more Ozzy, more Def Leppard, Ratt, White Lion, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, and Van Halen. REM kinda came out of nowhere. I had the shortest hair in most of the places we played and I never did get very good with the drums. I don't think they were related.

But finally, I found an oasis of music. This place, where I am now, is a big college town, and I met musicians, record shop owners, music reviewers, music fans. Tunes and bands were recommended to me left and right. Stevie Ray Vaughn and Capercaille and Elvis Costello and Green Day and Etta James and Louis Prima and Sheryl Crow and Vivaldi and Blues Traveler and the cool latin rock of Los Lobos. I bought my last vinyl album in 1991, and my first boxed CD set. My music collection tripled in a year. I found I was recommending more as well, and for the first time felt like I had something to say about music I liked.

Besides listening, I danced. Mostly at local clubs showing local bands, like Frank Allison and the Odd Sox, the Buzzcocks, Big Dave and the UltraSonics, George Bedard and the Kingpins and a host of others I don't remember, but also at clubs, to whatever dance pop was going on. It was a part of what I did every week. I danced til I could only shuffle, and walked to my car with steam rising from me in the cold mornings.

Then, it just stopped. I started my own business, got more serious at the day job, moved in with someone, and the music slid away. I let it. My life became all words and voices, with maybe an instrumental soundtrack quietly playing in the deep background. I did things, and went from day to day with a kind of task list, and didn't open myself to the tunes anymore.

I didn't notice what was gone until this year. I was staying up late last summer, thinking over deep stuff and not wanting to hear the tv or the quiet. I put on the Counting Crows August and Everything After, and 4 hours later at 3:30 a.m. I was standing, sweating, after finishing selections from Green Day's Dookie and Cherry Poppin' Daddies' Zoot Suit Riot. It was as if part of me, a connection with who I was and who I want to be, was restored in a wash of sound.

So, the music is back , with a vengeance. I listen to it every night, often to the exclusion of television completely. Friends, new and old, have helped bring the music back into my life, and that in turn has brought me closer to them. Philly Neo-Soul with Jaguar Wright, Country artists Lonestar and Kellie Coffey, regional Blues bands such as Walter Trout, long time surf guitarist Dick Dale, Newfoundland's Great Big Sea and Nova Scotia's Ashley MacIsaac, and zydeco Clifton Chenier from New Orleans are sitting on top of the older stuff on my shelf now. It seems like I missed them even before I heard them. And now, I can't imagine being without music again. That, as Martha would say, is most definitely a good thing.

Previous || Home || Next

frosty@stayfrosty.com

8 January 2003 Rules Links Latest Archives Me...