the first time music mattered to you...

[mattjs]

Ok so its the saturday before pay day so I'm having my 'got some beer in i'm gonna watch a music documentary night', so I dug through the old VHS collection and found 'Hype!' the flim about seattle/grunge and it got me thinking how 'the seattle scene' was the first time music really became a vital part of my life.

I was about 12/13 when I first heard a Nirvana record and then a Pearl Jam record and then a soundgarden record and so on. This was 1993 arguably past the peak of this whole thing but man the effect it had on me was life changing.

Just into secondary school (high school) going through the confusion of puberty and these bands and records just hit every emotional nail on the head for me. I became - as we all have i'm sure - totally obssessed with getting my hands on every piece of recorded material I could. I went to every vaguely related gig I could get my parents to give me a lift too with two guys who are still the best two friends i have.

Then in 1995 the best thing that couldhave ever happened to me happen...my family had our one big family holiday - a road trip down the west coast of the US. San Francisco to San Diego. I took orders from my firends and went to every record store I could find along the way.

I bought Green River vinyl in Carmel, I found Sub-Pop singles club vinyl in San Francisco (my spending money was spent quickly) and I got my hands on any pearl jam single I could find.

Anyway, to cut what could be a long story short. From 1993 to probably 1997 all I cared about was grunge and it shaped everything...the movies i got into the books I read, the kind of person I wanted to become.

So

How about you when was the first time music became intrinsic to your being? (excuse bad spelling etc, its 11.40 and I'm nicely drunk-ed)

[Mahoney]

^pretty funny, the similarity, but i am being completely sincere. i already had my answer in my head as soon as i saw the title of the thread.

Probably in about '93, my parents were really into grunge. in 93 i was 8, and i remember sitting in the back seat of the car hearing pearl jam's ten cassette. when black would come on i would get all tingle-y feeling in side and well up a lil. i thought it was the most beautiful thing, and i do still think PJ can write some pretty crushing ballads. always one of my favorites, the stuff i was raised on.

[bigontheinside]

My story is a lot worse than yours, but I was at a friends house (who incidently I am seeing tomorrow), when I was about ten and he was playing some Green Day. Now I liked music at this time. I danced around the room at the age of six or seven as my dad played records like Bad by Michael Jackson and Bottle of Smoke by The Pogues. But as far as my own music collection went, I had the Digimon theme tune. When I heard green day, though, I felt like I had finally discovered something that was ME. I went home and downloaded as much as I could in an hour on napster, back when it was good, burned myself a cd and fell in love. I then bought American Idiot, which was pretty much all I listened to for a year, no jokes. It was just perfect to me. I was only 10, so the power chords were still exciting and the swearing was still funny and rebellious. But then for some reason I bought U2s How to dismantle an atomic bomb. I liked it. I then listened to this for about a year. These are what I often refer to as the dark ages. I then got lost in a flurry of tenacious d and avenged sevenfold, before slowly finding my way through indie rock like the futureheads and especially art brut, who are still one of my favourite bands today. Green day suddenly became viciously hated as I started secondary school, and as I was just trying to fit in I sort of followed the crowd and haven't really listened to them since. I recently heard Know Your Enemy and thought it was absolute poo, though. I'm only 15 now though, 16 next month (woohoo), if you were wondering. It seems relevant.

[doctoracula]

short answer:

nirvana

[doctoracula]

then discovering punk rock pretty much changed my life

[lee]

well-put, dr.

"dookie" was the first cd i owned that mattered to me--after spending my three weeks at my gp's house on the lake fast forwarding around an older cousin's mixtape to listen to "welcome to paradise", "longview", and "when i come around", as well as the meat puppets' "backwater". nothing else on the tape was like those things.
then, the next summer, i convinced my grandma to buy me both "in utero" and "nevermind" one day at the sam goody near their house in west st paul, and later rage against the machine's "evil empire" at blockbuster (i only mention these names for nostalgia's sake, since none of these awful chains really exist anymore) by covering up the parental advisory sticker with my thumb. i must have been desperate, since i didn't even have access to a cd player until i got back to colorado.
sublime came along later, and i recall being so frustrated that i could not catch the entirety of "santeria" on the radio to tape it-- i had two halves of it on two different parts of the same tape for a long time. anyway, all through this time i was reading everything i could about nirvana and green day, as well as things like "please kill me", which talked about a lot of artists i'd never heard, and who turned out to sound a lot different than i had anticipated based on what i'd read. through this reading, i found out about punk rock and the bizarre indie scene of the nw, particularly riot grrl, another thing which i didn't actually hear for a while after i'd read about it.

sometime in the midst of this came minor threat and the clash. obsession followed. the last refused album was a big one for me, too.

there are lots of first times for me.

all of this does not even touch on hip hop. thanks, rage.

[doctoracula]

it didnt really hit me on a conscious level at the time, but in utero was probably the biggest game-changer for me. until that record, everything i'd heard (even the nirvana stuff) was pretty polished and radio ready. in utero was the biggest fucking band on earth deliberately alienating people and making a dirty, noisy, beautiful record for themselves. both musically and ideologically, that had a huge impact on me. i've come back to that record so much over the last 17 years because of it, and i think the spirit of rebellion and fun behind it is part of what makes it still sound so fresh.

[doctoracula]

also, without typing out gigantic stories, the following bands changed the way i thought about and/or listened to music:

REM (they actually hit me slightly before nirvana, but it all kinda blends together)
pixies
radiohead
joy division
bob dylan
screeching weasel
black flag
i hate myself/burnman
harvey danger
modest mouse
the lawrence arms
the hold steady

[stevedave]

My Dad was into The Stones, Steppenwolf, Dylan, The Faces and on Sundays he'd lay on the floor in the back room with massive headphones on listening to his albums while Mum cooked Sunday dinner. Then there came a period when Dad was away for ages and I'd moan about missing him. Mum suggested I did what Dad did on a Sunday before dinner (I think she just wanted me to get out of the way for a bit) so I put on Aftermath and the big brown headphones and laid down to listen to an album all the way through for the first time. That was it. 1 year later it was all Monsters of Rock tickets, I'm never cutting my hair agian and T-shirts with tour dates on the back.

[caz]

Good thread Matt I can remember making mixtapes since I was really little. Starting with recording songs off the radio, and then making mixes out of whatever cds were lying around the house. My parents are more into classical music, so it probably helped a lot that my brother was massively into bands like Radiohead and Bob Dylan etc. My dad did introduce me to the Beatles though. I liked Pearl Jam a lot when I was a young ish teenager and used to nick my bro's cds sometimes, but I think I was about 17 when Pearl Jam properly clicked for me in a huge way - and I kind of did a mattjs and listened to tonnes of PJ, Soundgarden etc. for ages.

And after I got really into Pearl Jam, it just lead me to so many other bands. Like, I saw My Morning Jacket supporting PJ in Paris and checking out their music and messageboard lead me to The National and The Hold Steady etc.

So I think music has always been the most important thing to me, but I've been seriously chasing music that really means something to me since I was about 16/17.

I also started playing drums when I was 14, and I was fully in love with in within about a minute of my first lesson (I remember it very well). I remember being really aware that it was going to have a huge impact on my life now that I had discovered an instrument I loved playing so much. And my drum teacher ended up introducing me to the likes of Stevie Wonder and James Brown, whose music had a big influence on my playing.

Now I pretty much live for music in every way

[parock]

Feb 20, 2010 19:54:09 GMT -5 doctoracula said:

short answer:

nirvana

And Siamese Dream.

It's still one of my favorite albums ever. The melodys, the guitars, the lyrics, everything warped my teenage mind.

Then growing up around the West Chester punk scene in the mid 90s had a pretty big effect on me. Plow United made my head explode because I was watching one of my favorite bands, and to me, no one outside of the West Chester area had any clue how great they were and what we were experiencing. Next thing I know, I'm buying every 7 inch available, waiting for the new Bouncing Souls album, buying tons of Lookout! Records cds and albums. It was insane.

Also, The Descendents - Somery changed me as well as a 13/14 year old. I had a Sessions catalog and the Milo shirt/character stuck out to me. "I don't wanna grow up" seemed like a good mantra to attach to. So I ordered the tape. Then I played "Suburban Home" and Pervert on my walkman over and over. It blew my fucking mind.

[toastie]

When I started High school, I didn't really listen to much music. During my first year, playing music became a big thing as we were getting taught guitar and bass etc. One day, we had a supply teacher who played electric guitar. That was it, I was hooked and as the school year dragged on I got an mp3 player that was filled with the music I enjoyed at the time. It was sometime around the september that my great-gran died. With my inheritance I bought a guitar. At this time, I was obsessed with the Foo Fighters. As the years passed, so did my musical taste. As my fourth year was drawing to a close and exams were wrapped up and this band was making noises in the magazines. They were of course, The Hold Steady. I was visiting my gran and wandering around Virgin Megastore when I spotted BAGIA and immediately bought it. I popped the CD in the car radio and it was love at first listen. I listened to it for 3/4 days straight and went back into fifth year with a new sense of what music I wanted to play. BAGIA changed things for me, I was discovering acts like Springsteen and the Stooges because of comparisons drawn. To this day, Born to Run and Raw Power are amongst some of my fav albums. I was loaned BtR by a friend who I was working with at the time.

[doctoracula]

Feb 21, 2010 11:40:12 GMT -5 parock said:

Feb 20, 2010 19:54:09 GMT -5 doctoracula said:

short answer:

nirvana

Also, The Descendents - Somery changed me as well as a 13/14 year old. I had a Sessions catalog and the Milo shirt/character stuck out to me. "I don't wanna grow up" seemed like a good mantra to attach to. So I ordered the tape. Then I played "Suburban Home" and Pervert on my walkman over and over. It blew my fucking mind.

somery was pretty big for me too. i guess it was 96 or 97 when the descendents were touring for everything sucks, they came to philly with a bunch of bands i wanted to see (i think weston and less than jake?) and i figured i should probably know some descendents stuff too. so i went out and bought somery. i got really into it and i'm really glad i did, because i'd still be pissed if i saw the descendents and didnt know the songs at the time.

[parock]

Feb 21, 2010 14:10:53 GMT -5 doctoracula said:

Feb 21, 2010 11:40:12 GMT -5 parock said:

Also, The Descendents - Somery changed me as well as a 13/14 year old. I had a Sessions catalog and the Milo shirt/character stuck out to me. "I don't wanna grow up" seemed like a good mantra to attach to. So I ordered the tape. Then I played "Suburban Home" and Pervert on my walkman over and over. It blew my fucking mind.

somery was pretty big for me too. i guess it was 96 or 97 when the descendents were touring for everything sucks, they came to philly with a bunch of bands i wanted to see (i think weston and less than jake?) and i figured i should probably know some descendents stuff too. so i went out and bought somery. i got really into it and i'm really glad i did, because i'd still be pissed if i saw the descendents and didnt know the songs at the time.

Awesome show! It was Descendents, Less Than Jake, Guttermouth and Handsome.

My buddy just put out a Milo bobblehead :


www.aggronautix.com/products.cfm?productid=13

Talking to him, he says that when All was going to play the church back in January with OWTH he said Milo was gonna stop buy and do a couple songs. Then Bill got sick and it was cancelled which sucks.

I still have hope that I'll get to see them one more time.

[doctoracula]

I KNEW MILO WAS GONNA SHOW UP! GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!

i saw ALL at the troc a while back and he did a handful of songs. they played "hope" and some dude in front of me said "whoa, they're covering sublime." i think LTJ headlined that one.

[jamesjesusangleton]

Prepubescent metal fan, who tuned in to John Peel in 1983 because there always seemed to be metal bands on Top of the Pops when he presented. He didn't play metal on the radio, of course, but the first time I tuned in I heard a repeat of the first Smiths session for Radio 1. And that was it.
I wish it was still possible to come across music like that: to tune in the radio and have no idea what this music was and where it came from - now you just look it up on the internet. In those days you had to piece it all together like a jigsaw puzzle, and you'd come up with your own - often wildly offbase - secret histories of music. And you had the joys of delated gratification: I think one of the reasons the first Ramones album means so much to me is that, in the UK suburbs in the early.mid-80s, it took me four years to find a copy. I suspect no one now spends more than four minutes trying to track a piece of music down.

[delboydrums]

After youthfully enjoying any rock n roll / blues, and then hearing Born in the USA (aged 14) - going backwards from there and buying The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.

Playing it in a hot summer with my bedroom window open (especially Sandy / Wild Billy's Circus Story).

Was a million miles from where I grew up, but touched something for me.

Everything else I then got passionate about (the rest of Springsteen's stuff, Zeppelin, going back to Beatles albums rather than just hits etc etc) came afterwards.

THS the first band to give me that feeling again.

[Five Alive]

Good thread.

When I was in my early teens, my mom remarried and we moved to this huge house in an old Hollywood neighborhood, one with an expansive three-section lawn.

Turned out that my new weekend chore would be to mow this swath pushing behind a ridiculously heavy cast-iron mower (not one of the modern ones with its own drivetrain.) Usually ate up over two hours out of my lazy teenage weekend time. And this was Southern California where the grass grows all year long...

The only thing that made it bearable was a Sony Walkman and whatever cassettes I could scrounge. I had a couple of Police albums I'd never really listened to... and my step-sister had London Calling. That was the spark.

Soon after, local acts Jane's Addiction, Social Distortion and Red Hot Chili Peppers started making waves in LA, even getting on the radio now and then amidst all the Cure, Depeche Mode and Morrissey then in heavy rotation.

And then my friend lent me some Pixies. That was the fire.

[campfirewood1980]

I started noticing music pretty early. I remember being a little kid and loving a cartoon called Kidd Video, which featured a LOT of pop music and, err, Robbie Rist. The theme song used to get stuck in my head for days- you can see the opening here.



On second thought, you might want to avoid that one.

That was pretty much how I was exposed to "contemporary" pop at the time- my parents were of the "lite FM" and "classic rock" stripe throughout most of my childhood, which explains my love of both Hall and Oates and Neil Young. Somehow, I discovered hip hop (I suspect an older cousin probably left a copy of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo sitting out while I was at their house or my grandparents'- that's how I saw a lot of stuff at that point) and, at the age of six, received a little boom box (that's what we called 'em back then, kids) and a copy of an album by my then-favorite band ever: Huey Lewis and the News.

After a period of time spent consuming entirely too much "Weird Al" Yankovic and... err... Ray Stevens, I entered junior high hating myself and loving classic rock- especially the "El Lay"/cocaine cowboy sound of The Eagles, though, in retrospect, this wasn't much better than the "Weird Al" in terms of cred (except that The Eagles did turn me on to Joe Walsh and, in a roundabout way, Warren Zevon.) When I started playing guitar, I got waaaaaay too reverent about Eric Clapton and, err, Lindsay Buckingham. Please note that this was during the "golden age" of "alternative"- I was in junior high from fall of '93 to spring of '96.

Some time around '96, I finally found music that mattered and I could call my own- something that wasn't Mom's (who had, by this time, hit upon Contemporary Christian and accidentally ensured that my brother and I would turn a song called "Watercolor Ponies" into a battle cry) or Dad's, but was my own. After reading a review in a local "alternative" weekly, I picked up Wilco's Being There.

That record opened so many doors for me. Through Wilco, I rediscovered the Stones as something that wasn't a nostalgia act while I discovered the Replacements for the first time (by the way: The Shit Hits the Fans was recorded twenty minutes away from me in 1983.) I started checking out other "respected" alternative acts, finding that I really liked R.E.M., Talking Heads, Guided by Voices, Radiohead, and all sorts of other artists. It was the great leap forward. Bear in mind, this is all pre-internet for me, so it took a LOT of work to hunt some of these things down. I didn't actually come in contact with a GBV record until college, for example.

The story continues, of course, but that's the best response to the prompt- at least until I funnel all of this into the memoir.

[doctoracula]

there's no such thing as too much weird al

[Rhinovirus]

Growing up weekend cleaning sessions allways filled the house with my parents music: Led Zepplin, Grateful Dead, Queen, Boston, Jethro Tull, Chicago.

Those bands will always hold a special place in my heart. But the first time I had music that I could call distinctly my own, was my borrowed Dookie tape. I listened to that tape ragged. Then made a copy over one of my radio mix tapes and gave the borrowed one back, in terrible shape. Then came Offspring Ignition, then the leevee broke with the Punk-o-rama compilation. Which got me into fast shrill skate punk, and ska. It was something nobody else in the house liked. It made me want to run around and break stuff. It was mine.

[Sunny D]

The first band that REALLY got to me was Green Day. Shortly after I found the Beatles with the "1" compilation, which exploded my love for music.

[mikeflynn]

I'll take the doctoracula route and just go with a chronological list of things that changed me.

Boston
The Police
Pennywise
College radio
Devon Williams
Modest Mouse
Seattle indie scene
Boys and Girls in America

[mike]

i wrote this for a zine (under a pseudonym) a couple of years ago...

I was kind of a late starter to pop music...well, to popular culture in general. I was brought up in a staunchly Christian family, and until my mid-teens we had no television, so as a child my cultural experience was largely limited to what I could pick up from school and church. The breadth of my musical spectrum was my father's record collection and the sounds of the church music group practice emanating from our living room every Friday night. Mercifully, my father had some great records, so my childhood wasn't as staid and soulless as one might fear. Michael Jackson, The Beatles, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, The Police...throughout my early formative years, all I had access to was 'the classics'. The classics and precious little else.

I still remember vividly the day that everything changed. It was as innocuous a turning point as could be imagined, really. My father was washing dishes in the kitchen and, uncharacteristically, was listening to pop music on the radio. I didn't know there were radio stations dedicated exclusively to pop music and I was agog at this development. Prior to that point the radio had simply been there for grown-ups to talk about things I didn't really understand, but this was different. It was a revelation - until that day I had never realised that I could access a constant stream of new music, completely free of charge. From that day forward, it became an obsession.

As with so many childhood obsessions, this was an era I now look back on with a mixture of affection and gnawing embarrassment. A family friend passed away and consequently I received my very own radio, a sturdily built little thing from the sixties, and when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old I would spend every spare minute listening to it. Absorbing every flash-in-the-pan teenybop hit with wide-eyed enthusiasm, I quickly learned the words to every oft-repeated hit and would sit in my room, radio-on-lap, singing along with all the enthusiasm I could muster. The classics I'd been brought up with were good, but this was different. This music was disposable, but I felt like it was mine. Whether I liked a song or not, my opinion was one I considered at length and, at that age, was something I considered irretrievably entangled with my very personality itself. Within months I could recognise any current single on the radio within moments of it starting, such was my fixation with my little, battered green transistor radio with its broken aerial.

These were the conditions in which my very first Favourite Band emerged. In the context of the bubblegum pop I was listening to, it's easy to say with hindsight that the real gems were bound to shine through, but it's still with a sense of pride that I recall my very first Favourite Band because even now, a decade and a half later, I retain an enduring admiration and affection for them, albeit for somewhat more culturally sophisticated reasons than I could really appreciate back then.

The band was the Pet Shop Boys. The year was 1993. The single was 'Can You Forgive Her'. At that point the internet was in its infancy and certainly way beyond the reach of a sheltered kid like me, so I was oblivious to the fact that the Pet Shop Boys already had the best part of a decade's worth of success behind them. That didn't matter to me. It was a song which intrigued me immediately, and I soon set about looking for more. I saved up my pocket money and bought their then-current album, 'Very', on cassette. Tape was the cheapest format available, but to my 10-year-old self it still represented a hefty investment. It was worth every penny, though, and I listened to that album so frequently it must have driven my family up the wall.

All these years later, with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to put my finger on exactly what it was about the Pet Shop Boys that resonated so profoundly in me. I know why i love them now, but those are not the reasons of a 10-year-old. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the chorale they presented allowing me to draw subconscious connections between their music and the church music I had grown accustomed to. Perhaps it was the dispassionate clarity of Neil Tennant's vocals, drawing maximum sing-along potential from the songs. Perhaps it was the dry, acidic wordplay and knowing nonchalance. I really would love to say it was all these things, but that would be adorning my childhood self with analytical prowess which I really didn't possess at the time. I just really, really, really liked the songs.

As time passed, I compulsively accumulated the rest of their back-catalogue whenever the funds became available. It reached the point where the softly-spoken, bearded record store clerk would set aside Pet Shop Boys rarities for me without a request being necessary, and I eagerly absorbed every morsel of their oeuvre I could get my hands on.

I remember that around that time I told a schoolfriend that the Pet Shop Boys were my favourite band. Their response: "The Pet Shop Boys? Aren't they gay?" I didn't know. To be honest, at that age I'm not sure I even knew what sex was yet. All I knew was that they made all these mysterious, propulsive records that I loved with every fibre of my being. Their music was a contemptuously raised eyebrow to the gurning, showboating pop music scene of the time. Their diffident, sarcastic, quintessentially English coldness rubbed shoulders with the flamboyance of disco and electro as if the two were organically connected. This was love; the pure, simple, all-encompassing love that a child has for their favourite band - these untouchable, ethereal figures who can conjure feelings and movements from the air.

There is no love like your first. As you get older, the mystique rubs away. You meet your favourite bands and learn that they're just regular people trying to make a living. You learn more about the way music works and figure out that it's something that regular people are capable of too. Anyone can do it, and that's beautiful, but is it as enchanting as thinking there's something truly preternatural about what you're hearing?

Nowadays I'd still count myself as a Pet Shop Boys fan, but my ardour has cooled. I'm able to detach myself from their music and ponder the ways in which they revolutionised electronic pop music in the 1980s; how the unemotional vocal delivery was a reaction against the over-emotive stylings of their contemporaries; how they incorporated high and low art into something which was accessible to everybody; the way they dazzle with their half-ironic Wildean lyrics which could elucidate the beauty and pain of day-to-day life into throwaway couplets ("I'm always hoping you'll be faithful/But you're not, I suppose./We've both given up smoking 'cause it's fatal/So whose matches are those?"); how they were always pushing themselves to do something that nobody else had done (if you've never seen the video of their 1991 "Performance" tour, it's still available on DVD and it's still wilder and more surreal than any live pop performance you're likely to see). Now I see the Pet Shop Boys with the cool, detached air of...well, of the Pet Shop Boys, I suppose. I wonder if they taught me that. It'd be romantic to think they did, but it's probably just growing up.

[hoodrat]

i love this thread. a lot. i haven't responded just because i'm not sure i know the answer. i remember my mother singing me lullabies in the crib. (one of her common choices was "hi lili hi lo" -- i shit you not). despite nearly everyone's lack of talent (except my mother), music was a family affair. mom led hootenannies in the mountains during the summer, christmas carols in the winter, and sing-alongs whenever a bunch of us got together. there was always music in the car - old timey country, bluegrass and folk and 1950s oldies. i still have some of the 45s from the old plastic record player in the playroom where me and my sisters listened to "we sing silly songs."

my own early piano lessons faltered. complete lack of talent, grace and rhythm is a problem, apparently. and that little metronome thing stressed me out. but it never really occurred to me that music might not be important. so, early on i listened to what my parents listened to. there was a fair amount of ricky skaggs involved. also joan baez. and the very first cassette tape i ever owned was Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water.

I couldn't really tell you when I started striking out on my own. I remember passing obsessions with all sorts of bands of varying degrees of uncool. They Might Be Giants, James Taylor, some ska band my lil sis introduced me to, nirvana, ben folds, the beatles, velvet underground, live. The thing about a small town, there can't be but so many sub-genres of identity. You were either into "hip-hop", "country" or "alternative." And those were your choices. I went "alternative", I guess; i certainly insisted I hated country music for a long time. I was not a Nirvana obsessive for the most part, but I remember my shock when Kurt Cobain died. In retrospect, only a 14-year-old could have been shocked. Me and fashionability only ever crossed paths during the "grundge era".

The first band I was ever truly smitten with was the Indigo Girls. My best girls and I snuck out of town to go to a concert. on a school night. singalongs on roadtrips. obsessive dissection of the lyrics and every rumor we ever heard about the band. Feeling assured of some deep emotive connection with the singers.

I discovered classic rock in college. And punk in law school. Go figure.