My adventures in music

Age 5: One week at school the teacher gave us each a musical instrument to play. The cool kids got the cool instruments. I got a triangle.

Age 6: I wanted a guitar. I overheard my parents saying they would give me a cheap one because they thought I would quickly lose interest. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the guitar was more a toy guitar than one you could play actual songs on.

Age 7: My parents gave me a transistor radio. Now I had some control over the music I heard. I was not limited to whatever radio stations or records my parents played. At least as long as the batteries lasted!

Age 10: My parents wanted me to learn how to play the clarinet! They said learning to play a musical instrument was good for me. Suddenly. My school did not offer guitar lessons – just lessons for instruments needed for the high school band. Ugh. I hated the clarinet. I learned the clarinet for three years. I learned two things: how to read music and the value of practice – to be really good anything takes loads and loads of practice. About 10,000 hours according to one estimate.

Age 12: My parents gave me a tape recorder and a plug-in radio. Now I could play the radio as long as I wanted – I was not limited by batteries. And I could record my favourite songs and play them to death. The New York version of Top-40 radio became the audio wallpaper of my room. I would listen to it even while doing my homework. To this day music helps me to concentrate.

Age 13: I became a serious reader. And started wondering about sex and love. So now the words of a song became the most important thing. I searched them for clues, like how archaeologists search the remains of lost civilizations. I did read the sex part of “The Naked Ape” (1967) by zoologist Desmond Morris, and knew what the older brothers of friends said, but it left something out.

Work: I worked at several places where I did not control the music played. So if the head dishwasher liked George Michael, I was stuck. One day I did get control of the radio, but the next day my boss hid the radio.

University: We were required to know something of the great literature of Western civilization. This was back before DWEMs became decidedly uncool. Literature, and art more generally, was about the mysteries of life, or so I was informed. I approached pop music the same way!

Marriage: I could no longer lay in bed all day and just listen to music and wonder about life. Nor go to Tower Records and blow $100. So my taste in music fossilized, pretty much at the moment Sade ran through the streets of LA in a wedding dress in “No Ordinary Love” (1992). Not that I stopped listening to music. In some ways it receded back into the wallpaper, but in other ways it became more important than ever. It has helped me through some bad, bad times. Only religion, not even money, can top it.

– Abagond, 2023. 

See also:

• songs
• other adventures in: porn, sports.
• My 1970s media diet
  • Time Warp Radio: 1979
• Sade
  • No Ordinary Love
• The 10,000 hour rule

523