Music and Reflections

I love music, and have a wide range of tastes from some old country to classic rock of the 50s/60s/70s to rap and pop from the 80s/90s to some very heavy metal.  I used to think my parents were crazy for not wanting to become very immersed in the music of "the now".  They loved listening to what they always loved, and weren't too impressed with what was coming out when I was a kid.  I always thought to myself that I'd never get out of the loop like that, that I'd always want to maintain relevance in the music world.

Fast-forward to aught-10s, and hear the music that spews forth from the radio.  I find much of it to be garbage, and find myself hearkening back to the 60s and 70s rock and roll...the golden age of rock, where new sounds were being forged and boundaries pushed.  When artists actually played instruments, wrote songs, and toured shit-hole bars and clubs making a name for themselves as well as learning how to perform live.

I grew up listening to the likes of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, and a large assortment of "trucker" style songs via my Dad.  I have a fond recollection of our vacations, driving to campgrounds listening to this music blaring with "4-55s" as my Dad used to say (4 windows down at 55 mph, the only a/c available in a truck at the time) cooling us off.

My Mom has more of a rock background in her, coming from the hippie 60s growing up in larger cities being a Navy brat.  I didn't realize she had a little hippie in her until much later in life when she told of Joplin concerts and getting in to trouble for fraternizing with the "wrong color" in high school during the times of integration.  Her station of choice was always "Oldies 96.1" on the radio.  They played a lot of 60s rock and roll - Beatles, Doors, Led Zeppelin, Monkees, Kinks, Animals....on and on, some of the greatest music ever, although  I didn't realize it at the time (it WAS called the oldies station).

Many of you reading this know already I tend to listen to some pretty heavy stuff.  As a kid, my first foray in this direction is now known as hair metal.  I still have a soft spot for some 80s hair metal - Poison, Cinderella, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Crocus, and on and on.  I was coming in to my own at a pivotal time in music, perhaps the last real movement in rock, that of Grunge.  Guns N Roses and Metallica of the late 80s and early 90s did a good job of putting a death stake in hair metal, but when Nirvana came on the scene, they decimated it, fully decapitating the beast.  Grunge was and still is such a great genre of music - the aforementioned Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains...They took stripped down elements of punk, turned it on its head, added chunky and highly distorted riffs, threw on a flannel and gave a big middle finger to the decadence of the hair bands preceding them.  In the background though, heavy metal continued to churn along.

I started college in the fall of 1997 at the University of Detroit Mercy.  Having grown up in a small farming community in mid-Michigan, I wasn't too familiar with the "big city scene".  I quickly gained some new friends who had similar affinities for rock music, and they showed me the heavier side of things.  Marilyn Manson (who was fairly new on the scene of shock-rock, clearly taking cues from Kiss and Alice Cooper) was the first real heavy concert I ever went to.  It was downtown Detroit at the State Theater (now called the Fillmore Detroit, for some unknown reason).  I've now seen him probably 7 times in concert, but I'll never forget the first - being smashed in tight when he came on stage, some crazy bitch biting my arm, the mosh pits and crowd surfing.  I had never been to anything like it, and I loved the energy of it all!  It seems violent, but not all things are as they appear.  There's a real camaraderie within a pit, a mish-mash of like-minded people syncing up with one another, feeling the music.  If someone falls, many people help pick them up. No one really wants to hurt anyone else, and no one passes judgement on you if you can only muster a couple minutes in the ring.  The pit is still my favorite location to be at a concert, even though I'm now the "old guy" in there.

Just a friendly get-together

By going to these concerts, my friends and I learned of other heavy acts.  One friend listened to Type O Negative, and he introduced us to them (they're now my favorite band, and I've seen them in concert about 8-10 times, mostly at the greatest venue in Detroit - Harpo's).  We gathered music collectively - Korn, Limp Bizkit, Static X, Rammstein, Deftones, Chevelle, Hatebreed, Mudvayne, Tool, Coal Chamber, Slipknot, Dope, Rob Zombie....and we went to as many concerts as we could.

R.I.P Green Man

I'm a lifetime member

After college, I went to work at  Plootie Holmes, and met more metal heads.  A guy, Rob, who started working the same day as me, was/is an old-school metal head.  He started getting me in to the older heavy stuff, and I found a bunch of "new" music that I'd never really known or listened to - Danzig, Pantera, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Rainbow....I also began revisiting some of my old music like Ozzy, Megadeth, Metallica and even Guns N Roses - all of which had been releasing new albums.  I continued to discover new bands and go to concerts as often as I could, and the atmosphere of music-sharing was again that of college.  When we found something great, or got something new, we made sure to inform each other.  One of the guys formed his own band, Recoil, and we helped encourage them as often as we could.  We also got in to Tenacious D, who if you haven't listened to, you really should.

I've since left Plootie and all my friends in the D (which is still difficult for me as I miss them very much), and moved to the great white North of Petoskey, MI.  I still listen to as much music as I can get my hands on, and try to find some new bands to listen to (like Five Finger Death Punch and Chimaira).  I continue to hearken back to the classic rock, and find "new" artists within that era that continue to excite me.  There really is nothing as sustainable as those great bands from the 60s and 70s...