It is said that people generally form their musical tastes about age
14.
I have never conformed to my peers, and unfortunately, I turned 14 in
1969, a year I considered perhaps the worst in musical history since the advent
of Buddy Holly (and I’ve never liked his music). Many will disagree with me on this.
1969 was during the peak of psychedelia. While Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery
Tour and the White Album were
released a year or two earlier, they were hailed as the Beatles’ coming of age
masterpieces, inventing a whole new kind of music. And I didn’t like any of
them.
When those albums came out, I turned my back on the Beatles, and decided
it was time to find someone new to love. I didn’t want Bearded Beatles with
shoulder-length hair and psychedelic clothes. I may have been 14, but
emotionally, I was about 10. I wanted my mop-tops, the Beatles I used to see in 16 Magazine. At that point, Herman’s
Hermits fit the bill.
The background music of my childhood had been the Beatles and the rest
of the British Invasion. Now they were turning into hippies and chanting with
maharishis in India.
Other musicians hitting their stride at the time were Janis Joplin,
Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, and a variety of others who at least wanted to appear
to be drug-induced acts. Yes, the Beatles used all sorts of drugs, even in the
early days, but I didn’t know that then, and it didn't ruin their ability to sing.
While Jim Morrison could sing, and I even liked a few of his songs, The
Doors were not a band whose records I’d ever buy.
The yowling screeches of Janis Joplin and the slurred mumbling
of Jimi Hendrix were not something I could call music, much less appreciate.
While oddly, my favorite Beach Boys song was “Good Vibrations,” and my favorite
Tommy James and the Shondells tune was, “Crimson and Clover,” in the main,
psychedelic music, especially endless guitar solos and guttural voices singing
songs that took up an entire side of an album, like “Inagodadavida” by Iron
Butterfly, were anathema to me.
14 was not a good time in my life to begin with. I was a short, fat, humiliatingly
over-developed brunette in a world of tall, thin blondes. I hated me, and
wanted desperately to find music that I could become. While everyone else
seemed to embrace this travesty in music, I retreated to songs that were more
closely aligned to what I had loved when I was eight. As far as I was
concerned, 1969 was not a good year for music.
My high school years continued to be a musical wasteland to me. My only access to music was AM radio. My classmates may reminisce about
how great music was in the ‘70s, but I can’t see it. I describe ‘70s music as
ick (Carole King, The Carpenters, Tony Orlando and Dawn), glitter ick (Elton
John) and disco.
Finally, the ‘80s arrived and brought a return to really good music, with the likes of Duran Duran, Split Enz, The Cure, Soft Cell, The Thompson Twins and Tears for Fears.
But looking through my 45s and LPs – mostly from the ‘70s, after the
Monkees and Herman’s Hermits albums – I can find music I still sort of like. I spent
most of 1971 listening to all four sides of The Who’s Tommy album on a nearly daily basis, an oasis of the '60s. And later, Quadrophenia, or at least “Love, Reign
O’er Me” affected me as much.
The Grass Roots, Three Dog Night, and pre-disco Bee Gees are in my collection. I have nearly every Moody Blues album they ever recoded – many of them now on CD – and during my college years, I finally had a radio with FM, which was no longer exclusively the domain of classical music. I not only listened to Carly Simon, Janis Ian, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and the band, Renaissance, but I also played a number of their songs on guitar and still sing them. That also applies to Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Dan Fogelberg and Cat Stevens. But that's pretty much as much of the '70 as I could ever stand.
So, while the 1970s weren’t quite the wasteland I remember, I still
prefer the ‘80s to most of what was being played on the radio in the ‘70s. I
certainly didn’t share the musical tastes of my Carole King/The Carpenters-loving
peers.
There are other bands, like Genesis, The Moody Blues, King Crimson,
Styx, Roxy Music and David Bowie that I continue to enjoy. Even though they
were making albums in the 1970s, I don’t think of them as ‘70s performers. I
didn’t discover Roxy Music until the 2000s. The others transcend any one
decade, so I don’t associate them with the ‘70s. To me, they belong to that
misty, ethereal “decade between the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
I consider myself a child of the ‘80s because that’s where I came into
my own – and made all of the mistakes my peers made in high school. It was the
decade I was at my best. I was an independent
adult, and I had music that thrilled me. Everything about my life in the ‘80s
just seemed so much better – we just won’t look too closely at the social
aspects of that life.
