Driving to the grocery store, when my son asks me to play, “We Belong Together” by Vampire Weekend - one of my favorite songs, one of his favorite songs - the chambers of my heart echo with a million kabillion choirs singing hallelujah and I only fail to turn up the volume because I want to hear his raspy four-year-old voice sing along. Alternately, when I’m blissing to, say, Radiohead’s “Videotape,” and my other son screams, “I want quiet, no more music, dad, it hurts my ears,” then I turn the volume down, down, down to off and it’s like the nuts of my soul getting kicked by a million kabillion work boots.
Growing up, my dad always played music. 50s/60s, sock-hop, doo-wop music. At home. Driving in the van. Sometimes, even at camp! Never was there silence!
In seventh grade speech class, the end of year assignment was to lip sync to two songs: your favorite oldie and your favorite contemporary. I knew plenty of oldies. The summer before, for my birthday, my dad had gifted me my first vinyl - Chuck Berry’s Golden Hits!
But my knowledge of new songs? None. Luckily, the year ended with only one kid performing the assignment. I don’t remember why no one else got to perform. What I remember from that class is that one day my armpits began to stink for the first time ever and I had no deodorant because I hadn’t needed any yet and so I went into the hall and wiped the stink away the best I could with notebook paper.
Then that summer, for my next birthday, my friend James gave me my first cassette, Metallica’s Black Album, but I never got another lip sync assignment.
In eighth grade, I was blasting Side A of Nirvana’s Nevermind loud enough to hear over the vacuum, so when my dad came home, I didn’t hear him yell, but I heard when he threw my cassette down the hallway and it smashed open, sending black tape trailing down the hall. In the silence that followed, at first I said nothing and then he said nothing and then I agreed my music shouldn’t be heard from the driveway and he agreed to buy me a new Nevermind.
A couple years later, my dad came home and he was tired and he sat down and his eyes drooped and he dropped his Newsweek and I put on Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York and he fell asleep and I was glad because maybe we weren’t so different after all in all is all we all are.
It was James who said, “Look at the clothes the guys in Nirvana wear in their album photos. We don’t have to own brand name clothes to be cool.”
Because flannels weren’t exclusive to Hot Topic, because we could shave the sides of our own heads, because the grunge era suppressed class-based teasing for a couple years as everyone wanted to look authentic and/or thrift store chic, we loved those guys.
I borrowed my dad’s guitar and learned the opening notes of “Today” and tried my best to power chord “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
My dad ran track in high school. My dad spoke with a reporter’s voice. All my female friends swooned over his height and his perfect hair and his disarming smile. “Your dad looks just like Superman,” they said and they looked at me and they didn’t say, “You look just like your dad.”
In eleventh grade, when I met my once-and-future best friend, he had a homemade collage of Kurt Cobain hanging on the wall of his room. Pictures meticulously cut out of Rolling Stone and Spin and glued on top of each other, like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, but just of Kurt.
My once-and-future best friend and I started recording songs with a portable tape recorder and a Casio keyboard and distorted power chords and dirty jokes. Our songs amused our friends, we were like a less-talented Ween. But then our friend Ryan got a gig as lead vocals in a real band, like a more-talented Creed, and my once-and-future best friend and I spent our weekends traveling to Dallas and Fort Worth clubs and Arlington motorcycle bars to cheer him on.
That opening drum roll? Stolen from my high school’s marching band. (RIP, Bam-Bam)
In college, I took my college friend Ben to see Ryan’s band on a night that Ryan licked beer off the stage and threw a cymbal into the air that sliced a cord in half when it landed and my college friend Ben said, “This is the best band ever,” and we went again with some other guys, but this next time there was no beer licked off the stage and no cords cut by cymbals, and when it was over, my college friend Ben said, “Sorry, Wil, your friend’s band sucks.”
It was Ben who said, “Don’t marry someone with different music tastes. It’s easier to stay married to someone from a different religion than someone who can’t stand to listen to the tunes that soothe you, that move you.”
My senior year, my house was burglarized. The thieves took my parents’ wedding silver and my mom’s jewelry and my dad’s stereo, in which I had left my CD of Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire. Filling out the inventory for the insurance claim, my mom held up the empty CD case and asked me, “how many of your CDs have “parental advisory” stickers on them?”
For the past decade, it seems each year sees either a newly remastered Nirvana album or Beatles album. When the 20th Anniversary of Nevermind dropped, I felt old. With the Beatles albums, I pull out my studio headphones and marvel at all the restored artistry. Less than ten years those British boys were the world’s favorite band!
I wasn’t always a Beatles fan. In high school, when my once-and-future best friend said they were the greatest band of all time, I scoffed and insisted every one of their songs sounded the same.
How little I had heard.
I got a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks, after hearing it played every time I visited the dorm room of my college friend Ben. But I didn’t own a Beatles album until after college.
Sometime when I was in high school, my dad broadened his music playing past the oldies station and started listening to Yanni, specifically Yanni’s live album, an instrumental jammy sounding mix of strings and horns and electric guitar and world beats. So, one drive to the campground, I convinced him to let me insert a Dave Matthews Band CD into the van stereo. I told him that I thought he would enjoy it. My dad listened politely, but a few measures into the second track, pressed pause and asked me, “What exactly about this music did you think I would like?”
I was visiting my buddy Aaron in Austin and we attended a performance of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and the production included several musical interludes, Beatles songs all, I thought. Because I recognized "Here Comes the Sun,” and “Love Me Do.”
But one song I didn’t recognize and wanted to hear again and I did, the next week, on the classic rock radio station! But you must remember, this was before Shazaam, before streaming, before Google. So, I hummed the tune the best I could, sang what lyrics I could remember, and my friends, Aaron and Ryan and Ben and James and all the others, they shrugged, they didn’t know, they said, maybe try the later Beatles’ albums?
It was Aaron who told me that, “we all want to be loved by someone who loves what we love.”
So, I checked out the White Album from the Central Branch of the Arlington public library. The song I was searching for was not there, but the White Album was a revolution. I returned that copy to the library and before driving home, I went to the CD Warehouse on Cooper Street and bought a copy for myself, my first Beatles album, for my own personal CD collection.
But my search for that song I heard first in that production of A Winter’s Tale continued. I borrowed Abbey Road. I listened to Revolver. Someone loaned me a CD-RW of Magical Mystery Tour.
In the end, the song I sought, the song that led me through the Beatles’ entire catalogue of brilliance, I caught the tail end of it on the classic rock radio station and as the deejay listed the previously played tracks, I learned it was not even a Beatles song. This entire time I had been searching for ‘Sunny Afternoon’ by the Kinks.
But it didn’t matter. By then, I was the Beatles fan my once-and-future best friend assumed I always should have been.
Last year, my once-and-future best friend texted me, after watching Montage of Heck, and asked, “Why didn’t anyone in high school tell me my hero was an asshole?”
Back in junior high, we knew we weren’t going to grow up to be rockstars, but when you’re young and not very athletic but yearning for greatness, which you’ve probably mistaken for popularity, seeing young men just a few years older than you, who also aren’t athletic, who also aren’t particularly attractive, not wearing expensive outfits, not spending a lot of time on their hair - it gives you hope, encourages you to believe that you don’t need to be athletic, good-looking, or rich either. That, maybe, if you can perfect some artistic talent, you could be beloved by everyone, too.
In the family van, driving my dad to the gym, I proudly played my new CD of the Beatles White Album. John Lennon sang about how tired he was and my dad said, “Who is this?” and I said, “This is the Beatles,” and my dad said, “This is not my Beatles.”
Hey! I’m back! I moved. I got a new job. My kids are struggling with the transition. I’m still working on writing all the stories I told you I was working on last time I brought up all the stories I’m working on. I got published! You can read my diner noir story in
Anthology: Turn Out the Lights and Cry edited by the legend . Please buy and share and review:
This was a great ride, Wil. Makes me want to dig into my own music vault and relive the glory days. The grunge era kicked ass, but I didn't really consider why before I read this. It was inclusive. And easy. And it sounded good, too. Everyone was dirty and happy at the same time. Now everyone is just clean and sad.
I'm glad you're still enjoying your coffee beans.
And I'm really glad you don't have ass cancer.
Love you, buddy.
P.S. Congrats again on your publication!!!!
I learned the opening of Come As You Are on my guitar that I picked out that my dad bought me for my birthday that hangs on my wall that I sometimes take down to play than put back up because nine years later it still needs new strings.