The first music I remember hearing would be the sounds of the Brill Building. The Shirelles. The Drifters. The Ronnettes. “Be My Baby” is a song I remember hearing in my crib. It remains one of my favorites. Something about that drum beat and the vocal harmony reaches deep within me. Once I was driving my mother somewhere and I popped in a mix-tape I’d made of my Brill Building favorites. She was surprised to discover I loved the music, and confirmed that she had played some of the songs when I was an infant.
Then there was church music, of course. Every Sunday, Baptists and Methodists sang mostly the same hymns in churches that were sometimes just yards down the road from each other. Memories of sitting in the laps of mother and grandmothers, then later standing and singing myself, the words in the hymnal easy enough to follow but intrigued by the musical notes that also adorned the page. It didn’t take me long to figure out the higher the note on the scale, the higher people sang, and vice-versa. I don’t have any use or need for church or religion any more, but those songs will be with me until the end. Few secular songs reach the inspired beauty of “I’ll Fly Away” (especially the version by Alison Kraus and Gillian Welch). Nobody has ever written a better song about family loss than “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — there are many lovely versions recorded, but I have a particular fondness for a version from the HBO series Treme.
Growing up, country music was everywhere. If someone’s car radio wasn’t tuned to a gospel station, it was tuned to a country station. Rock and roll had been happening for a whole generation or more, but more than half the local teenagers listened to country. I learned at least three Johnny Cash songs without even trying before I could ever play an instrument. The lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Cocaine Blues,” and “Big River” were tattooed on my subconscious. People ask me today if I’m a Johnny Cash fan. I tell them, “Johnny Cash is in my blood.” I’d wear black all the time if I looked as good in it as he did. Aside from Johnny, old timers taught me about Hank Williams and Hee-Haw provided a regular educational showcase where country greats old and new would perform. The guest roster for that show was pretty much a country music “hall of fame” where we enjoyed the likes of Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Marty Robbins, Patti Page, and Doug Kershaw. The humor was corny and sometimes base, but you couldn’t get a better country music education anywhere than watching Hee-Haw.
The Beatles broke up right about the time I became interested in them. This interest very quickly became an obsession. My dad had a few of their albums that I listened to relentlessly. I bought my own copies and spent hours at home listening deeply on headphones. There were books of lyrics, Beatles history, Beatles magazines — a tremendous amount of material being published about a band that was no more. This would be the first time I would actually study a band or musician with an eye toward learning and understanding their art.
My focus on The Beatles put me about a decade or more behind my peers’ musical tastes. While I was doing deep-dives into The Beatles (white album) and Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, they were listening to Boston, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and other bands I would be late (sometimes very late) to discover and appreciate. I devoted considerable effort toward memorizing Lennon-McCartney songs and learning them on the guitar, only to find few young people were either interested or impressed (though their parents often were). This was when I discovered the awkward position of asking if there were any requests, and having to say “I don’t know that one” six or seven times.
The Beatles led me to Bob Dylan. As it has been for many, this was an almost religious experience for me. I’d heard Dylan on the radio many times of course, but once I began listening to him, something changed. There was no doubt to me that his lyrics were poetry and Dylan himself a poet as much as a musician. On the surface he seemed simple, plain, his “bad voice” challenging you to stay attuned. Traditional concepts of music and song were being defied as well as respected. Dylan himself both embodied and rejected the “rock star” persona, just as he had embodied and rejected being “the voice of a generation.” Studying Dylan, learning his songs, was itself a kind of self-study, his lyrics inspiring me toward new ideas.
But if I thought being a fan of The Beatles separated me from my peers, I quickly discovered that my embrace of Bob Dylan was even more alienating. Nobody liked Bob Dylan any more. Even his biggest fans were feeling let down and betrayed by his latest work. Dylan had announced his conversion to Christianity, and subsequently released the album Slow Train Coming. I remember my father opining that this was probably just the latest of Dylan’s “personality changes,” which he was almost as famous for as his music. We listened to the album together, and agreed that while a “Christian Dylan” seemed odd, the album itself was full of good music. But for nearly everyone else I knew, my newfound love for Bob Dylan was weird. Learning to play his songs was a private thing, and I rarely performed one even for my friends.
So I reluctantly began trying to listen to and understand the music everyone else was listening to. For the most part, it didn’t go well. The late 70s and early 80s were a dismal time in music. Punk rock had bloomed and died. The New Wave scene had faded, apparently replaced by the No-Wave scene, all of which was pretty isolated to New York. Besides that, a kid in a small Southern town who suddenly got into Blondie was, shall we say, suspect. But I could not resist either the beauty of Debbie Harry or the beat-steady heavy-bass rhythm of their songs, and the ripping guitar of Chris Stein simply blew my mind. My pals were definitely rooted in the “stadium rock” genre — those that weren’t still blasting country music from 8-tracks in their pickups, that is. It was definitely the “artsy-ness” of New Wave that attracted me: I was already beginning to realize I was not meant for small-town Southern life, and that my future was definitely headed toward somewhere like New York or Los Angeles.
When John Lennon was murdered, it broke my heart. I found out while riding the bus to school and could not prevent myself from weeping, in spite of the inevitable social costs of such a display. Watching the mourners in New York on TV, I found myself wishing strongly to be there, even wondering if a sixteen-year old like me could run away from home and make it in New York City. Hearing the reactions of people around me, adults and teens alike, who had nothing positive to say about Lennon or The Beatles, only intensified my feelings of alienation and longing to get as far away from my birthplace as I could manage. Only one of my friends really seemed to understand or sympathize, though at least the rest of them tolerated my moroseness about it all.
During my last two years of high school I finally began hanging out with other musicians. Guitarists and bassists and drummers, some of them actually in bands. Some friends and I tried to form our own band, but after three practice sessions we couldn’t agree on what to play, and then our keyboard player got hired by a church and quit because “it didn’t seem right.” Some members of a local “Southern rock” band took a liking to me, letting me hang out and learn from them. One guitarist in that band was as good a slide player as Dickie Betts, another had fingers that were a blur of speed on the fretboard, and when they played Skynyrd tunes, they really rocked the bar or fairgrounds they were playing. They had at least one songwriter in the band, who wrote some pretty decent originals, including two songs I remember to this day: one a song about driving too fast and losing it in sharp curve, and another about the crucifixion of Jesus, a somber acoustic melody titled, “Jesus Died Alone.” The latter was driven by the powerful metaphor that each of our sins “drive the nails deeper in his hands.”
One of the backup singers in a local country band was a big Fleetwood Mac fan (really, a Steve Nicks fan). She loaned me a copy of Rumours after I overhead her singing “I Don’t Want to Know” acapella and instantly fell in love with the song. And her. But that’s another story.