Jethro Tull deserved that grammy, but not for Crest of a Knave.
Squeen listened to grunge? I always pictured Squeen as that milquetoast in the "Cradle of Love" video by Billy Idol.
When I was only about 5 or 6 my (much older) siblings took me to a record store with them. I bought
Sgt. Pepper's with my allowance money. The hippie behind the counter said to me
"Great album, man!" which traumatized me so thoroughly I remember it to this day. This was the early 70's, so the Beatles had recently broke up---which led to a life-long obsession with the conundrum of
"Why do good things end?".
(A light bulb should be going off in your head right about now...
)
In High School, I fell in with the suburban punks (
Clash,
Sex Pistols,
Dead Kennedys, etc.) That's when I started learning to play guitar. Still, I was all Zeppelin, Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, etc. at heart.---a D&D-playing, classic rock nerd among the faux-punks.
In college, I was all over the place with music. No internet yet, so discovering all the "Alternative Rock" of the late 80's and early 90's felt like treasure hunting. Metal had been commercialized by then and was looking pretty ludicrous. New Wave synthesizer and drum-machine stuff was lustily disparaged--but so was
Journey,
Foreigner and
Motley Crew.
(Yes, I've always been this judgemental.)
After college it started playing DC clubs with a metal-ish/punk band (
Fugazi,
Beastie Boys, etc.). Our lead singer was a large black guy with dread locks---he could only come across as "marginally angry" in his performance without scaring the white-folk...so we sort of drifted/merged with the emergent Grunge scene and played songs like our 12-minute
"Pirate Ken" with a hard-edge guitar driven refrain contrasted with reggae and ridiculously "metal"
pirate lyrics---it was a our secret weapon to win audiences over. My band mates (one of whom usually wore fishnet-stockings and a pink tutu on stage) used to tease me as follows:
Band:
"Hey man, did you see that girl in the audience? She was asking about you?"
Me:
"Really? (gulp) What did she say?"
Band:
"She wanted to know why we hired an Accountant to play guitar for the band."
That's when I grew my long hair.
I did eventually get kicked out of the band because I wouldn't quit my aerospace engineering job to go on tour with them up and down the East Coast. Looking back, it was a good call. I once got to sit in the pilot seat of the Space Shuttle
Endeavor during a private tour while it underwent repairs at KSC---closest I ever came to touching the stars. Did you know the Pilot never gets to steer---the Commander always claims that privileged?
You might (or might not) be surprised that I am a big
Radiohead fan.
Pearl Jam (once-upon-a-time) and
Alice in Chains too. Vangelis, Walter/Wendy Carlos. The list goes on. Lately though, it's striped down folk music that feels best---simple, raw, earnest, talent...without a lot of production.
Jazz, however, can kiss my ass.
(well...mostly---some 70's fusion is good. Some 60's hot jazz like Miles Davis is alright too...heck, I'm a music whore.)
No matter what the genre, I think my shit-detector has been proven by the test-of-time to be pretty solid. I can generally spot an unimaginative, frat-band/jock-rock/boy-band soon-to-be-forgotten sell-out/wannabe in three bars or less. (Looking at you WotC!)
