Disclaimer: I have no good concept of time. So this whole thing might not add up as for as years go. I might be a few years older than I thought when all of this was happening.
The first memory of music that I have is my parents singing to me, but I don’t remember what songs. The first memory I have of recorded music is The Beatles “Good Night” from The White Album. My dad has it on vinyl and I was obsessed with it when I was young, especially the tracks Rocky Racoon, Bungalow Bill, and Good Night. We used to sing it along with the record before I would go to bed. My upbringing was pretty Rockwellian.
Beyond that there was a lot of Sesame Street records and my Mom listened to a lot of Top 40 Adult contemporary, which at the time, I used to like singing it in the car with her. Songs like “Islands in the Stream”, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Break My Stride” are three that really stand out from that time. This would have been close to 1986, which was when I started going to Elemmentary School.
For most of my Elementary years I listened to aweful Top 40, Everything But the Girl, Haddaway (?), etc. (KS 104 in Denver was my FAVORTIE radio station). I vaguely remember hearing 2 Live Crew. I really had no clue who any of these people were at the time, I just knew the words to their songs. I liked Michael Jackson A LOT, and one of the first tapes I ever bought was the single for Smooth Criminal (1988) (which also had the first instrumental version of a song that I had ever heard, and of course I would Karaoke to it in my bedroom while playing with He-Man toys). After Jackson there was the Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer and Young MC. And I listened to that sort of thing up until about 6th grade. My group of friends all liked to dance to MC Hammer back in those days, at one point we had a dance contest. It was bad.
In 6th grade two things happened: I became interested in girls and I got my first CD player and three CDs (my parents must have spent a fortune on that thing), which were Red Hot Chili Peppers “What Hits!?”, U2 “War”, and Michael Jackson “Dangerous”. This was exactly what I had asked for that Xmas, but mind you I had never actually heard a U2 or red Hot Chili Peppers song. However, two girls that I liked both had U2 and Chili Peppers CDs and at the time that was enough for me to want them. The girls both had copies of Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik, which was what I asked for, but my parents said they wouldn’t buy me something with a PA label on it. I still have all three of the discs to this day, and I still listen to War from time to time. I couldn’t actually afford CDs then either, so they were the only threee CDs I had for a long while. Also around this time, I became aware of Guns ‘n Roses, Motley Crue, and Paula Abdul. I wasn’t really a music nut at this point in my life. I had never heard a GnR or Crue song, I just knew who they were and that a couple of my friends liked them. We didn’t have MTV at home when all of this was going on, so I had no clue how people found out about these sorts of bands. At that point in my life the only music video I had ever seen was “Opposites Attract”. Also one day in the cafeteria someone mentioned to me the band Nine Inch Nails and asked me if I had heard of them, of course I hadn’t. That must have been 1989 or 1991.
Important music from this time (for me) that I can still remember:
U2 – War
Red Hot Chili Peppers – What Hits
Michael Jackson – Pretty much everything up til Dangerous
The Beatles – The White Album
More to follow…
