Musically Isolated
LaserWolf
Portland Oregon 11,517 Posts
When I moved to Seattle 1982. All my friends were folkies or mainstream rock pop. I couldn't even get my friends to listen to What's Love Got To Do With It or Freeway Of Love, much less Roxanne Roxanne. So I was buying old James Brown records and new UTFO records, but listening all alone.This was mostly true in Syracuse NY also in the late 80s. The bright light there were some African students I was friends with who were impressed with my modest African collection, but really digging my blues and jazz records. Still no one wanted to listen to Salt and Peppa.So who else nurtured their musical tastes in a vacuum?John Book?
Comments
No doubt.
I was working shoe repair and my wife was at SU, 86-90.
It's not like we didn't enjoy music there. But when it came to people to listen to records with, or just appreciate records, I had no one.
Bright moments in my Syracuse stay include The Delta Rays. 2 brothers were playing in rock bands, but wanted to do their own music. Local clubs didn't allow originals. So they started playing as a country band and found as long as the dancers could dance no one carried what they played. They added a female singersongwriter (who is now pretty successful in Austin I think) and a hot guitar player. A friend or ours played bass. They were very good, originals were good and they did revved up covers of songs like Big River. They have a 45 with a pic sleeve.
Minds Eye, fusion band that was listenable.
There was a jazz piano player who went to jail for coke and when he came out he put together a passable Tower Of Power style horn band.
Dancing to Jersey Polka Richie and other Polka groups at the Polish Hall. Nothing like that out here.
Also saw a great Neville Brothers show. Bobby Bland in a Black club one night and BB King at the Landmark the next. Willie Colon at a hotel banquet room with the Hispanic student club. Robert Cray a few times. Little Charlie and the Night Cats, Dr John doing a solo piano show for less than 100 people.
The big highlight was driving to Rochester to see Miriam Makeba.
I imagined most people on this board grew up in the same way. Maybe I'm wrong. I sure feel the same way you do. It might also have something to do with me growing up listening to Hip-Hop in San Diego during the early-mid 90s. I was making tapes off Power 106 in LA, and listening to punk while my friends were listening to Blink and Green Day. I moved up to the Bay Area from 1996-2001. That made me feel a little more at home, but they didn't quite relate to the harder punk I was listening to then either.
That's one of the reasons I like Soul Strut. For the first time ever, people are talking about albums I've loved alone for a very long time, regardless of genre. I always questioned the mass appeal of my musical taste. My short time here at the Strut has put my mind at ease about my opinion of what good music is.
For that, I thank you all for letting a little dude hang out and listen.
I was part of a small group into Zappa and Beefheart and we were definitely the minority in my high school.
Actually, I always knew a small coterie of black folks back then who were into rock - this was during the Thriller/Prince/Culture Club crossover era. But, my friends were only into the rock they played on the radio, like Phil Collins or somebody. As far as the obscure stuff I read about in Creem or New York Rocker or Kicks or Trouser Press, I was definitely rolling alone. Yeah, I was happy to find a 99-cent used copy of the New York Dolls' first album (original pressing, too). But I didn't have anybody to talk to about it. At least not until college.
I was also into buying older R&B during this time. When I wasn't scoring ancient 45's from the used record place, I hit up this mom-&-pop store in my neighborhood that had all the reissues that were out, like the James Brown albums on Solid Smoke, or the Chess repackagings (this was when Sugarhill distributed them). Again, I didn't have friends who were into this stuff until my college days.
I know your feeling all too well. My father got my older brother and I into music very early in life. As a young child, I was listening to gospel, contemporary and straight-ahead jazz, R&B, and AM Gold music. So, on a given day, I might play some Swan Silvertones, Lou Rawls, Ramsey Lewis, Dave Brubeck, or The Guess Who. I was up on this stuff before the age of 10, while kids my age were listening to hit music on the radio (e.g., The Jackson 5, Commodores, Gloria Gaynor, etc.). How do you have a conversation with a fellow 7 year old about the Sensational Nightingales's "Song of Praise" album?. When I got older, I got into reggae, disco, rock (in various forms from The Police to MC5), folk, punk, and other variants of jazz (e.g., Return to Forever, Alice Coltrane, etc.). I was living in Maryland during this period (circa 1974-1981).
I moved to North Carolina in 1981. Around this time, I got into hip-hop but I still remained interested in the other forms of music mentioned previously. So, I was making rap beats and DJ-ing, and my MC dudes (who were mostly Black with a few exceptions) would come over and moms would send them back to my room. They would trip out when I had "Tin Man" playing and they're like, "What the fuck are you listening to?". Then, I'd play them loops of stuff I made for them and show that the originals samples came from that "weird music" that I was playing. They did get the point, but I was always called "weird" for my musical tastes all through life, even to this day. You should see the look I get from Blacks and Whites alike when I do "Wichita Lineman" at karaoke. Hell, in high school, I played drums in a punk band called Secret Sessions and we played "Cars" in the high school talent show when I was in 10th grade. I was considered "odd" even in beat-making because I used breakbeats and samples, which kids around my way weren't really up on. I liked groups such as Ultramagnetic, Krown Rulers, Black Rock & Ron, Grayson & Jason, JVC Force, Tuff Crew, Holiis Crew, Rodney O & Joe Cooley, The Egyptian Lover, etc. that they weren't into, or didn't know about. My taste went even more buckwild when I got into college, going further into forms of jazz, rock, folk, classical, etc., which NONE of my cats were diggin', in addition to more popular forms (e.g., R&B, rap). So, outside of my brother and a few other record collector types, I've trudged along musically isolated.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
Heh, that's funny. America's "Tin Man," right? In Chicago, the black stations played that quite a bit. I later learned it was a stepper's cut...
and Chocolate Milk covered it on the "Actions Speak Louder Than Words" LP.
This rings pretty true for me too, but my first band of high school buddies fell into the later part of the scene that F16's referring to, and as a result I later ended up meeting him and his buddies on the East Coast, as well as like minded folks in San Diego and all over really. Guys like Larry and his buddy Bill inspired me to be open minded about the scene when it came to the music(garage people tend to divide into 2 camps, the ACTUALLY curious and adventurous music scholars, and the hard-line my-way-or-the-highway types who are more interested in the fashions).
I was lucky that in high school I met a couple good friends who were into punk rock, the Beatles,Whodini, Curtis Mayfield,Fishbone, Prince, and who still rocked their Thriller cassettes as well as the Minutemen and the Replacements. I don't think that was too common in the land of Top 40 Midwest blandness in 1985-86. Seriously lucky.
I think jsut because I've always been into music it's put me ahead of the curve. The reality is most people just listen to what ever is out there and real heads are always on the hunt for something they havn't heard.
It pretty standard that I'm listening to soemthing and people are like "WTF???" and then 2 years later they asked me if I've heard so and so, forgetting that I played if for them when the LP dropped.
This sums up life in the midwest as a punk rock kid in the 80s.
oh and my art teacher got me into reggae in high school. no body at that school was listening to gregory isaacs, mutabaruka or the twinkle brothers back then!
It was when I was in my mid twenties that I became isolated. In Seattle it was about all my friends being folkies and only liking acoustic music. I could have been hanging with Dee Rock, but we hadn't met. I did go to an Africa Bambatta non-event alone, that he told me he was at as well. In Syracuse I just didn't know enough people.
Here is a sad story from Seattle. I was at a party and there were 2 shows I thought I could talk someone into going to me with. Robert Cray was the first one. He was still playing the I5 circuit before he made it big. So guy says;
"Is it acoustic, I only like acoustic blues."
"No, it's electric, but he is good, you might like him."
"Is he Black? I only listen to electric blues played by Black people. Except for this group called the Numbers Band, there real name is I, IV, V. It's a joke, see 1 4 5 is a blues progression..."
I wasn't going to tell him that Cray was Black so that he would go, since he would then surely ask me if he had picked cotton.
The other was Buckwheat Zydeco. Clifton had recently died and Buckwheat was touring with some of his old band. Same guy asks me if they have a fiddle player, because he only listens to zydeco with fiddlers because that's the real music...
It was depressing.