My Life In Music

van halen

In my first post of this series, I talked about the very first cassette tape I owned. This time I’m going to talk about the very first CD I bought.

The truth is I don’t really remember any other cassette tapes that I owned before I got a CD player. I’m sure there were some. I remember owning some kind of compilation album that had lots of 1950s-era hits on it – artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, and Little Richard. I think I had the Stand By Me soundtrack and maybe cassette singles from Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.

Things get muddled a bit because even after I owned a CD player for my home stereo, I still had a cassette player in my car. Sometimes I’d record my CDs to cassette for listening in the car, and I often bought used cassettes at the local head shop. My memory of which tapes I bought before I owned a CD player and which tapes I bought just for the car gets muddled.

I just looked it up, and there were only five years between when Europe’s Final Countdown (my first cassette tape) came out and Van Halen released For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (my first CD). That’s not a huge period of time for me to have built up a big cassette collection, especially since I was fairly young during that time period.

Not that any of that matters; it’s just the way my brain works. I had intended for this series to be more or less chronological, and the fact that I can’t think of another cassette tape I bought before CDs came along bugs me.

I have a very specific memory of being in a Wal-Mart with my mother and my older brother Neal. He was trying to convince Mom that he needed a CD player. These were fairly new at the time, and he was excitedly extolling the virtues of this new technology. About how the sound quality was so much better, about how they lasted longer, and most importantly, you didn’t have to fast forward and rewind a CD, you could just press skip.

Mom wasn’t having it. She’d been through vinyl albums, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes. She didn’t want to have to buy all her old albums on yet another format. She argued that in a few years some new technology would come along and he’d have to buy everything once again. Cassette tapes were good enough.

My brother saved up and bought himself a five-disc CD changer. Some time after that, he joined the Navy and moved away, leaving his CD changer behind. I can’t remember if he actually gave it to me, or if I just started using it after he left. But I was so excited by it.

Truth be told, I can’t remember if For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was the first CD I bought. It might have been U2’s Achtung Baby or Queensrÿche’s Empire. But whatever, the Van Halen disc was an early purchase. I thought the 5-Disc changer was awesome. I remember putting the first couple of CDs in it and wondering what I’d do when I got a sixth one. Then I’d have to decide which discs stayed in and which one had to wait. This was a big deal to me at the time.

Honestly, I was never a huge Van Halen fan. I absolutely loved “Jump” and enjoyed songs like “Hot For Teacher” and “Runnin’ With the Devil” but I’d never bought one of their albums and didn’t follow them in any way.

I bought the album primarily because I loved the song “Right Now” and I loved that song primarily because of the video. It is weird to think about how much time I spent watching MTV back then.

The video channel is gone now, but it was a long running joke to say that you remembered when Music Television actually played music. Like so many channels, they drifted in later years to mostly airing reality TV.

But the truth is, they played non-music-related stuff relatively early in their history. I remember a comedy show with Julie Brown, the game show Remote Control, and of course The Real World, which essentially launched the reality boom we are still living in today.

But they did play a lot of music videos, and I watched those all the time. Every day I watched their Top 10 countdown, but I’d also sit and just watch random videos whenever there was nothing else on to watch. Music videos were awesome. Not only did you get the great music, but they often did interesting visuals to match. I know people like Taylor Swift are still doing interesting videos for YouTube or whatever, but the late 1980s/early 1990s feel like the heyday of great music videos. Or maybe that’s just when I watched them.

Anyway, “Right Now” had a great video. They used big block letters running across the screen to discuss various social and political issues from the time. They’d say things like “Right Now No One Is Safe From Loneliness” and “Right Now Our Government Is Doing Things We Think Only Other Countries Do.” Behind the words were visuals that brought home those messages.

Watching it now, I find most of the messaging fairly simplistic, but at the time I thought it was amazing. I was 14 or 15 when I first saw it, so political messaging in a music video felt revolutionary. It touched on things I was thinking about. It. made me feel like Van Halen really understood me.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the album. I think I liked it, but didn’t love it. I certainly didn’t listen to it like I listened to Achtung Baby or Empire. At a guess, I’d say it was the first album that got taken out of the disc changer when I bought my sixth CD. Though I’d certainly pop it back in every now and again.

It is an album I haven’t listened to in a very long time. Listening to it now, I find it to be just okay. I still love “Right Now.” “Poundcake” is pretty good, and I like “Runaround” quite a bit. The rest of it is fine, I guess, but not really my thing.

Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant technical guitar player, but I’ve never really connected to him. I don’t want to say he lacked soul, but I don’t tend to connect to music that relies on technical prowess without having something deeper and more meaningful inside. It doesn’t help that a lot of Van Halen’s music focuses on frat boy antics and base sexuality.

But I don’t want to argue about that. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand all the technical stuff. I just like what I like. I connect to what moves me, and I don’t know how to explain it. But I also have no problem with those who connect to things I don’t like.

In the end, this is not an album I’ll probably ever listen to again. I didn’t add any of those songs to my playlists. Except for “Right Now” that song still rocks.

europe the final countdown

I used to write a series entitled “Random Shuffle.” This is where I’d literally put my entire music collection (all ripped to iTunes), put it on shuffle mode, and then talk about whatever songs came up. Sometimes I’d talk about the music, but mostly I talked about the memories the music brought to mind. It became kind of an emotional journal, a history of my life in music.

I love the way music does that. How a certain song can take you back to a specific moment in your life. It is transportive. I love that sometimes it isn’t a specific memory but a feeling. There are songs that remind me of being sixteen and driving around in my beat-up Plymouth with the windows rolled down and not a care in the world.

I loved writing those posts. I think it’s still some of the best writing I ever did. I often think about starting it again. But the thing is I just don’t listen to music like I once did. I no longer buy an album and listen to it over and over and over again. Those long nights where I’d lie on the floor with my headphones on, letting the music take me far away, never happen anymore.

These days I generally listen to music in my car as I’m riding around for work or at home while I’m cooking dinner. Or in my office while doing some work or playing a game. I hate to say it, but more often than not I’m letting Spotify or Amazon Music, or some other streaming service, pipe in a playlist curated for me off of songs I’ve told it I liked. These things usually aren’t that inventive and rarely play me new music that interests me. And I admit when they do play something I don’t already know, I often skip it.

So now when I put my music on shuffle, it doesn’t bring up any new memories. I haven’t connected to music in the way that I used to. I don’t mean I never listen to anything new or that I haven’t found music I loved recently. But I don’t connect to them in the same way.

Maybe I’m just not having the adventures I used to. Maybe my life is too boring to bring in new memories. It doesn’t help that I now own hundreds of albums that I’ve barely listened to or that my music player is filled up with thousands of live concerts. Shuffle looks a lot different now than it did back then.

But I want to write about music in a meaningful way again. My idea is to do something similar to Random Shuffle but more long-form. With Random Shuffle I usually talked about 4-5 songs; now I want to hit on just one album or one song.

This will still be autobiographical. I’ll still be talking about how the music connected to me on a personal and emotional level. I actually hit on this idea because a friend of mine is doing a list of the best 1,000 albums ever, but in a very personal way. He’s not trying to be objective about it (as if that even exists) but making it very subjective. They are his favorite albums.

I like that. I won’t necessarily only be talking about albums. Sometimes I’ll just talk about one song. And I won’t be counting anything down. They won’t necessarily even be songs/albums that I love. Just ones that I’ve connected to at some point in my life. I suspect they’ll start out more or less chronological, but then we’ll just see where it goes.

The third album by Swedish rock band Europe, The Final Countdown, was the first album I ever owned. I got it on cassette tape. I can’t remember now if I bought it with my own money or I got it for a Christmas or birthday present. I can’t remember much about the album now. I remember I liked it. I know I loved the single “The Final Countdown.”

I had probably owned some cassette singles before owning this album. I’m quite sure I had some blank tapes that I recorded songs from the radio onto. to tell the truth, I really don’t remember if this was the first album I ever owned. It is the first album I remember owning, so we’ll leave it at that.

What I do remember is losing it. I took it with me to church one day. This would have been either Sunday night worship or Wednesday night Bible Study. It definitely wasn’t for Sunday morning worship; that would have been uncivilized. I would have been about ten years old.

I vaguely remember taking the tape out of the case. We probably played it on the way to church, but I would have taken it out before going into the building. I probably did not properly put it back into its case. I liked looking at the liner notes and staring at the pictures.

When we got home that night, I realized I did not have the tape. I had the cover, but not the tape. I looked everywhere for it. I tore that car apart. Our best guess at the time was that I had probably laid it on the exterior of the car somewhere. Maybe I put it on the trunk or the hood when I and the boys played around after services. I had a vague notion I may have laid it on the bumper absentmindedly.

I can’t remember now if my parents drove me back to church that night or if they said it was too late and we went the next day. I do remember for weeks after every time we drove to church I’d look out my window hoping I’d see it lying on the side of the road somewhere.

We never did find it.

I was heartbroken.

Years later I remember finding a copy of that album. I think a friend had it or something. I definitely didn’t ever buy it again. This was a CD, and I nostalgically pressed “play” only to discover I didn’t recognize any of the songs. In that memory I loved the entire album, but none of the snippets I played (and I only played snippets; I didn’t have time to play the entire album in that moment) were familiar to me.

It wasn’t until the TV series Arrested Development made “The Final Countdown” popular again that I remembered that song. For me now, that song is a cheesy bit of nostalgia. Something that makes me smile and raise my fists when I hear it, but only if I hear it every once in a while. I had it on one of my Spotify playlists for a while, but that made me hear it too often, and that’s definitely a song you do not need to hear too often.

So this is the type of thing I’ll be doing now. Songs and albums that mean something to me. That provokes memories. I’d like to say this will become a weekly article. I’d like to say that, but I won’t. I’ll likely forget to write it fairly regularly, but hopefully it will at least pop up once a month or so.

Encouraging comments will help me keep it up.