October 2009 Editorial

When I was a little kid my parents stashed a few boxes of L.P.'s in our family's garage. It was the age of cassette tapes and aside from my mother listening to Bruce Springsteen they had both more or less stopped actively listening to music by that point. They never went so far as to sell their records at a yard sale like many people their age did, but nevertheless they were left to get moldy alongside things like pogo sticks, old text books, and a set of rusty golf clubs.

My interest in music began when I was about nine or ten years old and I eventually started making trips out to the garage and playing some of those old records. I started out with the things I was familiar with- Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Jefferson Airplane. Then I started listening to records from the bands with the weirdest record covers- Iron Butterfly and Ian Hunter (later I would check out Mott the Hoople). I also thought the Grand Funk live record looked really cool with its black and white picture of the band looking like they were going to explode with energy. I think that this was the most raw and rocking of all of those records. My parents' collection was not super extensive but it was enough to keep me interested.

One year while visiting my grandmother in Upstate New York she told my brother and sister and I that we could look through the records at her house too. My aunt and uncle were both pretty heavily into rock n roll in the early 70's and my grandfather had actually also been pretty hip to rock music along with Jazz, which was his true love. While my brother and sister sifted through my grandfather's Jazz stuff I hit the weird record cover jackpot. I took home a box full of records from Bowie, Alice Cooper, KISS, Mott, Lou Reed, and the Who. In general my rule of "the weirder that it looks the more rocking it will be" served me pretty well and I really dug into some of that stuff as it captured my imagination.

To this day the Who's "Quadrophenia" is one of my all time favorite records and Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" is still one of my favorite songs. Some of those records that I took home from my grandmother's house even made it out West with me when I moved to California and when I'm feeling it I dust off Alice Cooper's "Billion Dollar Babies" and I remember what it was like to find music that was weird and edgy for the sake of being weird and edgy. In a lot of ways those early finds helped me to form my opinions about what music should sound like and how being different can be cool rather than just odd. When I got into alternative music and eventually punk rock the aesthetics of Alice Cooper weren't all that far off from the aesthetics of The Misfits and of course it wasn't hard to fall in love with the Jam when I already loved The Who.

Sometimes when I go into a record store I still feel like I'm going into my parents' garage. If I don't already have something in mind that I want to buy I'll still sometimes find the record with the coolest cover and ask a friend behind the counter to play it. To me this is the spirit of alternative culture and a principle that could be applied to every day life. It's certainly a way of thinking that influences my approach to writing about music. As David Bowie said sometimes it time to "Turn and face the strange."
 

 

-Ditch-
Asst. Editor