Music you grew up with

Cafe Society
1

Remember the music that you listened to when you were young?
The earliest stuff I remember choosing to put on the record player were Peter Paul and Mary in Concert (had Puff the Magic Dragon on it which I loved to listen to) and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. I remember dancing around to that album in the living room when no one was around. I don’t know how old I was, but certainly younger than the 3rd or 4th grade.

I had a bunch of tapes that I listened to as well, which included:

[ul]
[li]David Bowie - Fame and Fashion (a greatest hits thing)[/li][li]Cindy Lauper - She’s so Unusual[/li][li]Simon and Garfunkel - Greatest Hits[/li][li]Moody Blues - The Other Side of Life[/li][li]Cat Stevens - Greatest Hits[/li][li]Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love[/li][li]U2 - War[/li][li]A bunch of classical tapes that were mini biographies of different composers with snippets of their music too.[/li][li]Some Rosenshontz tapes. They were a duo of guitar players who did children’s albums of original tunes.[/li][/ul]

When we’d go on road trips, my dad always had a lot of tapes in the car, but I mainly remember listening to many of the Beatles’ albums. He had made a tape of Abby Road, and I remember really liking some of it but hating it when I Want You (She’s so Heavy) came on. He also had The Best of the Band in the car, as I recall.

This was all before I was 10.

My folks had a huge record collection. When we got a CD player (mid/late 80s… it was a gift from my grandfather), they sold most of the records (oh, what sacralige) and started replacing the collection with CDs. My mom would listen to them a lot, especially on the weekends. Albums I clearly remember and associate with her putting on on the weekends when she was cleaning or whatever are as follows:

[ul]
[li]Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms[/li][li]U2 - Joshua Tree[/li][li]Traveling Wilburys - Traveling Wilburys Vol 1[/li][li]Talking Heads - Remain in Light and Naked[/li][li]Joe Jackson - Night and Day[/li][li]R.E.M. - Eponymous[/li][li]Enya - Watermark[/li][li]The Kinks - Live on the Road[/li][/ul]

Those are the ones that come to me off the top of my head.

By 1990 or so I was also listening to a lot of the other albums we had in the house. I’d put on a lot of Simon and Garfunkel/Paul Simon, Broadway musicals we had soundtracks for (My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof in particular), the **Temptations, Jethro Tull (Stand Up was the album I liked of theirs at the time), and probably many more that I just don’t remember listening to that far back.

I know the first music I ever bought was Meat Loaf - Bat out of Hell II, and his tour for that was also the first rock concert I ever went to.

So, fellow Dopers, share your musical upbringing. Let’s cut it off at age 13. What was the music that was formative in developing your musical tastes later in life? What music do you remember most clearly?

2

Cutting it off at 13? I hate most of the stuff I listened to then!

Bad Stuff:
Roxette
Beatles (there was one good outcome from this: I learned to use a record player from a very young age)
Metallica
Ace of Base

::shudder::

Ok, there was some Good Stuff. More than I remembered at first, actually.
U2
Pearl Jam
Nirvana
Randy Newman
Green Day

3

Two of the earliest I remember riding my bike to the mall to buy were Bluberry Hill by Fats Domino and Sunshine Superman by Donovan. Now I feel old.

4

Shaun Cassidy. Donnie Osmond. Barry Mannilow. Billy Joel.

And I worshipped at the alter of David Cassidy.

Damn, I’m old.

5

Oh, I’m sure there was plenty more than this, but one really stands out:

Men At Work - Business As Usual

First cassette I bought with my own (paper route) money at nine years old.

I really need to replace that with a CD.

6

My dad had pretty eclectic taste in music, and I remeber listeing to a lot of his records when I was a kid - mostly the Beatles (Sgt. Pepper and the 1967-1970 compilation), Billy Joel’s “The Stranger”, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, ABBA, Doug Sahm, John Denver, Simon & Garfunkel, and a bunch of that late 70’s country stuff like Kenny Rogers and Waylon & Willie.

I was born in 1974, so I remember all the 80’s stuff from my childhood - Men at Work, Survivor, Michael Jackson, Ray Parker Jr., Culture Club, etc. All of it was always around and I heard all of it but it never really did anything for me. Since then I’ve been able to filter the good from the bad and have gone back and gotten into some of the stuff that was actually good - the Talking Heads, for example.

The first music I got into on my own was when I was twelve or thirteen and was really into skateboarding. I used to read Thrasher magazine, which had a lot of music-related articles so I began to hear about all the crazy punk bands of the mid to late 80’s. Back then (1987) in a small, rural town there was NO WAY I could ever actually hear any of these bands like I could now with the internet. I eventually found some kids who had some third generation dubbed cassettes of bands like the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, the Ramones, the Exploited, the Misfits, etc. I think Black Flag’s “The First Four Years” was my most formative album experience, followed closely by the Dead Kennedy’s “Plastic Surgery Disasters/In God We Trust Inc.”.

Pretty soon after that I got into hip-hop via Yo! MTV Raps which was on at 10 a.m. every Saturday. Me and some friends would watch that, skateboard all day, then come back to my place and play Super Mario Brothers. There was a lot of classic hip-hop out at that time - De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising”, Ice-T’s “Power”, Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow The Leader”, Boogie Down Productions’ “By Any Means Necessary”, and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”.

This was all before I turned 14. I am proud to say that I never had a real embarrassing period of musical fandom - I always hated cheesy hair bands, for example - and I still listen to all of this stuff now, at age 28. Except for Saturday Night Fever and Billy Joel, but I am kind of thinking of picking up “The Stranger” for nostalgia’s sake.

7

My and my friends went down to the local swimming pool a lot, and they always had these songs on the jukebox:

Layla - Derek and the Dominoes
Alice Cooper - No More Mr. Nice Guy
Led Zeppelin - Black Dog

To this day, when we get together and hear one of those songs on the radio, we say “That’s a swimming pool song!”

This is so Reader’s Digest…

8

I remember being as young as two or three sitting in the living room playing with my toys while my Mom would play The Carptenters and the Fifth Dimension on the stereo (one of those big console units). According to my parents I liked to sing Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” at around that age, so they picked up the single and played it for me so I could sing to it. When I got to be around 6 or 7 my oldest sister was 12 and she began buying Kiss albums and playing them. This, I think, was where my tastes for hard rock music began. By the time I started earning an allowance I bought a few 45 singles. IIRC, “Urgent” by Foreigner was one of the first ones I bought myself. My first full-length albums were ZZ Top’s Eliminator and Quiet Riot’s Metal Health. After that I progressed to Motley Crue, Iron Maiden and Metallica, but I was past age 13 by then.

9

As a child of the early 70’s, those truely were the dark ages for me. I had no idea that there was anything other than what got played on the radio. My father’s musical taste came from the Big Band era and classical… both of which I had little use for (although he did buy the Beatles’ Red and Blue albums). My mother on the other hand wasn’t really into music and every morning at breakfast we were treated to the “Easy Listening” station… you know, 101 Strings versions of “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and the like.
The first song I can remember really loving was “School’s Out For Summer” by Alice Cooper. For some weird reason, it really spoke to me :smiley:
If it wasn’t for my friend’s older brother, things would have been really bleak. When I was around 10 or 11, he, no doubt sick to death of us liking KC and the Sunshine Band, turned us on to Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who and my favorite album of the time, Destroyer by Kiss. We eventually repaid his generosity by deciding to hate all that music and listening to punk rock instead (but that was later).

10

I’m 42 now, so my earliest musical memories are of the mid 1960s.

The albums I remember listening to all the time were…

  1. The Clancy Brothers Live at Carnegie Hall
  2. The original “Fiddler on the Roof” soundtrack, featuring Zero Mostel.
  3. The Dubliners’ “Seven Drunken Nights”
  4. Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” (my second grade teacher was a hippie nun who always played this album in class).
  5. A lot of Bach & Mozart… my dad was a classical music lover, and I just thought organs and harpsichords sounded very cool, from an early age.
11

I raised on a steady diet of Prog Rock. It took me years to recover.

12

I was raised on a steady diet of Prog Rock. It took me years to recover.

13

<old fart> Dadburn ye young whippersnappers! </old fart>

You have no idea what it was like to grow up during the Eisenhower years, when it seemed like the only music in the suburbs was schmaltzy “101 Strings play Mantovani” stuff.

I remember searching in vain through my parents’ record collection for some real music. Let’s see… Mitch Miller… 101 Strings play Ebb Tide… Kate Smith… Jim Nabors’ Gospel Greats… 101 Strings play Broadway Hits… Patriotic Sousa Marches… Nope.

Finally found one old Harry Belafonte album and some early Kingston Trio*.

Still have a soft spot for both for helping me maintain some “Sanity In The Suburbs™”.
<old fart> Hey thar ye young hipstersnappers </old fart> – find “Scotch and Soda” by the Kingston Trio. Still one of the coolest songs, in a “too cool to get worked up about anything” way.

14

When I was very little, it depended on whether my mum or dad were playing music. If it was my mum, it was almost always Bob Marley or some sort of reggae (she used to play Redemption Song on the guitar for me when I went to sleep!). If it was my dad, it was always Rod Stewart, The Small Faces or the Kinks.

The first single I ever brought when I was 11 was Prince - When Doves Cry, and the first album I ever got was Prince - Purple Rain - hmmm, I see a pattern emerging here!

I also loved The Cure and Soft Cell (although that was mainly some sick obsession with Marc Almond - I look back now and think “Eeew - what were you thinking? The man looks like he’s just crawled out from underneath a stone!”), and used to play them on my Walkman when I walked home from school.

15

When I was a kid I always used to beg my mom to put on “The Rhythm of the Saints,” by Paul Simon. Me and my sister LOVED dancing to that CD.

She also really liked “Jagged Little Pill,” so I grew up on that record too. (Yeah, I’m a young whippersnapper.)

16

My mom raised me on Queen. I also have extensive memories of my parents blasting the West Side Story soundtrack whenever we cleaned the house. I’m the youngest in my family so I’ve always had older siblings to introduce me to cool music, too. I’ve been very lucky.

17

I’m a child of the late '70s, early '80s, and, during my formative years, my mom’s favorite radio station played what they called “adult contemporary” music, which consisted of mellow “rock,” oldies, country, current pop as long as it wasn’t too loud or fast, that sort of stuff. It was really a pretty eclectic mix. Radio stations seem to focus more on specific niche markets these days. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable and squirmy when I hear these songs (which are starting to pop up more and more in late-night TV ads for song collections like “AM Gold,” “Easy Rock,” “Country Hits of the 1970s,” etc.), like, “Geez, this is the stuff my mom made me listen to when I was a kid.” But sometimes I feel nostalgic for it and wish that radio station still had that format (it’s switched to all news and talk).

When I got my own portable radio that let me listen to what I wanted when I wanted, I discovered top 40 music. That same year, we discovered the music video. We didn’t get MTV (our local cable provider insisted not enough customers wanted it), but TBS aired videos late at night on Friday and Saturday. We didn’t have a VCR, either, so my sister and I used to try to make our own tapes by holding a tape recorder in front of the TV. Of course, every giggle, cough, chair squeak, dog bark, parent shouting “Turn that crap off and go to bed!” was recorded, too. But it was so exciting. To this day, I think 1985 was a great year for music. Just don’t make me listen to too much, because it’s starting to make me feel uncomfortable and squirmy, too. (I wasn’t always happy as a kid.)

18

I was never really into music 'til I was mid teens.

I was VERY picky early on, living almost exclusively on a diet of Jethro Tull and Kate Bush.

Then I slipped into Zeppelin in a big way when I was about 18, followed by Hendrix, Traffic, Cream and well, lets face it, pretty much any 60’s rock.

Shame I was born in 1969, I woulda made a great Hippie :slight_smile:

19

The first songs that I can remember hearing were When I’m Sixty-Four by The Beatles and Make Your Own Kind Of Music by Mama Cass Elliot.

I have a very specific memory of being at Potomac Woods Swim Club one summer and that THE SONGS for that summer were Silly Love Songs by Wings and You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine by Lou Rawls.

It’s funny, I was never into music all that much, even in high school, in fact it wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I knew who the Grateful Dead were

20

Oops! Got those backwards, there, eh?

My musical education depended on whatever made its way down the stairs from my big brother’s room:

J Geils Band: Freeze Frame
The Cure
The Violent Femmes
Old R.E.M.

Hearing any one of these bands immediately reminds me of my brother.

Plus, the first cassette tape I ever called my own: Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. That and Invisible Touch by Genisis were on pretty much constant rotation in my boom box before I turned 10.