My great friend & fellow insufferable music geek Steve Holtje initiated this idea on Facebook last week, and it was sort of the logical progression from this post of last year, so here goes.
As I said in that post, while I no longer really believe in the concept of “guilty pleasures” (as an almost-52 year old, I think life is far too short to worry about what other people might think of my listening habits), there are still certain records and artists I’m quite surprised I devoted so many hours listening to. By the same token, as I think back, I cannot say I really feel any regret about digging certain music. I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, I can look back at specific records I purchased like Walkin’ the Razor’s Edge by the deeply stupid Canadian metal band Helix and/or maybe See You in Hell by the deeply stupid British metal band Grim Reaper and think I really ought to have known better, but hey … I was young, impressionable and deeply stupid myself, at the time.
So, while I don’t lament thinking, at one point or another, that certain music was worth my time (let alone my money), there were certainly moments wherein I harbored significantly misinformed opinions about particular artists. Here are some of those.
Stupid Musical Opinions I Have Held
1. Tom Waits' voice is unlistenable
For a long while, I found Tom Waits’ voice impenetrably cloying and affected. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could voluntarily subject their ears to his gruff, labored delivery, regardless of what he was wheezily crooning about.
Waits' brilliance, meanwhile, was forcibly imposed upon me by repeated airings of Swordfishtrombones and, more effectively, Frank’s Wild Years via my friend Rob D. From that latter record, I particularly warmed, somewhat ironically, to the track, "Cold, Gold Ground.”
But the song that really changed my tune on Waits was "Philippino Box Spring Hog” by way of my comrade, Tod Ashley. About a decade and a half ago, I used to work two overnight shifts a week at the TIME Magazine news desk in midtown. Tod, meanwhile, was a chronic insomniac routinely up past everyone’s bed time at his then-home down in TriBeca. In the small hours when newly broken news didn’t need attending to, I would instant-message songs back and forth with Tod. We would try to change each others’ opinions about certain sacred cows and unsung gems. One late evening, while I was unable to convince him of the brilliance of “Her Head’s Revolving” by paisley underground stalwarts, The Three O’Clock, his submission of “Philippino Box Spring Hog” from Tom’s Mule Variations album practically blew a new part in my hair. I was duly schooled, and it was all over, after that.
2. Steely Dan were just noodly jazzbos who made music for fern-bar-loitering divorcees
I don’t really know why I took such an immediate disliking to Steely Dan in my younger years, but I suppose they just struck me as so pretentious and sophisticated in a manner most of my favorite bands weren't. They were yawnsomely adult. Their album covers seemed arty and opaque (although, in retrospect, the sleeve for The Royal Scam does seem kinda metal). Their songs were about complex scenarios and filled with nuance, finesse and accomplished filigree. To my mind, Steely Dan just didn’t rock, so I made a series of exceptionally lazy assumptions about them.
Of course, Steely Dan were so much more than the soppy yacht rockers I myopically demeaned them as. While certainly jazzy with musical chops for miles, they were also arch, wry, sardonic, bitter as the punkest of the punks and very funny. They also wrote some perfectly flawless tunes along the way.
I didn’t have an epiphany with Steely Dan. I think I just wised up one day, and still feel stupid for ever selling them so short.
3. Patti Smith is only worthy of contempt
I kind of already covered this sore topic on this blog here way back when, but to summarize…
As emphatically stated here and then earnestly recanted here, my relationship to the music, legend and lore of Patti Smith has always been a troubled one. In much the same way I conjured several dim preconceptions about Steely Dan, I leaped early on with similarly myopic aplomb to the impression that Patti Smith was nothing but a pretentious opportunist whose music owed more to the hoary melodrama of Meat Loaf than to the distilled, cut-the-crap vitality of Punk Rock. I could not fathom equating her mannered, laborious incantations with the incendiary songs of the Ramones or the Dead Boys. I didn’t hear it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t get it. So I judged and dismissed accordingly.
As mentioned in those posts, I took my indifference about her music to a more vitriolic level when I penned a probably-too-zealous chapter in a friend’s “humorous” book about toppling sacred cows. From that period on, I went from a passive non-fan to an active detractor. That was unfortunate for anyone within listening proximity of my big, stupid mouth.
For me, the wake-up call came via my reluctant reading of Smith’s justly celebrated 2010 memoir, “Just Kids,” which recounted her early years in New York alongside her muse and partner, Robert Mapplethorpe. While Smith’s prose didn’t necessarily change my appreciation for her music, it did completely decimate several presumptions I’d been harboring about her backstory and how she conducted herself. Suffice to say, she was not quite the shrill, avaricious starfucker I might have made her out to be. I continue to feel like a dopey heel about that.
That said, while I own a couple of Patti Smith albums, I still don’t really listen to them very often.
Okay, those are mine — WHAT ARE YOURS?
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