KEOL 91.7 FM La Grande, OR. I had not been in town long when I was told about this radio station run by the students of Eastern Oregon State College. I tuned in quite a bit, but since it was a free form radio station where the DJs got to select their own music it was pretty hit and miss. The DJs at times sucked, and the music selections were sometimes horrendous. But when there was someone up there turning the right wax I was tuned in for their whole show.
Actually, I didn't start listening to KEOL right away when I moved to La Grande because for the first part of the first year we were there my family was living in an elk hunters camp site about 10 miles out of town. I listened to my walk man when we had batteries wearing out ZZ Top and Styx tapes, along with the few others I still had in my possession. We sat around the camp fire a lot and talked about stuff. But that is another story.
I moved to Pilot Rock, OR to live with my mom's Aunt and Uncle for a few months while my family settled in to some low income housing. More tapes... more music on buses. Everyone was into Ratt and Motley Crue not to mention the fore mentioned paintless Kiss.
The first summer I was back in La Grande, sleeping on the couch of my families low income apartment, I listened to the summer time skeleton crew at KEOL. One day I was getting ready to walk downtown and was sitting at the kitchen table listening to a DJ that just kept playing good songs. I could not leave. I kept telling someone (my sister maybe) that I would head downtown once the DJ played a song I didn't like. I wasn't going to be late for anything...I just wanted to go down and check out what was going on (it wasn't likely that anything was) but I just could not leave to radio.
Finally I called this guy up on their request line to talk to him and let him know that he was playing the soundtrack to my life and to ask him if he could play something else...I don't remember what. We talked for a while and he recognized me. We had a class together at school. The guy was the same age as me and was a DJ on the college radio station. I told him how lucky I thought he was and he pointed out that for $35 I could be lucky too.
So the following Fall term I went down to Eastern Oregon State College and signed up for a class that would teach me how to be a DJ. And the disk jockey who turned me on to this gig? He became my other best friend. We were pretty much inseparable for our Senior year of high school (except when I was hanging out with my new girlfriend.)
As a new disk jockey I was last in line when it came time to pick time slots. So I think I ended up with a late night Thursday 3 hour shift. I don't really remember, but I do remember that I was still into the power pop and heavy metal. I think if you looked at my old play list it would look like a heavy leaning classic rock station. But something happened when I started doing regular shows at KEOL. I had a nearly unlimited choice of music to listen to. That, combined with my new found aesthetic to listen with my tapping foot and feelings about what good music was, eventually lead me to more interesting musical choices. That is not to say I became a world music connoisseur over night, but the sheer exposure to all those different kinds of music was bound to wear off. And...it did.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
A journey of a thousand songs starts with one small step...
I'm not going to pretend that my epiphany led me straight to the whacked out eclectic choices I now enjoy. But it had to start somewhere, right? So I started liking U2 and the Cars as I said, and more of the Power Pop and middle America rock and roll and the occasional pop song. But my exposure was still pretty limited. But also at around this time I started getting bored with the same old heavy metal music...or more accurately I was getting bored with the formula that so many of the new bands were coming up with. The classic 12 bar blues riffs that many of the old hard rock bands and middle American acts like John Mellencamp (still known as John Cougar then) and Bruce Springsteen were offering wore well, but so many of the heavy metal bands seemed to care more for their mascara and nylons and teased hair than the music. Kiss took off their make up and came back just to prove that they still weren't very good at making music. I liked the first couple of Motley Crue songs but that was about it. Heavy metal went into a nasty skid for a couple of years there only to be partially brought back to credibility by Guns and Roses, but even that was more than I could handle. As luck would have it, I moved to La Grande OR.
I was pretty scared of moving there and when I talked to my mom and she said that was going to be our new home I was pretty sure my life was about to end. I had been staying the summer with my best friend in Springfield while my parents and younger sister were in Southeaster Washington and Northeastern Oregon trying to make some money in the "booming" Reagan economy. That wasn't really panning out and they sort of got stuck over there. I was told I had to get on a Greyhound and head over to my new home. My best friend Brian had been hunting over there and recalled that it was a small town filled with cowboys and that I was doomed.
I boarded the Greyhound and sat down. Pretty soon a pretty girl about my age sat down beside me and by the time we got to Portland we had been talking and I think we kind of liked each other. I had one of those Walkman players with two headphone jacks and she plugged in and we listened to Krokus for a while. She loved it. She borrowed it and said she was going to send it back to me. I never saw it or her again. But on the way into town I saw that at least this one horse town had a McDonalds. I was starting to feel a little better because I could see some trees in the mountains and the tumble weeds seemed to have been left about 50 miles back. The first person I saw in La Grande OR, coming out of the town's only McDonalds was wearing a felt Stetson cowboy hat, a western shirt held closed with those pearl colored snaps. Wrangler jeans with a leather belt that probably had his name or nick name engraved along the back, a great big silver belt buckle glaring the hot summer sun back into my eyes, and I swear to Gawd from 200 yards away I could actually see the shit on his cowboy boots. I told the pretty girl I was gonna die (I was probably wearing my muscle shirt with the rising sun picture and Kamikaze written in Japanese on it. My hair was down to the middle of my back. I looked like the rock and roll drummer I dreamed of being and these cowboys were gonna kick my ass.) The pretty girl did not try to comfort me. I think she knew I was dead meat. Maybe that's why she never sent me back my Krokus tape.
But La Grande wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. There were three kinds of kids in that town. The jocks, (and their girlfriends) the stoners (which I sort of looked like) and the "Goat Ropers." (the term the stoners used to describe the cowboys) There was also a college there. And they had a radio station that played all kinds of great music...sometimes. It was this radio station (KEOL) that began opening my mind to more musical posibilities. I was going to put my musicology knowledge to work. I became a college radio disk jockey.
I was pretty scared of moving there and when I talked to my mom and she said that was going to be our new home I was pretty sure my life was about to end. I had been staying the summer with my best friend in Springfield while my parents and younger sister were in Southeaster Washington and Northeastern Oregon trying to make some money in the "booming" Reagan economy. That wasn't really panning out and they sort of got stuck over there. I was told I had to get on a Greyhound and head over to my new home. My best friend Brian had been hunting over there and recalled that it was a small town filled with cowboys and that I was doomed.
I boarded the Greyhound and sat down. Pretty soon a pretty girl about my age sat down beside me and by the time we got to Portland we had been talking and I think we kind of liked each other. I had one of those Walkman players with two headphone jacks and she plugged in and we listened to Krokus for a while. She loved it. She borrowed it and said she was going to send it back to me. I never saw it or her again. But on the way into town I saw that at least this one horse town had a McDonalds. I was starting to feel a little better because I could see some trees in the mountains and the tumble weeds seemed to have been left about 50 miles back. The first person I saw in La Grande OR, coming out of the town's only McDonalds was wearing a felt Stetson cowboy hat, a western shirt held closed with those pearl colored snaps. Wrangler jeans with a leather belt that probably had his name or nick name engraved along the back, a great big silver belt buckle glaring the hot summer sun back into my eyes, and I swear to Gawd from 200 yards away I could actually see the shit on his cowboy boots. I told the pretty girl I was gonna die (I was probably wearing my muscle shirt with the rising sun picture and Kamikaze written in Japanese on it. My hair was down to the middle of my back. I looked like the rock and roll drummer I dreamed of being and these cowboys were gonna kick my ass.) The pretty girl did not try to comfort me. I think she knew I was dead meat. Maybe that's why she never sent me back my Krokus tape.
But La Grande wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. There were three kinds of kids in that town. The jocks, (and their girlfriends) the stoners (which I sort of looked like) and the "Goat Ropers." (the term the stoners used to describe the cowboys) There was also a college there. And they had a radio station that played all kinds of great music...sometimes. It was this radio station (KEOL) that began opening my mind to more musical posibilities. I was going to put my musicology knowledge to work. I became a college radio disk jockey.
I'm not supposed to like this...
The reason I heard Micheal Jackon's song Beat It is because they were playing it on KZEL. They even had to warn us that they were about to play a new song by MJ. They knew that we weren't going to like it but that we had to listen to it because there was a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. That was the hook for guys like me.
Looking back, there wasn't anything really all that special about the guitar solo. We had all heard him do much better stuff. So we could just dismiss it. But I couldn't. There was something about that song that I liked. I didn't know what it was but it made my foot tap. Each time I would hear it (because everyone always heard it all the time) and my foot would start tapping, I would stop myself, like I was doing something bad, like playing pocket pool while waiting for the bus, or picking your nose in math class.
Did I mention that I was a philosophical kind of kid? Well I thought about this for a while. I even worried about it a little. Then I had an epiphany. I had another one of these kinds of revelations a few year before this point and the logic applied to my present predicament. It goes like this.
When I was a kid a few of the kids decided that they were going to target me for ridicule. No reason for it, that's just how kids work. It bothered me for a bit. I even got into a fight with someone who had nothing to do with it. (long story) and had a near fight with one of the kids who did have something to do with it. (I slammed him against the locker and told him to knock it off...which he did. See how tough I was?) But after a while I did this thinking thing that I do sometimes and asked myself why I cared as much as I did about what those idiots though of me? I found that the more I ignored them, or just laughed at them the less I was picked on. So, applying the same logic, why would it matter to anyone if I liked the Michael Jackson song? And if my toe was tapping then that must mean I like it, right? So then and there I decided that if a song moved me in anyway then it was worthy of my time. (It took longer to apply that to Country and Western, but I got there eventually.)
This started me on re-evaluating all the old songs I had heard and all the old styles. I discovered something. Disco still sucked! But U2 was awesome! And so was INXS and David Bowie, and The Cars! My GOD the CARS! But I still loved heavy metal, but I also liked Neil Diamond and Bert Kaempfert!
Looking back, there wasn't anything really all that special about the guitar solo. We had all heard him do much better stuff. So we could just dismiss it. But I couldn't. There was something about that song that I liked. I didn't know what it was but it made my foot tap. Each time I would hear it (because everyone always heard it all the time) and my foot would start tapping, I would stop myself, like I was doing something bad, like playing pocket pool while waiting for the bus, or picking your nose in math class.
Did I mention that I was a philosophical kind of kid? Well I thought about this for a while. I even worried about it a little. Then I had an epiphany. I had another one of these kinds of revelations a few year before this point and the logic applied to my present predicament. It goes like this.
When I was a kid a few of the kids decided that they were going to target me for ridicule. No reason for it, that's just how kids work. It bothered me for a bit. I even got into a fight with someone who had nothing to do with it. (long story) and had a near fight with one of the kids who did have something to do with it. (I slammed him against the locker and told him to knock it off...which he did. See how tough I was?) But after a while I did this thinking thing that I do sometimes and asked myself why I cared as much as I did about what those idiots though of me? I found that the more I ignored them, or just laughed at them the less I was picked on. So, applying the same logic, why would it matter to anyone if I liked the Michael Jackson song? And if my toe was tapping then that must mean I like it, right? So then and there I decided that if a song moved me in anyway then it was worthy of my time. (It took longer to apply that to Country and Western, but I got there eventually.)
This started me on re-evaluating all the old songs I had heard and all the old styles. I discovered something. Disco still sucked! But U2 was awesome! And so was INXS and David Bowie, and The Cars! My GOD the CARS! But I still loved heavy metal, but I also liked Neil Diamond and Bert Kaempfert!
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Bass akwards
The funny thing about the way blogger works is if you intend to write something autobiographical like an online book it will always come out backwards. So if you want to read my life story in music then you have to go to the very first post.
So blogs sort of force you to stay in the moment. Hmmm....anyway, if you want to read these first few posts they way they were intended to go, start from the bottom and work your way up.
So blogs sort of force you to stay in the moment. Hmmm....anyway, if you want to read these first few posts they way they were intended to go, start from the bottom and work your way up.
Beat it! Mute Dog
By the time I got into high school I prided myself on being a rock and roll aficionado. I always had the latest hard rock (the term heavy metal was being used a lot more and I liked that despite the pans RollingStone magazine was giving the genre) and the harder the better. The first couple of Def Leappard albums had hit the scene and Let It Rock was my new anthem. I would take my tape of High and Dry to the weight room after school or in the locker room of the football team and crank it. People would come up and ask “who is that?” and I’d say Def Leppard. One of the senior varsity football players said is sounded more like Mute Dog. That pissed me off: this coming from a guy who spent far too much time standing around the weight room stereo rocking out to Pat Travers’ one good song. I just gritted my teeth and did another set on the bench press. Pyromania came out soon after that like a blazing left hook and dropped the nay sayers like a sack of Mute Dog shit. Boom, Boom, out go the lights indeed.
I became the guy my friends would all ask the rock and roll questions. I was even getting into the old stuff like psychedelia, music from the summer of love and Bob Dylan. I was also kind of a teen aged philosopher at times which accounts for my major attachment to bands like Rush and Yes. But I saw U2 as a new wave band and was not ready to go “preppy”. I’d hear bands like Fastway, The Headpins, and Ratt on KZEL when they were just hitting the airwaves and I ran out to buy the tapes. Ratt took a long time to get known anywhere but on my cassette player it seemed to me. The Headpins crashed and burned then came back a year or more later and tried it again with the same album. I had bought it the first time around and had already worn it out. (see how cool I was?) Then something happened that made me stop in my tracks. Eddie Van Halen played a guitar solo on a Michael Jackson record. “What the!?!? Hey wait. This is kinda cool.”
I became the guy my friends would all ask the rock and roll questions. I was even getting into the old stuff like psychedelia, music from the summer of love and Bob Dylan. I was also kind of a teen aged philosopher at times which accounts for my major attachment to bands like Rush and Yes. But I saw U2 as a new wave band and was not ready to go “preppy”. I’d hear bands like Fastway, The Headpins, and Ratt on KZEL when they were just hitting the airwaves and I ran out to buy the tapes. Ratt took a long time to get known anywhere but on my cassette player it seemed to me. The Headpins crashed and burned then came back a year or more later and tried it again with the same album. I had bought it the first time around and had already worn it out. (see how cool I was?) Then something happened that made me stop in my tracks. Eddie Van Halen played a guitar solo on a Michael Jackson record. “What the!?!? Hey wait. This is kinda cool.”
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Under the influence
I never became the rock and roll drummer that I knew I would be. But I did get really into it. And I had a lot of help.
Some time after I discovered hard rock, my family went on a road trip to my uncle's house in Washington. My two cousins who were living in Alaska were there too. We had great fun down in the basement playing pool. They had the radio blasting their new favorite band, the Scorpions, and one of their old favorites, Rush. They kept playing this one song over and over. It was the live version of Working Man and it had a drum solo in it that blew my mind. I was from that point on the biggest Rush fan and I liked the Scorpions quite a bit too. They were also playing an Australian band with a dead lead singer. Highway to Hell was another stepping stone to my long hair and muscle shirts. As soon as I heard that there was a new AC/DC album I collected all my lawn mowing money and went to the record store. Back in Black wasn't in the store very long and I may have been the first person in my town to buy it, but I sure wouldn't be the last. That thing stayed in people cassette players non-stop for more than a year. The only thing that I would take it out for was The Scorpions Black Out or Rush's Moving Pictures. (Actually a friend on the school bus would talk me into putting his Kiss Destroyer tape in sometimes, but it didn't really hold a candle to the stuff I was listening to. No offence intended to Kiss fans, but they just weren't as good as the boys from down under, Germany and the great white north. Sorry, it's just a fact you have to live with.)
The Christmas after AC/DC made such a big splash with Back in Black my uncle came over to visit (another uncle) and he had a gift for me with a catch. He took out a new copy of the tape. He said that this was the latest thing that kids were nuts for and he said if I could tell him what they were saying in the songs I could have it. I played along, knowing that he had no idea that I had been listening to this thing non-stop for a year. I listened to the first track. It took a while to get to it but it finally got to the lyrics...I stop it and pretend that I heard it for the first time "He says 'I'm rolling thunder, power rain, I'm coming on like a Hurricane" ... The tape was mine and just in time too, because my old copy was just about on it's last legs. I think I was probably in my 30s when I told him how he had been had. But since this this post is titled "Under the influence" it should be noted that this same uncle let me hear Bert Kaempfert for the first time. Talk about your guilty pleasures... If you like him, you gotta hear Esquivel! But again, I am getting way ahead of myself. I'm was a head banger, when head banging wasn't cool.
Some time after I discovered hard rock, my family went on a road trip to my uncle's house in Washington. My two cousins who were living in Alaska were there too. We had great fun down in the basement playing pool. They had the radio blasting their new favorite band, the Scorpions, and one of their old favorites, Rush. They kept playing this one song over and over. It was the live version of Working Man and it had a drum solo in it that blew my mind. I was from that point on the biggest Rush fan and I liked the Scorpions quite a bit too. They were also playing an Australian band with a dead lead singer. Highway to Hell was another stepping stone to my long hair and muscle shirts. As soon as I heard that there was a new AC/DC album I collected all my lawn mowing money and went to the record store. Back in Black wasn't in the store very long and I may have been the first person in my town to buy it, but I sure wouldn't be the last. That thing stayed in people cassette players non-stop for more than a year. The only thing that I would take it out for was The Scorpions Black Out or Rush's Moving Pictures. (Actually a friend on the school bus would talk me into putting his Kiss Destroyer tape in sometimes, but it didn't really hold a candle to the stuff I was listening to. No offence intended to Kiss fans, but they just weren't as good as the boys from down under, Germany and the great white north. Sorry, it's just a fact you have to live with.)
The Christmas after AC/DC made such a big splash with Back in Black my uncle came over to visit (another uncle) and he had a gift for me with a catch. He took out a new copy of the tape. He said that this was the latest thing that kids were nuts for and he said if I could tell him what they were saying in the songs I could have it. I played along, knowing that he had no idea that I had been listening to this thing non-stop for a year. I listened to the first track. It took a while to get to it but it finally got to the lyrics...I stop it and pretend that I heard it for the first time "He says 'I'm rolling thunder, power rain, I'm coming on like a Hurricane" ... The tape was mine and just in time too, because my old copy was just about on it's last legs. I think I was probably in my 30s when I told him how he had been had. But since this this post is titled "Under the influence" it should be noted that this same uncle let me hear Bert Kaempfert for the first time. Talk about your guilty pleasures... If you like him, you gotta hear Esquivel! But again, I am getting way ahead of myself. I'm was a head banger, when head banging wasn't cool.
My changing musical life...
There was a time when I thought that I had to listen to certain kinds of music. It took a long time to get to the point where I could admit that I liked other kinds of music. I don't think I am alone. If I were, then the term "guilty pleasures" would be meaningless in a musical context, but it's not. For example, if you liked or still like anything by Millie Vanilli, orVanilla Ice, then you have what many people would consider a guilty pleasure. So why should anyone feel guilty about liking any certain kind of music? Because we do. I still do, but now I will admit it and embrace it and listen to all the Bread songs Ima want to. That goes for Three Dog Night too!
When I first started getting into music I was more attached to the kind of music that went with the objects of my interest. So at the age of 10 or so I started liking trucker music. I'm talking about CW McCall specifically but there were others too. They all had a country and western feel to them, but they were all about life on the road in those big 18 wheelers. If there were a lot of rock and roll or blues songs about the trucker lifestyle then I bet that would have been in the mix as well.
At some point my mom bought me an album call "Golden Summer" and it had a picture of a beach babe on the inside laying face down in the sand and topless. You could just see the beginnings of the curvature of her breasts...right then I new two things for sure: I liked surf music and I liked blond chicks with their bikini tops no where to be found. (That may be the first moment that I knew that I was straight, though I would not think about that until just a few seconds ago.) The double album had songs from the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Venturers, Safaris, Chantilies, etc.. I loved it and wore it out from playing it so much on our big monster Hi-Fi cabinet. My sister and I would have to fight for what we would play and sometimes she would win and we would have to listen to Shawn Cassidy or some guy running around calling "Wildfire!" or "Seasons in the Sun."
I liked the beach music, but something happened when my sister brought home some records from a couple she had been babysitting for. She put them in the corner and they stayed there unplayed for quite a while. But I'm getting ahead of myself so let's go back a little. Before my sister was babysitting, we had a babysitter who would come to our house to watch us. We used to listen to music on our aforementioned Hi-Fi (as big as the couch looking like a credenza) and would argue about what radio station we would listen to. For the most part we were listening to the top 40 station. I don't remember the call sign but it was the biggest station in the Eugene/Springfield area. The babysitter wanted to turn it to KZEL, the "hard rock" station. I was adamantly opposed to such a change because I would not be able to take all that noise! They were bigger than me (her and my sister) so I was outvoted and had to run to my room for refuge.
One day I was board. It was a beautiful summer day and all I had to do was go ride my bike down to the river and go fishing with my friends, play touch football in the middle of the road, shoot hoops in my driveway or take the city bus across town to go to the mall or something like that. In short, nothing to do. So I grabbed one of the records leaning against the wall that my sister had put there a long time ago. The first one I grabbed was a big black cover with BAD CO written on it. I put it on as an experiment in self torture to break the boredom. Before I knew it, I had a couple of pencils in my hand and I was playing the air drums. My sister walked into the room and laughed at me and said something like "I thought you hated rock and roll". I just nodded and said this is OK I guess. But inside I knew I was going to be a rock and roll drummer and this was the best stuff I had ever heard. I was just getting started.
When I first started getting into music I was more attached to the kind of music that went with the objects of my interest. So at the age of 10 or so I started liking trucker music. I'm talking about CW McCall specifically but there were others too. They all had a country and western feel to them, but they were all about life on the road in those big 18 wheelers. If there were a lot of rock and roll or blues songs about the trucker lifestyle then I bet that would have been in the mix as well.
At some point my mom bought me an album call "Golden Summer" and it had a picture of a beach babe on the inside laying face down in the sand and topless. You could just see the beginnings of the curvature of her breasts...right then I new two things for sure: I liked surf music and I liked blond chicks with their bikini tops no where to be found. (That may be the first moment that I knew that I was straight, though I would not think about that until just a few seconds ago.) The double album had songs from the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Venturers, Safaris, Chantilies, etc.. I loved it and wore it out from playing it so much on our big monster Hi-Fi cabinet. My sister and I would have to fight for what we would play and sometimes she would win and we would have to listen to Shawn Cassidy or some guy running around calling "Wildfire!" or "Seasons in the Sun."
I liked the beach music, but something happened when my sister brought home some records from a couple she had been babysitting for. She put them in the corner and they stayed there unplayed for quite a while. But I'm getting ahead of myself so let's go back a little. Before my sister was babysitting, we had a babysitter who would come to our house to watch us. We used to listen to music on our aforementioned Hi-Fi (as big as the couch looking like a credenza) and would argue about what radio station we would listen to. For the most part we were listening to the top 40 station. I don't remember the call sign but it was the biggest station in the Eugene/Springfield area. The babysitter wanted to turn it to KZEL, the "hard rock" station. I was adamantly opposed to such a change because I would not be able to take all that noise! They were bigger than me (her and my sister) so I was outvoted and had to run to my room for refuge.
One day I was board. It was a beautiful summer day and all I had to do was go ride my bike down to the river and go fishing with my friends, play touch football in the middle of the road, shoot hoops in my driveway or take the city bus across town to go to the mall or something like that. In short, nothing to do. So I grabbed one of the records leaning against the wall that my sister had put there a long time ago. The first one I grabbed was a big black cover with BAD CO written on it. I put it on as an experiment in self torture to break the boredom. Before I knew it, I had a couple of pencils in my hand and I was playing the air drums. My sister walked into the room and laughed at me and said something like "I thought you hated rock and roll". I just nodded and said this is OK I guess. But inside I knew I was going to be a rock and roll drummer and this was the best stuff I had ever heard. I was just getting started.
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