For most of my life, I gave the credit for my passion for music to someone I hardly even knew: my dad Jack, who died when I was 5. I inherited his copies of Meet the Beatles, Elvis' Golden Records, and the Chairmen of the Board's In Session, among other albums, as well as his collection of 45s, including The Silhouette's "Get a Job," Clyde McPhatter's "It's a Lover's Question," and Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue," not to mention The Detergents' "Leader of the Laundromat," a parody of the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack." The mythology I'd created in my mind had me discovering these discs, and having them open up a alternative world to me, one in which I felt empowered and comforted rather than weak and alone.
As with most mythologies, there's some truth to that story. But in my sometimes desperate attempt to create an autobiography in which my father played a crucial role not for his absence but for his presence via music, I've ignored this other story, this other memory, the one of my mom Sonia standing next to one of her bog Altec Lansing speakers, swaying to...well, that part's missing. It could have been Kris Kristofferson, it could have been The Hollies, or Waylon Jennings, or the Moody Blues, or Emmylou Harris. It doesn't really matter what was playing in this particular memory, because music was a constant presence in our house, and those sounds made their way down the hall and into my room. Sometimes the albums themselves "just happened" to make their way onto my record player, too; the ones I remember the most are Elton John's Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road and a Warner various artists compilation called Superstars of the 70's. She bought me my first stereo, my first 45s (Bachman Turner Overdrive's "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" was the very first, I believe), and my first album, Steve Miller Band's Fly Like an Eagle. She let me walk down to the 1812 Overture record store (and, I realize now, head shop) to buy her a Peter, Paul, and Mary album, and gave me a few extra bucks to pick up Abbey Road for myself.
She tolerated the sounds of ELO, Stevie Wonder, and The Who blasting from my bedroom while I played air guitar in front of my window (I didn't have a mirror big enough to reflect my attempts to leap like Pete Townshend), and only occasionally did she tell me to turn it down.
She encouraged me to take guitar lessons when I was in third grade, and let me quit when it became clear I wasn't quite ready yet. A few years later, when my fingers and attention span had both grown to the point where I was willing to practice, she bought me a nice Epiphone acoustic and took me to lessons once a week. I was never going to be a virtuoso, but I got good enough at chords to become a decent rhythm player, and good enough at blues scales to lay down the occasional solo. I still played air guitar more frequently than the real thing, and I sang at the top of my lungs, and even when she told me to turn the music down, never once did she tell me to stop singing.
She didn't take me to my first concert, but she let my great friend and mentor Jack take me to see Bob Dylan on his 1981 stop in Milwaukee when I was 15, and she let me drive down again a few weeks later with some friends to see ELO. And when I begged to send in my cash for the ticket raffle for The Who's (first) farewell tour, she didn't even protest too much that I had no idea who was going to take me to the show. (I got the tickets and the ride, and a great view of this.) She and I were going to see Simon & Garfunkel play County Stadium in 1983, but a nasty bout of salmonella (I don't suppose there's another kind) kept me away. I can't count how many concerts I saw in high school—The Kinks, Bruce Springsteen, numerous trips to Summerfest—and never once did she suggest that I was wasting my time or my money. When I was in college, she gave me some cash intended to purchase a television for my dorm room, and she didn't get mad when I told her I bought a 12-string guitar instead. And she even came to see me play at the Willy Bear in Madison with my second college band, Boy Elroy, even though she wasn't exactly a fan of hard rock.
Ultimately, I had better chops as a rock critic than as a rock musician, and really my childhood dream was to write for Rolling Stone, and so I spent most of my time in college and just after writing about music for various publications, something I continued doing regularly until a few years ago. Music criticism in the 1980s, when I started, was almost exclusively a boy's club, which is just one of the reasons I never paid enough attention to how my mom had shaped my tastes and my critical sensibilities. I always knew she was crucial to the development of my political thinking and sense of social justice, but I never reflected upon how important she was in the development of my passion for music.
It wasn't until I read "If The Girls Were All Transported," Ann Powers' wonderful essay in the latest version of Carl Wilson's revelatory Let's Talk About Love—in which Powers explores the ways in which her mother's aesthetics helped to forge her own tastes—that I saw what had been there all along. In my case, it wasn't so much that my mom influenced my tastes as gave me permission and encouragement to follow my instincts and trust my ears. And even though she never said so explicitly, her relationship to music made it obvious to me that music was more than mere entertainment, that it was a tool to understand ourselves and each other better, to reckon with our deepest and sometimes scariest feelings, and to make connections with others who, contrary to what we might believe in our darkest moments, feel just like we do.
My mom has always said that when she dies, she wants The Eagles' "Take it to the Limit" played at her memorial service. She's 75 now, and she had a health scare a few weeks ago that made me wonder if that day was nearby. Thank goodness it's not. And thank you, mom, for the music and for helping to make me who I am today.
Bruce Springsteen wrote a terrific song about his mother called "The Wish." In the intro to the performance below, he jokes about how uncommon it is for male rock singers to sing about their moms, but if you want to skip to the music, jump ahead to the 2 minute, 10 second mark.
Comments