An Everflowing Font

I have always learned first about good music from my brother Brian. Sometimes I forget the impact he has had on my musical taste growing up. It all started early – probably when I was 7 or 8. I remember at school everyone was listening to Shaun Cassidy. I was getting ready to buy my first album and had decided on a scratched copy of Kiss Alive mainly due to it’s bargain price of 50 cents and the fact that some friends at school were into them. I brought it home, and was excited to show Brian, who had a great collection of albums. He could tell I was excited and wanted to encourage my musical growth but I could see the disappointment in his eyes.

After listening to this craptacular assembly of primordial hair metal for a week, I decided in the end it would be best to melt the album in the burn barrel in our back yard. Then to further show my distaste I hung it on a nail on my wall. I wanted to prove to my brother that I understood now what he had said in a moment with his eyes – that you know good music when you hear it, and that most people don’t even try to differentiate.

It was that Christmas that he bought me The Who Live at Leeds double album. I remember holding the yellow foldout in my hands and thinking wow this must be some heavy shit. I ran upstairs to listen to it. I heard “My Generation” for the first time and felt a connection with the music even though I knew I was too young to understand what Roger Daltrey was really singing about. When I tried to tell my friends at school that I was listening to The Who they just didn’t get it. Funny enough Brian recently sent me the album in mp3 format and it instantaneously found its way to my iPod – “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me…” I still love that stuff.

Thus began the journey. The next moment musicaux I remember was when he brought home Pink Floyd The Wall one day. There is one part on that album where there is this intense sound of bottles breaking against a wall. Brian took special care to point it out to me and I was instantly fascinated by the intersection of music and performance art. We listened to that album pretty much non-stop for the next two months.

Then one morning I was watching The Today Show and Gene Shalit had the nerve to try and review it. He must have been under pressure as it had become a sensation and he probably wanted to appear hip enough to have heard of it. At any rate he panned it for just some of the most retarded reasons ever, including the use of ambient sounds between tracks, saying they were distracting and often too violent. Thanks to my brother’s tutelage, I saw through this whole charade at the tender age of 10. The album has since gone platinum 23 times over.

But these two examples are more mainstream than most of what my brother listened to as we were growing up. He listened to not just Frank Zappa, but Captain Beefheart, whose was the much, much weirder one, and of course Little Feat. He had a whole bunch of punk music, including the Plasmatics, Stiff Little Fingers, and this awesome album called Black and White by the Stranglers.

Actually Stiff Little Fingers’ “State of Emergency” off of Inflammable Material had a guitar riff which haunted me for 25 years until I figured out who it was again after hearing one of their songs in the movie High Fidelity. I recently returned the iPod favor by sending Brian both Black and White and Inflammable Material on mp3. BTW, if the RIAA is reading this I want them to know that these are personal copies from licensed source material and were sent to my brother for sampling purposes only so that he may go out and buy the albums himself if he so desires. :>)

Later, when I was in college, I would first hear Joy Division, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth from my brother’s collection. If I only knew at the time the impact that these three bands would have on me later in life, I might have started speaking in tongues. But like everything else, I had to grow into them because they were really much deeper in substance than what I was listening to then. I like to think I’m the one who tipped Brian off to Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing's Shocking, which I think he thought was a little too intense at first. We both needed to connect with our ur-punker to really start understanding the heavy guitar sounds of the 90s.

One of those summers we would see Tool at Lollpalooza in Des Moines together. They were on the second stage, and man did it make an impression on me. I’ll never forget a head-shaven, shirtless, and ripped Maynard James Keenan jerking epileptically back and forth for an intense 45 minute set, only to be followed by some perverted puppet show.

Primus also played at that concert and I vividly remember Brian kept yelling between songs “Play Tommy the Cat!” I don’t think they ever played it but it was damned funny anyway. Around that time we also saw Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. All three of these bands have since betrayed me, but at the time they were awesome and hadn’t yet gotten so full of themselves.

And the story continues today. With the advent of the iPod and the internet our mutual exploration of great music has only accelerated. Brian’s recent recommendations have including the following amazing bands: Arcade Fire, Spiderbait, Death From Above 1979, The Futureheads, Deerhoof, Fiery Furnaces, Red Red Meat, Can, Le Tigre, TV on the Radio, Smoosh and The Kills. For my part, I hope I introduced him to The Shins, The Dandy Warhols, The Libertines and Elliott Smith.

BTW, if you haven’t heard of any of these bands, don’t fret. It’s just the evil music establishment suppressing the unique talents of the world with their mass-produced pap. If not for my brother, I would never have heard of them either, and all I can say is, thank God for him, because otherwise I would have lost all faith in music today. Good music lives on as always, still underground, but worth the trouble of looking for it, along the path my brother first led me down oh those many years ago.