o.p.m.

my dad liked to listen to german opera at pain-threshold volume. it really pissed me off when he and his friends were drinking and put on some of my cream records at the wrong speed and laughed at them. (his mantra: "take that cr-r-rap upstairs to your room if you want to listen to it -- and turn it _all the way down_!") once he and his friends made me listen to an album by a group called the mandrake memorial because one of their sons was in it. i thought it was precious horseshit. my mom liked jazz singers: sarah vaughan, ella fitzgerald. she encouraged me to get into jazz the way she encouraged me to read all kinds of books, and later on, i did.

my big sis liked what i considered "folk singers": joni mitchell, carole king (i knew nothing about the brill building in 1970), laura nyro, tom paxton. (when jesse told me the news about fraf, i came home, searched for "ramblin' boy" on youtube, and cried.) she was also into broadway musicals (i know every song from my fair lady and the sound of music -- interestingly, my second college roommate had a similar experience with west side story, which he inexplicably thought took place on mars), baroque music (which she played on the recorder), and a few out-of-character items like todd rundgren's something/anything and the kinks.

my best friend in junior high school liked roger miller and peter, paul & mary. also the music from marat/sade (he came from an interesting family.) when he discovered weed, it was all steppenwolf, neil young (after the gold rush), and the beatles (let it be). after he was, um, _experienced_, he used to stack all of the doors albums (except absolutely live) up on his record changer along with dark side of the moon and a brit import best of pink floyd and listen to them over and over and over. once when we were tripping at my house, i played white light/white heat in protest and wound up having the god-king of all bad trips. serves me right. to this day when i hear "for love of money" by the o'jays, "bridge of sighs" by robin trower (which once triggered a flashback as i was driving through the gate of an air force base), and "sufficiently breathless" by captain beyond, i think about that day.

at parties in high school, i remember listening to kids' edgar winter and steve miller records. (i liked entrance, children of the future, and sailor, but not the shit that they played at parties.) at my friend dave's house where we all used to hang out because his father was the night janitor at our high school, we'd get spaced and listen to yes and the allman brothers, which i came to think of as more architecture than music. we used to play air guitar to mott the hoople, which was kind of funny because some of us could already play for real. later dave developed a fetish for bruce springsteen, which i found regrettable.

at college, every freshman girl had that springsteen album where he sounds like he's reciting the fucking manhattan phone directory, and billy joel's piano man. i knew half a dozen bartenders on long island who claimed to be "john at the bar he's a friend of mine." (who would claim to be that wasn't?) on a visit to my ex-drummer after i'd dropped out, i walked into his room, found a copy of born to run on the turntable, and immediately smashed it to bits. later, driving to texas, i threw somebody's springsteen mixtape out the window somewhere in mississippi. (sorry, tommy.)

my first roommate in college liked elvis and led zeppelin. we wound up having a band together in which we thankfully played neither. the guy in whose room i wound up spending the most time was into zappa and joe walsh. i was surprised to learn that he wasn't a musician. it was at a party in his room (immediately after a kid down the hall had threatened to kill me for not giving him a cigarette; "he's got a gun, too," his roommate had assured me) where i met my second roommate and started a long-lived friendship based on our mutual enthusiasm for the who's live at leeds. my second roommate introduced me to captain beefheart, a song at a time, and later taught me how to play "kandy korn." we used to go to the library to listen to harry partch and ornette coleman records, to the befuddlement of the people around us.

the guy i roomed with when i first came to fort worth was into "new wave." he listened incessantly to the sex pistols album, the first two by talking heads, roxy music, ultravox's systems of romance, eno, john cale, and phil manzanera. i liked his girlfriend because she knew about the stooges. in particular, she liked "down on the street" real much.

the woman i briefly lived with in austin liked springsteen (sigh), the clash, aretha franklin. we went to a van morrison show together, also saw the huns and some of the earliest big boys shows (tim usedta work in the rekkid store where we did). we'd also go to liberty lunch to see a local band that played a takeoff on the knack called "my scrotem" that i thought was high-fuckin'-larious.

my future ex-wife liked the rolling stones. when we met she also liked '70s crap like starz and angel. she absolutely hated jazz, beefheart, zappa, anything "weird." if i played an unplugged electric guitar in the garage on the other side of the house from our bedroom with the door closed, the "noise" drove her "absolutely insane." she later "accidentally" gave away all my good records to goodwill in shreveport. toward the end of our marriage, she was listening to pearl jam, pantera, and nine inch nails. after we separated, she called me up once asking me to recommend blues albums, then she went through a country phase because she wanted something she "didn't have to share with me and the kids."

in basic training we couldn't listen to any music at all, except the music we marched to. (later on, in tech school, i found it quite hilarious that we marched to the theme music from monty python.) once when i was detailed to clothing issue, i found a newspaper in the trash containing the announcements of both john belushi's and randy rhoads' deaths. on the bus from san antonio to biloxi, i heard rick james' "the other woman" for the first time and thought it was steve miller, in the same way i first heard bto's "taking care of business" in albany and thought it was the rolling stones. duh.

in korea, the kid upstairs from me in the barracks liked journey's escape. i remember waking up to it on days when i didn't have to work and the sound of him ejecting the tape from his jam box to turn it over. the white guys all liked van halen and the clash ("should i stay or should i go") and the black guys all liked grandmaster flash, george clinton, prince, and d train. if you walked in between the barracks while they had their competing stereos going, it felt like having your head ripped in half. when we went on alert, they'd play the william tell overture over the giant voice speakers. i still get nervous indigestion when i hear that music.

when i was an instructor right before i got out of the air force i had to listen to wilson phillips and that fucking lee greenwood song every six weeks at the graduation banquet, right before the air force song.

my first serious girlfriend after i got divorced liked billy joel (boo!) but also the velvet underground (yay!). she had seen pearl jam when she was at the university of kansas in the early '90s. i made the mistake of lending her my tim buckley records, which i was too ashamed to ask for back when we broke up.

my sweetie likes tom waits, elvis costello, and jussi bjorling. i'm finding things i like about all of them. we met at a goodwin show at the black dog and she was a big woodeye fan. the first present i ever gave her was joe strummer's streetcore which i'd just finished reviewing. someone from the paper actually had the nerve to ask for it back. too bad. she also likes nearly all the stuff i like, which i didn't used to think was necessary, but it turns out can be really nice.