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Confessions of a Music Junkie
It all started innocently enough. I liked music, it was always
playing around the house as a kid (mainly show tunes and country
and western), so it was only natural that at some point I'd
start buying my own records to listen to. The exact date of
that fateful day when my habit began is lost to me but I know
that it occurred sometime in my fourth grade year at the age
of 10. Of course with hindsight this seemingly innocent moment
can be ominously pointed to as the beginning of my eventual
downfall into a full-fledged music junkie.
See it's an insidious habit and can take years to actually develop
into a full-blown addiction, but by then its often too late,
you find yourself well out of control. However, in retrospect
the warning signs were all there from the beginning. It wasn't
just the buying, but the way that music itself gradually started
to take up more and more of my waking hours, my conscious thoughts.
If not actually listening to an album, I was thinking about
listening or buying records or reading about groups. I spent
hours daydreaming about the Beatles, what they had done in their
spare moments etc… And it was almost always bands as opposed
to individual artists that I was fascinated by, the whole band
as a gang of friends really connecting with my adolescent fantasies.
There was a point around 1981 when I was hardly able to have
a conversation without dragging the Beatles into it in some
awkward fashion. I was able to convert a classmate and we then
began to trade books and get together and make files on note
cards cataloging the various Paul is dead clues. There were
endless afternoons creeping ourselves out listening to the fade
out of "I Am the Walrus" again and again, searching
for clues.
I'd also like to take a moment to mention Nicholas Schaffner's
role in all of this. I never hear him mentioned in rock writer
circles (probably cause he wrote too much from a fan's perspective)
but he authored two fine books that had a huge and lasting impact
on my perception of and taste in music. First, "the Beatles
Forever" and then "the British Invasion", his
description of seeing the Who repeatedly in an afternoon at
a Murray the K showcase is the most vivid and evocative writing
on the magic of that group that I know.
So gradually I branched out to other British Invasion acts;
the Rolling Stones, The Who, and the Kinks were the big three
in addition to the Beatles. Nothing out of the ordinary really,
especially in our current era of nostalgia for everything including
last week. But at the time, early 80's (prior to the invention
of the "classic" rock genre), this made me quite the
oddball and the target of ill informed teasing by my peers.
I don't know what the hell they were listening to, probably
not much, but they obviously didn't understand what this stuff
meant, they didn't get it, how important it was. It was like
magic, it took the place in my daydreams that had been previously
occupied by Marvel Comics and superheroes. Except it was even
better because it was real, or seemed to be.It didn't take too
long before I was drawing my own imaginary band, designing their
album covers and writing songs and settling on track listings.
I believe I still have some of these daydreamed albums hid somewhere.
They are of course embarrassing but not because I was young
and inexperienced but because I was young and inexperienced
and trying to write from the point of view of an adult. My adult
point of view being informed solely by what I'd gleamed from
pop songs. This led to far too many awful lyrics revolving around
"baby", and "oh girl" and worse. Now if
I would have written honestly about the things that really mattered
to me at that age I might have come up with something good.
So in any case, my family helped out a lot at the start, there
were many different occasions on which I was able to wiggle
an album or two out of a trip somewhere. But eventually, sometime
in High School I believe, they decided to cut me off, simply
stating that I "had enough records". Easy for them
to say, first they get me hooked then they arbitrarily decide
that I have enough, that its time to stop. What am I supposed
to do, go cold turkey? That wasn't gonna work, there was too
much left out there, hell I was just getting started. And so
I picked up the slack with a passion.
In drug and alcohol rehab talk they speak of the bottoming out
experience, my own such experience occurred all too recently.
I knew I was in trouble when I starting thinking about buying
a Todd Rundgren album--I had heard his early stuff was sort
of interesting. But the truth is I was just desperate. It's
not that I had run out of good music to buy, far from it. The
amount of albums and cd's I desire that I have no luck tracking
down mount into the hundreds easy. And there still are so many
genres left unexplored. But at that moment I needed a fix and
it was the only thing at the used record store that seemed even
remotely interesting. Shameful I know.
Oh and there was this other incident where I broke out in a
sweat as I watched an older guy unload his entire record collection
to a local record store. Record after record of hard to find
and wonderful music past by my eyes: No New York, Metal
Machine Music, plenty of SST records, 70's punk and 80's
post-punk, the employees of the store where all gathered round
like vultures immediately placing dibs on the ones they desired.
Me, I stood there pretending to listen to a cd as I felt beads
of sweat forming on my forehead and palms. Many of these records
I already had but seeing them all in one place like that gave
me the fever. I recognized then that I had a serious problem
that needed to be addressed.
I'd like to relate that I am now reformed and am able to engage
in casual record buying with no negative effects. But the truth
is that despite some limited progress I've been falling off
the wagon hard and repeatedly. The latest episode, perhaps the
most shameful, having to forego grocery shopping because I had
already blown my money on music. So I guess the best I can do
at this point is offer this as a cautionary tale, though I fear
those reading this have probably already traveled too far down
this same road. Look long and hard at what's in front of you.
| William
Crain, September 2002 |
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