[Think back to the first album or CD that you actually bought for yourself.]

I arrived in Corvallis, Oregon with my family’s entire collection of CDs. They fit in in my belongings without even wondering where to put them. Two were my mother’s, her Chicago Symphony rendition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a CD of Bach sonatas recorded by someone utterly boring, seven albums of Mannheim Steamroller, and two of Enya, and was utterly unprepared for what followed.

Everyone has always said I grew up under a rock. The first time I heard anything by the Beatles, I was fourteen, and someone started playing the Birthday Song at, appropriately enough, a birthday party. I didn’t know the words, but it was pretty catchy and not that hard to follow along, with a bunch of theater folks who’d already put away a half dozen bottles of cheap pink wine.

I hadn’t actually heard a recording of them until I was in the basement with my then girlfriend at age seventeen, and she’s flipping through her father’s records and putting on album after album and trying to get me to dance, and I finally tell her I’ll dance if she puts on something I’ve ever heard before. So out comes an album with an all-white cover, and she says “Well, here, I’ll put on this” -- I think my blank stare might have been a hint that I didn’t know what was coming. She yanks me to my feet and then moments later when the music’s blaring, she’s stomping her feet at me and glaring. “It’s the Beatles. You know this!”

I protest that I’ve never heard it before in my life and she stops.

At this point, she’s been a little accustomed to me saying outrageous things, but in her world, saying you’ve never heard the Beatles is slightly more disturbing than credible claims that you’re from another planet.

This is the girlfriend who, in our first conversation, bonded with me quickly over musical instruments, and we tossed back and forth between favorite pieces of Bach, she having just worked through the entire set of cello suites transposed for the Viola, and me having fond memories of blasting the Ninth Symphony or Tocatta and Fugue in Gm at top volume in various places.  She introduces me to the music of Paul Hindemith, I wax poetic about both Philip Glass and a favorite play of mine which mocks him mercilessly. I know most of the Irish reels she lists off by name, and we can hum or whistle them in unison.

But I’ve never heard the Beatles, and she is quite sure I’m from some parallel universe because of this.

And so the second phase of my musical education begins. She pulls the White Album off the record player and goes digging for a point where our common musical knowledge comes apart at the seams.

ZZ Top, I know I’ve heard somewhere -- it dawns on me later that it was my boss’s favorite band at my first job, one he had me encode into this new “internet music” file called “MP3”, because he’s sure it’s going to be the Next Big Thing and has to do something in his business with it, but just isn’t sure how. She’s not impressed that it’s just a footnote in my foggy memory, so next comes Pink Floyd, which I know only because Unschoolers are easily attached to a band that has a song rebelling against the educational system.

And so, my education in Rock and Roll begins in earnest. This is a family who has, averaged out, a half dozen musical instruments per person. Their record collection stretches across the basement, and the basement itself, which was an unfinished room when they moved in is a combination semi-soundproofed den, dancefloor and altar to The Guitar.

She pulls out Elvis and The Proclaimers and Supertramp, and every song on every album I’ve never heard, and she knows by heart. Most of the time, I can’t even say “I’ve heard of them.” 

I grew up in a household that didn’t listen to music. My mother is a strictly NPR sort of radio listener, and my father for the first thirteen years of my life worked in a grocery store of the sort that has their own flavor of canned music piped into every orifice. Even the meatcutting rooms that stink of death and bleach and have the constant loud whir of air compressors powering coolers have the insipid whine of flavorless renditions of Patsy Kline. When he would come home in the evening, should he be so lucky to have a shift that ended before dinner, quiet was the order of the day.

Odd, too, that my mother and father bonded over musical instruments, too -- she played the flute and sang in the choir, he played the drums and danced in the ballet, and their courtship consisted of a record player and a stack of albums, too, ones sold long ago when I was a small child.