For an in-depth look at the overlap of music taste between generations since the baby boomers, including interviews with Glenn A Baker and roots musician Mia Dyson, see the Focus story in the Sunday Canberra Times. According to a recent survey, most of today’s teenagers actually enjoy listening to their parent’s music. As a parent, my immediate reaction is, ‘Duh – we have taste’. But it’s more than that: shared taste in music is a wonderful connection with our kids, after the purgatory years in which we’re just an embarrassment. I don’t take it for granted, because such a connection with my parents was unthinkable.
About a year ago, my teenager was suddenly as excited about The Who, the Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd as I was at his age. It started with an innocuous question that almost brought tears to me eyes. ‘Hey Dad, is Jimi Hendrix any good?’
After a brief, stunned silence, I leapt into action.
‘Hendrix? Oh boy - I’m glad you asked, son. I’ll get some CDs and make us both a coffee, while you make yourself comfortable. This could take a few hours.’
He doesn’t ask anymore, but he regularly plunders my collection. In the same way I did, he’s working his way through all the biggies: The Who, Hendrix, The Stones, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, U2, Radiohead – etc. etc. It’s fun for both of us: he discovers all this great music (for free) and I get to rediscover it.
It’s a two-way thing, too. Every now and then, in amongst all the stuff only a teenage boy can like, he’ll bring home something that tweaks my ear. A lot of it, after all, isn’t too different from music I liked 10, even 20 years ago.
The generation-to-generation thing hasn’t always been the case, though. I had to buy all those records, because my parents didn’t have them. When I was 18, my parent’s record collection was as appealing as a sauna in summer.
You see, my parents were pre-rock’n’roll, so to them, the music I liked came from the moon. It was as alien and threatening to them as marijuana and boys with earrings.
But it took me a while to figure it out.
There were clues along the way. I remember one from when I was about 10. One day, with the cash from a tax return in his hand, my father took me and my younger brother to Young’s in Queanbeyan and told us to pick out a record – any record.
Excited at being able to buy our very first record, we grabbed Rocka, an Australian hard-rock compilation that included acts like Stevie Wright, AC/DC, The Angels and, mysteriously, John Paul Young. It had a really cool cover – an ugly green lizard with its tongue out, next to a rock covered in the Australian flag (subtle, too).
We put it on our little record player, perhaps a touch too loud, and my Dad walked in during AC/DC’s She’s Got Balls. “Is THAT you’re record?” he asked icily. “Yep”. He looked at us like we were taking drugs.
It didn’t add up, to me. I remember as a young teenager trying to work out all the significant historical moments my parents had been around to witness. Where were they during the Cuban missile crisis? What were they doing when Kennedy was assassinated? What about the first man on the moon? They could tell me about it. Cool.
Yet when it came to music, all the great Sixties stuff had completely passed them by. One day I asked my Mum if she’d been a fan of The Rolling Stones. I mean, they were huge, right? Like U2 when I was in my twenties. But my mum’s answer was a look of disgust. “Did they actually do anything decent?” she asked, skeptically.
My Dad didn’t even want to talk about it.
My parents’ problem with the Stones seemed very silly to me, because when I discovered them on the radio, in 1981, they had moved from writing songs about Satan to … slapstick.
But it suddenly occurred to me that, as laughable as it seemed in 1981, the Rolling Stones were my parent’s equivalent of the Sex Pistols - dirty, depraved, and devoid of talent. At least The Beatles wrote some nice songs. I’m not sure they’d even come to terms with Elvis Presley; “He’s alright when he’s not doing all that shouting,” was my Mum’s take.
The Sex Pistols must truly have seemed like harbingers of the end of civilization.
(Ironically, my parent’s disgust at the Rolling Stones put them right in tune with one of the most popular songs of the 1970s, American Pie: ‘So come on: jack be nimble, jack be quick! Jack flash sat on a candlestick, cause fire is the devil’s only friend/ And as I watched him on the stage/ my hands were clenched in fists of rage’. Don McLean had a problem with the Stones, too.)
But finally, back to record collections. What did I have available for plunder, as a young teenager? I had stuff like Nana Mouskouri, Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, Jim Nabors and, when my Dad finally decided to move with the times, and John Denver.
Kids today just don’t know how good they’ve got it.
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