Music From Your Adolescence....

[Chas]

Things got complicated realllly fast. Thankfully, I was a kid coming of age during the last great era of creativity in western pop. music.

I still have my white suspenders!!!

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Romeo Void....whooop whoop. "I might like you better if..."

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This man changed how I viewed music. Grateful, we are...

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[BinkieBaumont]

"Turning 16, in 1973 I was a "Glitter Child", I had the Bowie Ziggy haircut, and silver platform shoes, for high school, ....this is my favourite Bowie clip from the era, the "Monroe" look alike is Cyrinda fox who was married to Steven Tyler, from Aerosmith"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA29BVtCCpM

 

[lolly_loisides]

I was 16 in 1987. I had a hairdo surprisingly similar to Robert Smiths & I had a huge crush on Morrissey (like that was ever going to happen).
Here are a few of my favs
The Smiths - How soon is now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U5HpeA_WSo
The Pouges - Streams of Whiskey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHMG_SvUkw
It's Immaterial - Ed's Funky Diner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL1h39PxInI
The Blue Nile - Downtown lights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GVMnDjFKHw

 

[MisterCairo]

I too am a product of the 80s, from an adolescence point of view. Here's a CANCON (Canadian content) favourite of mine, with Martha and the Muffins taking us to Echo Beach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvqjYxeTODY


One of my first "celebrity" crushes (the first being Haley Mills in the Parent Trap - don't ask), Sandy Horne in the Spoons, from my hometown of Burlington, Ontario, with Nova Heart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtqIlvg3wsw


But it wasn't all new wave and punk for me. Rockabilly had it's place in my teenage heart, with the Stray Cats Rockin' This Town:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPy2eTPUHAU


The Cult, The Cure, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Billie Holiday, the 80s had them all.

;-)

 

[Lillemor]

I only began to listen to The Specials and Gary Numan in 2004. I still listen to Gary Numan. I continued to listen to bluegrass, country, some 60s-70s stuff I'd grown up with but mainly I was listening to Bollywood soundtracks which had the sound closest to the pop of the 50s- early60s that I like.

 

[Warbaby]

One of the very few good things I can say about being an old geezer is that I was around to see the beginning of rock & roll. Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, and all the other pioneers of rock hit the airwaves when I was in high school - and I've followed its development ever since. I was also fortunate to be living in NYC in the CBGB's era in the 70's and got to experience the emergence of Punk.

 

[Selvaggio]

Yay - the Specials were great! Also loved Terry Hall's later band the Colourfield.

 

[23SkidooWithYou]

The Clash...Combat Rock (think that was it)
The Cars...Candy-O
There was a hard rock band, Def Leopard? The album was Pyromania, I think.

A bit earlier it might have been Donna Summer, Michael Jackson as a solo artist and pre cosmetic surgery, and anything featured with Denny Terrio and the Dance Fever crew or Dionne Warwick and her Solid Gold Dancers. I wonder if the gold spandex has tarnished with age?

 

[23SkidooWithYou]

I was 16 in 1987. I had a hairdo surprisingly similar to Robert Smiths & I had a huge crush on Morrissey (like that was ever going to happen).
Here are a few of my favs
The Smiths - How soon is now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U5HpeA_WSo
The Pouges - Streams of Whiskey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHMG_SvUkw
It's Immaterial - Ed's Funky Diner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL1h39PxInI
The Blue Nile - Downtown lights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GVMnDjFKHw

Ahhh...memories! I was in college by this time and had a little ol' FCC license to DJ at the school's radio station. We played a lot of these plus, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, The Damned, Skinny Puppy, Mazy Star, Shonen Knife, oh boy, lots of stuff that died fast. The Damned are still a fav and probably one of the most enduring making it from 70's punk to 80's alternative.

PS I was always amazed nobody told Robert Smith (The Cure) to invest in a little lip liner, lol.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

While I never was much of a rock n' roll guy, I admittedly took a bit of detour into the realm of '80s New Wave back in the day. My favorites were The Cars, B-52s and of course....

DEVO

for some reason the Spudboys from Ohio are still one of my favorites.

 

[vitanola]

When I was just entering my 'teens I discovered the Coon-Saunders Nighthawks. Shortly thereafter a librarian led me to the Folkways Fletcher Henderson, the Chocolate Dandies, Johnny Dodds and Jelly Roll Morton. I then discovered the Benny Goodman Carnagie Hall concert, reissues of the early Ellington stuff, and the "Bennie Goodman" small group sies recorded while the was with Ben Pollack, "Room 1411", "A Jazz Holiday", "Shirt Tail Stomp" then the Hot Five and Hot Seven sides, and finally, BIX, with the Wolverines, Goldkette, Whiteman, Trumbauer, and small groups.

I was hooked!

 

[vitanola]

While I never was much of a rock n' roll guy, I admittedly took a bit of detour into the realm of '80s New Wave back in the day. My favorites were The Cars, B-52s and of course....

DEVO

for some reason the Spudboys from Ohio are still one of my favorites.

DEVO!

I remember meeting them in the courtyard of Mather Memorial Hall at CWRU when they were performing a sunday afternoon concert (they were just another strange local band then) I was engineering the recording of their performance for subsequent broadcast on WRUW. I still have a 15 IPS copy somewhere, along with a a couple of acetates that I recorded direct. the station had a pair of old disused Fairchild lathes in storage that I dusted off, repaired, and limbered up cutting transcriptions of the courtyard concert series, 16" 33 1/3 rpm, standard groove pitch, microgroove stylus.


I remember, too, trips to hear the B-52's before their gig Down Under. I went to concerts and clubs to meet "People". For musical enjoyment, though, I'd just wind up the Victrola Florenza.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo also did the music for the TV show Rugrats.

 

[cecil]

Arguably I'm still an adolescent now, hahaha.

One of the very few good things I can say about being an old geezer is that I was around to see the beginning of rock & roll. Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, and all the other pioneers of rock hit the airwaves when I was in high school - and I've followed its development ever since. I was also fortunate to be living in NYC in the CBGB's era in the 70's and got to experience the emergence of Punk.

Arrgh I am so jealous!

I drew the shortest of straws. I was sixteen in 2003-2004. Pop wasteland. I listened to the Sex Pistols, The Cure, The Ramones and The Smiths at the time. I've never much fancied '00s rock music but I suppose you could say that part of decade might be remembered for The White Stripes or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs or something. It's probably too early to tell, Howsabout I wait twenty years and get back to you?

 

[cecil]

Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo also did the music for the TV show Rugrats.

!!!! I had no idea!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I guess I'm the odd one out here -- I wasn't a part of the popular music of my adolescence. The youth culture, such as it was, in the neighborhood where I grew up didn't revolve around music -- the kids I knew, boys and girls alike, were more interested in baseball than in bands. Locally we had one 250 watt AM radio station that signed off at sundown, which was used mostly to listen to ball games, and we didn't own an FM radio until I was 13.

It was that radio that got me seriously listening to vintage-era music -- I happened to tune in the University of Maine "educational radio" station one night and tuned in a show called "Jazz Revisited," which played recordings from 1917 to 1947, and it hooked me. Another radio program I started listening to around this same time was "The Harley Show," which featured a gravelly-voiced character named Harley telling long rambling stories and playing big-band records. The U of ME station carried this show, for some reason, and I found it transfixing. It wasn't until years later I found out that "Harley" was actually a legendary radio personality from Baltimore, of all places, and how he happened to be on the air in the backwoods of Maine is a mystery I never solved.

Around this same time I started listening to Joe Franklin's late-night show on WOR, New York, where I got my first real acquaintance with the "personality" entertainers of the Era, and to this day I can't hear an Eddie Cantor or Sophie Tucker record without thinking of "Martin Paints, my friend..."

I think my favorite artists thru my high school years were Benny Goodman -- natural, since I had played clarinet in band -- and Fats Waller, who just seemed to be having so much *fun* that you couldn't not like him. I listened to Jazz Revisited faithfully all thru high school, taping and saving the songs on cassettes, and started grabbing 78s at flea markets and junk stores, not so much for collecting as *listening.*

I remember seeing an article about the punk movement in a Time magazine around 1977, showing a kid draped in a parachute splattered with raw meat, and I simply couldn't comprehend what it was all about -- we simply never did that kind of stuff here. I did, however, know a guy who was enough of a Devo fan that he came to school wearing one of those hats. Just once, anyway.

 

[amynbebes]

Teen in the early/mid 90's Loved (and still do) old and newer at that time punk and ska.

 

[davestlouis]

Graduated from high school in 1985, and drove my friends bonkers because all I wanted to listed to was "hillbilly tub thumpin' music" like Hank Williams, Hank Jr, George Jones, you name it.

I seem to recall that the first time I saw MTV was at the Daytona Inn motel in beautiful Daytona Beach FL, on spring break...didn't make much of an impression since I was inebriated the whole time I was there.

I did just find a song I vaguely recall from the trip: Till Tuesday, Voices Carry. It must have been in heavy rotation on MTV that week and it's burned into my brain. Not my kind of music though.

 

[rmrdaddy]

Thanks Chaz, some great selections you posted.
I still have a guilty pleasure for 80's music myself including The Smiths, The Cure, Elvis Costello, Culture Club, Kajagoogoo, Haircut 100, Icicle Works, Human League, Scritti Politti, etc...
I also took quite a fancy to first and second wave ska as well.

Cheers!
:beer:

 

[Edward]

I drew the shortest of straws. I was sixteen in 2003-2004. Pop wasteland. I listened to the Sex Pistols, The Cure, The Ramones and The Smiths at the time.

Make you male, thirteen years older and on the other side of the world, and that's where I was.... I discovered the Sex Pistols at the same time as early Alice Cooper (both, oddly enough, via Megadeth cover versions... lol ), when I was fifteen, and thus was saved, by Punk Rock, from the worst ravages of 80s Metal. Never cared for the Smiths... tbh I could never get past either Morrisey's voice, or his tendency to come over as a bit, eh, racist (I think the threatened libel suit against the NME was quietly dropped?). The Ramones were gods to me from late 1992, when I turned 18. Still are (at least musically..... heh.....). The Pogues have stayed with me - actually, thse last four years their pre-Christmas gigs in the Brixton Academy (or whatever it has been renamed in these days of corporate sponsorship) have become a strog tradition. Came away from the last one with a drumstick.

I never did get to see many of my real favourites live.... some of them because they were gone before I was the age to be into them, others because they didn't play in Northern Ireland. Right through the 70s, 80s and into the nineties a lot of acts just wouldn't go over there, either because they perceived it as dangerous (outsiders used to think Belfast was twinned with the Gaza Strip ), or because the cost of travelling over there to do one show in Belfast and then one in Dublin didn't stack up money-wise when they could do four or five major cities across Britain with about the same travel costs.

Especially wish I'd seen the Ramones live. I have caught Marky on his spoken word tour a couple of times. The last - must have been about 2003? - he had a couple of support bands, and after he'd done his slide show thang he brought one of them back on and got behind the drumkit himself for a set of Ramones numbers.... closest I've ever come. Fantastic to see him live.... wish he'd drop the dodgy wig, tho.... The Sex Pistols I saw at the second reunion in 2002 (the Pistols at the Palace gig, great day out) - I had a ticket for the original 96 reunion show, but the Belfast gig was cancelled (gutted! Pistols topped the bill, support by Iggy and The Amps - Kim Deal's then side-band). Saw 'em again in '07 (twice!). They still have it.... The Clash I never saw, but I did see Joe Strummer's last three London shows with the Mescaleroes - 1999, 2000, and 2001. He played quite a whack of Clash numbers at those; the 2001 show closed with a cover of Blitzkrieg Bop, Uncle Joe's unanncounced but clear tribute to Joey. If only I'd known about the 2002 FBU benefit gig in West London, I'd have been there.... Joe's last gig, and the one time he and Mick played together onstage after Mick was ejected from the Clash.

I still listen to a lot of this, and though I think I always listened to classical, Glen Miller, and a whole host of other stuff (because any self-respecting punk isn't going to be told by anyone what's cool to listen to and what ain't, right??), I also am now very interested in discovering a lot of the earlier, rockabilly and post-punk psychobilly and neo-rockabilly material that was the sort of sound that inspired acts like the Ramones and the Clash.