Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Your Parent's Music

The music I loved to hate when I was a kid was my parent's music. They didn't like rock-n-roll. They didn't seem to understand it. They were repelled by anything made popular by hippies. You may not relate to this, but my dad was a career miliary man in the sixties and seventies; a Viet Nam vet. Hippies were hostile to his culture and he and my mom didn't warm up to hippies much. Nor did they like hippie music much. You should have seen my mom's face twist into a mask of horror when I tried to bring a Kiss poster into the house.

My mom listened to junk like Barbara Striesand, the Carpenters, the Brothers Four, and other folk music. But not Bob Dylan. She liked Barry Manillow and Niel Diamond, but not Neal Young or Janis Joplin.

The only music my parents liked that I could deal with was country. I know having a blog and digging the twang of country music are mutually exclusive propositions, but if I had to choose one over the other, I think I stand with Waylon, Willie, and Cash. I don't have many fond childhood memories, but the good ones I do have Waylon Jennings picking in the background. Some of Waylon's tunes from the seventies have been the latest additions to my iPod playlist.

So what about you? Do you confess to giving the music your parents loved and you hated a spin every now and then?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I was about 5, I discovered an my Mom had an 8-track of "Rock & Roll Over" by Kiss because she like the slow ballad "Hard Luck Woman." Years later she repented of liking Kiss and I didn't...so in that sense, yes, I will agree to spinning some of Mom's old music (although in a different medium than the original!!)

Anonymous said...

Nope...I despised 'hippie' music :) The only common ground is James Taylor

Anonymous said...

Long live Waylon! His bass player, Sherman Hayes, toured with a Christian Band that I used to be in.
I love hippie music....Except Dylan...

Anonymous said...

Whose music are you calling "junk"?! ;~) Okay, so I must be in your parents' generation, or close enough. Born in the 40s, I still enjoy some of the music of the 40s and 50s, early 60s. Jerry Lee Lewis started pushing me out of pop music; I didn't like the Beatles, for a long time. 'Course, I had been slow to like Elvis, and then it always depended on which song we were talking about.

The Carpenters came in with some nice sounds. Once again, we had music with words we could easily understand, sung to very singable tunes. I grieved when Karen died.

Anonymous said...

My mom had the coolest LP collection around - Moody Blues, Deep Purple, The Eagles, Dr. Hook (does anyone remember them??), BTO, and ALL the Kiss albums - just to name a few. My first concert was with my mom to an Alice Cooper show... I've never NOT liked my mom's music.

What's hilarious is, you always hear about parents disliking their kids' loud music, etc... in my case, I was the one saying, "Hey mom - check THIS out!" and handing her a PFR cd. haha!