I loved music. Still do. In my c-PTSD childhood, music and books were the escape. I first found rock and roll through the Chipmunks albums and the occasional tune on a children’s record (“Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” for instance). As I mentioned several months back, I found a radio on one of my dad’s minister retreats at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, and I kept listening because of the magic therein.
My parents listened to gospel. There were Gaither records and church music all the time. I was not impressed, especially as a teen, with that. When I found rock, I was awash in pop and rock, and I wanted to share that . I was not able to connect with my parents in many ways other than the church, and I wanted to. I had friends who would talk music with me (sometimes), but I hoped to get my parents, especially dad, to understand what I liked. Dad hated my Dungeons and Dragons playing. He didn’t stop me from that, or from reading or listening to music or whatever, but he complained constantly about the “garbage” I chose. He never wanted to share ground with me, to understand me.
I would tell dad about a song like “My Life” by Billy Joel, which included the lyrics, “They’ll tell you you can’t sleep alone in a strange place/then they’ll tell you you can’t sleep with somebody else/Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space/In a way, it’s okay to wake up with yourself.” I’m sure we found that song because it was the theme to Bosom Buddies, which we watched together (because he didn’t want me to be exposed to anything without him around to set me straight). He was critical of the song because Joel didn’t say it was wrong to sleep with people you weren’t married to.
In another case, we discussed “Still Rock and Roll to Me” by Billy Joel (one of my favorites). I pointed out that Joel sang about getting more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers. Surely that was okay. He countered with his criticism of “Should I try to be a straight A student/If you are then you think too much.”
I played him “Time” by the Alan Parsons Project, which I thought he’d like somehow. He told me “Goodbye my friend/maybe for forever” was denying the obvious that the speaker would see their person in Heaven.
I tried to point out songs like “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” (to have a good time), to which he responded that it’s so awful that they’d have to write a song saying such a thing, that it wasn’t just a given. He was visibly shaken by “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and I didn’t even know why until he told me what go-go dancing was. I told him that wasn’t what the song was talking about, but I don’t think he ever believed me.
It was the same with others my age. I remember going to a Christian youth retreat where the other kids were trying to explain the video of Tears for Fears’ “Shout” had the person drumming across the sidewalk, as a metaphor for spreading God’s word. Some of us twisted ourselves into knots to make rock music somehow religiously passable.
At one point, dad decided that, if he couldn’t force me to stop listening to rock, he’d take me to a seminar by the Peters Brothers, “Why Knock Rock?” I went and listened. They were talking about Ozzy and Wasp and Quiet Riot and Ratt. I didn’t listen to most of the bands they were berating for the satanic and hedonistic sexy lyrics, so I didn’t care. Then they complained about Sting and the Police, which was my favorites of the time. I immediately catalogued every band they mentioned so I could check them out, even got dad to buy the anti-rock books so I’d have an easy reference. During the break, I went up to listen to the speaker talk to the other attendees, and there were a number of teens who wanted to recommend other bands to hate. While I stood there, they attacked Christian Rock (all rock is satanic, even Stryper) and Amy Grant. Grant because she sang a song with Peter Cetera about wishing for an affair (“If I Should Fall In Love’).
A few years later, on a break between freshman and sophomore years (at a Methodist college…another story), I was watching a VHS tape of Cure songs when dad walked by and asked “Is he [Robert Smith] a [spat out] HERO of yours?” I shrugged and said “not really a hero” (I lied). Around the same time, mom took a crack at REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by saying everyone talks about the end of the world and the Rapture, but it doesn’t seem to be happening, so she assumed the song was saying it’s not that time yet. I probably rolled my eyes, but she was looking the other way at the time.
In my 20s, I played “Great Atomic Power” for dad, since it wasn’t rock and he grew up on a farm. Maybe he’d like that? No, that didn’t go well.
Several years later, I asked mom if they had listened to pop and rock in the 60s, and she talked about how they had been fans of Simon and Garfunkel, but she was shocked when I played her “Baby Driver.” They’d listened to a few early Beatles songs, and mom remembered “Downtown” by Petula Clark; not that she felt anything about it, just that it was everywhere. That’s about as far as she talked about rock, and dad never really did.
It was all just disapproval and trying to dissuade me from rock and toward gospel. I don’t fully know why they didn’t take my music away and burn it like some parents I know (especially why they didn’t take away my D&D books, but that’s probably a different post). Maybe James Dobson said it would make me rebel harder or something, or maybe he knew from watching someone else raising their kids, but I was allowed to listen to what I wanted, with dad scowling disapproval all the while. I eventually learned not to care, but it made for tense days until I could leave home. There would never be common ground.
Bill Abbott, poet, web page 