I grew up in an era called 'crossover'. It was the early 70s, before America's bicentennial when every public mural had different color hands shaking. The years presaged the Rise of Lionel Ritchie and all the mediocre goodness that ensued. At some point I might be forgiven for hanging out with the sort of kids that liked Jackson Brown and The Eagles, instead of Aerosmith and Foghat, but it all sounded foreign to the rhythms of my blues.
Over the years, I have participated in what I call Recovery, which is essentially feeding my adult mind with those things that perplexed me as a youth. It's one of the dualistic aspects of a rather persistent memory. More often than not there are fine rewards to grasping the subtlety of some arcane bit of music that escaped my younger ears. Sometimes I discover that there is basically no sense to be made of that stuff.
On the nonsense front we have matters like the lyrics of McArthur Park, the proferred profundity of Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder, and the all the greatness that is supposed to be the stylings of Eric Clapton.
Clapton is a real puzzler because I don't generally have the patience to listen to enough of his stuff to figure him out. And I've never heard him do any rendition of a standard that make me say aha. Cocaine? Please. I Shot the Sheriff? An insult to the great Bob Marley. Layla? It sounds just as good when Weird Al Yankovich does his version.
At some point I will probably listen to an entire song by Jimmy Buffett, but probably not until I retire and have absolutely nothing better to do.
Somebody did tell me that I would like Jethro Tull. The same person told me that I had the personality to appreciate a band called Rush. It turned out that Aqualung is probably my all time favorite song to play on RockBand. But Rush I have yet to hear out.
Sometimes it's a near miss, and such is my experience with Pink Floyd. Of course I loved The Dark Side of the Moon, and sometime you might ask me about my altered state enjoyment of Animals. But it took me years to finally hear Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb. Maybe The Wall was a very good album but only it wasn't the only album you knew of them.
This is, largely the tip of the iceberg. Now that I have Spotify, I expect that I can do a great deal of Recovery. So I can tell you, for example that I am hearing A Sacerful of Secrets for the first time. OK. That's interesting. I wonder how long it would take somebody largely unimpressed with Earth Wind and Fire to hear 'Runnin' for the first time.
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