well it's the only music that makes me feel good - the kids, "this is rocknroll"

so our friend mags often claims that he is terrified by our taste in music.

which sounds funny coming from a dude in a pretty significant early punk band, who knows a lot about music himself and has been livinlearninLOVIN rocknroll for years before we were even born...right? the final straw came the other day: "yer vinyl hipness scares the hell outta me. Where the hell are ya pullin this stuff from?" i came to find there was no simple answer to his question, so i set out to find the best explaination i could. i don't know how well i did, but this was as close as i could come.

my reply to mags:

to answer your first question, no our parents were not in bands. haha. in fact, even though beth and i both grew up in households where music was often present, there is not even a recollection of very GOOD music (think plenty of elton john, carpenters, etc). i don't know that there is any one reason that we both turned out to enjoy old music and dusty vinyl as much as we do, but this is my attempt at making sense of it all.

i suppose the beginning can be traced back to 1994, when beth and i were 12. we began listening to local "alternative rock" radio stations and that is when we discovered a little band called green day. i'm not sure how silly it sounds to say this, but green day is what started it all for us. i remember hearing "longview" for the first time and feeling like something was happening, even though i wasn't quite sure what. they are what got us interested in music in general, and through them we learned about other bands, and the ball just sorta started rolling from there.

so we were very receptive to find out what else was out there that we didn't know about. and that included just about everything, past and present, since music hadn't been a significant part of our life until then. that same summer beth saw an old rerun of "the monkees" on tv. she taped it to show me and reminded me how we both used to love them when we were little. our parents each had a few albums, and the early 80s was when mtv was playing reruns on tv so we grew up watching the show as well. we still had some episodes on beta tape. thus, our love for the monkees was reborn and it was full-blown this time. we dug out our parents old records, looking for other things that might be of interest in the process, and started looking elsewhere for a place to find the other monkees albums our parents didn't have to complete our small collection.

so besides the monkees records we also "borrowed" things from our parents that looked like they might be interesting. i remember being very fond of my dads "turtles greatest hits" album, as well as the hollies and the rascals. in the meantime beth was scoring stevie wonder, the small faces and jefferson airplane from the basement.

i don't remember how we found out about it, but a DREAM of a record store opened up in garfield heights (where beth lived) around this same time called "oldies unlimited." it was owned by this eccentric younger lady with red hair named laura peskin, and she would laugh at things that weren't funny or sing songs under her breath. she was delightful. we had to be about 14, because i remember that we weren't old enough to drive or have jobs yet, so we would beg our parents to take us to the record store when we saved up some allowance. once, we wanted to go so badly that we walked all the way from beth's house to the store, which was from one side of garfield heights clear to the other. it took a few hours. it was a very hot day and we stopped at the air-conditioned library about halfway there to get a drink from the water fountain. i went first and when beth tried to get a drink it wouldn't work, so in effect i broke it and caused her heat exhaustion. another time, beth's dad offered to drive us there but he said we had to be ready to go in 10 minutes. back then we had this serious issue with leaving the house when we hadn't washed our hair...and there was no way we would both be able to shower and get dressed in enough time to go. so we both put on clothes and got in the shower together with the clothes still on, so that we could wash our hair at the same time and save some time. we made it. her dad took us. it was great.

anyway, that store was amazing and far too short-lived...and i only wish it were still around because i know we would appreciate it so much more today. it was there that i bought things that i heard on the local oldies station and liked, or that i always wondered about and thought i might like: