Soundtrack of my Senior Year

I thought I would write something about music, and the idea came to me to write about the music I listened to during my senior year in high school. This was the year that I believe I had a breakthrough in my ability to distinguish, for the most part, musical merit from musical crap. This isn’t invariably the case, as any perusal through my CD collection will indicate, but my senior year was the time where I shed a great deal of the music I identified with during the sap rising years that contained bouts of acne, pretending you’re stoned when you’ve only taken a Tylenol, and agonizing insecurities about the opposite sex. Groups like Queen, Yes, Styx, and Rush, all fell by the wayside, although Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd would hang around for another few years. I can’t say that my breakthrough came out of the blue because there were a number of people whose musical interest influenced me—thank God.
My junior year in high school I was shipped off to a republican infested boarding school in the North Carolina mountains to serve two years for being a lazy, want-to-be stoner. I was allowed to take my album collection and my guitar, on which I could play about 3/5ths of “Stairway to Heaven” and the intro to Yes’s “Roundabout.” This was a different environment from the Catholic school I had attended for my first two years of high school, where the soccer playing potheads who showed up to soccer practice on acid ruled the campus. This particular boarding school was stringent in its goal of getting every graduate to college even if it had to beat a 1000 or better SAT score into you. My album collection, which contained a rare Japanese import of Yes’s first album and Rush’s “Moving Pictures” picture disk, was impressing no one. Actually it impressed one single soul, a non-bathing English prodigy who smelled like pencil shavings and wrote diatribes in the form of poetry for the literary magazine. He borrowed my entire Yes collection and kept it for the better part of the year. Luckily, he was a Dylan fan and reciprocated by playing “Tangled up in Blue” for me, in the way of throwing me a bone.
The summer between junior and senior year I met some guys who lived together and had two bands operating out of their house. One was a skinny drummer who kind of looked like Neil Young. This was my first introduction to a thrift store subculture that ate at bargain lunch counters and frequented the Goodwill for everything from clothing to appliances and records. Although everyone was poor as dirt, this behavior was partly style induced as well, with paisley shirts being the prized items from the rack and old country records being coveted from the record bins. The skinny drummer would put on an old record and say, “listen to this, listen to the heartfelt anguish in this. This is about a man showing his friend a mansion that he and his wife bought together, but the marriage ended in divorce and now all he can do is show friends his empty house of dreams.” It was George Jones’ “The Grand Tour.”
I was just getting into Dylan at that time and the drummer would say he liked Dylan, but only if you played him at 45 speed. We did this and found it extremely hilarious. He would have nothing to do with Zeppelin or Rush or any of those bands so we would listen to Jonathan Richman or Roger Miller and drink cost cutter beer. The drummer was in love with the drummer from Let’s Active and one weekend we went to Chapel Hill to stay with her and her brother, another local musician who was in a band called the Flat Duo Jets. All I remember is that he lived in a mausoleum, (actually it was a converted tool shed meant to look like a mausoleum) he drank all of my bourbon, and we watched “The Young Ones.”
By the time I started my senior year, my musical taste had changed already. I suppose I should state that this was 1984-1985 and as far as popular music was concerned, there wasn’t much going on. I believe Billy Idols “Eyes without a Face” and Prince’s “Purple Rain” were radio’s non-stop rotation darlings that year. Listening to Rush’s 2112 with the black light on just wasn’t cutting it anymore for me. I returned to school with an appreciation for old country and one dollar used paisley button downs with the sleeves cut off. Not much of a stride forward, but at least I was trying.
In my senior year I had two roommates. Both were of the English, King’s Road commercial new wave school of music lovers. Mechanical drums—they loved em, singers who believed vocals required a thick London East End monotone—couldn’t get enough of them, guitar riffs that contained one note played through an analogue delay box and echoed for fifteen measures—their favorite, bands whose hair styles looked like Elizabeth Taylor had gone out on a bender and was just waking up—high fashion. There was a little friction the first few weeks of school over what music was to be played when, but we worked out a compromise that allotted each of us use of headphones during study period. This compromise worked relatively well.
Although we had wide divergences regarding our musical taste, we also had music that we all agreed on. This is the music that I remember defining my senior year. One record that we could all play, and did play constantly, was The Velvet Underground’s “VU”, which was an album, made up of unreleased material, issued that year. Also issued that year was the Lou Reed album “New Sensations” which we also all agreed on. Reed and the Velvet Underground were experiencing a resurgence in popularity that year due to their marked influence in groups like R.E.M. and The Violent Femmes’ sound. The Velvet Underground with Nico’s “Andy Warhol” was another record we played often.
Well, speaking of The Violent Femmes, that probably was the most played record during my senior year. We just couldn’t get enough of this angsty, angry, funny, fuck you, record. The desperation mixed with humorous, let’s all laugh at ourselves because it is so damned absurd, messages on this record helped us through all the months of knowing we would be free from school one day, but it seemed to be taking forever.
R.E.M.’s “Murmur” was another favorite in our corner of the dorm, but it was “Reckoning” that I personally was compelled to listen to every day for four or five months. You have to understand, MTV was beginning to take over the world, and image was beginning to replace content in everyway imaginable, so R.E.M., with its melodies, (something that most new wave bands had stomped on) was like a bucket of ice water in an endless desert of narcissistic artificiality. “Reckoning” was also interesting because, for once, you could understand what Michael Stipe was saying, at least partially. You could also get songs like “Don’t go back to Rockville,” and “South Central Rain” in your head and not feel like you were being manipulated by mainstream radio or MTV.
And what of Dylan? I had just begun what is now my twentieth plus year of Dylan fanaticism (I’m going to see him on Friday) and the album that year was “Desire.” The first song, “Hurricane” claims, “pistol shots rang out in a bar room night.” The first words of this record take me back to the top bunk of a small college prep school in western North Carolina where I was probably supposed to be doing chemistry homework but was probably doodling in a margin and dreaming of the blond older sister of a friend.
Somehow, toward graduation, I began to listening to Muddy Waters. I didn’t become a total convert to Chicago Blues but I did buy the record “King Bee” as well as “B.B. King Live at the Cook County Jail.” I think it was the song “I’ve Been down Hearted.” That compelled me to buy the B.B. King, with the classic one liner, “I gave you seven children, and now you want to give them back.” I was finally going to the source of what had influenced testosterock bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. By now I had pulled far away from the fantasy induced concept rock of my early adolescence and was listening to music that had something more tangible to say.
Other albums I listened to during my senior years were “The White Album,”(actually I listened to a lot of Beatles, but I had been listening to the Beatles since I was a child and was already familiar with most of their music by senior year, although I do remember listening to “Rubber Soul” a great deal that year as well) “The Best of Johnny Cash,” George Harrison “All things must Pass,” The Clash “London Calling,” “The Best of Roger Miller” and I’m sure I will think of more after I post this entry.
The day after I graduated from high school I saw R.E.M. at Meredith College in Raleigh. I good friend of mine’s brother had gone to school with Bill Berry, the drummer, and we all got to go back stage for the concert. I felt very sophisticated and important hanging out with these guys, the kings of thrift store sheik, (this was when they were still with IRS records) and it seemed a worthy reward for surviving the final year of my sentence. I was no longer a want-to-be stoner, although I was dangerously close to becoming a real one, and on returning home I could thumb through a record collection that now included Neil Young’s “Decade”, The Db’s “Repercussion” and the soundtrack to “The Harder they Come.” I was making determined strides although many missteps were still to follow.
When I think of my senior year in high school I generally think favorably of the experience. It was the music that my roommates and I listened to that comes to mind predominately when I file back to that stage of my recollection. I think that it was such a dismal year as far as popular music went that we spent a great deal of effort searching for something that was real. Some of those choices still hold the same sort of importance for me today.