I was not a cool teenager. I entered junior high in 1974. An era when a person’s musical taste was a critical identifier. The bands you aligned with said a lot about who you were. As I left grade school, my alliances were lame. My favorite bands were the Beatles and the Beach Boys. By the mid-seventies, the Beach Boys were has-beens and the Beatles were history. While I was listening to Magical Mystery Tour for the 700th time, the rest of the kids were choosing cooler tribes. Disco, hippy or hard rock. In New York City, punk and new wave would have been in the mix. But in Rockville, Maryland, that was still years away.
In my school, the popular, elite kids listened to disco, and the hoodlum types listened to hard rock.
My brothers, David and Dana, one and two years ahead of me in school, were in the hippy tribe. Bob Dylan and all possible combinations of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. David leaning a bit more towards hard rock – Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, Clapton, the Who. This was the music played in our house.
But in seventh and eighth grade, I was oblivious to these bands, to almost all bands. I didn’t even know they existed. I could name almost every Beatles song ever recorded, but I couldn’t identify a single song by Led Zeppelin except for Stairway to Heaven. The only Rolling Stones songs that caught my attention were the ones played incessantly on the radio. My lack of awareness transcended music. National and international news, sports, and even, unfortunately, my school work received the same inattentiveness. If a topic wasn’t presented to me in an easy to appreciate package, I wouldn’t take any time to try to understand it. This is probably why the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer was one of my favorite albums.
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This is on my mind now because of my son Eli. He is becoming a drummer. He played snare-drum in his grade-school’s band last year, and this summer he got his own drum kit. He’s now taking lessons from a laid-back music teacher named Chad. Chad knows his rock, and his musical taste overlaps heavily with mine – and with Eli’s. Chad’s studio is papered with posters of the bands he likes: The Clash, the Doors, the Who, Bob Marley. It looks a lot like my college dorm room.
When Chad imparts his rock wisdom, Eli has a tendency to check in with me. Eli thinks my knowledge of music is comprehensive, encyclopedic, professorial. He thinks the only reason I’m not writing for a global rock magazine like Rolling Stone is because I’d rather be analyzing the finances for a small, local non-profit. A few years ago, my daughter Sophie displayed a similar misunderstanding of my cycling abilities. She asked why I wasn’t participating in that summer’s Tour de France. Possibly, I’m overselling myself to my kids.
I’ve come a long way from the clueless kid of 1974. I teach a twice-weekly spin class that leans heavily on rock from the Sixties through the Nineties. I now know quite a lot about this music. I research it, study it. I look for obscure connections, and I try to highlight those connections during my class. I read biographies and devour wiki pages. I’m now knowledgeable about the bands that have caught my attention. And that list gets larger every month. But as a teen, this level of commitment was beyond my ability.
Eli is drawn to the hard-rock music of the Seventies. Bands like the Who, the Stones, Deep Purple, and AC/DC. Much of his exposure comes from joining me while I construct my spin class playlists. We listen to clips, and he weighs in on song combinations. Like me, he’s opinionated. He’ll embrace a song with a quick nod of his head. Or just as quickly dismiss it as lame.
And the rest of his knowledge comes from watching School of Rock over and over. In this movie, Jack Black’s Dewey Finn is a lot like me, except he can play guitar. The steady stream of pompous proselytizing from Dewey and me has swayed Eli’s tastes. Fortunately for all of us, Chad is generally in the same musical tribe.
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Our home printer is ancient, eleven years old. It’s big and bulky, so it lives in the basement. It’s not wireless and the paper-tray no longer works. To print, you need to attach a laptop with a USB cable and feed sheets of paper one at a time into the printer. It’s a pain in the ass. For an added challenge, our used-up laptop batteries barely last long enough to get a computer alongside the printer. Often, the laptop shuts off before it prints. Unsurprisingly, my kids don’t like messing with this. Typically, they just send a print job and let it sit in the cue until Susan or I need to print something. Then my kids’ documents come out ahead of whatever we took our time to run to the basement to print. The other day it was the sheet music for AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds.” And now I’m reminded of the Dunder Chief.
So who’s the Dunder Chief? No idea, but in high school, there was a popular song about dirty deeds and the Dunder Chief. Even though it didn’t make sense, I sang along, never one to question a nonsense song lyric. And fortunately, I never asked anyone what a Dunder Chief might be. After seeing Eli’s sheet music, I confessed this misunderstanding – which lasted for years – to my family. Now everybody is walking around singing about the Dunder Chief. Give it a try, it’s catchy.
I recently Googled “Dunder Chief,” and it’s reassuring to know I’m not the only idiot who made this error. Urban Dictionary has a definition.
Dunder Chief:
– One who is chief of all that is dunder.
– A persona created for one who commits many dirty deeds.
Dunder chief, what are some of the dirty deeds you have performed? Why are you so dirty Dunder Chief?
This isn’t the only time I’ve misheard lyrics. Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the first album I owned. I was ten or eleven when it came out. In the song Bennie and the Jets, Elton clearly tells us that Bennie’s got “electric boobs and a motor scooter.” He read it in a magazine! Obviously this makes no sense. But for half my life, I thought Bennie’s boobs were electric. As it turns out, she had “electric boots.” Oh, cool, that clears things up. And a mohair suit. I was an American preteen in the seventies, I’m pretty sure that Elton John was the only person who ever mentioned mohair to me for at least fifteen more years.
Other examples: Deep Purple’s “My Woman from Tokyo.” In my version: “My woman’s a T.K.O. She makes me sick.” And the Who’s “Boris the Spider”: “Hello Mr. Spider, yeeeaaah!” Shortly after I graduated from college, someone overheard me singing along with Deep Purple and gave me some well-deserved shit.
Things are easier today. Kids don’t buy albums. Those, like Eli, who prefer old, old music find their favorite songs on YouTube. Since these songs are forty or fifty years old, the videos don’t include filmed clips of the band. Many just show photos – and lyrics. And regardless, all song lyrics are at our fingertips now. Eli can’t understand the mistakes I’ve made. Cleverly butchered lyrics are another casualty of the Internet age.
The other principal casualty is the LPs – the music albums that set a mood or tell a story. Digital music changes the way artists present their compositions. Songs that aren’t hits are unlikely to be heard by today’s listeners. Most people now buy songs individually, or construct custom “radio” playlists from Internet services. Sure everything off of Endless Summer, a best of album, still gets played on XM stations. But an album like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – one of the top selling LPs of the Seventies? “Bennie and the Jets” gets airtime, but what about the slower songs, the deeper songs? Songs like “Harmony” and “Grey Seal”? These are my favorite songs on the album, and they’re lost. If Yellow Brick Road was made today, I doubt if Elton John would have even recorded those songs.
As I matured and finally learned more about the music of the Seventies, many of my favorite songs are not the hits. They are the songs that have something to say. Intricate musicianship, and a more thoughtful message than Bennie’s electric boobs. This is a topic I’d like to see handled in School of Rock II. Or better yet, I’d like to sit down with Chad and Dewey Finn over a cup of coffee and discuss how much things have changed… for the worse. Somewhere during this conversation, we would undoubtedly argue over what Manfred Mann really says in his version of Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.”
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Excerpted from the book Fragments, a memoir and is republished on Medium.
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