While trolling along on Facebook a few weeks ago, I came across a picture that hit pretty close to home. I wound up “sharing” it to my Facebook page knowing that some of my closest friends and family would appreciate it not only for its personal irony, but also for the shameless truth to it as well.
It was one of those “e-cards” that has the old-fashioned advertising images of yesteryear coupled with a snarky remark from the current millennium. This one simply stated “Successful parenting is finding 80s hair band music on your kid’s iPod”.
Funny, because it’s true. Disturbingly so.
As with many youngsters, the music that we started our son off with at an early age was the fun kiddie stuff. You know, some lady with an acoustic guitar singing about Eddie Spaghetti, songs in their tummies, and other annoying material that toddlers would find amusing and catchy. Songs that also often caused parents and grandparents alike to scramble madly for the exits…viciously pushing and shoving each other out of the way on their fanatical quest of auditory refuge and relief.
But really, who could blame them? When it got to the point where I found myself waltzing into work humming the Wiggles instead of the Deftones, I decided it was time for a full-up genre upheaval. Consider it an intervention of the boy’s musical tastes. Better yet…let’s call it a parent/child bonding moment that doubled as a preservation of the sanctity of my rock music integrity.
Over-amplified guitars instead of polka accordions. Thundering twenty piece drum sets instead of Casio percussion samples. Like I said…integrity.
Thinking back roughly eight years though, I do recall one particular collection of songs that we copied for him that I found both mildly amusing and wildly disturbing at the same time. It was a collection of songs by a group of innocent-sounding kids. Upon closer examination of the lyrics though, I found one kid crooning about his little brown jug filled with rum. And no, he wasn’t a pirate. Apparently, he was just a six year old lush. Another equally charming ditty was about a kid that fell, broke his leg, and lost it to infection. What kind of sick little scamps were these? These songs were like lullabies for the Manson family…and we were playing them for our year-old son.
It wasn’t just the lyrics that I found disturbing for our impressionable young son though. It was also the trippy, psychedelic beats that were sampled on top of it. All-in-all, an entire collection that could more accurately be described as Mother Goose’s hallucinogenic bad trip, as documented by Lindsay Lohan after a two week bender. Terrified by that prospect and the image emblazoned upon it, I made the executive decision to pull that particular selection from his rotation. This, in an effort to steer the boy away from growing up a sadistically disturbed vagabond “living in a van down by the river”. (Thank you, Chris Farley.)
Back to the topic at hand, I had started playing some of the cleaner versions of my music in the car for him over the last couple of years in order to navigate his tastes to more palatable type of music. Nothing too intense. Just catchy, note-worthy rock/alt-rock selections from the 1980s and 90s. He immediately took interest in it and begged for more. OK, check one off of the list. The Demons of Lohan had been exorcised!
Not only had my son been converted though, but apparently these playlists had struck a chord with my youngest daughter as well. One morning, she piped up from the backseat wondering if the song playing on the radio was “Back in Black”. It wasn’t, but the sentiment was noted and much-appreciated. The fact that we were on our way to church simply added to the comic relief.
My son and I continued along this path of intervention until this past Christmas. That was when he had finally gotten an iPod as a gift. Foaming at the mouth, the first thing that he wanted to do was to go through my CDs and digital files to grab whatever he could get his hands on. I had to use caution though. There is a reason why my digital music is kept under its own, separate “Mike’s R-Rated Music” folder.
We eventually sat down for a couple of hours and picked through my entire catalogue of music. I found that I had to sing several songs in my head prior to transferring them to his iPod. I wanted to avoid corrupting his young mind with some of the storied “excesses” embedded within song lyrics of the 1980s LA rock scene.
“Dad. What’s this song about? ‘Lady Red Light’?”
“Wow, um… It’s about a lady that didn’t follow traffic signals and ran stoplights. Let’s look at a different band now!”
“Did she go to jail?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure she did at some point… Let’s move on, shall we?”
Typically, I relate a lot of these songs to particular events that were occurring in my life around the time that they were popular. I’ll hear a sappy song and instantly start laughing out loud, simply because it reminds me of a funny situation from that time. Inevitably, I found considerable humor in many of my son’s selections. One in particular brought back some pretty vivid recollections of a vacation drive with my then-girlfriend/now-wife.
We were driving to the Florida Keys to visit our families and take in a little sun. I had decided to get in half a day’s work before we hit the road. The plans were to leave early that afternoon and make the initial drive from northern Virginia to Daytona that evening. Keep in mind, this leg alone was an 800 mile trek. Once in Daytona, we were going to stay with one of her friend’s sisters for a couple of hours, before closing out that last leg to the Keys.
Young, invincible, and unbelievably stupid, I was positive that I could easily make that first initial stretch to Daytona…even though I had been up since 4:30 that morning for work.
We switched off driving every couple of hours and made pretty good time. Eventually, midnight came and went in the state of Georgia and I wound up pulling the last shift on through to Daytona. My future better half had eventually nodded off to sleep and the headlights on the road had started to blur together. That’s when I realized that I had hit my invincibility wall. It had gotten to the point where I was so incredibly tired, that I decided that we had to get to Daytona. Right now!
This mental battle-cry eventually led me to barrel through the city of Jacksonville, Florida at very jail-able rates of speed. Crossing over the St. Johns River bridge at roughly 2 am that morning, I’m fairly certain that I caught a yardstick-measureable amount of air in my Nissan Pathfinder.
While airborne, and with delirium obviously setting in, the theme song from the 1970s TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard” began to stream through my head. As amused as I had made myself though, Waylon Jennings’ rebellious anthem about “two good ol’ boys never meaning no harm” simply wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something to raise my heart-rate and blood pressure. Right now!
I flipped through my folder of CDs, put in a progressive metal band, Dream Theater, and cranked the knob. My startled wife-to-be suddenly awoke to the pounding drums and blistering guitars of the album’s opening track. In a disoriented panic, she quickly looked at the stereo, then at the buried needle of my Pathfinder’s speedometer, and finally at the bloodshot eyes and possessed smile of the crazed madman behind the wheel.
And yet, she still married me.
Who would have thought that the same song that helped keep me awake in the wee hours of a Florida morning and scare the bajeezus out of my wife would one day be a staple on our 9 year old son’s iPod?
By the way, we made it to Daytona in one piece. By the time we got to our destination, I looked a lot like had gone a couple rounds with Mike Tyson. Power-slapping yourself in the face in order to stay awake has tendency to do that. As demented as it may sound though, I’ll take self-inflicted physical abuse over jail time as a clear measurement of success any day of the week.
Speaking of success, my son has gotten to the point now where he is actually downloading some of the classics that I don’t even have. He’s recently fallen in love with Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. I’m thrilled to see him taking sole ownership of the essentials that he hears on the radio and not merely what dear old dad picks out for him. Unfortunately though, he still fails to see the humor of his bald father standing in his doorway and air-picking that song’s iconic opening guitar riff on my imaginary “flying V” guitar.
He can shake his head at me all he wants, but the joke is on him. That’s because in my head, I can still actually hear the stadium’s thundering applause and chants for an encore. Oh, and I have hair. Lots and lots of hair.
“Thank you, Virginiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Until next time, keep on rocking…and goodnight!”
