I would hope that every music geek had a friend growing up like my friend John – a guy who was just as passionate about music as you were and wanted to talk about it all the time, and who absolutely, positively hated every artist you liked. John and I could talk for hours about one band after another, and most of the conversations would go like this:
“I was listening to G—— while I was doing my homework…”
“Oh, man — why? They suck!”
“No, they don’t. H——- sucks.”
“No they don’t — they’re awesome. Anyway, what’s with the keyboard part in that G—— song? That’s not a rock’n'roll song — that’s Dan Fogelberg.”
“Oh, sure. You and your 20-minute guitar solos. I don’t think any guitar solo should last longer than 30 seconds.”
“That’s because you’re a pussy.”
In other words, it was like your basic Popdose post — except WE WERE 14! (Here at Popdose, we don’t apologize for arrested development…we advocate it.) Anyway, John had an advantage over me when it came to discovering artists he could claim as his own: Every summer he would go visit his extended family in Puerto Rico, where the radio stations seemed to revel in turning fringe-dwelling AOR acts into local chart-toppers. By the time we finished high school the list would grow to include Duke Jupiter, Saga, Glass Moon, the Monroes — and on and on. (Heck, Glass Moon even got a 7-Up commercial there!)
John would bring these albums home from San Juan and I’d inevitably say, “Who the fuck is that, and why does the bass player have that Village People moustache?” But no matter how crappy (I thought) the music was, John would act like he had some cosmic understanding that I couldn’t share because I didn’t give two shits about “What Do All the People Know” or “I’ll Drink to You.” And he’d say, “Yeah, well, they’re better than (insert whatever long-ago-discredited-but-since-resurrected mainstream act I was listening to at the time here).” Usually it was “Hall and Oates”; I was a big fan, and John would say the words “Hall and Oates” the way Bill O’Reilly says the words “liberal Democrat.” (more…)
