Music in Snatches of Time

What I've Listened to Over Time

Photo by Panos Sakalakis on Unsplash

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Music—like for most people— has been weaved throughout my life like old, tangled vines crawling up a wall. Always there in one form or another; entangled within my experience on Earth. I’ve gone through periods where I listen to very little music, and other periods where something is constantly playing in the background. The soundtrack of my life has morphed as I’ve gotten older, but there have always been some basic similarities it seems. And sometimes there were large snatches of non-musical silence which I cherished. Other times the only thing I listened to were political podcasts and audiobooks and my own cognitive chatter in my brain.

I thought I’d compile—by ages—a list of some of my musical periods.

1.    Early-mid 1990s-ish (ages roughly 10-13):

The memories of music I have from this era all stem from MTV. I remember my best friends and I watching MTV for hours and hours and hours. The usual nineties pop-rock hits: Smashing Pumpkins; Bush; Hootie and the Blowfish; The Presidents of the USA; Marilyn Manson; Counting Crows; Third Eye Blind; etc. My friends and I worshiped MTV and almost all bands who played videos on it. This was the soundtrack of my pre-teen days.

2.    Late 90s-early 00s (14-19: Teens): Two words: Punk rock. Everything changed for me sometime roughly around 1997, 1998, when I discovered punk. The band was The Ramones first, and then quickly after that Sex Pistols. Growing up in small town, safe, bubble Ojai, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, a tiny, safe mountain town, it was not as easy to find this music as you might think. (Especially pre-driving age.)

But there was a little music store called The Music Box (now long-gone) owned by an old white-haired hippie and it was there, of all places, that we discovered punk. If it started with the Ramones, it ended, so to speak, with quintessential hardcore 1980s LA punk bands such as Social Distortion; DI; Agent Orange; Black Flag; The Adolescents; Circle Jerks; the Germs; X; Bad Religion; etc. From there we shifted to other non-LA punk bands such as Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Misfits, the Damned, Exploited, the Stooges, UK Subs, The Casualties; etc.

How many punk shows did my friends and I attend in Ojai (a local punk buddy, at the start of the 00s, convinced the owner of “The Women’s Club,” ironically a little building primarily used for things like Weight Watchers groups, to allow us to start hosting punk shows; this lasted only a year or two before we got shut down for drinking, snorting glue, and fighting), in Ventura, in Goleta, in Santa Barbara, and in LA? How many times did I literally come to out of a drunken blackout on the way home from a show in LA, only to realize I was actually myself driving my car, six or seven punk buddies with me, everyone minus me passed out, late at night, all the windows down, cold air rushing in, the Misfits or Adolescents or X playing full volume from the stereo, me weaving back and forth in the silent, empty Highway 33 ahead, genuinely happy and grateful to be alive and that I hadn’t killed us?

This time of my life, therefore, was characterized by punk. We were wild, young, dumb, and fiercely, unapologetically alive. Music—punk rock—raced through our veins like heroin, which I would later literally inject into my veins like the love I craved.

3.    Early-mid 2000s (ages 20-26): Still punk, for sure. Specifically Social Distortion, which is one of the few bands that have stayed with me all my days, even to this moment right now, at age 40. For one thing, Mike Ness—founder, guitarist and vocalist of “Social D.,” writes beautifully from the perspective of both traditional toughness and masculinity and yet also from a more feminine, sensitive, thoughtful angle. He straddles the line between tough and soft, and he writes a lot about love, the attainment and loss of it, and this I connect to deeply and always have. In addition, Ness has been sober since 1985 (age 23) and this impresses me deeply. You can hear his years of recovery and how they went in the records he put out over the decades. And his music has always touched my soul, whether it’s his more bluesey material or his older straight-punk stuff, or even his solo records, which are much more blues-country-acoustic-inspired than his full, more well-known band Social Distortion.

But anyway: I digress. A year or two after high school (or should I say: A year or two after I got expelled from high school three weeks before senior graduation for booze and pot) I moved, really for the first time since age 13 or 14, away from punk a bit. I discovered The Smiths, and for some reason Morrisey rocked my world and felt good for me back then. I had no direction in life at the time. I’d technically gotten my degree after a 3-month outpatient drug and rehab program. I worked a dumb, dead-end job at the front desk of a fancy, prestigious tennis club in Ventura. I lived with two punk buddies in a tiny, nasty, rancid one-bedroom apartment on The Avenue, notorious gang territory; we heard gunshots routinely at night. My only interests seemed to be surfing, drinking and girls. The word “career” was as foreign to me then as the word “love.” I remember driving around Ventura and Ojai in the middle of the night sometimes, alone, listening to Morrisey’s sonorous, contemplative voice, feeling alone and indignant in a world I did not understand. I felt lost and broken. But the music soothed me.

I also discovered, while living in San Diego circa 2005, at age 22, Jazz music. This happened accidently, through reading the Beat writers, specifically Jack Kerouac (who had the biggest impact in real-time on my life as a writer and young man), but also Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc.

Kerouac’s “bebop” jazz writing led me to musicians like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, etc. At age 23, at Mesa Community College in San Diego, I took, for fun, a History of Jazz Class. I remember one whole month of once-a-week night classes being about Jazz musicians and their love for heroin. From age 23-28 I followed in Kerouac’s footsteps and literally hitchhiked around and across the United States, selling most of my possessions, sleeping near railroad tracks and in the bushes and in the mountains, all over the place, always with a pack on my back, a dog-eared copy of On the Road in there somewhere, and jazz music often playing in my ears.

4.    Later 00s to the 2010s: (Ages 27 to early 30s: The Start of Sobriety):

At age 25 a girlfriend and I moved from San Diego to San Francisco. It was 2008. We’d just traveled Europe for five weeks. We moved to the Bay Area in January and broke up by June. But both of us stayed in the city. At 27, in 2010, I hit bottom and got sober. I was living in Oakland but immediately moved to Portland, Oregon, where a close sober friend lived. I only lasted in Portland for eight months and by June, 2011 I was back in Oakland again.

It was around this time—2011, 2012—roughly ages 29, 30, that I started getting my first fiction published in little magazines. I was also starting to edit books. I still felt very young, especially since I’d only been sober a few years at that point. I think it was around this time that I started getting more into two musical genres: Classic rock, and classical music. My old ex-hippie maternal uncle, who’d once been my black-sheep hero, introduced me to bands such as Harry Chapin, and I started listening more to musicians like Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, the Seeds, the Animals, Led Zeppelin, the Who, AC/DC, etc. Now, in fairness I’d been listening to these bands really since my pre-teens, but not as intensely as now. Bob Dylan and the Doors, I now realized, were really punk before punk. (Also of course the same goes for the godfather of punk, Iggy Pop, not to mention groups like Television, the Weirdos, Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, MC-5, Patti Smith, and many more. Dylan’s and Morrison’s dark edgy poetry was definitely punk rock, and it’d come in the early-mid 1960s.

And then classical music. This, too, emerged for me from a punk angle. A punk band I’d loved had been The Lowerclass Brats, who’d had a fascination with the book/film, A Clockwork Orange. Watching the film and then reading the book I became obsessed. And of course in both we learn of the sociopathic narrator’s love of Beethoven, especially the madness-inducing 9^th Symphony. In my teens, during high school, my mother (who had a side rock-n-roll wild past of her own) had handed me over her illustrious record collection. This was how I’d discovered many groups such as Dylan, the Doors, Johnny Cash (another punker before punk), and many others. (I can still vividly conjure up that ancient 1960s vinyl smell.)

But also a massive collection of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. For years I carried that record collection around, moving from city to city. In San Diego, I remember sitting alone in the darkness, circa 2006 (age 23), my roommate gone who knows where, drunk, gazing out at the pale sliver of moon out our sliding-glass doors, listening to Beethoven’s 9^th, taking it all in like some gleeful king. Later I added Mozart, Chopin, Wagner, Bach, Brahms, etc.

Punk was always still there, too, hovering in the background of my life, as I moved constantly, went back to college and then dropped out yet again, dated broken woman after broken woman, drank too much, got sober, made amends, did the 12 steps, traveled, etc. Social Distortion played whenever I walked through a new painful breakup, or I felt extreme anger, or I felt deeply depressed. Mike Ness once said a fan wrote to him saying Ness’s music had saved his life more times than he could count; Ness had responded, Me too. And occasionally, when in an aggressively buoyant mood, I’d snap into punk soldier mode briefly and put on the oldies but goodies, T.S.O.L. or Dead Kennedys or Agent Orange, etc.

5.    2010s to Current, 2023 (roughly ages 30-40)

The past decade my music choices have been all over the place. Jazz, classical at times, classic rock, sometimes punk, and added to the list is blues, and more contemporary acoustic music such as Joe Pug, one of my all-time favorite acoustic singer-songwriters, but also musicians like John Mayer. Over the past ten years, in general, I’ve listened to music less and have focused much more of my time and energy on writing and listening to audiobooks.

Yet more recently, say the past couple of years, I’ve slowly begun morphing back into music. I tend to still feel more inclined to the mellower side of music, exploring newer bands such as Jeffrey Foucault, Willie Watson, Middle Brother, Joe Pug, U2, Morrisey, Fugazi, etc. And yet sometimes, like eight or nine months ago, I pull out whole albums of Black Sabbath and listen to nothing but them for two months at a clip, full volume between dog walks. Or Silverchair. Or the old 1980s hardcore trash punk/metal band D.R.I. I’ll even sometimes get into a musical genre I don’t historically care much for: Rap. Eminem, but also Dead Prez, Wu-Tang Clan, Cold Man, NWA, etc. (Sometimes it just hits the spiritual spot.) Perhaps it’s the last three years of Covid, of my father’s cancer, the depression and loneliness, leaving New York, getting older and turning 40, but I seem to be more and more drawn, broadly speaking, to the acoustic, the mellow, the relaxed, the introspective and thoughtful, the quiet and understated. I’ve left the anger of punk and metal and the mysterious riffing magic of Jazz and classical for the slow, toned-down meaningfulness of acoustic singer-songwriter depth.

6.    *One Addendum: The Metal Years (circa 2006-2007)

I forgot this one, probably unconsciously. It’s embarrassing. Hilarious, actually, looking back now. For around a year or maybe 18 months, in my early twenties, I went through a very awkward “Metal Phase.” This meant I started listening to bands like Guns n Roses, Motley Cru, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, KISS, White Snake, Poison, Bon Jovi, etc. Just as with punk in my teens, I dressed the part. (In my punk years I wore skintight bondage pants re-sewn up the inseams with dental floss, a black motorcycle jacket covered in metal studs, torn T-shirts covered in patches, and had “chaos spikes,” my eight-inch-long hair spiked up all around my head, making me look like an electrocuted troll doll.)

Dressing the part during my Metal Moment looked like skintight white jeans showing off a considerable camel-toe. Black boots. Leather jacket, no studs. Longer hair. I drove a white used GMC truck that was too big. I played Appetite for Destruction full volume every chance I got. I watched The Decline of Western Civilization 2 far, far too many times (as I had with #1 covering the punk years before this). I tried to act how I thought Axle Rose might act. I even got the “G-n-F-n-R” skull/crossbones tattoo on my upper left arm. (Almost every single one of my 20-plus tattoos are rock-n-roll related.) Thankfully, this period lasted not very long.

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Music has always somehow relaxed the reality of being human, whether it was punk rock throughout high school or Neil Young’s album Harvest after dozens of backpacking trips over the decades, when I needed that somber voice and acoustic guitar to connect me to the land, and to myself. Through breakups and losses, traveling and moving, music has always been there, immortal and calming, primordial and profound. There’s something so utterly human and wondrous about music, whether it’s in the church or at the Hollywood Bowl or in some underground punk rock basement. Music grounds us, teaches us, relaxes us, makes us cry and smile and let go. At our most innocent and most dark, in our collective primal core, music is something ultimately comforting and real and raw, surging pain and luscious love, prayer and desire and need, hoping and wanting and asking. It is, in the end, a plaintive, spiritual call back to our primitive selves.

It is an artistic expression of our very nature.