Goin' Against the Grain
Years and years and years ago (like, more than 20!) my dad and his friend Tim used to get together on a regular basis and play music at our house. For a while, they'd set up in the dining room and play for hours, and later dad set up the basement and nailed egg cartons all over the ceiling and walls to absorb the sound and they played down there. Tim and dad did this for years, with various and sundry other musicians joining them at times. As you might expect, by the time the bands broke up and Tim had moved away and dad had stopped playing for the most part, I knew the words to every one of the songs, whether I liked them or not.
Most of them I did like, in fact, and for years afterwards I'd occasionally hear a song in my head and be reminded of those jam sessions. A year or so ago, dad loaned me a tape he and Tim had made back in 1983, and I was excited to find that some of my favorite Tim & Dad songs were on that tape! These were songs that had haunted my memories, that I couldn't quite place or recall, but little snippets would surface now and again.
Unfortunately, these songs were only on tape and I had long since switched all my music over to digital format. As I've written about before, most of what my dad and Tim or their band from that same era, the Surf Cowboys, have done is on CD by now. This tape was the last holdout.
Today, a package came in the mail from my dad, and low and behold, it was a digitized version of those 1983 recordings!! (It was also accompanied by a disc of cover songs my dad recently put together.) I promptly threw the disc into my computer and ripped it to my hard drive and have been happily listening to it ever since.
Many of the songs dad and Tim did together were ones Tim wrote or songs they collaborated on. Tim may be a lot of things, but he really is a talented songwriter. (Then again, my dad's no hack either and I can't figure out why they never did any of his songs... )
In thinking about it this afternoon, I realized that this music from my childhood is music that so few of my generation would know or recognize. I mean, sure, I know the usual bands from that era - The Bangles, Bon Jovi, Debbie Gibson, the Beastie Boys, Duran Duran, the Go Go's, Michael The Weird One, Wham! - but many of the songs I love best are ones that my dad and Tim wrote and sang. And that's not something I think I'll ever be able to connect with anyone on.
How strange is that?
