Journal
Fumbling Towards Forty: Music Part I
When I was really young my parents took me to see Sharon, Lois, and Bram. If you look them up you will see them with an elephant. The name of the elephant? Elephant. What a dumb name for an elephant. It doesn’t even get to be part of the name! Should be The Elephant with three Weirdos. Anyway I didn’t like it. My parents said I barely paid attention and eventually fell asleep. That’s technically my first concert.
Fumbling Towards Forty: Prologue
Fumbling Towards Forty: The Internet
Fumbling Towards Forty: Camping
Fumbling Towards Forty: Drugs
Fumbling Towards Forty: Videogames
I grew up in a household where my mom and dad loved rock and my sister listened to alternative and grunge. My mom honestly loved 80s rock/metal more than the classic rock. She even brought this up recently. Guns N Roses, Motley Crue, Metallica, and Whitesnake appeals to her more than say The Who or Rolling Stones despite her being from the 1950s. One of my mom’s favourite songs is “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes and honestly the song rocks.
My dad was into classic rock like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin but he also liked to listen to more modern music. A big reason why I do The Sweatdown on Spotify is because I never want to get stuck in my ways when it comes to music. There have been two points in my life I thought that was happening: mid 2000s and mid 2010s. Both times I could have just become one of those, “Wah music was better when I was a teenager” types or I could go the way I did which was put time and effort into finding new music. It’s why I flipped out on that Rick Beato take on Twitter:
There’s literally mountains upon mountains of incredible rock and roll music being made all of the time and has been being made and you old miserable fucks won’t bother to look for it so you think nothing new has come out since the radio won’t play it. Fuck you. https://t.co/calM2TGpFR
— GrapPro – Aaron Wrotkowski (@AaronWrotkowski) August 19, 2024
I’ve told the story a thousand times, but I remember my dad hanging out with a friend on Raleigh Street and they had MuchMusic on. Back then your friends would just… come over to hang out. And a song by Bush came on. My dad’s friend just started bitching about it and saying how could he listen to this modern trash. I remember him saying, “Why listen to this when you got Back in Black?” and my dad replied, “I can listen to Back in Black anytime. I also listened to AC/DC in the 80s. Why do I have to keep listening to them in the 90s?” and that had a big impact on me.
My middle sister was a big influence on music for me as well. She would get those Columbia House sets for CD’s and then never pay them back because she was too young to even be subscribing to them and they couldn’t go after her for it. I think she got like 100 CD’s total from them. My sister loved hair metal but also loved grunge and alternative. First time I ever heard hip hop was LL Cool J “Mama Said Knock You Out” since she got that record.
But my biggest influence? Videogames.
Playing NES and SNES games were huge in pushing my tastes to synthesizers and industrial sounds. I loved guitars and drums and the like but videogames quietly snuck everything from disco to Japanese jazz to prog rock into my music spectrum.
I remember my oldest sister had a big box of cassette tapes she left at the house once with a Walkman. One of the tapes was a 1980s Greatest Hits collection. This was in the early 90s so they were already hawking these things as if the 80s were a century ago and not like, like, two years ago. I remember this tape had “Twilight Zone” by Golden Earring on it which I loved. It also had “Talking in Your Sleep” by The Romantics on it and I used to listen to that all the time.
I didn’t start trying to get into bands until I noticed that Aerosmith seemed to be liked by everyone. My parents liked them. My sister liked them. My cousin Jesse liked them. Seemed like a safe band? My parents had a CD of Aerosmith Greatest Hits. It had the basics like “Dream On”, “Sweet Emotion”, and “Walk This Way.” But I actually liked the “second side” with the cover of “Come Together” and “Kings and Queens” from the album Draw the Line. My first foray of preferring the hidden gems over the essential classics.
Oh, I should also bring up the five CD stereo. In my hometown of Chatham, Ontario, Canada there was an electronics store called KRAZY KELLY’S WAREHOUSE which sold stereos. Not to be confused with CRAZY CARPET’S WAREHOUSE also in Chatham which sold carpets. Chatham is always confusing like this. We have two Charlie’s Variety’s. One is on Park Ave East. The other is two blocks from Park Ave West. I’m off track.
So at KRAZY KELLY’S WAREHOUSE my parents got one of the first five CD changer stereos. That meant you could hold FIVE COMPACT DISCS AT ONCE and you didn’t have to keep getting up and changing your CD. You only had to do it after five! The 90s baby. I remember that no matter what, my mom wanted to always have EAGLES GREATEST HITS VOL. 2, FOREIGNER GREATEST HITS, and THE CARS GREATEST HITS in that disc changer. The other two would switch out all the time. But those three had to be in there.
This made me hate those bands. Absolutely loathe them. I hated ever hearing those songs as a kid. In my brain my mom tried to play these all the time and I would have to escape to my bedroom to get away from them. I doubt it was that bad. But I grew to hate those bands.
Today? I actually like The Eagles. I think I had to grow up into a lonely bachelor missing out on long term affection to learn to appreciate The Eagles. “Desperado” could have been sung to me. The Cars you’d think my later found love of synthwave would make them appeal to me but not really. That said, “Drive”? Fucking classic. Maybe I just don’t like Rick Ocasek’s voice. Foreigner? Fuck Foreigner. Except my mom is in her 70s but to this day she will get up and dance if “Juke Box Hero” so I can at least appreciate that.
The first band I ever got into without anyone else’s influence, just me getting into a band? That’s Oasis. It wasn’t “Wonderwall”. It wasn’t “Don’t Look Back in Anger”. It wasn’t “Champagne Supernova”. It was the guitars on “What’s The Story, Morning Glory”? First time I heard those I was hooked. Loved the second album. Got the first album for Easter (we used to do a hot or cold search for gifts and get chocolate and music CD’s. One year I got Marilyn Manson’s Anti-Christ Superstar for Easter. That’s funnier before Manson revealed himself to be a legit asshole instead of a lying asshole but you know) and loved it too. My mom preferred Definitely Maybe over What’s The Story. My dad liked Oasis.
I also remember getting into Alanis Morrisette but everyone was into her in Canada in the mid 90s. I was just kind of bouncing around with stuff like Aerosmith, Alanis, and Oasis. Then 1997 happened. Nine Lives by Aerosmith sucked. Jagged Little Pill was losing steam. Oasis Be Here Now… was a let down. I was without a country.
It was around this time I remembered being at my cousin Jesse’s house watching MuchMusic. First they played, “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me” by U2 which I thought was a cool music video. And then they played “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. The live music video version with the black and white footage ending with the bird diving into the water for the fish? That had a profound impact on me. I remember hearing “The Perfect Drug” and thinking this music is kinda like the videogames I play. There’s that sort of crunch I remember from playing Final Fantasy IV (“Within The Giant”) and Phantasy Star IV (“Laughter”) that was appealing me to Nine Inch Nails.
In the eighth grade I remember we had to do a lipsync music thing in front of our class. I can’t remember if I did “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2” by Pink Floyd or “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper. What I do remember is there was this older high school kid who came to help my teacher for this and he was a definite goth kid. And he directed me to stuff like Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral. I remember asking for Pretty Hate Machine and getting it for Christmas.
I got the full Nine Inch Nails experience from 1989 to 1999 and was a full fledged huge fan by the time I saw the MTV Video Music Awards 1999 performance of “The Fragile” and I remember skipping school to go to the store and buy it. Back then the Canadian dollar was really low and it was a double album. It cost me over $30. Imagine paying that much in 2024 for 23 songs.
At the same time of my growing love of Nine Inch Nails I was getting into nu metal like a lot of teenage boys with angst they had nowhere to put. I remember this kid Chad saying back in sixth grade that KoRn was going to become the biggest band and he ended up being.right. I felt like okay he was right I should fall in line. I owned a KoRn shirt, I bought Limp Bizkit albums, I even had Kid Rock’s Devil Without a Cause. And I liked them? I know it sounds like I’m trying to be like, “Oh yeah I’m too good for this” but the reality is even at the time I was kind of posing.
I was a poser for KoRn.
I also won’t lie. I liked Devil Without a Cause. I listened to it a lot. There’s a lot of songs I could probably recite off the top of my head. I was into Kid Rock. Sorry.
I listened to 9 Teen 90 Nine by Limp Bizkit just before the ball drop and then drank the bottle of champagne my parents left since they went to their friends party and left me at home alone. I was 14.
— GrapPro – Aaron Wrotkowski (@AaronWrotkowski) August 20, 2024
Older I got, the more my tastes dropped the nu metal. I got way deeper into industrial music (KMFDM, Pig, Manson, etc.) but there was another music genre I was getting into and at the time felt embarrassed about. I would watch Electric Circus on MuchMusic, a show about young adults dancing to electronic music in Toronto. Admitting I liked this in high school would have got me attacked. I only had a few friends I would like it was a secret.
