reading this thread on what music people listened to as teenagers has been an interesting one for me. Needless to say, as one of the ahh ermm blechhh, shall we say, more senior citizens of this community, my musical beginnings seem to almost have come from another world compared to most of the other postings on this particular thread.
I was born in South Africa in 1950. My Mom loved classical music and her collection was on those large, breakable 78 speed discs that cracked if you looked at them hard enough. The discs that were in the best condition in this collection had some gems amongst them and I consider myself very fortunate indeed to have been able to listen to Toscanini's conducting of the Beethoven symphonies, more precisely, numbers 5 & 6 along with some Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The most enduring piece of music for me was unquestionably Ravel's Bolero, a piece I still love to this day. The rhythmic ideas coupled with the lyrical and melodic content still have significance for me.
My Father listened to some Jazz, and the most memorable disc in his collection besides the Benny Goodman classics was a disc entitled Gershwin, Shavers and Strings. This was one of those new-fangled (well, at the time!) long-playing discs that did not break if you dropped them and it was also a stereo disc. My Dad also owned the 1941 Swing Series which was a collection of 78 speed discs that represented the swing releases for that year. I sure wish that I had that set in my collection right about now!
When I first began to listen to music of my own, I began with Elvis and his English counter-part, Cliff Richard, who had a great band called the Shadows. This group, which had a line-up of 2 guitars, Bass and drums was the progenitor of so much musically speaking for me and I remember the Shadow's music very well. Tunes like Apache, FBI, The Rise & Fall of Flingle Bunt and others really did it for me and the Fender guitars that the Shadows used were a key part of my visualization of the music I was becoming crazier about. The Shadows music brought me directly to the Ventures, Duane Eddy, Jan & Dean and then the Beachboys!
When the Beatles first appeared they really rocked me, but when the Rolling Stones began rocking, I was blown away for sure! The Stones were the group that had me thinking for the first time about where the music came from and what it meant. This was where I began to understand the Blues and that, coupled with the Gershwin and Bennie Goodman discs, lead me to Jazz and the passion that music keeps growing inside my slightly twisted mind ( yeah yeah, maybe more than slightly!).
As a teenager, I went to boarding school in Pretoria which was about 80 miles from the town I grew up in. It was at this school that a couple of friends and I discovered the BBC and where we used to huddle around the transistor portable one of us owned and listen to Top Of the Pops and the Hit Parade on the Beeb. It should be noted that many of the groups that were popular in the rest of the world were NOT broadcast via the strictly controlled airwaves in pre-Mandela South Africa. the Beatles were banned for John Lennon's intemperate remark about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus and the Stones were way over the top for obvious reasons. It was at this high school at these listening sessions that I first heard Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Manfred Mann(another South African!), the Butterfield Blues Band, Blood Sweat and Tears and others. Hendrix really did it for me but it was really not acceptable for a white kid to be a serious fan of a black musician so my passion was a clandestine one at best. You probably cannot imagine that it was not good to be connected so obviously to musicians who were people of colour but that was just a small slice of things in those days in that blighted country. While Jimi was my most serious musical here, Bob Dylan was the poet of all time to me. When I first began to play the guitar, I used to play my versions of Masters of War, With God On Our Side and World War Three Talking Blues, I was hauled unceremoniously off the stage on several occasions by the racial and political zealots who were not prepared to accept the lyrics of his Bobness, or the guitar wizardry of the Jimi.
During my youth I heard a lot of the music played by the people of colour in the country and my love for the music of Africa is still growing. It was particularly uncool for white kids to even listen to this stuff but especially bad for them to be serious fans, but I loved township jazz, Mbaqanga and, needless to say, the drumming of Africa very much indeed!0
Once when I was picked up by the police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (I was never charged with anything!), the plainclothesman who interviewed me had a file on me that apparently had notes about the music I loved so much and he asked me why I was unpatriotic enough to listen to the music that I listened to. How could I possibly like James Brown, he wanted to know, that enduring sex legend? Just what was it that I saw in the music that was of redeeming quality? To tell you the truth, I never had to respond because he was just trying to harass me and make it clear to me that they knew a lot about me, including my predilection for the songs of Bob Dylan and the music of Jimi Hendrix!
So my teenage years from a musical perspective were certainly different! I still am a big fan of Hendrix, I play some James Brown, Stevie Wonder (who I saw live at the Top of the Town in London in 1969!) and other funky things at many of my gigs. Since I am still an active DJ at the tender age of 50, it would seem that my musical experiences as a teenager have stood me in good stead and the Apartheid Regime only made my commitment to music that much stronger. I reckon that I can continue Deejaying into my sixties since I want to be able to celebrate 50 years of musical passion with a very big party, wanna come?
leslie/The Power of Sound
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