By the fall of 1998 I was really starting to appreciate music but I was still forbidden to use my father’s stereo. I was staring to amass a CD collection and pay attention to stuff on the radio, but I couldn’t blast my favorite songs for all the neighbors to hear – that was strictly my dad’s job (and if the neighbors didn’t like The Jam they could go fuck themselves). When I wanted to hear music I had to use my portable CD player* or the Walkman that I took to school every day.
*Please allow me to go off on a tangent for a minute:I had a portable CD player but when I went to school I took my old cassette player. I know that iPods and other MP3 players have left CDs in the dust, but there was a time when you didn’t just walk around with a CD because, where I lived, someone might steal the CD player, or worse, someone would think you had money and try and take that from you too. The only thing worse than getting beaten up for money is getting beaten up for money that you don’t have (or so I hear). One thing a mugger hates is accidentally mugging a poor person because then you have to take SOMETHING for your trouble and you wind up as bad as the victim, but I’m getting off topic here.
We didn’t have that many rules in my house, but not using the stereo was at the top of the list. It was also the only rule not created in response to something stupid I had done. I had no problems ignoring the other house rules but I respected the stereo rule until the day I saw my chance to break it and get away with it.
On a late summer afternoon my dad was out mowing the lawn. He had been out there for some time – cursing whenever the lawnmower hit a rock or a toy one of us had left in the yard, cursing when the lawnmower stalled for no apparent reason, cursing when the lawnmower fell into the small hollow where our garden used to be and slicing into the ground, throwing clods of dirt in the direction of our neighbor’s house. Meanwhile I was inside and his stereo was still blasting music in the living room, even though he clearly couldn’t hear it from outside. I knew that asking to turn the music off would only result in “no,” so when he was out mowing the far corner of the back yard I dropped one of my favorite albums into the six disc CD changer and put it next in the music cue. It took a few minutes to come around, but when Graham Parker’s “Fool’s Gold” faded out, this song came on:
R.E.M. – Finest Worksong
I knew my dad liked R.E.M., but I was the one who had put it on, and worse, I had interrupted what ever was next in his CD cue. Five minutes later he was in the house staring in disbelief at his stereo.
“Did you put this on?” he asked, swinging around to the couch where I sat wincing.
“Yes.”
He looked at the stereo again, then back at me.
“Good choice,” he said, and went back out to tend to more yard work.
That September he bought me my own stereo for my birthday, and whenever he wasn’t blasting music through the house (and neighborhood) on his stereo, I was doing the same on mine.
