Classic music for the young

[SteveO]

I had an interesting conversation with a young man yesterday. He has a degree in sound engineering although as he said there is not much call for it in our area. Therefore he works at HMV music store so I talked to him about my favorite subject ...Music !

I asked him what bands do you like ? His answer in no particular order was:

Johnny Cash, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, The Band, Captain Beefheart, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

Now this young fellow can't be more than 25 years old.

I found it fascinating that he quoted those older bands !...remember he's a sound engineer !!!!

By the way, HMV is the only dedicated music store remaining here ! There are two HMV stores in the area and that's it !!! Our metro area has a population of 400,000 ! We have the big box stores that sell CDs but they have a small inventory.

[Keef Rob]

This is like my generation as teenagers being fascinated with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe "King" Oliver, James P. Johnson, Fletcher Henderson, Frankie Trumbauer, Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke, and Bing Crosby. As I remember, it didn't happen -- if you were teens or twenties and even knew who they were in the 60's and 70's you were dreadfully unhip for the rest of your life, even if you were an audio engineer.

I much prefer it the other way around, surprising those 20 years younger than me who ask me what's in my portable and I show them radio shows from the previous week in all sorts of dance genres. They tend to freak and I gain hip points. They normally say "damn I wish you were my dad." It's nice to be able to say "yes I saw them live" and tell them stories, but I'm very quick to tell them that all of that was a really long time ago and being there while it was happening is quite enough.

[SteveO]

Exactly Keef ! As teens we did not explore music in general that was 40 years old !..circa 1935

This young lad listens to dance mixes also and other music but he also listens to the classics.

[Keef Rob]

A couple of years ago I asked a group of kids while talking about this "well what's new?" The best they could come up with was Radiohead. I said, "well they're still 25 years old. Got anything new?" They couldn't name anything newer than that. That's when I realised that they weren't going in and digging anything up. They were getting it fed to them ... don't know how, Pitchfork maybe? Rolling Stone? Two minutes later, the radio on the coffee house we were in played "Subconscious" by Samantha James, which must have been a week or two old at the time, and they were shocked to death when I said "Aw yeh, this is more like it" and even sang along. They were gobsmacked. They said "you really *do* listen to new stuff!" And I said "all the time. I've heard all that stuff you were talking about zillions of times and I've been sick of it for years." Next song up was Andain "Beautiful Thing", and I sang along with that too. They said "this is great, we've never heard this!" I said "it's about 8 or 9 years old" and then their minds were REALLY blown. All I could do was grin big and say "hey ya just gotta stay in tune, right?"

[SteveO]

^ thanks for sharing your story, Keef !