I can not think of a major moment in my life -- past the age of 12 -- where music was bereft from the background noise. When I was 10 years old the present wrapped in gold was a Sony boombox (with tape and CD player). I don't really consider this the same keystone event as my first tape Walkman due mostly to the fact that the first CDs I owned (Spin Doctors Pocket Full of Kryptonite; Paula Abdul Greatest Hits) were not indicative of my musical taste two years later.
First break-up album - 1996 - Modest Mouse This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About
The day I bought my first tapes and broke out of the hand-me-down music that I borrowed from my parents (James Taylor; Carley Simon; Cat Stevens; Indigo Girls; Strength in Numbers) was the day that I never wanted my life to be without music ever again. Ownership Hole's Pretty On the Inside, Miss World, and Nine Inch Nails's Pretty Hate Machine were the single personal-political events that served as my justification in declaring war on silence. As I lay in my bed that night, headphones on and volume maxed out, I thrashed violently on a twin-sized water bed while clumsily playing air guitar to "Credit in the Straight World" in the darkness.
First slow dance and kiss - 1994 - Grant Lee Buffalo, "Mockingbirds"
When 1998 rolled around, I was in 8th grade. Farragut Middle School took a band-wide trip to Washington D.C. -- the whole ride there I blasted Sebadoh's Bakesale and various Smashing Pumpkins albums. My close friend Lauren Anderson sat next to me and we traded tapes back and forth. On the drive back to Knoxville, Disney movies playing on the televisions and streetlights passing in a way that made shadows on the bus appear as sundials fast-forwarding, I listened to my first Sleater-Kinney albums (Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor, Dig Me Out) and followed up with Bikini Kill's The C.D. Version of the First Two Records. Within a week I was digging through the network that would later coagulate into the file-sharing application, Napster -- listening to Team Dresch and trying to rationalize singing along to lesbian Queercore lyrics as a pubescent male.
First disc trade - Marilyn Manson's Portrait of an American Family for Offspring's Smash
The years after this are a blur. Napster was a fine service if you knew what you wanted, felt the urge to fill out missing tracks in your collection, were looking for rare tracks from an artist, or if you felt like using wild card searches for documents that people had inadvertently shared ("pass*.*"; "*log.doc"). Around the halfway mark between Napster's first release and the first media faux pas it created -- another service popped up called AudioGalaxy. The novelty with AudioGalaxy was that the search and GUI portions of your browsing were inside of a browser: click a button next to the track on the web page and a program specific URL would queue the song for download in the stand-alone program. The nice part about this was that AudioGalaxy allowed for the option to sort by genre, pull up obscure genres, and then sort by download popularity -- a feature it also allowed when browsing by artist. This was during a pretty heavy Aphex Twin binge. I knew most major Aphex Twin releases and side projects (from Caustic Bubblebath/Joyrex to Mike and Rich) -- and that led to Boards of Canada, Plaid, and Squarepusher. The genres of music I paid the most
attention to were Illbiant and Downtempo.
Most valued artist find - 1999 - Nick Drake
There was a popular VW ad in 1999 called "Milky Way". This was one of the first major uses of solid non-mainstream music on a prime-time advertisement -- a far jump from the more common use of Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" on Carnival Cruise commercials. In the commercial, a group of friends drives through a series of back roads between dusk and night -- making good use of the Cabriolet's retracting roof to admire the night sky while Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" played in the background. The car pulls up to their intended destination, a party with one drunk staggering back inside, the passengers look at one another -- and then continue to drive into the night. The next day I called VW to get the information on the song that played. Two years later, undergoing massive dental procedures that would later result in the removal of more than half my teeth in the slowest and most painful manner possible, I found myself on my couch -- drugged, sore, and depressed -- listening to the Pink Moon album. And then Five Leaves Left. And then Bryter Layter. And then old demos scrounged up from the Internet ("Been Smoking Too Long"). Someone else had felt this low before -- and knowing that helped me keep my level of self-pity below flood stages.
First album won - 1996 - 94.3 FM - Tripping Daisy I Am an Elastic Firecracker
I've made out to Jimi Hendrix's "Angel" sitting in a car at the entrance to a neighborhood in the pouring rain, walked into a bar to reconcile a fight with my father with "Hey Joe" playing on the jukebox, shared the first kiss of a relationship to the initial chord strike of "The Bends", and sat in the back of an Astro van -- my first golden retriever, unable to walk and with failing kidneys at 14-years-old, with his head in my lap -- listening to Smashing Pumpkin's "French Movie Theme" on repeat as we drove to the vet to put him to sleep. I have been pulled over three times for speeding to "Geek U.S.A." in Knoxville and one time to JUSTICE's "D.A.N.C.E. Pt. 2" on A Cross The Universe in Sydney, Ohio. I had the best cigarette of my young life sitting on top of my car at Bonnaroo after being lost and alone for roughly five hours -- blasting Jethro Tull's "Sweet Dreams" from my stereo at 6 in the morning. I've pulled up to the FHS marching band summer dance in 2000 in a black Jag convertible with Slint's "Breadcrumb Trail" pouring out of the speakers like an erupting volcano. A driver slammed into the car I was in going 50 MPH while New Order's "Temptation" played, I was T-boned to Presidents of the United States of America's "Mach 5", and the first song to play in my replacement car was Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues". I got violently ill and lost the contents of my stomach on Justin Timberlake's lawn in Georgia while a still-running car played Spacemen 3's "Losing Touch With My Mind".
Most played soundtrack - (tie) - The Crow (1994 - 1997) // Kids (1998 - 2002) // subUrbia (1996 - 2001)
When I was 12 years old I signed a pact with music in blood. My ears would forever ring as a testiment to my war on silence and every sound above the threshold of ringing would make the sound less noticeable. I reap the fruits from that contract on a daily basis.
First concert with a girlfriend - Moby
If cigarettes were numbered and I could name them like milestones -- "Oh, I remember #13,492. We were speeding through the back roads of Cumming and my girlfriend at the time had Ride the Lightening thundering in her car that she called Blitzkrieg" -- maybe this would have played out differently. Probably not. I only remember my bank account number due to the obsessive number of times I check it online. I'd just end up with a wallet full of faded papers with numbers on them and no recollection of why I felt the need to keep them -- much like the debit receipts from restaurants and bars currently.
Matthew Smollon (Spider Jerusalem) - Music Life Coach
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