This post originated as a letter to my younger brother, Gus. It was accompanied by a list that I had drawn up for him of my favorite albums from my childhood. Gus was born in 1989, so I wanted to make him aware of what I felt were some of the milestones of music from before his time, as well as clue him in to some of our family's history.
It is an axiom of human behavior that we regard the things we learned and the artifacts we encountered in our youth as the best of their type. The language spoken by our family seems proper. The morals that are modeled for us become our morals. The culture that we are raised in becomes second nature. And, of course, the music that we grew up with will always sound to us like the best music there ever was.
But the music that I grew up with really was the best music of all time! I’m only halfway kidding. Obviously, as I’ve just stated, most people who were young during the Big Band era or the early stages of rock and roll will regard these periods as the best, and probably regard the later stages with disdain. But the music produced in the wake of the Beatles and Bob Dylan after 1964 is definitely a high-water mark in rock music. The latter half of the Sixties saw a succession of bands trying to outdo one another, which is a classic recipe for greatness. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin and so many more contributed to this golden age of classic rock. Then the singer/songwriter era of the early Seventies, exemplified by such greats as James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Warren Zevon, influenced such bands as Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles.
I got most of my early musical tastes from my mom, who had a beautiful soprano voice and was totally into the Sixties music revolution. [Gus is my half brother; we share a common father.] Like most kids, my first record collection was basically my parents’. The first of Mom’s albums that became one of my favorites was Abbey Road, by the Beatles. There is no room here to go into the overall greatness of this album, generally considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, rock albums of all time. The quality of the songs is top-notch from beginning to end. Side One opens and closes with two of John Lennon’s greatest songs, “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” There are two classic Paul McCartney confections, “Oh! Darling” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Ringo chimes in with one of his few Beatles songs, the classic “Octopus’s Garden.” And the album contains two of George Harrison’s greatest songs, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” The latter opens Side Two, but this side of the album is best known for its medley of unfinished Lennon/McCartney songs that McCartney mashed together in a most amazing way. The album ends with the famous line, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” The album was the second to last released by the Beatles—Let It Be was their last release before breaking up in 1970—but Abbey Road was the last album they recorded. I listened to Side Two of Abbey Road every day after school during my junior and senior years in high school. Every. Single. Day.
My second favorite album from Mom’s collection was Janis Ian’s Between the Lines. This was Mom’s favorite album too, with its songs about divorce, one-night stands, etc. (Mom was the only prominent divorcée in Barnwell throughout the Seventies. Mom and Dad divorced in 1968, when I was four.) Beautiful melodies and awesome arrangements. Still one of my favorite albums.
One single that stands out from this period is “Bohemian Rhapsody”; I didn’t buy the album it was on. When I finally started buying my own records, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, by Elton John, were favorites that I listened to over and over. I should mention that I was the only brother who had his own record player. Mom had a nice sound system in her bedroom that I listened to before I got my own. Dad also had a nice sound system in his house on Manville Drive. (We spent half the week at Mom’s and half the week at Dad’s.) Dad wasn’t really into music, but somehow he had a pretty good record collection. Maybe he was a member of the Columbia Record Club, because he inexplicably had some of the best records of the Seventies at his house, including American Pie, Sweet Baby James, Me and Bobby McGee, Don Quixote, etc. He never listened to them, but we wore them out. In retrospect I feel like maybe he got them for us.
I’m leaving out a lot of stuff for brevity. Everything on the list is an absolute gem. Frampton Comes Alive. Jesus Christ Superstar. Beggar’s Banquet. Who’s Next. Blood on the Tracks. I moved to Hilton Head with Dad in 1980 when Mom moved to New York to marry Bill Kolb. One of my best friends there turned me on to Hunky Dory, by David Bowie, still one of my favorite albums of all time. The Eighties was a weird time for music. I loved the singles from that period. We had a great radio station in Charleston throughout my college years and beyond, 96 Wave. They played all the funky Eighties singles, from “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” by Cyndi Lauper, and everything in between. This is a whole nother story. Suffice it to say, I loved the singles but didn’t buy any of the albums. I basically continued to listen to all my favorite albums from childhood all through college. I might be exaggerating a little, but it wasn’t until I went to graduate school in 1987 that I finally fully turned on to R.E.M. and U2. In my defense, their big breakthroughs both came out that year, Document and The Joshua Tree.
I’ve always considered myself lucky to have grown up during not one but two great periods of Anglo-American rock music. After the Eighties descended into the depths of hair metal, there came the great renaissance of rock music in the early Nineties. One of the harbingers of what became known as Alternative Rock was R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” which became a most improbable hit in the spring of 1991, even in the South. I had just spent a year in New York working my first stint at ------------. I decided I wanted to move back to South Carolina and I secured a position teaching summer school at the College of Charleston. Since Charlie and Missy were getting married that spring, I convinced Dad to let me come down early and live with him between the wedding and summer school. The plan was to attend Charlie and Missy’s wedding and then spend a month or so prepping for my teaching gig. Well, as everyone knows, I chickened out of teaching and convinced Dad to let me spend the summer at Banksia Hall pursuing a career as a painter. This didn’t really work out either, but I did spend the summer hanging out with ---------, whom you called Jen-Jen.
That fall was when Bob opened the Sports Pub, and I went to Charleston to take up my position behind the bar in basically the same place I had tended bar at San Miguel’s. Perry went with me, and we shared an apartment in Mt. Pleasant. I didn’t have a car at the time, so I either rode in to work with Perry if we shared a shift, or I borrowed his car to go in when I was working and he had the night off. One day on the way in to work we heard “Alive,” by Pearl Jam on 96 Wave. I had heard snippets of this song, which had just come out, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was or who Pearl Jam were, because we were listening to 98 Rock (the “classic rock” station that didn’t play new music) at the Sports Pub, due to some putz of a manager whose name I forget. That day, after hearing “Alive” on the way in to work, I strode into the bar and announced that we were listening to the wrong radio station. I don’t know how I had the balls to declare this. The putz manager could easily have overruled me, but thankfully he didn’t. I’d been gone from the downtown Charleston scene for four years, and I felt like I was defending 96 Wave’s place as the cool radio station in Charleston.
That fall was fucking amazing. Aside from the fact that we opened a sports bar at the exact same time that the Braves decided not to suck anymore and went on a two-year World Series run, the music was awesome too. The Sports Pub was a phenomenal success, packed every night, and I just have to imagine that part of it was due to the fact that we played the best radio station (this was in the days before satellite radio, much less the internet). It is difficult to describe the impact that Pearl Jam and Nirvana had that fall. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was simply one of the coolest songs ever written, and it and “Alive” and “Black” and “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam just opened up the floodgates. Achtung Baby came out that fall as well. U2’s Joshua Tree was great, but it cemented U2’s and Bono’s reputation for bombast and melodrama, for lack of better terms. Grandiosity, not to mention egomania. (There was an old joke about a person who was in a car crash, then in a coma, then dead and in heaven. When he walks through the Pearly Gates, he sees Bono running around, ranting and raving about world peace. He can’t believe that Bono has died. Saint Peter says, “Oh, that’s not Bono. That’s God. He just thinks he’s Bono.”) But Achtung Baby had a grittier, industrial edge that U2’s earlier albums did not, and it transformed them from a great band to a band in a class all by themselves. The fact that U2 pivoted to an alternative sound right before Pearl Jam and Nirvana hit the scene attests to their sense of the zeitgeist.
And then, like I said, the floodgates opened. I might not have the order right, but over the next few years came such classic songs as “Creep,” by Radiohead, “Plush,” by Stone Temple Pilots, “Round Here,” by Counting Crows, “Girlfriend,” by Matthew Sweet, “Longview,” by Green Day, “Today,” by Smashing Pumpkins, “Linger,” by Cranberries, “Jealous Again,” by Black Crowes, “Hey Jealousy,” by Gin Blossoms. A slew of hits by Pearl Jam: “Better Man,” “Rearviewmirror,” “Daughter,” “Animal,” “Corduroy.” I mean, I’m not even scratching the surface. And 96 Wave would play deep cuts that would become hits, like Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost.” We sang all these songs when they came on the radio, I mean me and the customers at the Sports Pub. I was known as the Singing Bartender. Between midnight and two a.m., when there was no sports on, we would put the T.V.s on MTV. I remember when “Creep” came on we all just went crazy. I did, anyway.
This was also when I laid claim to my nickname “Nedrock.” There was this old dude who drove a candy truck in our neighborhood on Colonial Drive in Barnwell who gave all the kids nicknames. Perry was “Pericho” (as in Jericho); Charlie was “Charlie over the River” (as in I have no idea); John was “John Henry”; and I was “Nedrock,” which rhymes with “bedrock.” Clearly mine was the only one that was any good. (He called one of the girls in the neighborhood “Mud Puddle.”) Still, nobody in Barnwell ever really called me Nedrock—that would have made me too cool. Dad called me “Crud.” And I never used it in college. But it was always in my back pocket, and when people at the Sports Pub started to call me “Nedly” (a common variation on “Ned” that I despise) I again had the balls to say, “It’s Nedrock,” and it stuck. Everybody who knew me during that Sports Pub period—I worked there from fall of '91 to fall of '94—knows me as Nedrock.
Anyway, between Nedrock and the Braves and the renaissance of rock music, the stars aligned for me in the early Nineties. I’m not even scratching the surface of all the great songs and bands that came out during this time. I’m just saying how lucky I was to have experienced the two great periods of rock music in the last third of the twentieth century. And we went to many great concerts during this time. Black Crowes played the Gaillard. Lollapalooza came through Charlotte in 1992, featuring Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry. U2 played Williams-Brice Stadium that same summer on their Achtung Baby tour (officially the Zoo TV Tour). The whole period culminated with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock in August of 1994, which featured many of the bands of this renaissance. I went to all of these concerts. And it was in the spring of '94 that I finally learned how to play guitar. Many of the first songs I learned were from this second renaissance. When I decided to play music in clubs in the late Nineties, I was determined to establish a new canon of cover songs for the nightclub scene.
Going to Hilton Head for the Heritage every year in the Seventies, then going to high school there in the early Eighties, then living in Charleston for most of the Eighties, I was exposed to the “guy with the guitar” in nightclubs and tiki bars from early on. I would often get up and sing with these people, and I always said that one day I would learn how to play the guitar. It wasn’t until I went to Paris in the summer of 1993 that I finally made the decision to actually do it. I saw many buskers on the streets of Paris. I flew back through NYC on my way home and spent a weekend in the Hamptons with an old friend from college. Also there that weekend was some dude that I barely knew in college. There was a guitar in the rental and this dude picked it up and started playing a Bob Dylan song. I loathed this guy, and now he was the one who was serenading the women when it should have been me, just because he could play the guitar. I figured, “If this asshole can play the guitar, so can I.” Still, it took me until the following spring to fully knock the Coke machine over. I borrowed a friend’s acoustic guitar, bought an instruction book that came with a cassette and taught myself how to play the guitar. Our greatest fears lie in anticipation, and honestly when I started out I really didn’t know if I would be able to play the guitar or not. In reality, it probably didn’t take much more than a month.
A lot of the early songs I learned were favorites from childhood, like “Behind Blue Eyes” (from Who’s Next) and “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” (from Abbey Road), but I also determined early on to learn many of the songs that I had just fallen in love with during the previous three years at the Sports Pub. Ironically, when I started playing out four years later, back in Charleston after my second stint at ------------ from '95 to '97, the kids in Charleston all came up to me and asked me to play songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Van Morrison, etc. Basically, the old canon. I figured they’d want to hear the new canon, but they really just wanted to hear the songs that they’d grown up with in their parents’ record collections.
Nedrock, Houston Street, NYC, 1997
