All Y'ALL NEED TO STEP OFF!
In 1983-4, I went to a hippie school in a neighboring town that Drogie's mom taught 'music' at. We mostly sang "Where have all the flowers gone" and "Kum Ba Yah" with her playing acoustic guitar as backup.
This was during my mom's ultra-religious period, where she made weavings of the stations of the cross and went a little bit nuts reading "The Way." bible. (Frederick up in this piece?) I don't know if she was into Opus Dei, but she certainly went to a lot of bible study meetings.
I had three instances where I came into contact with popular music, as we weren't really supposed to listen to it, and didn't have any money to buy any (I bought my first tape in 1986-- Madonna's True Blue) They are:
1. Visiting my cousin's house in Texas and listening to Karma Chameleon every morning as my uncle made coffee. My uncle, who used to be a priest told me about the Culture Club
2. Watching Drogie make a painting of three colored stripes. When I asked him what it was, he said really sarcastically "Don't you know what The Police are?!?!" And I made some kind of dumb comment about how my painting would include blue flashing lights, and he looked back at me like I was gum on his shoe.
3. Going over to visit Travis' family, who lived even further into East BF at the time, and asking some neighbor kid why he was only wearing one leather glove. I believe that instance in Blackstone, MA, on their 50 acre farm was the first time I ever saw breakdancing. I seriously didn't know what it was.
You all with your BMG and Neil Diamonds-- and with all of your "who was the least cool arguments" have no idea what it was like to grow up with THAT much kale, wheat germ, carob chips, and chickens.
On a final note, here are the albums (vinyl) we listened to in 1984, because we didn't have a tape player:
Free to Be You and Me-- Milo Thomas and friends
Annie, the soundtrack-- Various
Some album my grandmother bought for us at a yard sale because she felt bad for us-- Donnie and Marie
A Chorus line soundtrack-- Various, but we had to fast forward the "Tits and Ass" song
Whale sounds-- National Geographic recording
Thrift shop clothes, a ban on any television with potentially questionable morals, Sunday school every week, and <a href="http://gospellightvbs.com/main-630_content.html">Vacation Bible School</a> every summer.
But no carob chips.
My mom let me run my own "radio station" by putting a stereo speaker in my window and broadcasting to the backyard. My aunt took me to my first concert (Cheap Trick at the Boston Garden) in 3rd grade. She followed this up with Duran Duran at the Centrum (6th grade) and Huey Lewis on the Boston Common (7th grade).
Also in 3rd grade, my grandfather came home shitfaced after winning big at the horse track. He slipped me a $100 bill, which I used to buy a boom box at Radio Shack. Mom then told me I was not allowed to use it to play my Saturday Night Live cassette at school because others might object to the phrase "painful rectal itch". So, there were limits.
My neighbor's parents would not let him stay up to watch when "Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park" was broadcast on TV. As far as I was concerned, he had the meanest parents in the world.
I have to say, it's almost impossible to sheild your kids from most things, although mine tried. I played Atari's "Frogger" waiting for my mom to pick me up from 4-H, watched "Creature Double Feature" when I was waiting for her to pick me up from Girl Scouts, (she was always late, as you can tell), and sometimes snippets of rated R movies while picking my sister up from a neighbor's house. Even better than those, were "Solid Gold" when we had the nice babysitter, V66 sometimes Sat AM before the parents were awake, and I and even managed to trashpick some Hustlers from the dump and get them home before my parents found out.
Good times.
I think we went to all of them-- Congregational, Catholic, and Baptist, evey summer. And CHURCH! Sometimes we would go skiing with the cousins and have to go to Sunday evening mass with our ski boots on. We never missed a week.
My first semester at UNH I woke up at 9:00 on Sunday, no matter how late I had stayed up the night before-- It took about 6 months of keg parties to get me to wake up at noon.
It took me another six months to recognize that if you go to 10:00 Mass every sunday for your entire life, getting up for it is a hard habit to break.
We were exclusively Baptist, though. You know you're Baptist when...
...you're 6 years old and having recurrent nightmares about Jesus and the Devil physically fighting for your soul.
The Lutherans Gave me an OCD (tm) at Summer Camp one year by telling me that if I didn't apologize for a sin (even one that was thought, but not voiced) and say "Go Away Satan in the Name of Jesus" each time, I would go to hell.
I never went back to that camp, but the OCD stayed with me for years until I decided that it couldn't possibly be true. About 5 minutes later I started my slow decline from saintliness into godlessness by one little word, said in the living room with no one around to hear,
"shit"
I think I was 12.
As in:
<strong>I hate Mrs Andrews, she's such a </strong><i>shit</i><strong>. And her </strong><i>boobs</i> <strong>are a weird shape.</strong>
I can't even tell you how mortified I was when my mother found the Robyn Hitchcock mix tape I'd made for myself and titled "Robyn Hitchpenis".
I was way torn about the "am I going to hell?" thing largely because I inadvertently said oh my god or Jesus a lot which was a big no no in those circles.
then I moved from Lewisville Texas (outside of Dallas / Fort Worth - FW being the hometown of Ornette Coleman btw)to Merrimack, New Hampshire where I kept a mostly Unitarian crowd. I retained all of my curiosity from my earlier southern days, but I think I left most of the religious guilt and hand wringing over heaven and hell in Texas.
Ed has a picture of me in Iceland's Blue Lagoon onto which he's photoshopped the word STEAMIN'! I am convinced that my father will think we're bad people if he sees it.
Total protestant OCD.