Rethinking the music of our youth

I have this theory. When we first start developing musical taste that is separate from our parents', we're not very good at it. That's an understatement; we sucked at it. This explains all sorts of things from our youth including Debbie Boone and KISS. The gist of my theory is this — 75 percent to 80 percent of what we listened to before high school was crap.

I'm not proud of it, but I owned 45s of "It Never Rains in Southern California," "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" and that Cher song about Native Americans. If you tell anybody about that, I'll deny it. But it's true, unfortunately. I also owned "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" by Jim Croce and "Will It Go ’Round in Circles" by Billy Preston, but I suspect the blind squirrel axiom was at work there. It's not just our generation either. My son, who knew the words to all five verses of "The Weight" when he was 5, owned CDs by NSYNC and Backstreet Boys when he was in middle school.

Let me say here that crap is, of course, in the eye of the beholder (or something like that). My point is that our musical tastes change as we mature, and the lists of what we liked at 12, 17, 25 and 40 are very different. Or at least they should be.

By the time we get to high school it's about a 50/50 good stuff-to-crap ratio. It might be higher if you had an older sibling to introduce you to better stuff. I remember the first time I heard Led Zeppelin; I was at my friend John Trent's house and it was his older sister, Mary's album. This 50/50 split explains why both Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and Captain and Tennille's "Do That To Me One More Time" were each top 10 songs of 1980.

I'm not saying we all loved both those songs, but there was a lot of crap out there that year and somebody was listening to it.

By college, the middle school ratio has reversed itself. We're now looking at 75 to 80 percent good music and only 20 to 25 percent crap. This is where most of us started listening to entire albums instead of just singles. This is where I discovered Talking Heads, The Clash, Elvis Costello and even Prince. But I also owned a copy of something called Like Gangbusters by JoBoxers. In fact, I still own it. It's in a box in the basement. I blame the Columbia House Record Club for that — 15 albums for a penny!?! I would join, buy the minumum number of albums as fast as I could afford to, quit and join again. I must have done that half a dozen times. Anyway, nobody's perfect.

That 80/20 ratio holds pretty well through your 20s. It gets even better in your 30s and by 40 you can be pretty sure that what you like then, you're going to like for the rest of your life. The problem is, at least for some of us, this seems to have happened a lot earlier and/or we think we'll never find music as good as it was in our 20s. This explains the Journey-Styx-REO Speedwagon reunion tour that's been going on in one form or another since 1992. I'll stop short of calling this music crap, but it was only OK the first time around. There's better stuff out there. I don't understand the nostalgia for these bands. Def Leppard and Foreigner just played here in Columbus, Ohio. And people my age were there in droves.

I guess I don't begrudge people their enjoyment of these bands.

I just wish they'd look forward as much as they look back.

With that in mind, I'm going ironically do a little looking backward — specifically at some bands some of us turned our noses up at when we were younger. Just like a lot of what we liked was crap, a lot of what we thought was crap, or at least not worthy of our attention, was actually very good. There was a lot of really good music that some of us dismissed because we weren't quite ready for it. The best example of this is Steely Dan. A lot of people dismissed Donald Fagen and Walter Becker's music as Jazz-infused soft rock. Amongst Zeppelin and The Who it kind of was. But that doesn't mean it wasn't also very good. Now that we're old enough to enjoy it, let's go back and try again.

There's a reason that Aja is high on most lists of the best albums of all time. Great musicianship and thoughtful lyrics, but a lot of us weren't that inspired at the time. We were wrapped up in things we could call heavy. It sounded like something our parents would like. Well guess what, now we are our parents. If your parents were anything like mine (only 20 years older that me), they did like it. And now we should too.​ While you're going back to look at old Steely Dan albums, check out solo efforts by both Fagen (The Nightfly) and Becker (11 Tracks of Whack). Both are very good. But Steely Dan was not alone.

Well, now you step inside but you don't see too many faces Coming in out of rain to hear the jazz go down ...

And a crowd of young boys, they're fooling around in the corner Drunk and dressed in their best brown baggies and their platform soles They don't give a damn about any trumpet playing band

— "Sultans of Swing" Dire Straits

Back then, we used to say "Jazz" like it was a bad word. Most of us aren't the boys on the corner anymore. Dire Straits didn't have quite the "Jazz" stigma that Steely Dan had for a lot of people. It's not really jazzy at all. But it is different. Mark Knopfler play guitar with almost no distortion. You can tell a Mark Knopfler guitar solo from the first couple of notes. It's true that, for about a year they were the biggest band in the world, but Dire Straits is not Led Zeppelin. It's important to note that Brothers in​​ Arms was Dire Straits sixth album, not its first. As good as "Sultans of Swing" is, I think this is Dire Straits' best song. "Telegraph Road" has been called the thinking man's "Free Bird." It is equally epic.

I remember listening to "Sutlans of Swing" on the radio in Reno, Nev., where I grew up. I also remember thinking about how different it sounded. I liked it, but I was not ready to give up on the Rush and AC/DC that dominated my early high school years. When I got to college that changed. Even before MTV, there was a nightly one-hour music video show at 11 p.m. on the public access station in Denver. We gathered around the TV in the dorm lobby and watched almost every night. Two videos, "Skateaway" and "Romeo & Juliet," from Dire Straits third album, Making Movies, were in heavy rotation. I went out and bought all three albums early in my freshman year. "Telegraph Road" is on Love Over Gold, the fourth album. I think that's where my musical taste grew up, or at least started to.

A third artist deserving of another look is Bruce Hornsby. Along with The Range, Hornsby had a couple of hits on his first album, The Way It Is, in 1986. He's been making music ever since. Hornsby and his newer band The Noisemakers have done albums, he's made solo albums and worked with everybody from Ricky Skaggs to The Grateful Dead. Hornsby is a singer and keyboardist known for the spontaneity and creativity of his live performances. He draws frequently from Classical, Jazz, Bluegrass, Folk, Motown, Gospel, Rock, Blues, and Jam band traditions with his songwriting and the seamless improvisations. Those last couple of sentences seem like a mouthful, but watch the video below and you'll see.