I Try To Broaden Horizons

 My parents are not big popular music people so we had little musical carry over from their generation. What my mom was into when she was in high school was some hard and dark rock like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. That was not really my cup of tea and I got into ABBA, Cindy Lauper, Madonna, Depeche Mode and Bon Jovi because my sister and the aunt who lived with us were into that. The first tape I bought myself was Robert Palmer because I loved the song “Simply Irresistible”. When I got into junior high Rob came and lived with us and turned me onto AC/DC, Guns'n'Roses, and Metallica. After that I got into grunge like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I also started to like some darker industrial stuff like Nine Inch Nails which was the first CD I ever bought. By my senior year a friend of mine had opened my ear holes up to the soulful folk styling of Bob Dylan and I bought the greatest hits CD and was hooked. It is a fact of life that if you like Bob Dylan you will find that you are in a world where most people know little of him except fro songs of his that were covered by mainstream artists and on the other hand super fans who have every single song that was ever recorded by Dylan in the last 50 years. There is very little middle ground. By the time I was doing the announcements I was listening exclusively to Pink Floyd, Ween, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan not a play list that was huge on the top forty at the time. I would try and get some of my favorite music on the air and it was not going over well. Most people were telling me it sucked or would give it the tepid 'its okay'. I was frustrated that the plebeians couldn't hear the talent I heard and because country music was the mainstay at our school I decided to make a little joke about it that I stole from from Bob Newhart: “I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.”

I did not give him credit and there were lots of hillbillies who didn't get the joke because they were hillbillies. I was asked for two days what that was supposed to mean and I would not explain it any further. I would just riff on the joke by keeping my answers obtuse and esoteric and have myself a little private joke at their expense. I stopped playing songs I liked for the announcement intros and outros but I still stand by my belief that the opening riff of 'Kashmir' is one of the best lead ins possible in the best of all possible worlds. Lay your earballs on this sweet lick and then look into your soul and tell me with a strait face that the part of you that likes other people and believes the world is a good place didn't get just get a little bigger and a little sunnier.