{"id":2249,"date":"2012-09-28T08:36:36","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T12:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.westwoodvalley.com\/?p=2249"},"modified":"2012-09-28T08:36:36","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T12:36:36","slug":"my-musical-evolution-part-278-roach-days-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wrharrison.com\/musicalevolution\/2012\/09\/28\/my-musical-evolution-part-278-roach-days-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"My Musical Evolution – Part 278 Roach Days Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow, as I write this, we are just a couple of days away from the end of September. I have been doing this Musical Evolution<\/em> project for nearly nine full months. The post number tells me that I’m statistically ahead of one post per day. Here again I find myself wondering if I should have spent some more time trying to map everything out a little better before I started. Would it have been more comprehensive? More entertaining? Easier to follow?<\/p>\n

Of course the other side of that equation is less scientific and more emotional. Since a large component of this project deals with influence and importance<\/em> it only makes sense that the stuff that comes to mind when I sit down to write the next piece must be the most significant to me.<\/p>\n

I’m feeling the urge to recap a little bit here. Most likely this is because the vinyl album era has just ended and that is a pretty significant change, technologically.\u00a0 So far, the major musical influences are fairly typical, parents, siblings, peers, radio, magazines, MTV.\u00a0 I find it fascinating how those same components influence just about everybody but the subtle changes in the composition can have such a dramatic impact. Siblings, for example. In my case, my siblings are all younger. Sure they had some influence but is was a much different kind of influence compared to my friend Scott who is the youngest of four. By the time he was in high school he had older borthers-in-law to add to the influence. His musical evolution was artificially mature because he was introduced to the stuff that people 10 years older were listening to.<\/p>\n

As for the music itself, as you’ve seen, the core is pop music. By that I mean stuff traditionally found on the radio and MTV. Sure there were some sides streets into Heavy Metal, Showtunes, Soiundtracks, and progressive album oriented rock. Looking back from this point, I think that Agony<\/em> by Ilhan Mimaroglu <\/em> would be the most dramatically off the beaten path piece of music that I owned. My Half-Speed Master recording of Walter Carlos’ Switched On Bach <\/em>would probably be the most unexpected record in my collection.<\/p>\n

With just three months to go, and being not even half way through my life, I wonder if one year is long enough to complete this project.\u00a0 I guess though that my most prolific years of collecting music were up to this point. I would amass hundreds of Compact Discs in the coming decade but a large part of them were replacing the old vinyls . This kind of poses a time line problem of sorts.\u00a0 How do I handle the rediscovery<\/em> of some those old albums as I get them on Compact Disc.<\/p>\n

Another problem is what to do about the ambient <\/em>stuff? By ambient, I mean how should I present the music that was all around me in clubs, on the radio and on MTV that I never felt compelled to buy at the time but still feel somewhat attached to. Really, there were plenty of songs that when I hear them remind me of those glory days at The Roach Motel.<\/em>\u00a0 Did they contribute in some way to my musical evolution? I think that they had to hold some influence or I wouldn’t be remembering them almost 30 years later.<\/p>\n

Here are a few of what I’m talking about<\/p>\n

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Dream Academy – Life In A Northern Town<\/em>
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