My Musical Knowledge
I will be the first person to tell you that I don’t know everything about music. But coworkers have called me Music Man (or some variation) for years and a guy who calls my radio show weekly addresses me as the Professor. Here’s something to illustrate the gaps in my knowledge. It’s mildly embarrassing by my standards, which will hopefully make it funny by yours.
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to The Replacements album ‘Let It Be’. There’s a song on it called Black Diamond that has a nice heavy metal kind of feel to it, just a bit dark and ominous – call it ‘mostly cloudy’ – and thought it would tie to a song by another band, etc, etc, a playlist forms in my head. I kick off my show (the 27th) with the song, talked about it a little, and when it was over Leeman, who was hanging out after his show (Headshop), says, “That’s one of my favourite Kiss songs.”
“It’s by Kiss?” I say with complete innocence until I realize the level of dufus-osity I’d stumbled upon. The look on his face was a shocked, “You don’t know that was a Kiss song?! Dude, aren’t you a DJ?” The look on my face was not unlike Charleton Heston finding out what soylent green is. And just to confirm what Leeman said – scratch that – to confirm my own idiocy I popped open the CD liner notes, something I normally study with biblical attention, and see the familiar names from Kiss gracing the songwriting credits. Damn Shaniqua.
Everyday I learn something new, even now, sometimes at my own expense.
My only defense was that I’m truthfully more familiar with Kiss as an icon rather than a band, with the exception of some 80′s stuff. Those were crazy, crazy nights after all. Henry Rollins has a spoken word bit where he talks about everyone knowing the chorus to Detroit Rock City, but few know the verses. Me in a nutshell. I could lie to myself, but it’s true.
It brought back a memory of a letter I wrote to Dave G in Spring 1994 that included a bit about a cool debut album I’d just discovered by a new Irish singer named Sarah McLachlan. I found out in very short order that I was a dumbass because the album in question was her 3rd and she’s from Nova Scotia.