By: Jamie Jones
It’s a lazy summer’s night in 1999 and my dad and I all walk out of one of the pubs on the shores of Furzton Lake in Milton Keynes. We’re a stone’s throw away from the Milton Keynes Bowl and the grassy lakeside area has become a makeshift camp site, lined with rows and rows of tents full of metalheads gearing up for the Big Day Out, Metallica’s one off festival. The air is ripe with anticipation, camaraderie and general half-drunk merriness. My dad suddenly realises he’s left his tobacco pouch in the outside seating area back at the bar. He shrugs and says that with this size of a crowd it’s most likely been taken by now. I cheerily insist it’ll still be there and jog back, 16 years old and tipsy on lager and excitement. I find it sitting in the exact spot he left it minutes earlier. I race back and smugly hand it to him, telling him that, “the rock community isn’t like that, Dad. It’s a brotherhood, us against the world. We look after each other…” I babbled on at him for a while, spouting such naïve, idealistic nonsense for a few minutes whilst my dad, veteran of countless festivals a decade and more before I was born, who’d seen the Stones, Zeppelin, Dylan and a whole host of legendary artists I was only vaguely even aware of – my dad looked down at me and smiled.
Growing up as my father’s son was like being Fat Charlie in Neil Gaiman’s book Anansi Boys. Charlie is the son of the African trickster god Anansi, a larger than life figure who’s always the soul of the party. Even where there is no party. It always seemed like everyone knew him, either from having worked with him or through his connection to the Polish Club, the local pub that he gradually turned into the town’s leading music venue – much to the chagrin of the ageing patrons who wanted to spend their evening playing cards without some sweaty dudes blasting out Deep Purple covers at them. I think he’s always been slightly confused at how his son ended up quite so shy by comparison. He often says he never gets embarrassed and judging from the stories he tells you can easily believe him. I sometimes wonder if the embarrassment gene skips a generation in our family.
I’m not sure how much he actually influenced my taste over the years –he’s often been more of an enabler than a dealer. But my earliest memory of music is to dancing around to Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing in the living room of our family home in Barnsley. Shortly after my dad got a copy of their follow up single (Wikipedia tells me this must have been Brothers in Arms). “What’s this?” I asked. “Dire Straits,” he told me. I insisted it wasn’t. No really, it is, he tried to tell me. But I was having none of it. Dire Straits was Money for Nothing – everything else they did was something different that I had no interest in. He shrugged and let me get on with it from then, leaving me to go through my Michael Jackson phase (it was a more innocent time…).
He passed on a second hand stereo when I was old enough to work it so that I could continue my nascent love affair with music via the Sunday top 40 show on the radio. The record button was broken but I’d sit holding it in while a song I liked played, capturing those sparks of magic and discarding them again as soon as I got bored. He gave me a few vinyl singles and albums to play on it as well, mostly ones he no longer played, with a couple of classics slipped in that I guess he hoped I’d listen to and fall in love with. This was something of a mistake. Whilst I remember listening to his copy of Joe Dolce’s seminal classic single Shaddap You Face the only memory of his copy of Blood on the Tracks is of attempting to learn to scratch with it during a short lived gangsta rap phase aged 10.
At that time he didn’t have much time to be ‘into’ music himself. Nor did my mother – working whatever hours you can get to look after 2 kids makes keeping up with musical developments seem somewhat unimportant. We both were into the same stuff briefly when Britpop came around – I was still getting my fix on music via the charts, completely oblivious to the whole concept of ‘underground’ or ‘indie,’ and the likes of Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers seemed like manna from heaven compared to the boyband junk that had started clogging up the top 40. Mostly the house was full of the music he’d picked up over the decades. Some of it seeped in through my skin, moulding my taste through osmosis – despite instinctively disliking most of it at the time (because no one thinks their dad is cool at that age, right?) by the time I hit university the likes of Talking Heads, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty started to sound not only important but strangely comforting, somehow both radical and nostalgic at the same time.
My mum on the other hand was never as big a fan of music; at least not in the crate digging, gig going sense. But from her I learned tolerance. “You’re just like you’re dad,” I’d often hear in my teens. “Tunnel visioned.” Like many kids defining their identity I was often more vocal in what I was against than what I was for – especially as a young dilettante ducking any labels people might have thrown at me. Manufactured pop, laddish indie, bloody dance music – I could tell you what I wasn’t into quicker than I could tell you what I was. But my mum taught me empathy – I might not have liked the latest MOR pop songs they played on the radio but as she happily sung along to it whist making Sunday dinner I started to think about the people who get excited about this stuff, who just have other things to worry about than who’s pushing the boundaries in the realm of doom metal. It’s not that they don’t like music; they just don’t chase it down like a hungry dog. I stopped getting angry about what I didn’t like and started appreciating what I did.
By the time the Big Day Out came around my dad had lost touch with modern music. He may have run a venue but at the time they made their money booking tribute and cover bands with original material a rare and often unwelcome thing. As for me, my cousin had introduced me to the heavier stuff a couple of years earlier – White Zombie and Marilyn Manson being my gateway drugs. As the line-up filled with bands I was desperate to see I asked if we could go. He jumped at the chance to take me to my first ever festival, and it became an event which was something of an awakening for me and a reawakening for him. We took different things away from the day – he went crazy for Creed and followed Mark Tremonti on to Alter Bridge, a band he’s since a bunch of times since. Whereas I was preoccupied with surviving my first mosh pits for Sepultura and Pitchshifter. But we both fell in love with Queens of the Stone Age, who gave me my first taste of that desert baked sound I traced back to Kyuss and out to the countless bands they influenced. And Monster Magnet charmed us both with their OTT cartoonish form of rock n’ roll. From there we went on further live adventures, trekking to Sheffield and Nottingham whenever the right band went touring. And it both kick started the broadening of my horizons and reminded my old man of what he’d fallen in love with all those years ago.
I may not listen to many of the same records as my mum or dad these days – though I’ve just sold my dad on Baroness and I know exactly what songs to put on the jukebox in his local that’ll put a smile on their faces. But the attitudes they fostered in me run deep. My dad sums it up by saying, “music is moods.” Or sometimes, “music is life,” depending on how much snakebite he’s had. But mostly he says, “Keep It Live.” My mum’s health makes it hard for him to get to gigs as often as he’d like but he still makes it out to the Rock n’ Blues Club, now in it’s 20th year, to catch bands whenever he can. And when I’m out in some dive bar watching people make strange and wonderful noises on stage I think of him still keeping it live after all these years and I smile, hoping that I’ll still be as in love with music as he is when I reach his age.
