distortions and misunderstandings about music that your parents passed onto you as a child

today on the 'College Rock Goes Pop' thread, i posted:

i remember at the height of Cosmic Thing's success my dad said something to me about how they had changed their sound and lost their way creatively after the death of one of their founding songwriters, and so for a while i had this weird idea that the B-52s were a much more 'serious' band before that

― gargle on my nuts (some dude), Thursday, May 26, 2011 12:38 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

that also got me thinking about how my dad used to show me his copy of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and explain how it, not Rumours, was one of the biggest blockbuster albums ever, which has seemed funnier and funnier to me over time.

so this thread is mainly about those kinds of weird factual errors or misrepresentations that your parents (or older siblings or whoever, really) told you about music growing up -- not like "lol my parents were so ROCKIST" making fun of their opinions about music kinda shit.

I remember my mom telling me that John wrote When I'm 64 because he so wanted to grow old with Yoko

My mum (or dad) told me that the Beatles wrote every one of their songs on sheet music/notation before recording it, so I should be jolly glad to learn.

Of course, years later I discovered that they never even learned how.

My dad told me that the "robot" voice chorus on Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" was in fact Stevie Wonder playing a synth (he called it "organ") in a way only he was capable of, to simulate human singing.

He also told me that pretty much all the sounds used during the '80s (including guitars, drum, bass) were actually synths. He wasn't that far off, now that I think of it.

I was singing The Who's "Squeezebox" once around my dad & he explained I shouldn't sing it because it was unspeakably dirty. I plied him for details and he didn't want to share but he pulled me to the side of the room and whispered, "Momma's got a squeezebox she wears on her chest, and when her daddy comes home, he never gets no rest?" followed by a very grave glare. I still didn't understand why this was too vulgar to sing around the house and I tried really hard to figure out why. I think I overthought it because all I could come up with was an image of a woman with some Cronenbergian vulva between her breasts. I should note I was like 17 when this happened.

This is what happens when you forget Titus 1:15 around one of your kids.

Abbott's parents:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9WivuyE_PU

Good thread idea.

My mom told me that "Gimme Shelter" was about Charles Manson (confusing it with "Helter Skelter," sort of, I guess?) and even now when I hear the chorus, I think of Manson.

My uncle (who got me into Neil Young) had me believing that Time Fades Away was so impossibly rare that even if you actually found a copy, it'd cost you thousands. I got it for him for Christmas one year (cost about ten bucks) and he was so ecstatic I thought he was gonna cry.

Ha! If only Christmas were so easy every year.

My dad went to see VU in Cleveland because he heard they were really good, but he was outraged when he found out that they were not a folk group or anything like Simon and Garfunkel, so he walked out. Ever since then, he has always brought them up as a band that was not anywhere as good as people claimed, so in my house Velvet Underground was basically the epitome of a band that just plain SUCKED.

Ha! Yeah, my parents happily bought me albums by Slayer, Motley Crue and Judas Priest, but for some reason, they told me they 'didn't like me listening to Def Leppard.' This was around the time of Hysteria. Maybe they just thought Def Leppard sucked.

My mother also said that the Sex Pistols were verboten (these rules were never actually enforced).

My mom's explanation of Alice Cooper (I really liked "School's Out" when I was probably 5 or 6) wasn't very nuanced, that I remember. I think she must have seen a televised concert, took it completely seriously, and freaked out. I don't remember the whole thing, but I recall her telling me in a very pained way that at some point he was whipping his backup singers, which was apparently the worst thing in the world. Wish I could find the video of whatever it was she saw...

this is not really my dad's fault, but he told me when i was a kid that he had seen iron butterfly a couple of times, and i mixed them up with iron maiden. so for a while i went around thinking my dad was this kind of intense metalhead when he was younger. (he most definitely was not).

My parents were unimpressed with the MC5, saying they were "just loud."

On the other hand, my dad said that seeing Charles Mingus at the Five Spot in 1963 was "one of the greatest experiences of my life," so that about balances it out.

Thanks to my mother, I spent part of my youth believing that Rosedale (as in, "Going down to Rosedale with my rider by my side") was Rosedale Beach on the Indian River, a few miles east of Millsboro, Delaware, USA.

When my father listened to Jimmy Buffet or Huey Lewis and the News he would get this deeply satisfied look on his face, nod sagely and say, "This guy's got it all figured out." I thus believed for a brief period that Jimmy and Huey possessed some transcendent knowledge of the universe that I could not understand until I was older or more worthy.

Oh and there were lots of arbitrarily chosen metal bands that my aunt led me to believe were straight up evil, so like Judas Priest was fine, but Black Sabbath was To Be Avoided. Even stranger, Dio was fine but Dokken c. Tooth and Nail was full of Satan.

Not sure my parents would even have heard of him, but after reading a mention of Sun Ra I asked my parents what an Arkestra was and they told me it was the Swedish spelling (the internet now tells me it isn't), so for many years I was firmly convinced Sun Ra was Swedish

tbf, this seemed as enticingly alien to me as a kid as Saturn did anyway

"don't let your mum catch you listening to this" - pills n thrills n bellyaches, aged 13
"good, now your mum's out we can listen to this!" - white light white heat, a couple of days later

[i]When my father listened to Jimmy Buffet or Huey Lewis and the News he would get this deeply satisfied look on his face, nod sagely and say, "This guy's got it all figured out."[i]

HAHAHA... I love this. I distinctly remember my dad acting all goofy when I was really young and singing the line "I'm a homo sapien too" over and over as he bopped around the kitchen. I didn't remember the song the line was from at the time, so I remember inventing some sort of really major-key cod-reggae backing track in my head (this had to do with the inappropriately jaunty way he intoned it, I think). Imagine my shock when I picked up the Pete Shelley record, oh, 17 years later!

Rockism.

not sure if this fits but i put the violent femmes in the tapedeck on the ride to school one morning and my dad said "this is good, what's the band called?" and when i told him he said that was terrible, they should be more responsible about what they call themselves, violence towards women is never acceptable and i was like DAD you're missing the point, but it's not as if i had any other "explanation" of their name so we just stewed there in the parking lot of the school, unable to bring the conversation to a close but me unwilling to get out of the car.

Fuck, that's what happens when you try to be funny without reading the opening post properly! :(

For real though, the distortions I can remember were mostly around the importance of a series of prog rock bands that made up my dad's record collection that were all I was listening to apart from old pop hits radio stations - like without any kind of outside context it took a long time to realise that Pink Floyd and Barclay James Harvest (neither of whom were on the radio) didn't really have an equal cultural impact.

My dad was convinced Uriah Heep (which he liked) and Iron Maiden (which I liked) were the same band, even claiming that the cover of Heep's Very 'eavy very 'umble contained a picture of Eddie. But dad, I muttered, none of the band members match; but he wouldn't have any of it.

My dad went to see VU in Cleveland because he heard they were really good, but he was outraged when he found out that they were not a folk group or anything like Simon and Garfunkel, so he walked out. Ever since then, he has always brought them up as a band that was not anywhere as good as people claimed, so in my house Velvet Underground was basically the epitome of a band that just plain SUCKED.

― Garyln (La Lechera), Thursday, May 26, 2011 11:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I thought this was supposed to be about distortions your parents passed on to you. Your father sounds very wise here.

I still think it's funny that he was expecting them to sound like the Kingston Trio. They probably did pretty much suck, though, that's true.