Well, tonight something very scary happened to me. It’s not earth-shaking nor is it something that just happened. I guess I have known about it for a while but kinda dismissed it until tonight. Tonight…. the song “Fire & Rain,” came on by James Taylor and I was grooving to it.
There, I said it. Ugh. Then Fleetwood Mac came on with “Go your own way.” I was in heaven. Then it dawned on me. The lyrics from Harry Chapin’s hit song and go like this, “My boy, he’d grown up just like me.” Oh my God, I am doing what I swore I wouldn’t do. I am grooving to old music that was made when I was either too young to appreciate or not even born. What’s next, I am going to utter those awful words, “music today sucks.” The Horror. The horror (okay, quoting books from well before I was born isn’t bad. That’s cool.)
But it is kinda scary. I remember when I was a plucky lad. I didn’t get why people were listening to the old music. Even when I was in college and jamming the Grateful Dead (who were still around then), I was always up on new music. Hell, I was a disc jockey back in the day. Loved it. Used to joke I had the biggest damn stereo on campus. While I appreciated the older stuff and always made time for Jim Croce, the Beatles or the Four Tops, I was always there with the new stuff first and foremost. Be it Husker Du, the ‘Mats, Depeche Mode or Midnight Oil, I was on top of it. I used to joke that if I put half the time into classes as I did music, I would be on the dean’s list.
Then, I got older, out of college and it was too hard to keep up with the new stuff. Radio changed, and I think it’s the consensus and not just from an old fart that well, it sucks now. I don’t have an iPod, don’t do iTunes or other downloads so what do you do for new music. So, I just let it go and my library has dwindled as space has caused me to sell more and more of my LPs, 8-tracks and cassettes, not to mention CDs. Now, I am so out of the loop that I can honestly say I turn on the radio or MTV for the 15 minutes it plays music, and can honestly say I don’t get it. That’s what was so scary. I was driving home, flipping around and there was all this stuff I just didn’t know, then James Taylor comes on with his “I’ve seen lonely times when I could find a friend/But I always thought I see you again.”
It was wonderful. Truly it was like an old friend came back and said, hey dude, you can still rock in America (Night Ranger, ugh. It’s getting worse). And James Taylor isn’t even rock. Well, screw it. I am going to embrace my “Old School” ways and put in some of the Dead Milkmen because I “dance to anything by the Smiths.” 
