Musical memories of my father

My father was the record buyer in our family.  The shelves in our family room were stocked full of 50's and 60's rock and soul records.  Along with many people from his generation, The Beatles and Motown records were his favourites, but there's a good reason those records have stood the test of time.  His love of classic rock ended with the 60's though.  Browsing his collection, one might think that rock ended after Cream and the Woodstock soundtrack.  I felt that void much later on, in high school, when I had to play catch up in getting into Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and countless other rock staples.  In fact, my lack of appreciation, and even contempt, for a lot of 70's rock well into the 21st century, is almost certainly related to the lack of exposure through the records we had at home.   

But we had disco.  A lot of disco.  My father used to teach night classes in law at Ryerson University (then a college), and there were a number of record shops in that area in those days.  He'd teach his class and grab some disco albums or 12" singles while he was in the area.  When I think about my earliest musical memories, most of them involve disco.  Donna Summer.  Sylvester.  The disco lessons my mother would teach in the basement, with my father as her demonstration partner.  

The 80's came along, and my father still had his pulse on what was cool.  Long after most of his friends had stopped following contemporary music, my father was inspired by a new, revolutionary way of enjoying music -- via the music video.  There was no MTV in Canada, and Much Music didn't come on the air until 1984.  My father stayed up late on weekends to watch shows that would air music videos, like City Limits, and his finger was glued to the record button on his VCR.  I think this was his greatest achievement as a music fan.  Long before streaming services and the internet, we had video on demand thanks to my father's many sleep deprived nights. He didn't blindly tape whatever they showed either, he only taped the songs he thought were good.  His taste was impeccable.  I had every great video of the 1980's on the tape shelf in our family room.  Song by song, weekend by weekend, his diligent work added up.  He taped dozens of hours of videos over a period of about six years.  Other families had home videos with family picnics on them.  Ours were starring Duran Duran.  

When my parents split up and my father moved out, he left the records with us.  Once in a while he'd ask about them.  Most of them were technically his, either purchased by him or stuff he had before they were married.  He never made a big point about demanding them back though, possibly because when he moved out, he wanted a clean break from things in his former life.  I effectively inherited those records, because I was the only one who really kept listening to them.

I only attended one concert with my father -- the Stray Cats in 1991.  He wasn't a concert goer, and he wasn't a "round up the family and buy tickets to such and such" kind of person.  He didn't buy tickets to this concert either, they were freebees from the managers of the concert hall next to his office, so he took us. Many of the biggest musical acts from 2010 are still big now.  But in 1991, The Stray Cats might have well have been beamed in from another planet.  The music industry had completely turned over since the 80's, and even the megastars would have trouble adjusting (Prince, Madonna, Bruce, and more).  The Stray Cats were awesome that night though, although it was difficult to admit it then.  That was the first and last free show I ever saw there, I never bothered my dad to ask for free tickets even once.  

From then until the end of his life, my father entered into my musical life only indirectly.  He stopped being an active collector for all intents and purposes.  But he was there when my friends and I used his apartment as a home base before and after Suede's first concert in Toronto, at the nearby Palladium on the Danforth.  I have no idea what he was thinking when we returned from that concert, still buzzing and soaked in sweat, babbling about the tiniest concert details.  I crashed at his apartment countless times after staying out late at a concert or club.  

We were not a musical family.  We didn't grow up singing or playing musical instruments, I learned those things in school when I was older.  If my father thought that music was important he might have pushed us to take an active part in it, but he didn't.  He probably thought we'd absorb what we loved naturally, because that's how it was when he was growing up.  So my father was the biggest musical influence I had when I was a little kid.  His tastes were largely my tastes until I was a teenager.  Whether he intended it or not, I learned so much from him.