On A Friday, pt. 1

Radiohead were the first band I loved.

Or at least, the first band I loved obsessively. Certainly the first band I loved whose music I sought out myself.

I had kind of a weird musical upbringing, in that for most of my childhood and early teen years, I just wasn’t that interested in music. I mean, I liked it, but I couldn’t imagine sitting in my room alone listening to something, and when I was in the car with my mom (where most of my early music listening happened), we listened generally to what she chose-namely older r & b (lots of Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin), adult contemporary pop (again usually with some r & b lite attributes, like Jon Secada or something), and for some reason, British synth-pop superstars Erasure. We also listened a lot to Electronic, a mostly forgotten synth-pop collaboration between Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr, which I dug a lot (it remains worth a listen), though at the time I had no idea of its two principles’ significance.

Furthermore, I didn’t have any older siblings to pass things on to me, though I do remember being in the car once with my cousins Desna and Max when they put on the Gin Blossoms’ (still great) “Hey Jealousy” and being kind of blown away by the sheer rebellious audacity of a singer talking happily about being chased by the cops.

Anyway, back then, I also wasn’t the type of kid to listen to much music socially, mostly because I was a weird, introverted only-child who was mostly content to spend most of the time alone (though not unhappy). That combined with the fact that my mom had an odd no-MTV policy made it so that listening to whatever was popular at the time never really entered my world.

I mean, I did sneak MTV sometimes, and I was at least somewhat aware of what was popular and cool (I did have friends, if I didn’t usually do much with them outside of school). I remember really liking Oasis, and thinking Bush’s “Glycerine” was great, and I liked Blues Traveler and Live a lot too. But it wasn’t until I was about fifteen, and facing soon driving myself around and having that independence that the notion of choosing my own soundtrack for my life became a possibility.

By that time, I was watching MTV much more, and could easily have gotten into what was popular then (what was popular in 1997-98? Had nu-metal begun its rise to prominence?). But I was already something of a young elitist, determined to find music that struck me as different than most of the stuff I was seeing on MTV. This led me to . . . Dave Matthews (come on, what other band on MTV back then had a violinist and saxophonist? Also, to be fair to myself, none of my friends at the time were listening to Dave Matthews, at least as far as I knew. Poor naïve Josh thought Dave Matthews was such a rarefied choice that upon seeing a Dave Matthews sticker on the car of a major crush, he believed it was a sure sign of a future connection!)

Of course, actually listening to the Dave Matthews CD I bought (Before These Crowded Streets) was luckily enough to push me away from that scene, and even better, my dedication to finding things that were different led me other weirder and more interesting stuff, like Portishead and Pulp. And Radiohead.

At the time what drew me to Radiohead, I guess, was the videos. Back then, the videos for "Paranoid Android" and "Karma Police" were getting semi-regular rotation, and I liked them immediately. "Karma Police" remains one of the greatest music videos ever shot, I think, and the videos for "Just" and "Street Spirit" are classics as well (I liked it at the time, but I haven't seen "Paranoid Android" in years, though I suspect it might not have aged as well).

Anyway, I got Ok Computer, and loved it, and pretty soon after I picked up The Bends. (I actually never got around to buying Pablo Honey--I think I convinced myself that it was something juvenile and unnecessary). And suddenly I, whose previous strongest musical likes were hitched to the Sega CD classic Lunar, had a favorite band. I would take long drives on weekends just to listen to the albums. I was drawn online, and started looking for reviews and media about Radiohead, wanting to find out more and more, wanting to figure out what it all meant. I watched footage of the band on TV, playing at outdoor festivals in England, thrilled as all hell that the live version of "Creep" replaced the mild adjective "very" with the much more rockin' "fuckin'." I developed an odd obsession with Ed (which remains), worrying that he didn't get enough to do. I watched the misery inducing / joy snuffing / sunshine murdering tour documentary Meeting People Is Easy and convinced myself it was good. I wore a t-shirt that said "We hope that you choke" on it to school, and was mildly rebuffed by a history teacher.

I felt cooler listening to Radiohead-not only was this loud, angry, and rebellious music (well sometimes--"My Iron Lung" got a lot of play), but it was smarter and more interesting and dare I say it, more profound than all the nu-metal everybody was listening too. Thom Yorke didn't just yell about his pain like, I don't know, Jonathan Davis or something, he spat out lyrics about chemical reactions and polyeurethane! The band members weren't a bunch of bald, tattooed mooks, but thin, artsy looking dudes, dudes who looked cool in a very particular way, like I wanted look.

And most importantly, for the most part I was the only one listening to Radiohead, at least amongst my own group of friends. I knew some older kids were into it, and there were a few guys in my class who were into Radiohead and Limp Bizkit (they claimed to appreciate Wes Borland's guitar effects), but for the most part, I felt like listening to Radiohead was something that made me stand out, that made me different (of course, later, in college, it became apparent that every Radiohead fan--and there are A LOT at college--felt the exact same way). And what can I say--it added to the appeal.

It wasn't to last forever, of course, my love affair with Radiohead. As much as I loved The Bends and Ok Computer (and the awesome Airbag / How Am I Driving? ep, which I was thrilled to discover at a Borders one fateful day--"A Reminder" remains one of my favorite Radiohead tracks), I needed other stuff to listen to also, and Radiohead actually proved vital in leading me to new things. Sure, I already had Portishead, Pulp, and Eels from MTV and MTV2, but it was on some Radiohead fansite that somebody compared Blur's just released 13 (an underrated, excellent album) to Ok Computer. So I picked it up, and that opened up a world of Britpop greatness (Oasis, The Verve, Manic Street Preachers, Mansun, to a much much lesser extent, Travis). Then, a little later, after I'd moved to North Carolina and started eleventh grade, I kept reading about this band Pavement, whose latest album was produced by Nigel Godrich (and even featured Jonny Greenwood on harmonica!). So I checked that out, and suddenly found myself an indie rock fan. (This went down about a week before Pavement played in Raleigh, on what would be their last tour. If I had just found that album a tiny bit earlier!)

Pretty soon, Pavement supplanted Radiohead in my mind as my favorite band. I was as pysched as everybody when Kid A came out in 2000, but it didn't occupy nearly as much time in my CD player as those earlier albums (though I do think that Kid A is the band's greatest achievement). And then when the weak and generally pretty boring Amnesiac came out a few months later, my former favorite band was suddenly fallible. Old news even.

I continued to love Radiohead as I went to college. I even had a Bends era poster on my freshman year dorm room wall, though this was partially in response to my roomate's Boys' Gospel Choir poster (don't ask). But at a time when lots of my peers were discovering Radiohead for the first time, for me the magic was already gone. Was that in part because by then lots of people, lots of my peers even, were Radiohead fans? Yes, maybe, I don't know.

I still bought and liked the ridiculously titled Hail to the Thief. And I was online with everybody else last year downloading In Rainbows (I paid five dollars!), which I liked, though not as much as lots of other folks. And I'll probably get whatever the band puts out in the future. And when a Radiohead song comes up on my Ipod, I usually enjoy it (unless it's "Knives Out"-as I cleverly thought to myself at the time, its Radiohead aping The Smiths, and coming up with something that misses everything that's good about either), even if the glass-breaking guitar solo in "Climbing up the Walls" doesn't blow my mind like it once did. The fact remains that my Radiohead fandom was pretty instrumental in making me the music obsessive that I am today, which is a pretty big part of who I am today. So that's worth something, I think.

coming soon-the second part of this Radioheaderific postathon, in which I discuss seeing Radiohead live in a context as far removed from my original experience with the band as possible!