The lovely Lois Lane [click here for her version] tagged me with this meme, which was originally created by Kyra, as best as I can tell [invite-only, so no link].  She wrote:

The Theme:
I’ve often felt that my life has a soundtrack. Don’t we all have one? There are songs that remind me of different times of my life, different places and different things. And of course, since so many songs are about love, romance and breaking up, it is inevitable that our life soundtrack includes songs that remind us of our past relationships.

The Rules:
Write a post about the soundtrack of your life. Please include somewhere in the body of the meme “This was started by Kyra (last refuge of the lonely housewife)”… I want to google to see how far and wide this meme travels.

The focus is intended to be on past relationships, but it’s your soundtrack. You write it the way you want it. You can embed videos or link to videos or just list the songs. (I’m not that big of a control freak). I’m going to put links in since I have so many.

Include as many songs as fit your soundtrack. I’m going in chronological order, somewhat.  At the end of your post, please tag others if you like.

Since Veronica is the only woman I’ve truly loved, following Kyra’s original intent is a little difficult.  Remember, Veronica and I met when I was 20 and she was 18!  Instead, I’m going to select songs that I think of when I think back to different times in my life and treat this as an autobiographical trip down memory lane.

[Any links on song names take you to YouTube videos of the songs.]

I know that Lois didn’t know this about me when she tagged me, but music has always been a big part of my life.  My mother has her associate’s degree in music theory and used to give voice and piano lessons in our home when I was a kid.  In fact, that piano was bought by my grandmother when my mother was a teenager, and now that same piano is my sisters.

I first started to listen to radio and popular music when I was in about 7th grade or so, which would be the 1982-83 school year.  Remember “Gloria” by Laura Branigan or “Allentown” by Billy Joel?  I can remember hearing those songs come on the radio in my room at home and can still picture that room, this mish-mash of toys that a boy would have mixed with the belongings of a pubescent teen.

That summer the family moved one town over.  My grandmother had died earlier in the year and grandpa was not physically able to care for himself, so we were moving to a larger home and he would move in with us.  Around this time I had a growing circle of friends, due in part to 4 or 5 elementary schools feeding into a single junior high school.  My new friend Gabe was a huge Police fan and their Synchronicity album came out around this time.  This is one of those albums that I had forgotten about for a while, listened to in its entirety not long ago and realized that I had forgotten how fantastic the entire album is.

Around 9th grade or so I started listening to more hard rock/heavy metal music.  Songs like Screaming for Vengeance and Run to the Hills were great outlets for teenage angst.  Or, at least what I thought was teenage angst.  I was actually a pretty happy and well adjusted kid.  In 10th grade I went to my first concert and was hooked on live music.  Ronnie James Dio, Nassau Coliseum, spring of 1985.  Never heard of him?  He was briefly the singer of Black Sabbath, replacing Ozzy Ozbourne when he left the group.  True story- remember my Fantasy post?  The sportscaster who was calling the football game while I was fucking Veronica in the radio station record library was Dio’s illegitimate son!  Around this time, Metallica’s epic Master of Puppets came out and my parents’ divorce was finalized.  Dad moved out of the house, leaving me as ‘man’ of the house.  I can remember mowing the lawn, Sony Walkman hooked to my belt and “Battery” thumping in my head.  I also saw Judas Priest in concert around this time, I think just before seeing Metallica for the first time, which was also the last time they were ever the opening act for someone else.  Metallica had been toiling for a few years, looking for their big break, and then managed to sign on to open on tour for Ozzy at the height of his success with “Bark at the Moon”.  To this day, that is probably the single best show I ever went to, aside from the 4 other times I’ve seen Metallica since then!

Senior year of high school and Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet” and Whitesnake were huge.  Who can forget Tawny Kitean writhing around on the hood of a Jaguar in the “Here I Go Again” video?  Guns ‘N Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” came out just before my senior year of HS and it’s pains me to realize that these albums are now older that todays’s college age kids.  Shit, I’m getting old….

My college years saw a broadening of my musical horizons.  My freshmen year I lived in a dorm that was right next to the dining hall that also housed the campus radio station and 2 guys on my floor were disc jockeys there.  I became friends with Bill and Scott and occasionally hung out with them in the studio during their shows, talking music and picking songs to play.  It was only a 250 Watt non-commercial college station, but it was fun.  The DJ schedule was full for the year, but I auditioned and got my name on the alternate list for the spring semester.  Basically, alternates were on-call for whenever a regularly scheduled DJ couldn’t cover their shift.  Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever and The Traveling Wilbury’s Volume I both stand out around this time, as does a ton of indie music and lesser known artists.  I wish I still had a cassette deck, I would dust off one of my old radio shows that I taped for reminders!  Joy Division, The Violent Femmes (good lord, my roommate freshman year loved “Blister in the Sun”!), Joe Satriani, Marillion, Bela Fleck, The Butthole Surfers, Jesus Jones, Queensryche (lame live show…), and many others I can’t even remember now.  And I saw a number of live shows- Bob Dylan at Ithaca College, The Rolling Stones at Syracuse University’s Carrier Dome with Living Color opening, Jimmy Paige with Mason Ruffner in the Onondaga County War Memorial in Syracuse, Metallica for the 2nd and 3rd times, The Kinks on a college tour…

My junior year in college, I was inexplicably elected Station Manager of the college radio station [I was a phys ed major who goofed around at the station for fun. what the fuck where the other DJs thinking?…] and met Veronica barely a month into that school year.  I can remember the day Stevie Ray Vaughn died in a helicopter crash.  I was at the station and my chief announcer [the one responsible for coordinating all of the alternate DJs] came into my office, practically in tears.  The Vaughn Brothers album had just come out, which he had recorded with his brother Jimmy, who was the guitarist for The Fabulous Thunderbirds.  I love SRVs acoustic version of Pride and Joy.

One year after I graduated Veronica and I got married.  This raised the dilemma of what to pick for our wedding song.  She and I have very divergent tastes in music- you’ll see, I’m gonna tag her with this meme.  Be prepared for lots of musical theater and chick-rock references.  I think the only artists we really have in common are Billy Joel, INXS, U2, and Paul Simon!  So anyway, it’s no secret that I can’t really dance well at all, so the first criterion was the song had to be short.  Romantic, I know!  We settle on “Color my world” by Chicago.  I had forgotten and had to ask her what song it was as I was writing this.  “Honey, what was our wedding song?”  *ducking as she throws the nearest deadly object…*
Around this time my musical evolution crashed.  We moved to NH, got jobs, and the only decent radio stations in the Portsmouth area were entirely predictable classic rock stations with a smattering of alternative artists thrown in.  We did manage to see one concert in 4 years there- Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with Jewel as the opening act.  What a weird combo- Neil Young in full-on Rust Never Sleeps ear-drum damaging glory coupled with someone who yodeled during her set!  Other than that, I can’t think of anything remarkable about that era, except for memories of first hearing some grunge.  I just remembered- I was enlisted in the Army at the time and attending Primary Leadership Development Course at Ft. Campbell, KY in the summer of 1999 and can remember one of my platoon-mates singing the lyrics to Limp Bizkets “Nookie”. All. The. Damn. Time.

The turning of the millennium corresponded to a re-awaking of sorts for me, musically.  I hadn’t seen Metallica since 1992 and was excited to see them again.  Even better, they were doing a huge football stadium festival-type tour and had Kid Rock, Korn, Powerman 5000 and System of a Down all on the bill, for a 7-8 hr long show!  Three years later they did it again, this time with Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, The Deftones and Mudvayne.  And Veronica, not the least bit interested in any of the bands, was cool with me taking the babysitter [and her lovely DDs..] to the show with me!

The most recent show I saw was Godsmack at Penn State University.  I knew a few of their songs and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see when the arena they would be playing was literally 1 mile from my house!  The opening act was entirely forgetable, but they put on a fantastic show.  Now that I think about it, that was 2 1/2 years ago!

I’ve always thought that my parents musical tastes froze at some point in time, like before I was born!  I hope that my musical tastes continue to evolve, much like I hope to continue evolving as a person.  In the last year, I’ve added a number of artists I’d never heard of before to my iTunes collection, including a few *gasp* country artists [thanks to M and Jennybean for suggestions some time ago!].  Hopefully some day DB and PP won’t think I’m the lame dad with antiquated musical tastes…

As Lois Lane originally suggested to me, I’m going to tag Veronica with this meme.  Hopefully she won’t be as lame as me and won’t take a month to get it done!