This article is part of a series of blog posts about music and it’s influences on us. In part 1, I talk about how a particular band and even more so their lead singer, contributed to my teenage years and how it’s even affected me as an adult.
The earliest music I can ever remember as a kid was either Gordon Lightfoot or CCR. I do remember tidbits of my mom playing Abba, and even some Roger Whittaker but when I think of music from my earliest of years, Gordon Lightfoot and CCR stand out at the top. To this day, anytime I hear Lightfood on the radio or come up on my iTunes or Spotify, I think of my dad.
Music has always been a huge part of my life. I can remember as a young teenager wanting to buy this set of LPs just because they had the song Jump from Van Halen on it. The first actual album I ever bought, at least as far as I can remember was Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry although it is possible that an Alvin & The Chipmunks LP may have been the first. You can decide which would have been the better purchase.
I went through a pop phase in my junior high years and was always a fan of rock music counting AC/DC among my faves at the time. Def Leppard followed, along with a rush of hair bands like Motley Crue, Poison, and then on to the likes of Metallica. But I never saw myself as someone being dedicated to one form of music over another. This was further amplified by my introduction to a band called Faith No More in 1990.
Sitting in the living room of my late friend J.C.’s home, he popped in a VHS tape to show me a video he had recorded of this weird band on the MTV Music Awards.
As I watched the singer trip, flail, and bob around the stage, I turned to J.C. and made some comment about how that guy was baked out of his mind. Another friend of mine, Chris, who was sitting in another part of the room turned to me and commented how the singer was just weird, and that the band was very anti-drugs and alcohol. As I would learn later on, he was right on the money. The lead singer, Mike Patton, was in fact more interested in a sugar rush high than smoking dope or getting hammered.
At first I found the notion that a “famous” rock band wouldn’t be doing drugs or alcohol to be a bit ridiculous, but after seeing the video, and enjoying the music, I started digging a bit more into who they were and what their music was about. As I peeled back the onion on this oddball band, I was opened to a world that would set the tone for much of my life moving forward.
Me and J.C. took a real liking to Faith No More so we bought the album, their live show VHS tape, and started following any music magazine that printed anything about them. This was before the internet so the only news we ever got was through magazines, newspaper articles, and once in awhile you’d catch something on MuchMusic about a band. Listening to The Real Thing, their first album with this new singer, I found myself enjoying the music but becoming a bit more surprised about how diverse the music seemed to be. The first few songs were rock-ish with Epic being a new stab at the whole “rap-metal” concept, but then along came Surprise! You’re Dead! which felt more like a heavy metal song, and then Edge of the World which could have easily been played in any piano lounge.
This was a band unlike anything I had ever heard before. They weren’t just a rock band. They weren’t just metal. They were a little bit of everything and the more I saw them on TV, and listened to their music, and purchased bootleg LPs from Room 201, our local underground music store, the more I came to realize that these guys ran the gambit when it came to musical genres.
As someone who’s earliest musical beginnings had been so mellow, I’d become a lot more enamoured with heavier music as I got into my high school years, but my interest in other sounds was always still there sitting in the background. I think a lot of the “metalhead” in me came from the fact that many of my friends were into that music so much that I just sort of fell into it. Plus the metal thing was kind of “in” at the time so it kinda fit for me. But Faith No More’s lack of specificity when it came to the music they played really somehow spoke to me as someone who loved different kinds of music. I could listen to one band and hear things that were heavy, songs that were light and almost pop-ish, and songs that just sounded great.
At the same time, I was a teenage kid who was trying to find his place in the world. I was a 16 year old adolescent who somehow was combining the personalities of being a wannabe metalhead with the likes of computer geekdom. Remember, this was the 90s and being into computers, Star Trek, and all things geek were not considered cool. I fell into a group of friends that somehow didn’t seem to fit the bill of any other kind of “clique” as it were. We weren’t the jocks, or nerds, or chess club kids, theatre kids, or glee singers. We just seemed to be this oddball group that needed somewhere to belong and so I found myself a collective I could become an active part of.
But like every teenager, I was trying to find out who I really was and break away from being lumped in with everyone else. My mom and dad had split up years ago, and home life was good as my mom did a great job bringing me up, but I didn’t really have any kind of stable father-figure which made things like figuring out the complexities of adolescence so much more awkward and difficult. So, like many young people, I found solace in music and the artists behind it to help me try and find my inner-self.
Chris had told the story of how the band, particularly the lead singer, were very anti-drugs and alcohol. After reading enough articles and seeing interviews on TV, I learned that he’d taken up a position to abstain from drugs and alcohol simply because most people chose those substances as an escape to allow them to do crazy and stupid things. He thought it made more sense to just do the crazy and stupid things anyway and not care what others thought, and stay clean. That stuck with me in a way that nothing else ever had. Now mind you, in retrospect, I don’t know if I ever saw him say that specifically, or that if he did, it was even true, but as a 16yr old kid trying to find himself, that’s how I interpreted it, so for me, that’s how I started to live my life. Looking back on it now, whether it was actually true or not doesn’t really matter because the end result is that I ended up becoming the person I wanted to be.
For the rest of my high school, and eventually my college years I found myself becoming the guy who “would do anything”. Whether it was silly pranks, writing songs and music about ridiculous things and sometimes very inappropriate things, thrashing around on the floor like a fish out of water (nicknamed “spushing”, inspired by the very MTV performance mentioned earlier), stealing road signs, picking up and going on spontaneous road trips to get “coffee”, yelling in the middle of malls about my children with my best friends (which of course confused them as none of us had kids), walking into a coffee shop wearing a bathrobe and moose slippers, stealing someone’s car and driving to Grand Bay because we were bored (we knew the owner but they didn’t know we took their car), or doing anything to try and embarrass anyone I knew. Nothing seemed too crazy or outrageous as long as it didn’t hurt anyone. For me, I was up to just about anything.
During all of this, I never touched alcohol or drugs. I was accused of it countless times when people would see me act certain ways they would be absolutely convinced I was baked out of my mind but I’d always turn around and tell them I was fine. Mr. Grondin at Harrison Trimble watched me and my good friend Jason spushing at a high school dance and asked me afterwards if I was feeling ok. People would constantly think I had taken something or had drank way too much but it was simply a coping mechanism to make me feel like I had a special place in the world. Somehow by being the “crazy” guy, I could feel like I had a purpose and could participate with my friends, but managed to stay out of the drug and alcohol arena.
As time passed, the band released various new records for which I thoroughly enjoyed, and as their music became more and more diverse, my musical interests mirrored that. I found myself going even further along each side of the musical spectrum. Whether it was enjoying some Frank Sinatra, to popping in a Slayer CD, I always seemed to have such a varied musical interest that most people found themselves confused by what I listened to. When my wife and I first started dating, we drove to Saint John and as a Carcass song finished on the CD player, “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” from Burt Bacharach (whom I had never heard of until I heard FNM do one of his songs on a live CD) came on and she was in complete shock. How could I be going from one extreme to another? I told her I just loved a lot of music. I can say for certain now that listening to a band like Faith No More allowed my musical interests to diversify in ways I never thought possible.
But the affects of that band, and their singer, outlasted high school, and continue to live with me today. As of August 12th, 2019 (the date of this writing), I have never drank a single ounce of alcohol nor have I partaken in any recreational drugs whether they be legal or not. Prior to Faith No More, I didn’t drink because I was scared of alcoholism. In my high school and teenage years, I didn’t drink or do drugs because of Patton’s idealogy. As an adult now, I choose not to drink simply because I don’t want to. No judgement against those who do it’s just never been my thing.
Alcohol aside, it wasn’t until very recently that I actually realized the full scope of how much this band had influenced me as a person.
I bought the Faith No More biography, “Small Victories” by Adrian Harte because I knew he was close to the band and that his detailing of their career and history would be a good one. At some point in the book there’s a line about how the band has never been one to do things the same way others have. They have been a band that has constantly pushed back and just said they want to do things their own way, and basically, to hell with what anyone else thinks. As a follow up to “The Real Thing”, their label wanted them to create another album very similar to it. So the band gave them the finger and made “Angel Dust” which is nowhere even remotely close to TRT, but by many is considered to be their best album (King For A Day, Fool For a Lifetime is my favorite). It was nowhere near as commercially successful as their previous record, but musicians and bands like Korn, Slipknot, Papa Roach and countless others repeatedly will cite Faith No More, and often that specific record as an influential album. Time and time again, this is a band that would buck the trend and go their own way and be happy with the results whether they be good or bad. Even their singer, who’s vocal range goes far beyond what you’d expect for a rock/metal singer, went on to do other projects which were far less commercially successful than Faith No More simply because it was something he wanted to do and it was what felt right to him. The band has always been about creating their own path.
As I am reading this part of the book, I paused for a moment and realized in that moment that not only had my musical interests been affected by the band, but choices I had made about other things in my life were indirectly affected by them as well. As an adult, you can look back at your life and see things in a different way and that night I realized this band’s influence was far greater than I had ever thought.
Going back in my own personal history to my college years and beyond, I was always the type who didn’t want to do things the same way everybody else did. People would always push and steer you in a specific direction because that was what everyone else expected and I was always the type to stand back and say “why?” Why can’t we do “this” instead? From college and school projects all the way to websites I created not that long ago, I’d always insist that there wasn’t a need to do it the same way everyone else did. Sitting on that bed, I was reminded of something I had done in 2010 which went against everything people said. I’d created a new website for some locals in my community and it was expected that I create it a certain way because that was the way people had always done it, and that’s what people expected. I took a completely different approach because I didn’t want to be like everyone else and despite the resistance, I stood my ground and kept it the way I wanted it to work because that’s how I felt it should work. The site ended up garnering a large audience and even led me and a good friend of mine to become involved with a national television program because of how unique our website was. Taking a different approach made it noticeable amongst a sea of all the same.
In a conversation with someone else last year, I questioned the logic behind the way certain things were being done and was told it was done that way simply because “that’s how everyone else does it”. I immediately wanted to rebuff with “Why do we have to be like everyone else?”.
As I laid back in bed I turned to my wife and found myself a bit speechless about what I had just learned about myself. Yes, I am sure that my upbringing, family, and friends definitely contributed to who I am now, but it was clear as day to me that my obsession with this unique rock band from San Francisco had shaped me in ways I never realized.
Even in my writing, and my desire to explore the world of publishing my works, I find myself questioning whether or not the traditional path works for someone like me and maybe I need to find another way. Again, wanting to do things against the grain and not the way the industry “expects” you to do it.
Which brings me to the real point behind this particular long post about music. I’ve come to realize recently that for those of us who surround ourselves by music, it influences us in ways we don’t realize. Whether it’s shaping a young man to step out of his comfort zone, to giving you inspiration to create something, music can have the power to shape the world around us.
Some would say that music can change the world and that music brings us together and blah blah blah. I don’t feel like I want to go to that extreme, but I do feel that music does hold a certain power that many don’t acknowledge or even understand. After reading that book, and doing some real thinking about my life, I see the influence music has had on decisions I have made and the direction I have chosen to go in my life. I’m sure other things influenced it as well but music has definitely been a part of it.
The next time you turn on a song you like, or queue up a playlist you enjoy, don’t simply dismiss those sounds coming from your speaker as just pure enjoyment as they may have a more profound impact on your life than you may realize.
