Ridiculously incorrect beliefs you had about music and musicians while growing up

i was disappointed that the 'electric guitar' patch on my keyboard did not sound like a guitar solo

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Saturday, September 4, 2021 4:12 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

my yamaha midi keyboard led me to believe that "distortion guitar" and "overdrive guitar" were specific kinds of guitars

I used to think the purpose of the bass drum was to display the band’s logo. I thought the sound of the bass drum actually came from the floor tom, that is, a drummer would play the hi-hat with their left hand, and alternate between the snare and floor tom with their right. I didn’t know there was a foot pedal behind the bass drum. (I was maybe six or seven. This was pre-MTV, and I had never seen someone play the drums, either in person or on film.)

if you'll recall the "Once in a Lifetime" video, there are four copies of David Byrne in the background doing various moves, but i didn't know about video trickery when i was little so i thought those were the other four members of the band doing dances that were somehow perfectly in sync, which i thought was really impressive

i've been rifling through my memories all day trying to think of some of these and generally coming up short. as a kid i don't think i really invested a lot of imagination into how music was made or what the musicians were like, i just sort of took the songs as things that were around to sing along to. i didn't even have a lot of curiosity about Raffi. so i think most of my ridiculously incorrect beliefs were just in the category of getting lyrics wildly, impossibly wrong and accepting it because it didn't occur to me that lyrics would typically make sense or use real words. e.g. on "Say Say Say" :

Standin' here
Baptizin' all my tears
Baby Thulious
You know I'm cryin', ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh!

as a teen i probably had a share of more pedestrian misconceptions that i've now forgotten. definitely the whole "recording live as a band in the studio" thing. i'm still vague on whether and to what extent that's still a thing. like don't some bands do at least the instrumental performance together and only do the vocals as separate overdubs? right? dunno. but probably most of my wrongheaded notions were artist-specific, like being introduced to Beck via the "Where It's At" video, and having to be talked out of the notion that he should be primarily categorized as a "rapper."

For Hail to the Thief, the five members of Radiohead, along with longtime producer and collaborator Nigel Godrich, entered Hollywood's Ocean Way Recording studios with a plan to finish the record relatively quickly and without much fuss. Six weeks later, they emerged with an album mostly recorded live, with minimal overdubs and a return to the guitars that helped spark their second album (and first classic) in 1995, The Bends.

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/radiohead-hail-to-the-thief/

My earliest memory of watching Top of the Pops was an episode playing out with an Abba song (Waterloo?), accompanied by the studio audience bopping away to a playback of the finely-crafted Swedish hitmakers. In my naivete I assumed the dancers were actually the band, and that Abba had about 30 people in them. Not sure how long that misconception lasted, probably until the "back-to-back" video was made.

I guess the way i felt about the session cats was something like the jobbers in pro wrestling, they just didn't have cool nicknames and colorful costumes

Until embarrassingly recently I had it in my head that Charles Hayward (of This Heat, Camberwell Now and numerous other projects) and Charles Hazlewood (conductor, composer and radio presenter) were the same person. Even now when someone mentions Hayward, I picture Hazlewood automatically. I didn't even have the excuse of being a stupid kid either, so goodness knows where it came from.

Very into British beat records as a kid, and would read the band lineups that would mention Roger Daltery or Keith Relf on “vocals, harp” and listen closely for those Joanna Newsom sparkles.

I assumed all musicians were always dressed immaculately, a drink in hand, looking out the floor to ceiling windows of their penthouse suite

This was how I used to imagine ILX posters.

i imagine ILXors wearing bibs and covered in their own filth

I think of both artists and ILXors as burnt out solitary average joes thinking a lot about the world and their career and living in front of their computers in their basement, but maybe that's uncharitable

I was very young and had no idea what punk sounded like but I saw pictures of The Clash and thought I had an idea.

"Rock the Casbah" was huge (which means I was around 13 at the time which is about right; I only heard classic rock and disco on the NYC radio stations I listened to) but I thought there was no way that was "punk" based on those pictures and the reputation. So I convinced myself that it must have been a cover. Now, whether this meant it was The Clash doing a cover or someone covering The Clash, I don't recall.

Haha, yeah, I don't recall any punk rock getting commercial airplay before Green Day (unless you count Nirvana) so ime most people were confused about what it was, if they thought of it at all. From reading, I knew Billy Idol had been in a punk band and that the Clash were supposed to be a punk band ("Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" did get play) so ... maybe it had something to do with those? Except they didn't sound that different from other 80s pop/rock so it was still confusing. I knew it was supposed to be stripped-down and simple rock n roll so ... maybe it was a bit like George Thorogood? That could sort of fit with "Should I Stay..." When I first heard It's a Shame About Ray, I figured it was probably a punk album.

Friend of mine in college thought that "Rock The Casbah" was about blowjobs, as she heard the chorus as "Cheree, she don't like it..."

I thought the bass on sgt pepper was played by Ringo on a series of tuned bass drums.

flaming lips did this on "waitin for a superman" and it kinda sucked. don't know whether it was actual separate bass drums or just edited, or completely synthetic, or what though

My partner has a "punk mix" tape made by an older cousin in the 80s that mostly consists of stuff like Cowboy Junkies and Edie Brickell. Also "Some Kind of Wonderful".xps

It was definitely confusing to read the rock history books where writers were saying that punk rock killed off the old dinosaurs, while I was hearing Zep, Floyd, and Rush daily on the radio and was still trying to figure out what punk even was.

“I Wanna Be Sedated” got wider airplay and was played at parties etc. but yeah you wouldn’t really hear too much punk per se outside of college radio and certain corners of New Wave stations. Feel like London Calling was pretty big though too.

Although the sound of London Calling was not really punk at that point of course. Still, it was apparently a Top Ten album in the UK.

There were also a few notorious punk rock episodes of certain TV shows.

Pumk bands were in the charts all the time in the UK, and not just the Clash and the Sex Pistols but the UK Subs, the Exploited etc.

Sham 69 had three Top 10 singles.

Sid Vicious was in the London Symphony Orchestra or something!

tom at FT picks up this UK "punk in the charts" thread in a few places i think - his "Rat Trap" review comes to mind: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/08/the-boomtown-rats-rat-trap/

also, not punk-specific, but a useful summation of some of the spirit of this thread: "UB40, I was aware, made reggae. Therefore reggae sounded like what UB40 made. I can’t have been the only one who made this logical mis-step, and I expect I wasn’t the only one who spent a decade-plus assuming they disliked reggae because of it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmJxxnemxmw

I remember in 1979 when Blondie finally started to have hits in the US a friend telling me that Debbie Harry used to be a punk rocker, which he communicated in a tone as if he were saying she used to be a prostitute. I only knew about punk that it was outrageous and probably filthy. (It was likely that same year that another friend brought home some Ramones records and I finally could put a sound to the word punk, which then struck me as cartoonish rather than shocking). But yeah, you didn't hear straight up punk on US rock radio, and I was surprised to learn later that lots of punk records were big chart hits in the UK (x-post to Tom).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k37XXZL1YY

That Quincy episode apparently has a friend of ILX0r suzy in the cast.

UK Subs had six Top 40 singles!

So yeah in the US it was contained, but in the UK you could hear regularly it on the radio as Tom D says, and you would see punks down at the pub and no one would blink an eye, as my friend pointed out when Local Hero came out.

The local classic rock station does play "London Calling" and the Clash's cover of "I Fought the Law" now but they've only done so in recent years. We didn't have a new wave/alternative/modern rock station until the late 90s, though you obv heard stuff like the Cars and Police and REM and MuchMusic played The Cure, Siouxsie, etc. The two campus stations had shows devoted to Indian music, the Haitian community, early jazz, avant-garde electronics, BBC news, etc. They did have punk shows but I wasn't listening as a kid. I might have heard "I Wanna Be Sedated" once as a kid and thought of it as a goofy novelty. Not sure it was getting played at all in the "just say no" era, though.xps Haha, I was thinking of adding "before Tom D: 'in North America'" but decided against it.

For a while, I thought maybe punk had killed off 'dinosaur rock' in some esoteric way that only rock critics were sophisticated enough to understand; at some point, I realized they were probably just British.

I remember hearing the Clash's "I Fought the Law" quite often but almost nothing else off that album unless I played it myself at home.

I believe many US critics said the same thing.

I remember chortling at all that The Year Punk Broke stuff and Sonic Youth, or whoever, going on about punk rock in 1988, when the Anti-Nowhere League and the Exploited had been on Top of the Pops over here!

xp Yeah I had thought that "Train in Vain" was the first Clash record I ever heard (meaning was played on US radio), but now you mention it I think "I Fought the Law" preceded it by a few months. I don't think the "London Calling" title track was played initially, only years later.

Yeah, but I think that Punk Broke title is meant slightly ironically.
(xp)

Our old friend Ρεμπετολογια had a punk rock radio show in Canada in the mid-70s, but he had also been in London, England for a while before that, it seems.

Sonic Youth were absolutely beeing cheeky with "The Year Punk Broke" etc, since they knew full well the US was way behind on punk

When his printed bylines started appearing in the NME, I thought that ILM's mark s had previously been in The Pop Group and Rip Rig & Panic. But that was Gareth Sager, who shares three letters of his surname with mark s.

This is interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling_(song)

"London Calling" was released as the only single from the album in the UK and reached No. 11 in the charts in January 1980,[4] becoming at once the band's highest charting single until "Should I Stay or Should I Go" hit No. 1 ten years later. The song did not make the US charts, as "Train in Vain" was released as a single and broke the band in the US, reaching No. 23 on the pop charts.

Sonic Youth were absolutely beeing cheeky with "The Year Punk Broke" etc, since they knew full well the US was way behind on punk

Punk rock was considered corny as hell in the UK by the time all these US bands washed up on our shores blithering on about it.

The year punk blithered and died.

I remember hearing the Clash when "Rock the Casbah" was an actual Top Forty hit in the US (and liking it), but nothing else, on the radio anyway.

I also remember one character in a Stephen King book saying to another, "You've gotta hear this band the Ramones — they're hilarious." I didn't actually hear the Ramones until maybe...1985? I bought Leave Home and then a couple of years later I bought the Ramones Mania compilation and eventually got around to the first two albums.

I had a slightly older friend whose slightly older brother was into punk in the early 80s, though, so I heard Black Flag and Flipper and Dead Kennedys by around 1983. That same friend insisted that Motörhead were the only metal band worth listening to, so I bought No Remorse (which was new, so this would have been 1984) even though I was already listening to Judas Priest.

Suicidal Tendencies and DRI got played on MuchMusic's metal show but I just thought they were metal (which they were by then).

My oldest brother only listened to Jethro Tull, but his girlfriend had Ramones records (probably more inspired more by fun novelty than punk orthodoxy). My middle brother listened to Rush and Led Zeppelin, but also Sex Pistols, Clash, PiL and Siouxsie. So reading a few years later that fans of these artists were supposed to be at war with each other was an incorrect belief I had to question.

https://www.tshirtsonscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/theyoungonesrushtshirt-e1450118659710-1024x598.jpg

Well I never!

I recall being in a record store around the time the Sex Pistols album came out, and the guys that worked there slapped it on the turntable and proceeded to ridicule it for its "amateurism." I thought it sounded pretty good, not that different from the hard rock I was into at the time (Alice Cooper, Blue Oyster Cult and Bowie, primarily.) Didn't get where they were coming from.

I was thinking about Xmas '79 the other day... how Pink Floyd seemed like a bunch of old geezers (my brother had had WYWH on cassette, and I associated that with the tail end of his ELP prog phase, years before), like 50-something at least, and how shocking it was to discover that Dave Gilmour was younger than Debbie Harry! I also thought of Bryan Ferry as much older than, say, McCartney or Bowie.

I can't recall ever not knowing "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go." Both were played on normal pop radio in St. Louis when I was in junior high school, 1983ish. But I doubt I heard "London Calling" or "Train in Vain" until high school, and wouldn't have heard (for example) "Guns of Brixton" until college.

v surprised to hear that "Should I Stay or Should I Go" was a chart hit in 1990(?), apparently it was in a commercial?

My father was into the Ramones and New York Dolls, so I must have heard those things but they didn't leave an impression on me. I considered myself a New Wave kid. Even when I moved to DC, punk manifested itself more as a group of fashion choices than a music genre. "Punks" were people who went to Commander Salamander and Smash for purple temporary hair dye and shirts made of safety pins, plaid miniskirts, Docs, etc. You could have a Dead Kennedys pin on your backpack, and it read as "edgy," but no one in my personal orbit connected it to owning or listening to music.

I dressed up as a punk for Halloween in 1st or 2nd grade. Think I actually repeated the costume the next year or year after. I have no idea how I was even aware of what a punk was. Def hadn't heard actual punk music.