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

I don't know in what way they were killed off, though? You hear "Aqualung" less than you used to but I think that has more to do with the classic rock format updating itself in subsequent years rather than something that happened in response to Nirvana or Green Day. (I was going to say "Roundabout" too but that's become a meme. It has 20M more Spotify plays than "Anarchy in the UK".) Aerosmith and Eric Clapton were still among the biggest artists of the 90s, Pink Floyd's Division Bell tour was huge, "Stairway" and "Hotel California" were still topping the classic rock station's 'greatest songs' lists, and then we got OK Computer a couple of years later.

Smashing Pumpkins, NIN, and Soundgarden were all earnestly paying tribute to 'dinosaur' bands.

it's all tidy rock-crit narrative and not worth fussing over TOO much..... but could there be a case that more broadly, punk and new wave didn't kill off the towering monumental AOR bands, but DID maybe kind of gradually change the sound/style of the average local band, average bar band? like, not that there was a national ban on chooglin' or white blues imitation, but maybe that more and more bands were trying to sound more like The Cars than like Grand Funk. iow it's more like local 60s garage-rock displacing Elvis and Frankie Valli wannabes than a mass deletion of the big names...?

and in terms of chart action you'd find it in Hall and Oates updating their sound, Huey Lewis scoring big, etc., not in more aggressive stuff tearing up the airwaves (until GnR and then Nirvana maybe)... idk.

Yes, my theory of grunge rock is that people around my age (born late ‘60s) who were schooled on rock as adolescents via ‘70s bands like Kiss, Cheap Trick, BOC, Aerosmith, perhaps Sabbath, Zeppelin… larer discovered punk in high school, very likely playing in a punk band at that time and adopting a punk philosophy… and then at some point post-high school had the epiphany that those old school hard rock bands were actually kind of good, and that one could meld the punk rock attitude and punk principles with the chops and weightiness of those classic ‘70s bands. And grunge rock was that melding.

not that there was a national ban on chooglin'

If chooglin' is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

That photo above of Vyvyan jogged my memory - he was probably my first impression of whatever "punk" was (when The Young Ones started running on MTV in 85/86), until I started seeing/hearing whatever punk/post-punk Dave Kendall would dredge up on 120 Minutes a year or two later.

I used to think that making music was super difficult and virtually impossible for a person like me (even in spite of the punk "anyone can do it" mentality + riot grrrl emerging during my most formative years) but as it turns out, that is not so.

I mean, I was into punk/hardcore/noise-rock in the mid-90s but everyone involved with it thought of it as an underground thing vs behemoths like Aerosmith that dominated the airwaves.xp

I was watching Repo Man from an early age, so I had a pretty good idea of what at least that slice of punk culture & music was about (not to pat myself on the back, just adding my experience). Plus, like someone else above, I'm sure I saw punks in Georgetown (D.C.), near where we lived.

Until I was well into my college years, I assumed that artistic merit was sorta inversely proportional to popularity. Like all these obscure indie/punk bands that people had buttoned to their jean jacket were inherently better than the top 40 I was listening to, but my ear just wasn't discerning/mature enough yet. I didn't really occur to me that they might be obscure because they were bad, or that they might be lo-fi because no one wanted to advance them any money to record their songs properly.

If I'm honest, I still haven't completely shaken off this prejudice.

Kelefa Sanneh personal history piece slots nicely into this derail

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-education-of-a-part-time-punk

Growing up in the New England countryside, punk was a definately a thing, but it was an inner suburb/urban thing. Punk got to me via a state collage radio station, early-80s high school. I was the only kid making a Clash tshirt in the printshop class - much easier than making a one-pass silkscreen out of a Journey cover, as I saw a classmate struggle with. Jocks and burnouts knew about it, but it wasn't present. The quarterback was in my guitar class, and he'd heard a Fear song, but didn't know any more than that, but thought the bile was hilarious. He taught me how to play Misty Mountain Hop. My clique could get a ride to a train to get into the subway into Boston, and that's how we got the records and eventually, the shows.

At this point maybe the use of the word “punk” is kind of like the use of the word “surreal”: does it refer to a specific, somewhat brief moment in time or does it refer to all kinds of other stuff that came afterward and was somehow inspired by the original thing?

When graphic equalisers became fashionable in the early 80s I thought that they were used to isolate the different instruments on a track so you could only hear the bass guitar or drums or whatever.

Haha so did I. I was SO disappointed to find this wasn’t the case.

I know this is just a misheard lyric, but to me it transcends that because I had the title of the song wrong in my head for years. When the song Cult of Personality came out (I was 10), I somehow took it in as “Cultive Personality”. It never came up in conversation, so I was never corrected, and somehow I never saw the actual song title in print. The mishearing stuck with me, unquestioned, until my middle teens when I “rediscovered” Living Colour and read the lyrics. It took some serious recalibration to come to terms with the actual title/lyric and the fact that I had had it wrong for so long.

For at least a few months I thought it was "pumped-up personality".

Well, this isn't music related but I used to think Timbuktu, Abu Dhabi and Walla Walla, Washington were made up place names.

FP'd you for racism

(ie not including Woop Woop, Woy Woy, or Wagga Wagga)

i'm MENA fwiw and p sure my mom still thinks Timbuktu is not a real place

I have a vague recollection of thinking that electric guitars weren't real guitars, you just plugged them in and they would play themselves and guitarists were just pretending to play them during concerts (I guess electric to me meant that it was somehow all automated). This was when I was probably 5 or 6.

I thought it was standard practice to include not just lyrics but guitar chords in your CD inlays, like on Blur's Parklife and was disappointed to realise this was just Blur. More bands should have done this

Complete notated transcriptions or gtfo

Otm

I thought you could just nail a wire into an acoustic guitar then nail the other end into a stereo speaker to make it electric

I thought it was standard practice to include not just lyrics but guitar chords in your CD inlays, like on Blur's Parklife and was disappointed to realise this was just Blur. More bands should have done this.

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin)

I wish.

Not on the US CD. No lyrics or chords.

We were strumming along
To Beetlebum

I thought John Cale and JJ Cale were the same person

There is an extremely niche gimmick cover band concept somewhere in there

JJ Cale J

A Child's Cocaine Christmas in Queens

I thought, when listening to Sting and having little other pop music to compare it with, that Sting had this really clever technique of coming up with a catchy contrasting section of his songs. I knew about sonata form, but not verse/chorus.

I once thought Rick Grech was somehow connected to Gretsch guitars and/or Gretsch drums.

Wait, he wasn’t?

For a brief period when I was about 8, I thought guitar solos were played on special instruments called "air guitars."

oooh that's a good one, I didn't think that per se, but definitely heard the expression "air guitar" and thought it was an instrument for a number of years before I understood what it meant

Me too

No lie, I thought the "air guitar" was specifically the talk box guitar that Peter Frampton used. You blew air into the tube to make it work, hence "air guitar".

Did your elementary schools not have air band competitions?

Nope, but I still learned how incorrect I was in middle school.

A Child's Cocaine Christmas in Queens

― henry s

(Over 'Venus in Furs') "He's had quite a strange career, he also wrote 'Cocaine', the Eric Clapton song..."

When I was maybe 10, I heard the son of one of my parents' friends play bass at their house. He played the breakdown from Metallica's Orion and I was absolutely blown away. I stewed over it for a month or two before deciding to make a big announcement to my dad: "I want to play bass! Do you know what bass guitar sounds like? I've got a great song right here." And I proceed to play a cassette of Guns 'n' Roses Sweet Child of Mine. Cue Slash's intro lick: "You hear that? THAT'S bass guitar!" "That's not bass guitar," says dad, to my immediate confusion and embarrassment. A few seconds later the rest of the band kicks in, along with Duff McKagan's equally iconic bassline. "THAT'S bass guitar."

I think that there are certain melodic similarities between the Orion bass line and the SCOM intro and maybe I got confused there. Or maybe it had something to do with Slash's tone.

Anyway, my dad's little brother had played bass in a rock band during high school and college, so I was not going to be fooling him! Lesson much appreciated, dad.

It also didn't help that I listened to most music on a cheap little boombox, so I didn't hear much of the bass frequencies anyway. During the incident above, I had brought my tape downstairs to dad's larger stereo system.

Hey, take it over to bass guitar through a guitar amp? and other questions from an ignorant beginner

but this amp melts FACES, dood

omg that whole contretemps was fifteen years ago.

it is older than my oldest child

i thought when a band was named after a member of the band (as opposed to a solo artist) that the guy was an asshole

I still think that, mostly.

There must be a note that feels better than any other to end a song or piece on. I have to test them on the piano, both singly, and with simple tunes.

**time passes**

It's probably E. A tune should preferably end on an E.

I thought electric guitars were mains powered via the lead, I think based on hearing a story about a guitarist being electrocuted onstage because it rained or something