Rabbitman Rocks Out to the '70s (and 60s and 80s and maybe even the 90s)

My multi-disk CD player in the basement o'rabbits has started having mechanical issues. I've had to manually change to the next disk for a couple of years, but recently it would sometimes not change the disk even manually, or play at all. When it was feeling co-operative recently I managed to get my CDs out and have decided to not risk putting anything back in. This does make painting sessions with Wierdy-Beardy a bit quiet if we've seen each other regularly and are all caught up. I mean, once you're past your 20s or 30s there isn't really that much to talk about once you've covered your grown kids, grandkids, jobs, new gaming project, recent movie/book. Bitching about work or the government doesn't help and just takes effort.

While tidying up yesterday for a game I found a couple of boxes with my old cassettes, and the basement o'rabbits stereo does have two cassette decks. Among these were a collection of mix tapes made for me by my friend John. They have interesting names like Stuff etc. (with things), Jazz Rock Friends, The Police: Some Stuff!, Vitamin Enriched Bits of Cardboard and the obligatory make-out CD; The Return of the Son of Fluff: Music to Fall off a Chair By (which definitely got played when the future Mrs. Rabbitman came over to my apartment for our first dinner date!). He's an audiophile and his collection of vinyl was pretty cool back in the day (I hope he's kept building on it). We'd hang in his room talking about life and he'd give me a pretty good education in music. His taste ran to the eclectic; Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Kate Bush, the Chieftains  and Jethro Tull (more to them than Aqualung), with a solid foundation of ZZ-Top and Led Zepplin leavened with some cool jazz like Pat Metheny and Branford Marsalis. I first heard the Blues Brothers in his basement room.

So when Mrs. Rabbitman came along to fill my ears with 80s New Wave, I was open to more sounds than 70s soft rock. Today for example we woke up to Portishead.



John hated my pop and 60s folky leanings. He liked Paul Simon without Garfunkel. I like them both. Paul Simon's lyrics with Art Garfunkel's harmonizing is pretty amazing. Yeah, I've left the folky 60s protest rock, it just bugs me now. I prefer Blue Grass when I'm in the mood for mandolins, banjos and rich harmonizing vocals. But some pop music is just a guilty pleasure ya know? Bands like ABBA, who don't pretend to be anything but some pop act having fun, I can take a lot easier than pop acts that try to dress themselves with 'deeper meanings' and teen angst. Besides Belinda Carlisle's Mad About You is "our song".



I hate guys my age who claim all good music stopped sometime in 1978. Stupid pop music is stupid pop music whether it's from the 60s and 70s or the 90s or this century. Admit it, we listened to a lot of banal crap when we were kids, One Direction and Justin Bieber are just the latest incarnation of that. My daughter has turned Mrs. Rabbitman and I on to some pretty good new stuff too.

The cassettes will disappoint Wierdy-Beardy though, I don't have any Johnny Cash on cassette. But I do have the music of my university years, and that's pretty cool.