What Do Old Metalheads Listen to for Mellow Times?

How did I wind up listening to so much music I hated when I was a kid?

I grew up on old-school heavy metal, and I'm still there with it: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Blue Oyster Cult. However, thanks to my sister (who got me into Sabbath, inadvertently, when I was all of 3 years old), I'm also reasonably ecclectic: I had some Kate Bush nestled in between Sabbath and Maiden cassettes. And 8-tracks. Yeah, 8-tracks. Remember those? They died right around the time CD's first hit.

So...

What did I hate to hear while I was growing up? Well, there was Disco, which everyone loved to hate. Then there was the 80's synth pop and electronica, plus New Wave. There were New Wave tunes that I liked hearing in the morning as I got ready for school (rock radio!), but I kept a certain distance from it because, simply, it wasn't Metal. Metalheads are religious about what is and is not Metal, and the capital is deathly serious. I try to be tongue-and-cheek about my musical religosity, but there is a certain serious vibe that lurks beneath my humor because traditional heavy metal has always been a big part of who I am, and it got me through a great deal of shit.

Another thing is that I was born late in my parents' lives and there was a cataclysmic generation gap between the surburban heavy metal kid that was me and the hillbilly who grew up with moonshiners, actual moonshiners, and fought in the Second World War. That was my dad, and my mom's original fiance died trying to escape the sinking USS Indianapolis. It messed with her head forever, and she with obsessed with hating the Japanese, all the way to the last year of her life, which was 2006.

At home, we had to watch Hee-Haw, a variety musical show centered on bluegrass and country (my dad), and Lawrence Welk, which was in the general neighborhood of the swing and sweet orchestras that my mother followed (along with her late fiance). She actually saw Glen Miller live. You might not remember who he was but he was a rather prominent American musician back in the 1940's.

I suffered through both of these and then would go upstairs to my room and listen to my Metal and classic rock and cleanse myself. Trust me, these musical variety shows from the '70's were horrific. I was horrified to find out, about ten or so years ago, that there are people who actually write fanfiction about the Lawrence Welk show. It still flabbergasts me. What could someone write about that? The most interesting thing that could happen to Lawrence Welk, a man who grew up in a Polish-speaking town in Ohio, is finally losing his Polish accent. "Vunderful, vunderful." (Cue bubbles. Bubbles, like in champagne, were a big part of the whole Welk mystique. A cousin of mine whose mother grew up with mine wrote into the local TV Guide supplement and complained about exactly this.)

So, in my fifties, when I'm increasingly looking to music to soothe my nerves and my hypertension (which Heavy Metal was definitely not designed to do), where do I turn for mellower stuff?

Right now, as I type this out, I'm listening to an 80's synth-pop band called Naked Eyes playing an old Burt Bacharach tune. I like their version a lot better; it was one of those guilty pleasures I had when I listened to radio when I was in high school because I really dug the melody and the wistful lyrics. (Burt Barach died about two weeks before I wrote this.)

I actually really like the whole first Naked Eyes album. It creates a bright atmosphere for me and puts some color into my surroundings. I walk around with it on my phone (Spotify) while I do things at work or anyplace else. It also reminds me of a couple of friends long gone. That's kind of bittersweet but as human beings we do that. It's especially poignant when I think about the two guys who made up the band. The singer still does nostalgia shows with a touring band but the keyboardist died back in 1997 after stomach surgery. A lot of musicians I like have been dying. Here I am, trying to be mellow and positive and energetic for a break from the doom and gloom of Sabbath and I'm still hit in the face with mortality checks, listening to bright and cheery 80's keyboard-driven stuff.

Another example: I always absolutely hated Madonna, and really still do, since I view her as a big, glaring example of everything that's cheap and nasty about pop media - she can't even cover Don MacLean's 'American Pie' without jiggling her boobs like a bad pole dancer. (I had totally missed this in 2000 but I was reading about old school rock and this came up as an aside in the article, and fool that I am I had to check it out as a matter of morbid curiosity. It made me wanna die.)

But I digress. Why did I mention Madonna? Because there's a French/German singer that kinda worked the same territory but with infinitely more class and talent, named Sandra (a mononym, this is the same lady who sang for Enigma, which was a project of her husband's). The European melodies of her songs and her classy appeal made her music romantic and compelling instead of cheap and sleazy, like Madonna. There's just more breadth and depth and it relaxes me.

Those are just two examples. What's the last one? Well, I did mention to you that old nasty thing known was Disco. I have to tell you that since the mid-1990's, the better examples of old-school Disco have become the easy listening of many heavy rockers. For me this means some of the better melodies, backed by some scorching guitar, of the Bee Gees and the soaring vocals of women like Yvonna Ellerman. If you leave out the tackier stuff and forget about the mind-numbingly shiny imagery of the whole discotheque scene from back in the day, it becomes a different thing.

What else? Getting back to some of the New Wave and electronica there's Blondie, Lena Lovich (a real weirdo) and Missing Persons, plus early Elvis Costello, and then there's the suprisingly masterful stuff from Bryan Ferry and later Roxy Music. I don't like their early stuff, because there's something rough and discordant about it I just don't need, like early Iggy Pop stuff. However, their last few albums, particularly Avalon, and singles from Ferry such as the one from the Legend soundtrack, 'Is Your Love Strong Enough?', create a very mellow atmosphere with a touch of class that makes me wonder what my life might have been like if I'd grown up in a different corner of the neighborhood, musically. The fact is that I wasn't social enough to run with those kids, but you never know.

Yet the truth is that I always did have some options, musically, for an alternative to Sabbath, but it's been in rotation for me for so long sometimes I just want something that's not so guitar-driven. There's one particular musician of whom I've always been a strong fan, and that's Robin Trower. A disciple of Jimi Hendrix with an amazingly lyrical style and a mellifluous songwriting vibe, Trower is still out there and I even managed to take my wife to see him. Additionally he's still making strong albums and memorable songs. However nothing beats his days in the 70's and early 80's with Chrysalis records. Somehow many people manage never to discover this stuff and I find myself educating them. My wife remarks often on my knowledge of music and my taste, and I've been finding her doing her cooking or other work with a recent Robin Trower album (The Playful Heart) in the background.

It's nice to know I've been a good influence.

Ah, Spotify just threw me a new one from back in the 80's heretofore unknown to me, 'When in Rome'. Interesting.

Yes, metalhead that I am, as I get older I get even more ecclectic.

One more thing: another reason I keep looking over music I disliked in my youth is that music today is terrifyingly awful. Pop music today is beyond derivative and boring. It's absolute garbage. On the other hand, I've been reading consistently that old music is badly outselling new music, with quietly unreported numbers that dwarf the sales of new stuff.

That makes me happy: Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath are badly outselling Justin Bieber.

That is definitely a golden lining.