When did you become passionate about music?

[DeafPoet]

We all hear music from almost the day we're born, but in my experience with myself and my friends, there's a defining moment where music is something that happens to your parents or maybe your friends and the moment where it suddenly matters to you. So, what is it? This thread is likely to be full of lengthy unrelatable personal accounts and that sort of thing is often death for a thread so I'll try to keep mine from being too TL;DR.

My dad always played guitar and I always appreciated that. I tried to get him to teach me on a few occasions. But it's clear looking back that I didn't know enough about music to want to really do it. Later, my friends got me into late 90s metal like Korn and Limp Bizkit and that was fine. But my eyes weren't opened until one awesome July night.

I was 12 and I was hanging out with my best friend in a tree fort we built on an abandoned lot looking out over the highway. We liked to shoot paintballs at cars. It was 300ft away so we never hit anything, but it smelled of rebellion anyway. He had a shitty dual-cassette boom box and he stole one of his older brother's dubbed tapes. It was Rage Against The Machine's first album.

The first song ("Bombtrack") played without much notice from me. We kept shooting paintballs. And then the main riff from "Killing In The Name" kicked in and I was fucking sold. From that moment on, music mattered in a way it hadn't before. We kept doing our thing but that riff was in my head constantly until a week later when I found it on Napster (it took me awhile because I didn't know the title) and I picked up the guitar seriously the next day.

Not only did it make me care about music, it may consequently be the defining moment of my life so far.

What are your guys' seminal moments?

 

[Jetfire]

I would have to say when I first heard Appetite For Destruction by Guns 'N Roses. I was like 10.

 

[Pingfah]

Queen at Live Aid, that day.

 

[Jetfire]

^
Queen is awesome...I don't know where people place the importance on an event...but the Concert For Life was great and a wonderful tribute to a awesome frontman and cause.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQJMR-X41FA[/yt]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQJMR-X41FA

 

[Australis]

I always liked music when I was a little kid, but when I was 14, a friend of mine had bought the just released 'Made in Japan'. The opening of 'Highway Star' was just.... 'whooaaaa...'. That deepened my interest in rock rather than pop, and continued in other moments of revelation. Catching 'Bo Rhap' on the radio. Buying 'Permanent Waves' on a whim and hearing 'Spirit of Radio' for the first time.

Then meeting some guys who had a great band, writing original songs, a rarity in a town where every other band was a covers band. Learnty a lot watching them.

Then teaching myself the rudiments of bassplaying and getting into bands myself. The more I played, the more I appreciated it.

 

[Goliath]

When I started listening to hardcore punk, at age sixteen.

In fact, I can remember the exact date when the switch flipped in my head: the 21st of September, 1984.

I went to a gig at a crappy old community hall on skid row--five bands for five bucks. By the end of the night I was a different person.

If anyone's interested in this type of music, the band that was headlining that night was SNFU. They're still around today, and there are a couple of near-contemporary videos of this band performing on YouTube--search for SNFU 1986 to see what Western-Canadian hardcore looked like twenty-five years ago.

 

[TheBrew]

When I listened to my parent's LP of the soundtrack to Empire Strikes Back over and over and over when I was 6.

 

[Agent Richard07]

The summer of 1991 when I was 15. I really got into watching music videos that summer. Before that I had no interest in music the way all the other kids did. Didn't collect tapes or CDs and didn't know any of the singers or bands. A few conversations got embarrassing whenever the latest sensation came up. And you know how kids get when you don't know what's "in".

 

[Eyes]

Last year. It began in the summer, when I was listening to one of the football songs for the world cup, 'Wavin Flag', and I realised I didn't know the lyrics. Throughout the summer, I began listening to more and more music, until I wanted to follow the charts, and buy albums, which I had never dreamed of doing before.

It's fun looking up previous stuff, remembering what I heard but just dismissed as something to listen to. And cursing myself that I hadn't been interested when it originally came out.

 

[Kirby]

In 1980 when I was 11 years old, my brother got Paradise Theater by Styx, and I listened to that album countless times. The next year Journey's Escape was released, and I wore out that cassette tape.

 

[I Grok Spock]

1977 - Star Wars soundtrack + starting trumpet lessons.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Probably when I started to listening to the Beatles in 7th grade.

 

[WillsBabe]

I'm afraid I never did become passionate about music. I am one of those apparently rare people for whom music means not much.

 

[J.T.B.]

There was always music around when I was growing up, my mom came from a musical family and always played piano and sang. She was also a good baby boomer and so I grew up with healthy exposure to the Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Cream, Doors, Creedence &c. My dad is a cowboy so Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall and that whole end of the spectrum were always well represented.

The first band I really connected with on my own was Blondie. I'll admit this had a lot to do with Debbie Harry, who was the first media figure I every understood as "sexy" as opposed to just cute or pretty. The first record I bought with my own money was the 45 single of "Dreaming" at age 9.

I found out that music really mattered to me, though, at age 13 in 1983. Contrary to what you see in John Hughes movies, acts like the Cure, Thompson Twins, Specials, (English) Beat, Smiths, Oingo Boingo and so on were not widely known in the US in the '80s, as their chart figures will readily verify. People knew about that scene either through MTV, which my family didn't have, or through the relatively small number of "Modern Music" format radio stations, usually in big cities or affiliated with colleges. I didn't live in a big city, but somehow I was lucky enough to have in my town a commercial FM radio station that played that format. And it was like a whole other world. Most kids at school were listening to stuff like Foreigner and Styx, and there's nothing wrong with that, but those bands had roots back to the '60s and sounded like it. The stuff on this station sounded new and different, "for a new generation" to use a tired phrase. And if you saw somebody at school with a Jam pin on their jacket or a picture of Nick Heyward in their locker you had some kind of instant connection, it was like a secret club.

In less than a year that station went under. It must've been a school holiday, because I was at home listening to the radio. Something cool was playing (I have forgotten what!), then it turned noon, and then the Carpenters. And then Barry Manilow. I called the station's request line, and they answered with a different name. I asked them what was going on and they said very curtly that it was a format change and there was nothing that could be done about it. Well, I thought my world had come to an end. I was too young to have (or afford to get) many records, so there was just no way to hear that stuff anymore. To this day I sometimes get a tune in my head from one of the songs I heard back then, almost 30 years ago, and Google the lyrics and find it was by Ebn Ozn or Toto Coelo or someone equally obscure.

My musical tastes were really clarified in 1985. I had been to concerts before, including Van Halen 1984. But my uncle took me to see X on their "Ain't Love Grand Tour." Not the greatest record, but wow, what a live show. Just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, no stage sets or light shows or pyrotechnics. Incredibly tight playing in a small venue. Two- to three-minute high tempo songs with barely a break between them for two hours. A kinetic crowd completely caught up in the energy. It confirmed to me that it's the music and the playing that matters, no matter how a band looks or how popular they are or who likes them. In 25 years I've never completely re-captured the feeling of that show.

--Justin

 

[marillion]

I've always been a music fan. Having a brother 16 years older than me meant that I grew up listening to a steady diet of the Beatles, the Who, Fairport Convention, etc...

But it wasn't until a fine fall day in 1982 when a friend first let me hear Rush's Tom Sawyer, did I give myself over completely... Music has been a part of my life ever since.. I interned at a radio station in college, worked in radio for years and taught audio production..

One of my fondest memories was taking my class of students to the Norman Petty Studios in Clovis, NM, which is where Buddy Holly recorded all of his biggest hits (despite what that Gary Busey starring abomination of a movie would have you believe)... They brought out some master tapes and we listen with headphones.. If you closed your eyes, you would swear the Holly and the Crickets were in the next room playing.. It was magical...

 

[Goliath]

In 25 years I've never completely re-captured the feeling of that show.

I know the feeling.

 

[iBender]

When I was 12 or 13, I've always liked it, but that's when it took a hold of me.

 

[C_Miller]

I always could have been considered a music person. I listened to a lot of classical, by my own choice and I took relatively quickly to instruments and theory (although I never got really good with any of them). But, I was 11 when I first heard The Beatles. After that you couldn't stop me in my desire to seek out and absorb every kind of music out there.

 

[Skywalker]

I'm afraid I never did become passionate about music. I am one of those apparently rare people for whom music means not much.

I'm with you, there. I like music, but it's never been something I was very passionate about.

 

[C.E. Evans]

When I first heard Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder doing "Ebony and Ivory." As a kid I didn't have the faintest idea what the song was about, but I liked the melody and the vocal arrangements. It was the first time I really started paying attention to how songs are structured.

I eventually became a bass player, and even now I still tend to listen to how a song is structured more than what is being said through the lyrics.