Music history part 2: Personal Choices for a Change

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Industrial Music for Industrial People While shopping with Skank one day in 1988, I randomly chose an Einstürzende Neubauten tape; it was in German, I speak German, why not buy it? It was the most hideously beautiful noise I'd ever heard. I still have no idea why I liked it, but I turned him on to it. It was something totally new, full of noises, creaks, groans, screams, insane imagery, and painful agony. Just what a melodramatic and emotional teen needs, right? After Governor's School, my high school girlfriend and her brother turned me on to the Cure (their song "Like Cockatoos" was great). I spent the rest of high school playing all this music at the same time. As long as no one else was around, I didn't hear any complaints. Let's face it, though, grunge coming out about 3 years later did not surprise me, it was just classic rock filtered through a punk sensibility, while including a ton of moodiness, which is how I felt at the time.

Duke radio - GOTH! NOISE! PSYCHEDLIA! In 1989, I went off to Duke as an undergrad, and I thought I would become a DJ at WXDU for two reasons: I was already obsessed with new music, and I was so chickenshit scared to talk in front of people that I thought I would train myself to talk over the air. An audience I couldn't see, but someone out there would be listening, so it was public. Suddenly I had the freedom to play what I wanted, and the access to bands I'd never had the money to buy. The more music I played, the more hooked I got. It started with goth, like the Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Fields of the Nephilim, and Christian Death. For a while, I went more and more into Wax Trax, back when ANYTHING by them was worth listening to. I suppose that the style was generally "rock" based, meaning: bands, songs, structure, even when it was noisy (like Sonic Youth or the Swans). My roommate (Rich Burket) had a pretty big influence on all this, since he was more familiar with goth. Love and Rockets was played a lot, but he also got into my Pink Floyd (where I owned everything they ever recorded....up until 1988 that is). When we later got into ambient and electronic music, the whole shared music thing came to the forefront again. Rich would later introduce me to death metal and grindcore (through John Zorn), but he always listened to that more than I did..... Read the next section (Vienna eclectics, radio freak-out) here. The pictures included in these pages are by Juan Miro, Pablo Picasso (Guernica and Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon), Jasper Johns, Rene Magritte, Oskar Kokoschka (the sketch of Webern), and Wassiliy Kandinsky. I also found some pictures of Tom Waits, Coltrane, and somebody making a drum...

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