While I'm not claiming there's anything of outstanding interest in the fact that I've spent a fair chunk of the last forty-five years listening to music, given my current attempts to write about what I've been listening to, drinking, reading and watching it makes sense to put things into some sort of framework.
OnTthe Wine Pages that's reasonably straightforward. Pages devoted to particular wineries, the odd rant here and there, pieces about the various wine clubs I've signed up for and the Article Archive fill in the back story fairly well.
As far as the reading is concerned, reviewing a particular title gives a chance to fill in some of the back story as far as Hughesy's interest in the author or the subject matter goes, and I've started retrospective runs through the works of some favourite authors, but there isn't really a consistent narrative that runs across individual authors or topics.
With what I've been watching, the back story, if one exists, can be slotted into place where needed, but with the music, there's a separate narrative that develops when we're talking about Hughesy's listening habits.
THere wasn't too much, at least at the beginning, to separate my interest in what I was hearing on the radio from the massed ranks of my teenage peers, though an inability to do things in moderation probably guaranteed it wasn't going to stay that way.
As a result, through Where I'm Coming From and the Making of a Music Freak we're looking at Hughesy's gradual detachment from the mainstream, a process that was aided by the discovery that owning the right records had implications for your standing among your peers even if it didn't tend to impress the opposite sex.
Then, running through the years between 1969 and 1972 there were the halcyon days outlined in A Less Than Distinguished Musical Career and The Underworld Years, when, briefly, I was able to enjoy a lengthy ramble through what had been recorded through the sixties, casting forwards and back from there and meeting a range of things that have shaped my listening habits for the past forty years.
Those things, in places like Townsville don't last, and in any case those youthful alliances have a tendency to splinter wherever they are formed as careers and relationships impinge on their territory, but a year away on the Palms, another year finishing a university degree and the gradual dispersal of the old peer group without a new one coalescing meant I can't think of a better tag that The Wilderness Years for the period between 1973 and the start of the internet era, where I suddenly found myself back in something that wasn't exactly like The Underworld Era but wasn't too far removed from it either.
In between, switching from vinyl to CD in the late eighties helped as well, since it brought the realisation that there was a swag of material I hadn't managed to acquire first time around they had been reissued, often with enhanced content, which is why I ended up buying the Elvis Costello back catalogue four times (once on vinyl, once on CD, again in expanded versions and a fourth time as the album plus accompanying bonus disk).
It's easy to take the Internet for granted these days, and unless you were there at the time it's probably hard to comprehend the liberating aspects of almost instantaneous communication among music freaks.
Then there was the whole tape and CD trading bit that allowed the participants to build up extensive collections of unofficial recordings so you could, should you be so inclined, build an archive that covered every incarnation of Neil Young's concert persona, from the early solo work, through the Danny Whitten Crazy Horse era, the Tonight's the Night excursion towards the ditch, the reformed Crazy Horse through the late seventies, the Trans band, the International Harvesters run, the rockabilly and R&B excursions…
I could go on, but that's enough to make the point as far as Mr Young is concerned.
If your tastes ran wider than Neil Young you could (and I did) do much the same thing with the works of Messrs Costello, Morrison and Thompson. Had my earlier interest in Dylan survived the Dylan, Self Portrait and New Morning era I might have done the same thing with the Bobster, but there were outfits like the Allman Brothers and Little Feat that needed to be investigated and a man's only got so much listening time, eh?
Once we started to move into broadband, peer to peer torrenting, digital downloads and the whole iPod portable player bit things, predictably, changed again.
That means, regardless of the personal story, that we've covered the landscape from the era where the 45 rpm single reigned supreme through the age of the album, the emergence of the cassette, the rise of the CD and the devolution into digital. It's been quite a journey...
Along the way there’s been a bit of live concert action, so it made sense to hive that off from the other reminiscences, separating the concert content into the Townsville years and the Bowen years.
