If music be the food of love...
Ihad a miserable upbringing. Heartache, betrayal, misogyny, murder and melancholy: that was the soundtrack to my youth. Ruby took her love to town, Patsy fell to pieces, Tammy stood by her man, while Johnny shot one in Reno and Hank was so lonesome he could cry.
No prizes for guessing my parents’ favourite musical genre. On long car rides – and when you grow up in the wops, all car rides are interminable – my sister and I were country music captives.
At home, however, we were free to find our own rhythm and, aged 10, I found Huey Lewis and the News. If This is It was the first song I ever liked of my own accord, the first song I wanted to record on my TDK mix tape. If I played it once, I played it a thousand times, until my dad’s Walkman could take it no more and chewed up the tape.
Last summer, when Huey Lewis sang If This is It at his Whitianga concert, I was there. And I was taken back to my big sister’s bedroom, circa 1984, the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 on the radio, my index finger poised over the record button on her cassette player.
How times have changed. My children are digital natives with no patience for radio playlists. When we’re in the car, they expect their favourite tracks on demand via YouTube and bluetooth, be it Pitbull and Ke$ha yelling timber, Taylor Swift shaking it off, Adele sending her love, or anything from Katy Perry’s back catalogue. Which begs the question: should I indulge their newfound pop appreciation or force them to listen to Dolly Parton?
In Virginia Hanlon Grohl’s new book From Cradle to Stage, the mother of Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters founder Dave Grohl interviews other rock mums about raising boys (and girls, in the case of Amy Winehouse and Miranda Lambert) in bands. Without exception, they recall how their children were singularly obsessed with music from a very young age.
How young is too young? Gladys Knight, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin were all precocious preschoolers. American violinist Oscar Shumsky held his first public concert as a 4-year-old, and Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou – the Chariots of Fire composer better known as Vangelis – was writing his own music at the same age.
My 5-year-old son Lucas reckons he wants to be a scientist when he grows up (phew), but his 4-year-old brother Lachie already marches to the beat of a different drummer. He likes to smash stuff in a timely fashion; when we let him loose on his teenage cousin’s drum kit, he didn’t miss a beat.
Perhaps he’s inherited his ancestors’ orchestral manoeuvres, rather than his parents’ middling musical abilities. My husband has been trying to learn Led Zeppelin’s Over The Hills and Far Away for as long as I’ve known him and, as a schoolgirl, I endured five years of private piano tuition in an unsuccessful bid to master Richard Clayderman’s Ballade Pour Adeline (though it did at least spare me the weekly indignity of cross-country running).
My children’s great-grandmothers, on the other hand, were gifted pianists and violinists, while their greatgrandfathers played the fiddle, harmonica and piano accordion. My grandfather Albert deserves a special mention as he played both banjo and violin, or at least he did until he was relieved of two of his fingers in an unfortunate incident involving a cream separator and a chain drive in his Raglan cow shed.
Amputations aside, Confucius was correct to claim that ‘‘music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without’’. It is the language of the spirit (Kahlil Gibran), the literature of the heart (Alphonse de Lamartine), the emotional life of most people (Leonard Cohen), and a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy (Ludwig van Beethoven).
It can also be a serious traffic hazard.
While I was driving him to kindergarten this week, Lachie threw a fit.
I caught sight of him in the rearview mirror – eyes closed, head lurching backwards and forwards, shoulders shaking, feet kicking – and slammed on the brakes, at which point he sat upright and cocked his head at me, quizzically.
Turns out he wasn’t having some sort of febrile seizure after all; he was just getting his groove on to Lorde’s Green Light.
Lachie already marches to the beat of a different drummer. He likes to smash stuff in a timely fashion; when we let him loose on his teenage cousin's drum kit, he didn't miss a beat.