Add Some Music to Your (Son's) Day

by Rich Bunnell

As part of her studies in environmental behavior, my wife (and invisible Discord & Rhyme co-host) Jen researched interest, which is not to say compound interest, but the concept of being interested in things. And though some of what piques a person’s interest is in their genes, it’s just as much a quantum roll of the die. So while I fully plan to be the dad chucking a copy of Remain in Light in the Onion article “Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation,” I know that it’s fully possible my kids will turn on music, because that’s what I did with my dad and cars.

My dad grew up at the height of ‘60s California car culture, and was a kid when the local Ford plant in my hometown of Milpitas rolled out three generations of Mustangs. He’s always been especially devoted to Ford: until recently he still owned his first car, a Shelby GT350, and he’s already seen Ford v. Ferrari in theaters at least twice (the first time in IMAX). Meanwhile, I’ve lived in Michigan since 2013 and have been to the Henry Ford Museum once, and spent most of the time at a temporary Beatles exhibit. 

Dad always tried to nudge me into car fandom, but something just never stuck. I think the way that cars work on a mechanical level is fascinating, the way they harness millions of tiny explosions into hustling two tons of metal down the road. But their physical reality has always been immensely unappealing to me -- the grease, the fumes, the smelly garages, the machismo. A story he loves to tell is that when I was four or so, he brought me with him to the Milpitas public works department and showed off a vehicle from the city’s water-equipment fleet. My only response, in front of his co-workers, was “Can I go now?” 

But luckily, being a car kid in 1960s California also required you to love the Beach Boys, and their early albums formed a constant, humming soundtrack to the years before I knew I loved music. Their songs were about cars in a way I found interesting: my dad would explain what it meant in “Little Honda” to go from first gear to second gear, what a “no-go showboat” was, and how the chorus to “Custom Machine” is meant to sound like an engine accelerating. When the car talk was paired with music, I would perk up, and I loved their cruising songs with easy-to-follow stories like “I Get Around” and “Fun Fun Fun.”

I always got the sense that music was a secondary interest for my dad, inherited from his high school (and still) friend Glen. But music formed our shared pop culture language, and he subtly guided me at several points along my road toward being the kind of person who would have a podcast like this. When I was 4 he showed me the liner notes for Magical Mystery Tour so I could read along with “I Am the Walrus” (goo goo ga joob). He blasted “Money for Nothing” in the car, and most of the lyrics went over my head, but I loved that a band was singing about microwaves and color TVs. When I actually started buying my own music, he sagely informed me that I could buy it for even less if someone had already owned it. He took me to my first live show past bedtime, They Might Be Giants when I was 13.

When I discovered the online music reviewing community where our hosts all met, my music fandom exploded, and thinking about music began to form the underlying fabric of my entire brain. This is when I learned that the Beach Boys had a bunch of albums that critics loved, and a string of whacked-out ‘70s albums that nobody seemed to talk about. Meanwhile, I discovered my favorite band, XTC, whose leader Andy Partridge has written such anti-car polemics as “Roads Girdle the Globe” and “River of Orchids,” and I eventually went on to get my degree in urban planning, a field dedicated to hating cars.

I call music my favorite thing about being alive, and it took me way too long to realize how important my dad was in introducing me to it as a concept. When the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy came out in 2015, we saw it in theaters while I was visiting the Bay Area, and the experience practically put me into tears. It hadn’t occurred to me how primal the Beach Boys were to my entire perspective on music, my entire sense of wonder. Seeing it together felt ceremonial, like acknowledging the gift he gave me, and it was about the most animated I’ve ever been talking about a movie on the drive home.

So Dad, this post is publishing on your 65th birthday, and this post is my gift to you, and I’ll probably send more of those chocolate-covered cherries, too. I may still hate cars, but I love The Cars, so thank you for adding some music to my day.

P.S. My mom also influenced my taste in music, especially artsier bands like Camel, but I credit her more with my overall sense of iconoclasm.

P.P.S. If my children force me to go to a single Little League game, I pray invisible headphones exist by then.