I'd rather listen to music

… than walk on the beach

I love music—any variety or genre. I love rock and roll, classical, contemporary, jazz, blues, country, western, orchestral and chamber, alternative, opera, big band, ska. I could listen to Reznicek's Overture to Donna Diana all day long, it's so happy and bouncy.

My personal recommendation: You simply must hear Modeste Moussorgsky's Dawn On the Mockva (Moscow) River, the lilting, melodic, ever so incredibly romantic prelude to his opera Khovanshchina.

And then check out my page on Moussorgsky and a few of his mid-18th Century composer-compatriots—the Moguchaya Kuchka group from St. Petersburg. If you like Pictures at an Exhibition as I do, you'll enjoy what I've discovered about the work.

I'm also … well … a Beatles and Led Zeppelin fan and contemporary. Those two bands and the Loggins/Messina group formed my musical genesis and defined who I was as a teen and young adult.

I wanted to be a rock singer, of course, and joined a band which based our music on Led Zeppelin (and quickly found that my vocal range wasn't adequate). Our single claim to fame was a one-time opening for Heart, who also derived their style from the same Hammer of the Gods.

As I grew up, I started listening to the "construction" of the music more deeply, hearing the instrumental breakdowns and techniques. That started me on the road to music history and theory, from which I became a daily newspaper entertainment editor and critic, which I loved. I met celebrities from all over and was introduced to an even wider range of musical tastes.

I found there isn't a genre that I don't enjoy, or can at least find something worth studying (yes, even disco). From Led Zeppelin's primitive electronic explorations, I moved to Emerson, Lake and Palmer's more fully realized electronic symphony stylings, which led me to light classical, and then … oh, my … to heroic Beethoven, piano virtuosi Franz Lizst and mad Wagner (who was Lizst's unwilling father-in-law, though they agreed to disagree on everything about music).

I worked one Saturday afternoon with the newspaper's newlu-hired young photographer, helping her learn her assignments and showing her the darkroom—as we processed and printed the next day's feature photos, she started humming a famous overture. Naturally, I identified it and blurted out the title and composer's name—the William Tell Overture by Gioacchino Rossini. She snorted with mock anger and said: "You're the ONLY person I've ever known who would use the classical name without even thinking of it as the 'Lone Ranger Theme Song.' "

I like the Rossini piece for the stop-start break between the slower middle section and the "Lone Ranger" part. I'm especially partial to that whole stop-start school, which is one of the reasons I like rock and roll so much—I favor compositions by Lennon and McCartney, Page and Plant, Jim Messina and Stephen Stills, and by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller—whom I consider pop geniuses.

One night, my son Troy and some friends took me to see Reel Big Fish (I trhink they were counting on dad's taxi and needed to do something with me during the show). The girls were concerned whether I was having a good time or not and kept asking me "are you sure you're is okay?" With my love for music in any form, I had so much fun. I even got up and danced with them (no mosh pit though, I've never been into that much physical stuff).

I've been known to go on musical "binges," listening for whole weeks to one artist or one genre—say, a period of nothing but Moodie Blues during which I'd scramble to locate every one of their recordings from "Go Now" to my all-time favorite "Simple Games;" followed by a week of Antonin Dvorak (the two-tone slam of my shower door reminds me of the opening phrase of his From the New World symphony (Symphony no. 9 in E minor)—the old NBC News theme).

There was a time when I'd rather have lost my sight than my hearing. But as I get … ummm … more mature, my ears are suffering the excesses of my youth with the long-known debilitative effects on the tiny hairs of the inner ear. My eyesight hasn't changed in years but someday soon, I'll have to invest in a hearing aid (the modern, computerized, super-miniaturized kind) or risk not having my music anymore.

I find myself compensating by watching people talk, trying to pick up visual clues to what I can't quite hear clearly. It's especially bad when I'm in a big room with a lot of other people carrying on conversations and a person with a medium-toned voice is talking to me, the background swell overwhelms my focus.

But in the quiet of my sanctum sanctorum, I still enjoy all the music—especially with the expensive headphones I got to shut out the whine of the CPU fan and my family's abysmal television viewing habits.