So, I was probably sitting in my bedroom toward the end of the war-torn 1960s, listening to Ginger Baker’s “Toad” drum solo on Cream’s “Wheels of Fire,” when our mom’s mom-voice rose easily above Ginger’s wailing and commanded us to turn that junk down.
My memory starts pixelating pretty badly as it’s asked to stretch back that many decades, so it just as easily could’ve been 1972 and the “junk” that Mom demanded I turn down could’ve been me playing Quicksilver Messenger Service’s “What About Me,” with both guitar and mic plugged into a Gibson amp that I’d purchased at Gilmore Music on Seventh Street.
HEY! Just because you don’t dig it doesn’t mean you get to call it junk!! I thought-yelled at her from the closed-door safety of our room where I stood in my burgundy corduroy bell bottoms and a long-sleeve paisley shirt made out of some Space Age material that would probably burn quicker and brighter than a gas-drenched Duraflame firelog.’
My mom listened to Broadway musical soundtracks and the vocal stylings of Sergio Franchi, while my dad preferred barbershop quartet records and Dixieland jazz. When they were both home they chose the safe middle ground of Mantovani & His Orchestra or the 101 Strings, both of which were so soporific that I had to sprint through the living room where it was playing softly lest I would fall asleep mid-stride and tip over.
It’s been said that if all dogs ran and bred freely throughout time, all dogs today would be medium-size and brown. I’m not sure what the result would be if all musicians ran and breeded freely. It could be 101 Strings or Mantovani, or it could be Zappa and Captain Beefheart, depending on the dominant musical genes and the outcome of certain wars.
But there hasn’t been rampant cross-breeding in music. There’s been a little intra-family hanky-panky (on my deathbed, my biggest regret will be the time I squandered on Jean-Luc Ponty’s jazz fusion), but there remain as many distinct categories of music as there are AKC-recognized breeds of dogs. And each has its own set of rabid fans who, over the years, have actually weaponized music to use aggressively against the musical enemy, whether that enemy is a prisoner of war, a barricaded cult, a gaggle of loitering teens or an encampment of homeless sleepers.
When ousted Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was taking refuge in the Papal Nunciatura in Panama City in 1989, members of the U.S. Army’s psyops squad, noting that Noriega was an opera fan, put together a polar-opposite playlist that included the Clash’s “I Fought the Law,” Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” and blasted the music at the building in which Noriega was hiding. The tactic was dismissed as silly and trivial and appeared to have no effect on its intended victim. Apparently Noriega was one of those people who claim to enjoy all sorts of music, a statement that’s never true. He did surrender eventually, but it wasn’t because of the Clash.
Music has long been used as a form of torture, from raps by Eminem to the theme song from Barney (“I Love You”) to Metallica’s metal, but I can’t think of anything worse than the U.S.’s use of repeated plays of the Meow Mix jingle during the War on Terror to wrest confessions from terrorists.
Prolonged playing of songs including Tibetan chants, Christmas carols and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” along with other random noises, at intense volume were famously used to try to get Branch Davidians to surrender at the 1993 Waco siege, prompting one negotiator to remark, “If they go Barry Manilow, it’s excessive force.”
Well, maybe is was excessive in 1993, but now Manilow’s tunes are being used to chase away panhandlers and loiterers at California Rite-Aid stores, including stores in Long Beach, Hollywood and San Diego.
Manilow isn’t one of those artists that I care about, but his music is sort of oddly nostalgic. It makes me hearken back to the days when I used to dive for the radio control in the car when one of his songs came on. Now he’s just sort of a guy I used to be enemies with, but now we can sit down and have a beer together—as long as it’s in a tavern where the jukebox doesn’t suck.