Your Father Should Know

By Benjamin Nugent

While my father is not the Nugent who sang Cat Scratch Fever, he and I have had more conversations about rock 'n' roll than about anything else. Rock was the greatest joy of his youth and continues to be the greatest joy of mine. I can't imagine what my childhood would have been like without my father's rock 'n' roll, and I can't imagine what my taste in rock 'n' roll would be like if I hadn't learned about it from my father.

My dad's parents had absolutely nothing to do with his discovery of rock music in fifth grade, which came in the form of Thurston Harris's 45 Little Bitty Pretty One. He listened to it 19 times in a row in a friend's basement. The moment I "got" rock took place at home when I was four and my father introduced me to the Coasters--with a little explication, I discerned that Yakety Yak was a satirical broadside against parents ("Just tell your hoodlum friends outside/You ain't got time to take a ride"), and I insisted that it be played six or seven times a day. When my father tried to open me up to the woefully inadequate Beatles, I'm pretty sure I tried to break something. Before I was literate, I had definite opinions about rock.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to know more about one rock song or another. When my father stood in the middle of our living room and delivered his David Byrne impersonation, I wanted to know precisely what he meant by "This is not my beautiful house!/This is not my beautiful wife!" For most of my childhood my father helped me decode rock songs. With his guidance, I grew fond of boomer anthems I might have otherwise dismissed as stoned ramblings, like Steely Dan's Deacon Blues and Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues. And there were records in his collection I discovered myself, like Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food and Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, albums I still number among my favorites. There are, of course, bands we've agreed to disagree on. I think Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground was sporadically brilliant; my dad thinks they were sporadically awake. He finds the Band sublime; I think it sounds like a Canadian beer hall.

Never one to be discouraged by such differences of opinion, I've always tried to get my dad to appreciate new bands I like. It irritates me when boomers assume nobody is cutting good rock records anymore just because they haven't heard them, and I figure if I can sell my old man on recent overlooked albums of genius, he'll spread the word throughout his generation. After years of campaigning for Sonic Youth, I was inordinately proud when their opus Daydream Nation turned up on his CD rack. And when he reacted positively to indie-pop-riot grrrl bands like Cadallaca, I had to crow, father-like, to my friends.

More important, conversations about rock kept our channels of communication open when I was a crazed teenager. At a time when parents usually seem like just another indignity to be endured, along with acne and sex-education rallies, rock gave us something to talk about. The old records of my father's that bore the scars of obsessive listening--The Beatles (a.k.a. the "White Album"), Let It Bleed--reminded me that he had suffered his own slings and arrows and had sought the same salve I had: great rock songs.

We Gen Ys have used music to connect with our parents in a way our parents couldn't connect with theirs. But that intergenerational bonding has meant rock can never be an expression of solidarity for my generation the way it was for my father's. We came to our first concerts already divided into subcultures, armed with the different rock educations our parents gave us. Musical taste became our primary means of distinguishing ourselves from one another. In college most indie-rock kids respected hip-hop, and most hip-hop kids respected indie rock, but there was rarely any question as to who was hip-hop (baggy clothes) and who was indie (thrift-store clothes). The two groups tended to keep to themselves.

In other words, while rock was the banner under which boomers rallied against their parents, we their children have used it to define ourselves in contrast to one another. So to paraphrase The Great Gatsby, whenever I feel like criticizing somebody my age for liking Creed, I remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages I've had. My music, like my accent or my eyes, marks me as my father's son.