HOW MY MOM TURNED ME INTO A ROCK AND ROLLER
I grew up in a home with only one record player. Later, it was a stereo, but there was still only one of it. This meant everybody heard whatever was played. In the beginning, of course, our parents chose the music, which generally meant Mom did. She enjoyed musical comedy, so we heard a lot of Rodgers and Hammerstein. She cleaned house to Bach, and we also got significant doses of Handel, Beethoven, and Grieg. If she liked a new song on the radio or a movie soundtrack, she'd buy the album. We did a lot of singing in the car, folk songs and camp songs and hymns. I'm not sure which came first, but when I was around 5 or 6, she bought a guitar and started listening to Simon and Garfunkel. She learned pop-inflected sacred music by Avery and Marsh and Carlton Young, and shared it with the youth and adult choirs in our church. For a time, she and my dad led the church youth group, and when Sgt Pepper came out, they hosted an event for the kids to explain and defend the music to their parents.
When I was 10, I decided I wanted to play drums in the school band. My folks bought me sticks for my birthday. On my next birthday, I got a snare drum of my own, and started drum lessons. Eventually, I got a drum set. When the music store closed, Mom arranged for me to have my lessons in an empty office at the nursing home where she worked. When my brother got his driver's license, he also got the job of driving me to my lessons every Saturday, 40 miles each way. We'd listen to pop music on the radio, and we were both thinking, "Why didn't I know there was music like this?" Then he started buying records. We still had only one stereo -- everybody heard everything. I was a quick convert to Three Dog Night, Elton John, The Who, The Beatles -- but so was Mom. She'd listen, pay attention, find herself singing inappropriate lyrics in the hallways of the nursing home. She may have asked us to turn it down, but she never asked us to turn it off. Before long, she was cleaning house to Rocket to Russia.
During the summer of 1983, my brother and I took over the living room for an hour or two every day to play at being a rock band -- he played Mom's acoustic guitar and I played my drums, and on weekends our sister joined us on tenor sax. Even unamplified, we were loud enough that Mom might close the door. But she never told us to stop, and when we gave our sparsely-attended concert at the end of the summer, she and Dad listened proudly to both sets. In 1985, she came with us to a Bruce Springsteen concert. In 2002, she spent a lot of time listening in her car to The Rising.
In 2004, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She experienced precipitous declines and long plateaus, from which she could never come back. We went every week, with her guitar, and sang for her: folk songs and camp songs and hymns, Avery and Marsh songs, Beatles songs. Playing and singing on a regular basis gave my brother the skills and confidence to start a band, which he named Your Mother Should Know. Eventually he figured out he should invite me to be his drummer. Sometimes we sang his songs for Mom, and I know that if she could have, she would have listened carefully. She would have liked them, and she might have sung inappropriate lyrics in the hallways. She would have been there when we played in SkyChurch and at the High Dive. She would have listened to Your Mother Should Know in the car.
We thank our mother for our ears and our voices and our eclectic musical tastes. She was our earliest and most regular audience. I know I will think of her whenever I play or sing. Thanks, Mom. I know you're listening.
In loving, rocking memory --
Marilyn Frances Meyer
December 30, 1932 - May 10, 2012
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