One afternoon when Dylan was around 15, he and I got into my car to run an errand together. I turned the stereo on, preparing to load a CD by the Who. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” was playing on the radio.
“That’s Aretha Franklin,” Dylan noted.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
“I saw her on TV this summer, playing some new songs,” he said.
“That’s cool,” I said in response. “I’m going to play the Who in a minute, but you don’t turn off the Queen of Soul until she’s done singing.”
“That would be disrespectful,” Dylan said.
“It would,” I replied. “Yes, it would.”
“And the song is called ‘Respect.’”
“It is. Yes, it is.”
We pulled out into the street and down the block, the moment lasting until we turned off toward the main road.
Music is very important to me. It energizes me, and has since I was a small child, standing in the shopping cart, giving impromptu concerts for passers-by (using a toy ice cream cone for a microphone) as my mother shopped for groceries. It is my sword and my shield, providing me with encouragement, support and fortification when I have most needed them. It has been my instrument of comfort, giving me emotional sustenance when little else could. It is a passion I have developed over practically my entire lifetime.
My taste is all over the map – I have thousands of vinyl LPs and CDs, with nearly every genre and subgenre of music represented 1. From practically his infancy, Dylan was the recipient of my attempts to imprint my taste on him, from my dancing around the living room with him to the Talking Heads and Flaming Lips, to my singing James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” to him before he went to bed at night; to the selections I would play in the car while taking him somewhere. Music was important to me, so I wanted it to be important to him, and I wanted him to have what I considered the benefit of my taste. I really didn’t see it as being much different from teaching him manners, or imparting a sense of right and wrong, or any of the other things we imprint on our children.
It quickly became complicated, though. While my wife and I were of a shared opinion on manners and moral code, we did not share the same taste in music (or film, or books, or television; really, it’s a wonder we’ve stayed together for almost 30 years). Dylan wound up spending more time in the car with her, so he became quite enamored of the pop music of the day, which was more her taste. So, while he didn’t mind it when I put on classic rock or modern rock or R&B, he was much more interested in hearing Justin Timberlake, Usher and the Black Eyed Peas, none of whom were of any interest to me.
And while my wife and I would pretend to argue about the music to which he was being exposed, something was happening inside Dylan’s head – he was developing his own likes and dislikes, taking in the sum total of sounds to which he was exposed and making choices about what he enjoyed and wanted to hear. His sense of hearing was giving him input, and that input was routing around his neural pathways until it eventually tripped one of three switches – Like, Dislike or Don’t Care. In many ways, those inputs and resulting choices were not much different from the methods that led him to announce he didn’t like peas or mushrooms, but would gladly eat as much yogurt as we were willing to put in front of him.
Eventually, his taste in music broke off from both mine and my wife’s completely, and Dylan became enamored of Justin Bieber’s songs (more about that later), tweener power-pop from Nickelodeon Shows (Drake & Josh, Victorious, and The Naked Brothers Band, in particular) and other sources we cared nothing about. In the past four or five years, he has become obsessed with Broadway musicals (Hamilton was the gateway drug for this), a genre that is one of the few not represented in my record collection.
But it doesn’t have to be. In a way, it’s kinda cool that it isn’t. He’s studied it; he’s gone to see a ton of shows; he’s part of communities online populated with fellow obsessives; the walls of his bedroom are covered in posters and Playbill covers. He has developed a passion that is his own. His mother and I gave him what we liked, and he took it, processed it, and went in another direction, made his own choices.
And while musicals are not my thing, they’re his thing. And I respect that. Even better, I’m proud of him for doing it. I just wish he listened to the Who more often.
1 Allow me to illustrate – there is a stack of CDs inches from where I’m typing this. In that stack are albums from jazz masters John Coltrane and Terence Blanchard; country great Willie Nelson; jam band instrumentalists Circles Around the Sun; the progressive rock band Yes; adult contemporary stars Ambrosia and Leo Sayer; ‘60s icons the Doors; modern folkies the Avett Brothers; singer/songwriter Amy Petty; cowpunk assassins the Geraldine Fibbers; and Elvis Presley.