In honor of Father’s Day, Pitchfork staff and contributors recall their musical memories of their fathers, of being fathers, and explore the lives and loss of their dads.
Marc Masters: The first record my son asked "what is this?" about was a 45 of Soft Cell's cover of "Tainted Love". It's my wife's copy and neither of us realized it was sitting in a stack of records near him—it was even in the wrong sleeve, so we thought it was Love & Rockets' "So Alive" until he pulled it out. We let him put it on our cheap/beat-up-able USB turntable, and he has since asked us to play it constantly, recently learning to put it on himself. It's scratched and scuffed and cat-fur-embedded, but it still plays. So this will probably be the song I think of most when I think of being a father, despite the fact that he'll forget it soon and cringe every time I bring it up. Actually, because he'll cringe every time I bring it up, that's why I'll always think of it.
Brandon Stosuy: I have this thing with Deafheaven and their song "Dream House". When my mother was dying of cancer, I would listen to their early music on repeat. It was cathartic; I'd think about her and cry and somehow feel a little better. I remember seeing Deafheaven play at Saint Vitus sometime after she was gone, and I stood in the back, kind of in the shadows, and just sort of fell apart.
But the reason "Dream House" in particular reminds me of being a father is because one day my son Henry, who was maybe almost three at the time, asked me to play "super hero music really loud." It took me awhile to figure out what he meant, but eventually realized he was talking about Sunbather, especially "Dream House", and so I'd play it, and he'd make these exaggerated super hero moves, a totally serious look on his face, and I'd laugh.
He legitimately loved it, to the point that I snuck him into one of their soundchecks so he could watch them perform it. He stood in the middle of the room by himself in awe. We walked home from the venue, me carrying him on my shoulders, and he talked about how loud it was, how he couldn't imagine anything louder (he was wearing massive headphones to protect his ears, but he said he could "feel" how loud it was). He was glad to see that they really were super heroes, he told me.
Henry was born five weeks after my mother died, and so I had this quick transition from mourning son to doting father, and each year when we come close to the anniversary of my mother's death, we're also approaching Henry's birthday. The way he reacted to and loved that song turned it from something sad, to maybe the happiest song I know.
These days he's joined by his little brother, Jake, the two of them tackling each other, giggling hysterically. These simple moments are my favorite, and we have a lot of them with music, whether it's Jake singing along in his toddler voice to Pitbull's "Time of our Lives" in the back of the car, Henry at Carnegie Hall excitedly asking me how Björk's voice can so completely fill a room, both of them changing songs like "All About That Bass" to songs like "All About That Poop", or the two of them having extended dance sessions, where they'll channel surf between Bollywood, grindcore, pop radio, Pavement's "Cut Your Hair", Swans, and Van Halen.
It's all amazing, but watching them dance to "Dream House" is something especially affecting to me, and something I know I'll never forget, even after they're grown and my ears are totally shot: These little boys, who I love, dancing as fast and dramatically as they can in Superman capes, now and then looking up at me and laughing.
Corban Goble: What my dad lacked in traditional music training he made up for in enthusiasm. One of my earliest memories is him pounding away at the piano interlude of "Layla", something he'd eventually teach me as I began my own career as an enthusiastic but technically uninformed musician. His music—which was the frat rock of the '70s, the Doobie Bros, James Gang, Chicago, etc.—has always had a place in my life, even if my mom's records were comically cooler.
Ian Blair: Last winter, around the time the sunless, chilled skies in New York remind me I’m no longer in northern California, I stumbled upon a link of a 1987 Soul Train Music Awards performance of Dionne Warwick’s “That's What Friends Are For,” featuring Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, and Whitney Houston. I immediately burst into tears.
The song reminded me of my dad who lost a bout with brain cancer in December of 2008 after a valiant two year fight. He was my best friend. We called each other "my guy." He taught me how to read music, how to play ball. We played cards and "the dozens." We’d talk Kobe and family drama. We’d kick each other intel about my brother and mom. We’d rap about life.
But even as open as we were with one another, my fondest memories with my dad were when we didn’t talk, we just listened. Not to each other, but to the tunes jamming through the speakers, the bass pulsating through the seats of my '96 Buick LeSabre. Just vibin’. We’d just ride—eyes forward, seat reclined, body slumped with a slight lean to the right. He slouched from driving a big-rig. I slouched because he was watching. As for the tunes, we both liked it loud. We strove to bring the concert inside.
Every now and then we would break our silence to jive: "Oh you aint know ‘bout this!" we ribbed before cranking up the volume, as if to say let me teach you something. Teacher and student. Father and son. Student and teacher. We mostly did this with the black acts, the relatively unknown rhythm-n-blues and funk bands, the soul vocalists who sang with a limp. Luther and James and Cuba and Dionne and Whitney and Gladys and Stevie. Aretha. We loved the growls and grunts and hisses and woo-woos. They all would make our necks recoil and our arms turn to Braille. Cruising became my education in the vastness of blackness. Each song peeled back a layer of existence.
That day I watched Dionne Warwick and company perform their beautiful rendition—the song was originally written by Burt Bacharach and Carole Sager; Warwick popularized it with Gladys Knight, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder in 1985, the year I was born—those memories of cruising returned to the fore. I just listened. And listened. And listened. And then I text my mom the link that read: "Proof that God is real."
She replied: "Amen. Left me crying in my car."
Philip Sherburne: My father, who lived through the Great Depression, was a great collector. Saving any object that might one day be made useful again was second nature to him, and it bled into the hobbies that he pursued—collecting coins, stamps, vintage glass insulators, and rocks. So many rocks.
Looking back, he was an eccentric, in his own, quiet way—something I only began to realize afterwards, some time after he had stopped being anything. Not a major eccentric, but he never did things you would expect, well, anyone to do. He invented things occasionally, and I believe even applied for patents. For years, the clothespin affixed to the headlight switch was a staple item in the family car; it was the prototype for a device he was sure could be marketed to remind people to turn off their lights upon parking. Analog, all the way. He taught me to build a radio once, spooling copper wire around a toilet paper tube. Incredibly, it worked, just barely, and I marveled at the crackle of static and voice emanating from our battery-powered contraption. It sounded like we'd made contact with Mars.
I suppose that a lot of his eccentricities had to do with the fact that he was mostly deaf, or as he called it, "hard of hearing"—a steady erosion of his hearing that had begun in his forties, before I was born, and slowly, gradually cut him off from much of the outside world, not that he ever complained or even seemed to mind. Maybe there was some relief there in that muffled cocoon. Mainly, I just think he'd made his peace with it.
At night, when I was a kid, he sat in front of the television wearing enormous air-traffic-control headphones, two squishy black pads on either end of a bowed metal rod, which attached via an ominously thick, coiled cord to a crude aluminum box, designed and built for him by a friend, that sprouted glowing tubes like Turkish domes. He listened to the television with that for years, cranking up the volume knob on the box, until finally the loss was too total and the box went to prop up other boxes in the garage. It would be perhaps a decade before closed captioning came to cable and we learned to watch TV without even bothering to listen, the text giving away spoilers two beats before they left the characters' lips, a strange and frustrating Doppler effect. After he died I deactivated the captions and gave way to nights of mindless, immediate immersion. But when I returned to visit my mom, she had turned them on again. Old habits die hard.
Music was never a big deal for my parents; my mom had a box of records in the closet—the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Joan Baez, The Sound of Music—and my dad went without entirely. I never did find out what he listened to in his hearing years, up through the '50s. But he sat through my piano recitals anyway; later, he designed synthesizer stands for me—fairly sophisticated things, double-tiered, with pipe legs that unscrewed, just in case I ever needed to bring them to a gig. (Aside from one high school talent show, I never did.) And when I got into punk, and my mom was certain that all that screaming could only lead me to ruin, it was my dad who sat on my bed and read the lyric sheets I gave him, and then tried to reassure my mother that I wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. "Actually, honey," he told her, "aside from all the swearing, they hold some pretty upstanding values." (I wasn't stupid; I made sure to show him Embrace and Rites of Spring, not the Accüsed or Poison Idea. In any case, she wasn't convinced.)
I used to wear NoMeansNo's "Dear Old Dad" t-shirt—the song's about an abusive father; the t-shirt features a man's looming figure in the doorway—and I always worried that his feelings would be hurt, but it had nothing at all to do with him; that was just the only shirt at the merch table, and I really liked NoMeansNo. There's a photograph of us fishing off a dam in the Cascades, me wearing the shirt, my dad in his floppy fisherman's hat. I'm guessing he never even noticed the shirt.
One of my earliest memories—I couldn't have been older than four—took place in the house where I was born. My mom was out for the afternoon, and I had just woken up from my nap. My dad brought me into the living room and said, "I've got a surprise for you." I was thrilled. Would it be toys? Candy? Toys and candy?
It was neither. He brought me over to the record player—a cream-colored hi-fi record player, with a top that flipped up and speakers that snapped into the unit, allowing you to close it like a suitcase and carry it around by the attached handle. At the top of the spindle, hovering a few inches above the platter, teetered three or four records. He put the needle on the record on the platter—a kids' record, maybe. I don't have the faintest recollection. And when it was finished playing, the turntable arm lifted up and swept back, in a herky-jerky motion, and a tiny switch at the top of the spindle released the next record, which came sliding down on top of the first one, and the arm swung back into position, lowered itself, and slid into the groove. And so on. This was apparently some sort of auto-play feature, and it delighted him to no end.
I thought it was a pretty crappy "surprise," to say the least. But I've returned to that memory many times, over the years. Partly because I've wondered just what the heck inspired him to do that. But I've also wondered if that didn't plant the seed of my own lifelong obsession with records. And I've also wondered if his own loss of hearing, and everything that came with it, like the homemade television amplifier and, eventually, his cochlear implant, didn't have some profound effect on my own appreciation for sound. I know that without my father's eccentricities, his hobbies, his collections, his private and unexplained passions, I never would have become a music writer.
His whole life, he wore a hearing aid in each ear, and they'd squeal when the batteries got low, or sometimes when he chewed. Because he couldn't hear the squealing, we'd have to tell him, and he'd futz with a dial until it quit. Some of the music I like the most, these days, sounds a lot like that squealing. Maybe it just feels like home.
Mark Richardson:
This song came out in 1961, a strange time in American music; post-early rock'n'roll explosion, pre-Beatles. At the time of the single’s release, my father was 18 years old. And he loved it. It was a single and then it appeared on an album in 1962 called Surfer’s Choice, which my father bought that year. My father had this record in a box of old records in the closet of my childhood home, purchased during his late high school and early college days. I am a little obsessed with this box of records because they represent the music my father was willing to spend his money on when he was 18 and 19, prime music-buying age. Johnny and the Hurricanes, the Ventures, the Astronauts, and above all, Dick Dale, the King of the Surf Guitar. I never talked to him about these bands in any kind of deep way, but I think his connection to them must have been heavy.
My dad grew up in Chicago, and at the time he was buying these surf guitar records he had never been west of Wisconsin. I imagine California, the ocean, surfing, all seemed very exotic to him. When I was a kid I would paw through my dad’s records; they were very beaten up and probably unplayable. I did not at that time think too hard about them. My brother and I saw his Dick Dale records and we made fun of him, mercilessly. We figured this Dick Dale was square. For one thing, his name was Dick. As a 12 year old, that was already pretty funny. And then the album cover had a surfer on it and it had songs called things like "Peppermint Man". Seemed like a joke. I’m pretty sure the album was too damaged for us ever to put on, and I’m quite sure we had no desire to play it anyway.
Two decades later, I am living in Seattle. And a friend that I’m staying with points out that Dick Dale is going to be playing a show nearby, promoting his new album, Tribal Thunder. This was a year before Pulp Fiction when everyone suddely knew Dick Dale. We went and checked it out, and it was fucking amazing, Dick Dale had lost nothing on guitar, he was a great showman. Afterwards I went up to him, with a piece of paper in my hand. And I said, "My father has been a huge Dick Dale fan since he was a kid, would you give him an autograph?" "To Rick—Thanks, ‘Tribal Thunder’ -Dick Dale", promoting his album but giving my father that little shout-out. I mailed that piece of paper to my father; he had never seen Dick Dale. He framed that piece of paper and put it up in his office.
David Dark: Contemplating a father can be a mixed bag of fear, despair, and—in my case—gratitude. There are habits of body and mind we pray we might somehow get clear of, evolving our way into better ways of being in the world. And hopefully, there are also more than a few instances of courage and eloquence, wit and magnanimity, and general awesomeness to which we’re determined to be true. Maybe a person can be occasionally pleased to suddenly see themselves on the same trajectory as that of the old man. That wouldn’t mean you aren’t often scandalized and horrified too.
Mine merged with the infinite in the late 20th century. I often recall him as a cross between Peter Falk’s Columbo and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch. He loved a good argument, the moment snobs suddenly see that they’re embarrassing themselves, love between people, coffee, and cigarettes, and every instance in any genre of redemption song.
On the way to here and there, my kids complain about my tendency to drive down the sparsely inhabited side-streets of Nashville, especially in and around the fairgrounds that used to house Fair Park, an amusement park. But the lengthy detours are, I suspect, a sort of search and rescue mission. Was he here? My memory wants to say my dad took me to Fair Park every week or so for a certain season. It also wants to imagine him overcoming his estrangement from himself and others in magical ways I never knew about. If he did, maybe I can too.
So here’s Tom Waits working it out, delivering—as he always does—the common goods, profoundest confession and profoundest compassion every which way; another meditation on an enigmatic proverb to which to cling on this our boulevard of broken dreams. Is it our own hopes or the hopes of others on which we prey and pray? How do I fight loneliness without doing damage to people, without lying? Weave, rip, patch, sow, heal. Put it in a song. Or try to. And know that, a Carl Jung instructs, "Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important."
As I listen to it, I see my dad sitting in a Waffle House in the pre-dawn hours. He’s not home, but he wishes he knew how to be without upsetting himself or anyone else. He’s reading Elmore Leonard, but he’s also often only pretending to as he watches and listens to a nearby couple trying to be as honest with each other as they can. He’s interested, moved, and keeping out of it as he telepathically wishes joy upon them. Let it be so.