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by Blake Cooper

I was born in 1986. At least from a current standpoint (as I write this it's New Year's Eve, 2004), that is not a particularly cool time to have been born. I'm not quite old enough to embrace the somehow cool tackiness of the eighties, and just barely old enough to stake claim to the trends of the early nineties: the rebirth of punk in grunge rock, the clothes and the cool alienation of a disaffected youth that i was a few years younger than but could have sworn I felt their angst. Basicallly I was left in the middle of a changing tide in the trends of music.

In addition to this, I grew up in Bloomfield, NY. Those who live a little East of Rochester know about Bloomfield. Not that it's a bad town or anything, but it's a little annonymous. Cornfields among more cornfields, if you get my drift. It's the kind of small town where you get bored easily, and start planning your escape early (in fact, I moved after seventh grade and when I came back a year or so later for a party and saw all my friends again, I was not so surprised to find that almost all my friends had, in one year's time, embraced punk rock as a sort of temporary escape. More about that later). In this kind of setting, you can see how sometimes information from the so-called 'outside world' gets lost in translation.

Which pretty much brings me to Ted Case. Since kindergarten, Ted Case was my best friend (that's his real name too. I haven't talked to him in years, but if he reads this, I hope he doesn't mind). Some of my more vivid memories of childhood took place in Ted's bedroom, usually in the early hours of the morning as we huddled by the radio to listen to whatever was on. This was one of the very limited inlets of information we got at the time (this was before the internet, keep in mind, and although Ted had cable television, I didn't). Back then I didn't know about radio what I know now: it's all business, a losing battle really. We knew none of this, so to us it was new and refreshing. We started to listen to modern rock, which was obviously hit or miss, but it did have it's plus sides. The first album I ever bought on CD was The Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, after hearing "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" on The Nerve, an album I still listen to this day.

The first time I realized how important music was to me was when we heard a song on the radio, a single from a little know band called Green Day. The song was called, "When I Come Around," a song off their major-label debut record Dookie. Ted and I became obsessed. It was a sound we had never heard before. It was fresh and different, but most of all, it was human: it was guitars and drums and things we knew about and could actually play. It was just noise, there was something alive in it. Looking back, I imagine this is how people felt in '77 when they first heard the sex pistols. But again, I didn't know that at the time, so to me it felt like I was the first person to discover this feeling.

Over the next few weeks, we became obsessed with Green Day, Dookie in specific. We got a copy on casette from Ted's cousin Pat, who served in part as the older figure who led the way in all things cool. We copied the tape several times, listening to it religiously, until we had every little lyrical and instrumental nuance down in our minds. We stared at the cover for hours, each time seeing something we'd never seen before in the album's all-encompassing artwork (in the lower right hand corner, you can see two dogs humping). My mom even listened to the tape a few times, to make sure there was nothing objectionable (to my parent's credit, they were actually very cool, even though they could easily pick out the album's many references to teen apathy ("Burnout"), violence toward others (the suicide-bomber anthem "Having a Blast"), and masturbation ("Longview," and the infamous hidden track, "All By Myself") even though I couldn't).

This obsession may very well have been the start of my overall obsession with music. I was amazed when my cousin Chase lent me a casette of Green Day's first album on an independent label, a collection of their previous EPs called 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, an extremely underrated collection of songs (which I heard was recently re-released and remastered, good for them) that taught me about indie music. It was a brave new world, with a whole new thirst for knowledge that would not be matched ever again.

By seventh grade, me and Ted had more or less drifted apart, but the obsession with music had stuck around. From music I learned about everything they can't teach you in school. I learned about revolution and change, as well as history and english, all presented to me in a way I could understand and relate to. If I had never heard that song and that album, not only might I never had learned the things I learned, but I never would have had such an extensive knowledge of all things...cool. Without a doubt, Dookie fueled the thirst. Without Dookie, I might never have heard the immaculate weirdness of Ween, the mind-blowing sounds of Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool (the album for which this long, strange trip down memory lane is named), or the haunting and hypnotic sound of Bjork's voice. It was the first step, a gateway drug if you will. It started something bigger and more empowering than anything I could have ever imagined.

And I never looked back.

Blake Cooper is the managing editor of Quadraphonic Magazine, as well as a contributing writer. He is planning to attend Harris Institue for the Arts starting March 2005 for Music Engineering and Production. His latest music purchase was a copy of Al Martino's Spanish Eyes 45" for 29 cents. He apologizes for this piece being so sappy.

Copyright (C) 2005 Quadraphonic.