Fatherhood anonymous; an open discussion on being a dad.

[Bunion 2020]

Right back at ya.

[Harry]

You guys gotta cut Bunion some slack. His office up in the Penalty Box was about 20 feet from the antenna for a very powerful radio station, 104.7, it plays Classic Rock, basically the station is stuck in 1973 the year Big Sky was built. It is the only radio station available in Big Sky and that station largely set the mood for the area until the advent of online music. The radio waves probably altered Bunions brain (among other things…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBZM

https://www.powder.com/the-bump/big-...k-gateway-gnar




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[Mustonen]

The generational music snobbery is pretty tedious. Music snobbery in general is tedious. You’re taking lots of enjoyment off the table with that. Good music is good music. Being popular doesn’t mean you can’t throw down. That girl has talent.

[hatchgreenchile]

Shitty Dead shows get decades of airplay, but TS (who can sell out an entire stadium tour instantly) doesn’t stand a chance ? OK Boomer…

We play a wide spectrum of genres in our house, and I make it a habit to ask our daughter what she likes / dislikes about certain tracks. She wasn’t feeling Elvis, but Chromeo was a hit!

[Mustonen]

I try to teach my kids to enjoy lots of different things. I figure that means they’ll enjoy more things.

Being a snob isn’t fun.

But you lousy old fuckers do you, I guess.

[Bunion 2020]

You guys gotta cut Bunion some slack. His office up in the Penalty Box was about 20 feet from the antenna for a very powerful radio station, 104.7, it plays Classic Rock, basically the station is stuck in 1973 the year Big Sky was built. It is the only radio station available in Big Sky and that station largely set the mood for the area until the advent of online music. The radio waves probably altered Bunions brain (among other things…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBZM

https://www.powder.com/the-bump/big-...k-gateway-gnar




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OT but I do believe that building is gone and "my office" was 4000' lower and 5 miles north, I built it but never spent much time there. My go to was hike the Headwaters, if they were good drop an A-Z, cut the tram line and ski a N. Summit lap and then ski around Moonlight to have a look at things. But the Eagle was the reason I clad the penalty box with 10 Ga. steel when Merik and I and a kid named Micah built it, my version of a Faraday cage. Micah also helped build the Headwaters hiking trail when we did that, that was a fun summer.

[yeahman]

he also helped build the Headwaters hiking trail.

Speaking of that I talked to a guy this winter who said they were paying him to continue (blasting?) the trail out and around to the Gum Wall.

[Bunion 2020]

No one cares about the Gum Wall.

Merik and I did that hike around to the 1st chute west of Kastle Rock and dropped that one day when the BSSP had opened the upper A-Zs. The BSSP were not amused and even more so when I pointed out that due to the weird property boundary in that area we were on MLB property for the upper 1/2 which meant we needed check the snow before allowing their skiers access.

Anyway, back to music, listen to what ya want and I will do the same. But if you start raving about something I don't care for I will probably express my opinion.

[Buster Highmen]

I remember Merik from his days at Crustal. K00k.

I don't know Taylor Smith's music at all.

One of my kids doesn't listen to music, the other one listens to everything from FZ, the Dead to The Cure and even Ms. Smith and Lana Del Rey.

I had applied for a job at Cellophane Square in 1981. When they asked my what kind of music I liked, I wrote: "good music, not bad music". I got a job offer. Just goes to show there's no accounting for taste.

[zion zig zag]

^^^^Ugh, I thought we had covered the worst of current popular music with Swift and Maroon 5, but Lana Del Ray takes it to a new and horrific level.


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[zion zig zag]

But seriously, of the current crop of teeny bopper bad music, Cyrus beats Swift in the talent department.


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[Mazderati]

This just in. Out of touch old fucks are out of touch.

[Buster Highmen]

But seriously, of the current crop of teeny bopper bad music, Cyrus beats Swift in the talent department.


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Talent, schmalent.

The only thing that matters is shelf life and post industrial marketing.

Sheesh.

[zion zig zag]

This just in. Out of touch old fucks are out of touch.

You never tire of sticking up for this, eh? You go girl!

(Entirely in jest, I’ve been an out of touch old fuck since I was 25)

[Buster Highmen]

You never tire of sticking up for this, eh? You go girl!

(Entirely in jest, I’ve been an out of touch old fuck since I was 25)

Dissing Lana Del Rey is just an anti ginger trope. For shame!

[zion zig zag]

Dissing Lana Del Rey is just an anti ginger trope. For shame!

Ha, definitely!

[yeahman]

My wife and daughters just returned from Denver where they saw the first of two sold out shows at the football stadium. 73,000 people at the show. Taylor Swift played for 3.5 hours, everything from her pop hits to just her and her guitar and piano. Best show she's ever seen, wife said. "Life changing. Worth every penny." She's got wide ranging tastes and is not some clueless tween.

[Bunion 2020]

She's got wide ranging tastes and is not some clueless tween.

Who? Your wife? Of course not. Taylor? Well, she is like 35 years old now.

I remember Merik from his days at Crustal. K00k.

Yes he was, but in a good way, RIP.

Lotta Old Guy Swifties here, who knew.

Meanwhile this hit the Wapo today.

Why ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ still matters at 50, and not just to dads
Pink Floyd’s masterpiece maintains a cross-generational appeal that has made it the fourth-best-selling album of all time
Perspective by Ty Burr
July 18, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT


You lower a record player’s stylus onto an LP, and it begins. The crackle of needle on vinyl is silenced by a long, low heartbeat fading in and then a maelstrom of sound that serves as overture for the (dis)passion play to come.
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Perhaps the record player is illuminated by the light of the nearby lava lamp your sister gave you when she left for college. Perhaps the Snoopy and R. Crumb posters on your wall are obscured by clouds of smoke from the bong cradled in your best friend’s lap. The maelstrom builds and swirls like the Aleph in that Borges short story your hip English teacher assigned the class, and then — whammo — the album’s soundscape widens into 3D Technicolor CinemaScope, and a weary Godlike singer arrives to remind you to “Breathe … Breathe in the air.”

It’s 1973, you’re 15 years old, and you’re listening to “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

Well, maybe you weren’t, but I was, and so was everyone my age — an entire generational cohort of suburban adolescents, mostly male, mostly White, for whom Pink Floyd’s album served as a sonic bellwether of our discontent. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of “The Dark Side of the Moon” — if it hasn’t aged, neither have we — and this month sees the limited theatrical release of “Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd,” a long-in-the-works documentary directed by Roddy Bogawa and the late graphic designer Storm Thorgerson, whose cover art for “Dark Side” — a prism blasting color into the night — is as enigmatic as anything in the grooves of the album itself.
“The Dark Side of the Moon.” (MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images)

These milestones are convenient excuses to commemorate a work of popular culture that stubbornly refuses to go away. With its clanging alarm clocks and stately dirges, its banshees and its bliss, “The Dark Side of the Moon” is a monolith of Classic Rock, a genre better known to our children and grandchildren as Dad Rock, which they either quickly flip past on Sirius Radio or settle into with studious teenage curiosity, the way I once listened to my mother’s Sinatra records. But here’s the catch — “Dark Side” doesn’t need Sirius or a parental playlist to be discovered by 21st-century adolescents. They find it on their own, right around the time their disenchantment with an adult world they’re being frog-marched toward crystallizes into exhaustion.
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I played a lot of music when my two kids were growing up at the turn of the millennium, but not a lot of Floyd. And yet at a certain point in their respective teenage individuations, there “The Dark Side of the Moon” was, handed along by friends like (and possibly with) a bag of janky high school weed.

It’s an intriguing conundrum. There are other monoliths of early ’70s Dad Rock — “Who’s Next,” “Led Zeppelin IV,” “Layla,” “Eat a Peach,” insert your own candidate here — so why has this one had such an insanely long tail? “Dark Side” is the fourth-best-selling album of all time, starting with an uninterrupted run of 14 years on the Billboard 200 and regular appearances up to and including 2023, for a total of 981 weeks on the charts.

It’s not like the world was waiting to pounce on a new Pink Floyd album a half-century ago. “The Dark Side of the Moon” caught everyone by surprise, musically and commercially, especially in America, where the British band’s experimental art-rock had been ignored in favor of stateside sonic explorers like the Grateful Dead.
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“Dark Side” represented the culmination of the group’s struggle to extricate itself from the long shadow of original leader Syd Barrett, the textbook case of a 1960s rocker who went the chemical distance and never returned. As the new documentary makes clear, The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called, fusing the names of Barrett’s favorite American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) was very much a product of Barrett’s visionary acidhead whimsy, with bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason supporting the leader’s singing, songwriting and lead guitar. The magic lasted through the group’s eclectic first singles, but as early as the tour for the 1967 debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” an LSD-addled, mentally ill Barrett was staring into the middle distance and playing one note for entire sets. He was barely present on the follow-up, “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968), and got jettisoned from the band shortly thereafter, with guitarist Dave Gilmour already drafted to take his place. Fellow musician John Etheridge later remembered thinking that Gilmour should “enjoy it while it lasts, because without Syd that band’s going nowhere” — one of the great wrong calls in the history of popular music.

But it certainly looked that way after the strained noise-rock half of “Ummagumma” (1969), although the first two sides of that double album conveyed the band’s live power. By 1970’s “Atom Heart Mother,” you could hear Waters, Wright and Gilmour back off from the hyperactive inventiveness bequeathed them by Barrett and start to assemble a sound we now recognize as Floydian, and 1971’s underrated “Meddle,” with its sidelong masterpiece “Echoes,” set the stage for the majestic aural cohesiveness of “Dark Side.” “Echoes” was rock, it was a trip, but it was somehow pop, too. All that was missing was for Pink Floyd to mean something.

With “The Dark Side of the Moon,” they meant something, and in a way that many young American listeners in 1973 intuitively understood.

The Watergate scandal was a spreading stain leading to the door of the Oval Office; U.S. military involvement in Vietnam had ceased in January but the bombing of Cambodia continued for months. The movie theaters were dominated by parables of corruption (“The Godfather” won a best picture Oscar the same month that “Dark Side” was released) and demonic possession (“The Exorcist” was out by the end of the year). Your parents watched “The Waltons” on TV and wondered what had happened to this country. If you were a teenager, you didn’t join protest marches like your older siblings; you’d missed the revolution and Woodstock, and, anyway, what did protesting get you other than a Nixon landslide? Instead, you hung out with your friends at this new place called the mall, or you just stayed in your room and got high. “I’d love to change the world,” the British band Ten Years After had sung a year or so earlier, “But I don’t know what to do/So I’ll leave it up to you.” A lot of us knew exactly how that felt.
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So, apparently, did Pink Floyd. “The Dark Side of the Moon” was lyricist Roger Waters’s attempt to catalogue the strains and enervations of the rock musician’s life and in doing so he solemnified and romanticized a generation’s sense of defeat. The drag of an after-school job: “Dig that hole, forget the sun/And when at last the work is done/Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one.” The deadening IV drip of teenage existence: “Kicking around on a piece of the ground in your hometown/Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.” The sense that the future was more of the same: “Up (up … up … up …) and down (down … down … down…)/But in the end it’s only round and round.” The steady beat of the songs, Gilmour’s mournfully chiming guitars, and Wright’s piled-up clouds of synthesizers left a listener comfortably numb, unprepared for the plane-crash paranoia of “On the Run,” singer Clare Torry’s wordless wails of despair on “The Great Gig in the Sky,” or the 7/4 snarl of “Money.”

Among other things, “The Dark Side of the Moon” showed Pink Floyd give up exorcising the living ghost of Barrett and start mythologizing him instead on the album’s penultimate track, “Brain Damage” (and on “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” from the band’s 1975 follow-up “Wish You Were Here”). “The lunatic is in my head,” Waters sang in “Brain Damage”; a lot of us thought we knew how that felt, too.

Such were the emotions and pretensions of middle-class teenage existentialism in the suburbs of mid-1970s America. “The Dark Side of the Moon” gave them a soundtrack to nod and nod out to and, if you lived near a city with a planetarium, a laser show to light up the dark side of your brain. In three years, punk would come along to obliterate the glorious self-pity of “Dark Side” and insist that there was no future but the one you made for yourself. By that time, a lot of us were moving on and either finding a purpose or letting a purpose find us. Pink Floyd got rich, turned ambitious, splintered into acrimony.
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Syd Barrett died of pancreatic cancer in 2006, having retreated from public life to his mother’s house and the eternal mystique that comes with being Classic Rock’s most unknowable lost boy. But “The Dark Side of the Moon” remains a quintessential adolescent rite of passage. It’s a playlist passed along like a secret handshake, a CD in the car of a long midnight drive, and a heartbeat connecting one generation of kids struck dumb by doubt to the next.

[Buster Highmen]

I hated Dark Side of the Moon when it came out.

I guess in part because it spoke the truth about the music industry; it was just so much more about the material world than Saucer Full of Secrets or Meddle or Ummagumma. Yes it was about the defeat, the end of aspiration.

It does have shelf life though.

[schuss]

^^^^Ugh, I thought we had covered the worst of current popular music with Swift and Maroon 5, but Lana Del Ray takes it to a new and horrific level.


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Hold on. Born to Die is a modern classic. Later stuff is eh in a lot of ways in comparison, but that album is a fucking gem. Give that one a listen through cover to cover then tell me she's a bad artist.

[Danno]

I'm not a rap fan, I have a hard time discerning what is "good" vs what is just "popular". So if I don't like some rap that someone plays for me, I don't trust my opinion of its musical worth. I trust my opinion that I don't like it, because musical taste is personal (though there are certainly plenty of artists that I didn't like on first listen but grew to appreciate).

I don't much like mainstream country music, but again, just because I don't enjoy listening to someone like George Strait doesn't mean I can't recognize that he makes good music, it's just not "my music".

I sure as fuck don't know anything about classical music or opera, and generally wouldn't listen to any of it, I don't usually enjoy it much. But the fact that I don't enjoy it much would not lead me to say that a particular composer is no good, or that people won't be listening to that composer 50 years from now.

Bunion, if you are wondering why I said your ignorance was showing, this is why. Nobody is saying you should like TS. What I am saying is that the fact that you don't like her music -- and probably don't like much pop music at all I am guessing -- doesn't make you a good judge of what will have staying power, yet you have stated just that (not putting words in your mouth, you literally said "That there will be "some" pop music that has staying power but Taylor Swift is not a very good example."). I'm a terrible judge of rap music or country opera, but I recognize that fact and don't pass judgment on those artists beyond "I don't like this."

She's talented AF, she's a great songwriter, and her songs will still be played decades from now. I can guarantee that. And because you don't like her or listen to her, you probably don't even really have a sense of the music she's actually putting out. You said "Please someone, anyone recite 3 lines from one of her songs." I can recite a lot more than 3. Which is way more than I can say about most/all pop artists. Why? Because she's a damn good songwriter, not just writing "earworms".

[Danno]

My wife and daughters just returned from Denver where they saw the first of two sold out shows at the football stadium. 73,000 people at the show. Taylor Swift played for 3.5 hours, everything from her pop hits to just her and her guitar and piano. Best show she's ever seen, wife said. "Life changing. Worth every penny." She's got wide ranging tastes and is not some clueless tween.

I saw the second show, and it was absolutely one of the best shows I have ever seen. Of course it wasn't like the 3 hour Dead shows I used to go to, it was mostly scripted because it had to be, because the production values were crazy off the charts. But the energy, the effort put into the whole production and its length, was amazeballs. And the fact that I got to experience it with my daughter, who will remember it for the rest of her life as her first big concert, was priceless.

I didn't pay $1000 for a ticket or anything, and wouldn't pay that much for a ticket to anything. But I can guarantee that those who did felt like they got their money's worth.

[Bunion 2020]

Bunion, if you are wondering why I said your ignorance was showing, this is why. Nobody is saying you should like TS.

Danno you can fuck right off. I never said I do or don't like Taylor Swift. I said I don't think her offerings have longevity.

Beethoven, Bach and Mozart compositions are how old? They still are played today.

You Swifties are mighty thin skinned.

[jackstraw]

Who is Taylor Swift? A lot of talk about her. I'll have to google her name.

[Bunion 2020]

I think you mean Taylor Smith.