«Turn that darn noise down!!»
I could hear the exclamation marks. There
were
at least two of them. It was my neighbor. Again.
Apparently, I could have been playing a wee bit too loud. My neighbor lived
about four hundred feet away. I turned up the volume a little bit more, so I
wouldn’t have to listen to his noise. For approximately eleven nanoseconds, there was a
tiny little fight between John Lennon and my neighbor. Home.
By about thirty decibels. My stereo definitely won
that one. What with power-extensive random-muting, touch-sensitive level
fluorescent display, threshold amount silver ultra feedback ability and a very
useful button that blinks ‘turbo’ in a traffic-light-look-alike-way when you
press it. Then mom came in. She wasn’t angry at all. She said in a friendly,
though very loud voice : «Can you please turn that
noise down?» Everybody seemed to talk about noise. «Huh?»,
I politely replied. She tried to open her mouth again, but sort of gave up. She
walked out again. «Don’t slam the door», I mumbled. «Jim Morrison might fall
down.» Then, before you had the time to even think
about saying ‘Sony is a brand that always needs to get repaired’, mom suddenly
popped her head into my room again. «Forgot to mention ;
Your dad and his accordion club is having their rehearsal
tonight. Sorry, but I will need the car.» My music was
still annoyingly loud, still I heard every word she
said. That was it. Period. My life flew by in a
revue-like fashion, like everybody’s lives fly by when their dads have
accordion rehearsals. I will never understand how between five and eight
people, everyone out of tune, can work together and even not be ashamed of
admitting they like it. They all hear they are out of tune, they all know they
are out of tune, they all want to do something about it, but nobody does. They
just nod their heads in all sorts of directions, and say «Aren’t we good».
That’s basically what being in an accordion club in
I lived to see the next day. The sky was blue, there were no accordions up
there, not even
the slightest accordion-cloud to annoy me. It seemed to be a jolly good day.
And it was getting even better. You see, my teacher was kind of old-fashioned,
and could never really like him. In history class that
very day, I had a couple of CD’s laying scattered around on my desk. Teacher,
fifty years old and with squeeking shoes, came by. He
was the kind of teacher who needed emergency aid for managing to play out a
musical tape for us, he never went skiing in months with the letter ‘r’ in them
and the most revolutionary idea he ever
came up with was saying ‘pink’ instead of ‘bright red’. Luckily, he eventually learned how to press the button ‘play’. One of the CD’s
(unfortunately) happened to be More Power Ballads. OK, I’m a softy... But I
didn’t pay any money for it anyway. Swapped it for a Kylie Minogue
record I received for answering a toothpaste-ad very fast. However, teacher, fifty years old, picked up the CD and had a look at
the track list. Suddenly he bursts out: «What? Led Zeppelin and Return (being a
Norwegian band even more pathetic then Bon Jovi) on
the same record? How do they allow this stuff?» The
class never seemed the same, neither the teacher. It was that day I realized I
was lucky, being there at school. Being able to, and encouraged to learn stuff.
It was that day I decided that I really wanted to learn something. It was that
day who plotted the course I was to take in my life. And it was that day that
made a great starting point for writing a novel that I would get an ‘A’ for (OK,
this is yet to be settled).
So I went home, whistlingly
happy. My uncle was sitting together with my family, watching TV. Watching a terrible program with a terrible singer. He
looked as if he was a truck driver, and as matter of fact, it turned out that
he was. So no wonder he was a bad singer. My rather strange uncle, being twohundredandeight centimeters tall, was tapping his legs,
eagerly singing along with the hopeless lyrics the TV was hammering out. «Now,
that’s what I call music», he said. «That is what you young guys should listen
to. Some culture!!» «Yeah, it’s good», I said. A
bigger lie than «No, I didn’t break the car window.»
I went back up to my room. Out came my dated
vinyl-collection. Took out one LP. The loudest one I
had. The one with cannons for bass drums
and rifle shots for snare drums. The one with UZI-shots instead of guitar solos.
I put it on. Turned on the stereo. Invoked
the threshold-level distributor. Pressed the ‘turbo’
button. Inserted my earplugs. Hid under the table. It took a few seconds, before the
adults began to bang the roof, which happened to be my floor. «It’s the music
we listen to!», I yelled. «It’s culture!» I turned it down after a while, after hearing mom and dad
talking. I heard only a couple of words, but I must say I didn’t like the sound
of neither ‘organ donor’, ‘withdrawal of weekly wages’ nor ‘grounding’. Still,
I thought I got my revenge.
The days went by. I came home from school. Dad was
sitting at the VCR. He was watching my KISS video. HE WAS WATCHING MY KISS
VIDEO! I was lost for words. My dad’s most decadent choice of music had earlier
been Bing Crosby, and now he was watching KISS? «Good band, that», he said.
«They had a really good drummer in KISS», he went on. «Pity they split up». I
went to my room, and put on my Chet Atkins CD.
In the words of Paul Stanley: «If life is radio, turn
up to ten...»
The End