Sometime around 6th grade when I was about eleven years old, I decided I wanted to get into popular music.  I hadn't paid all that much attention to it prior to that, but that was about the time when the prospects of maybe possibly being considered "cool" by my peers would be desirable and being hip to music seemed to be one way to maybe get a bit closer to that?  

Keep in mind this was the late 80's and the means for discovering music was fairly limited.  My parents thought cable TV was a waste of time and money so all we had were the basic networks.  Thus MTV was not an option for me.  That left the radio.  

On an average day you could flip on the radio and sort of randomly get whatever and if there was a song you liked you just sort of hoped it would come on.  In reality, they only played a limited number of songs and they'd repeat them over and over again, so there was a pretty high chance the song you liked would come on if you just waited a little bit.

On Sunday afternoons though there was Casey's Top 40 in which the incomparable Casey Kasem would count down the 40 biggest hits of the week.  This seemed like a really good way to get informed about what all was out there and what was currently cool.  So for about a year I made a point of listening to it and sometimes I would even pull out my cassette recorder and record it so I could listen to it again later.  There was always some pretty big anticipation as to what would be the #1 song this week.  

There was definitely some stuff that I heard that appealed to me and even all this time later I'm pretty well versed with the pop hits from that particular year.  If there was a song that was on the radio around 1988 or 1989, there's a good chance I know it and remember most of the words.  

But something started to happen over the course of the year.  I was far from a discerning listener and I hadn't particularly developed anything remotely resembling taste, but even so I started to come to the realization that I didn't actually like a lot of the music I was hearing.  A lot of it seemed really kind of dumb or uninteresting to me.  I tried my best to like everything, but a lot of it just wasn't doing it for me.  I didn't know at that time there was any other music out there, so I began to wonder if maybe I just didn't really like music all that much.  Around this time I got really interested in comic books so most of my attention floated over there and I kind of let music fall by the wayside.

It wasn't until 1991 and a couple of my friends showed me this album called "Out of Time" by a band called R.E.M. that my ears perked up a little bit.  Somehow this stuff sounded far better to me than the top 40 stuff I'd been listening to a couple years earlier.  I didn't even know music could sound like that.  It's not like it's the most experimental or radical recording of all time by any means.  Some old school R.E.M. fans think it marks the point when they sold out to the mainstream, but to my inexperienced ears it was kind of mind blowing.  I didn't own the album, but a couple of my friends had it and I would ask if I could listen to it over and over again.  I liked every song on it and it was all I wanted to listen to for a while.  I didn't know it, but I had just taken my first step down the path towards becoming a full blown music nerd.  It turned out R.E.M. had more albums than just Out of Time so it seemed natural to start exploring those next.  I thought for a while maybe I would just be an R.E.M. fan and not necessarily a music fan, but slowly some other bands started to creep onto my radar as well.  

All of this stuff is a long story to relate, so I think I'll pause here for now, but I'll definitely return more to this later.