Will Someone Please Turn Down the Music?

My son believes he’s the only twenty-one year old in America who has to ask his mother not to play her music so loudly. I know that can’t possibly be true. There must be plenty of other slightly past middle-aged moms who still love loud rock and roll. And it wouldn’t matter that my hearing is not what it used to be. It’s the music itself that makes me play it loud. To quote a friend, another old rocker from many years ago: “It was made loud to be played loud.” He played the stereo system in his apartment so loudly that whenever we were there I expected his door to explode open at any moment, exposing a crazed neighbor brandishing a loaded sawed-off shotgun.

In the 1950’s I remember watching the Ed Sullivan Show and seeing Elvis shake, rattle, and roll across our tiny little black and white TV screen. My parents, in their twenties at the time, heckled, jeered, and predicted an early death to rock and roll. “It’s not music! It’s just loud noise! How can you listen to that crap?” Over the years, “turn it down!” became their battle cry. Mother and Dad, both born in 1928, were professional musicians and had performed everything from classical to ragtime. Naturally this made them feel highly qualified to preach about this new “racket” we youngsters were calling music. A few years ago, I had the smug pleasure of telling my dad that while he was right about a lot of things, he had been dead wrong about the life expectancy of rock and roll.

Fast forward to the 60’s and 70’s when I vacillated between devotion to Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin. I lived in Chicago and saw Chicago Transit Authority, Jefferson Airplane, and Blood, Sweat and Tears—live and loud at the clubs on Rush Street and State Street. Like countless other aging baby boomers currently test-driving or already the proud owners of hearing aids, back then we stood for hours in front of booming, blasting amps taller than ourselves. The word “tinnitus” was not yet in our vocabularies.

Every now and then I have a flashback to the 60’s or 70’s and I can no longer exist without buying a CD with music by Joe Cocker, Chicago, or Janis Joplin, to name a few. Right now my favorite album is a compilation of hits by Chicago. I play “Feeling Stronger Every Day” so loud that I’m sure the people in the car next to me at a stop light can hear it, even with their windows and mine fully closed and a motor cycle roaring behind us. I’m hoping—no, praying—that if I have an accident and I’m rendered unconscious, there will be a Good Samaritan who will turn the volume down on my car stereo. I would die of humiliation if the police and paramedics arrived only to hear the words, “you know I’m all right now” blasting in the wreckage.