The night before Fathers Day 2024 I went to a birthday party for someone my age, someone who’s spent his life championing new music outside the margins, especially the next generations. He hired a band for his bash. The band was five guys in their 30s and 40s playing music from the 1950s: music from 60 and 70 years ago. They were dressed in pink tuxedos, played pink guitars and even had pink patch cords. Full shtick, fully ridiculous, absolutely fun.
I did not expect the guy who once booked Getachew Mekurya with The Ex to throw a party featuring a local equivalent of Sha Na Na, but there we were, in a Dundas back alley, having a grand old time. I did not expect people wearing Suicide shirts and who gig with tribute acts to The Fall and who can dispute the finer points of Jesus Lizard records and one guy who was once famously sued by Michael Jackson to be singing along to “Runaround Sue.” But there we were.
The half-century birthday boy (man) told me he’s working on an American history project about a group that’s been around as long as he’s been alive, and also about how he took his father to see Feist at Massey Hall. I told him about how my barely teenage child is obsessed with a jazz song in 9/8 released in a year when my own dad was 17 years old, and, to my shock and delight, is determined to learn it on piano.
Generations were on my mind. Why were we dancing to music from the 1950s in 2024, and why did that music mean anything to us? What music do we inherit from our parents, what stays with us no matter what other paths we travel, and what do we pass on in either direction?
This all happened a few weeks after Duane Eddy died, on April 30 at age 86, news of which I felt I had to share with my 82-year-old father immediately.
(This week’s Toronto live music listings are here)
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Both my parents love music—not in the unhealthy way I do, because they both held down well-paying jobs and stayed together. They both have eclectic tastes. They went to many shows (not with me—other than Zamfir). My mom made sure I was in piano lessons, and took me to musical theatre and the symphony. She later surprised me with Brazilian and Caribbean and Edith Piaf records I didn’t find until I was an adult.
My dad had a box set of classical music’s biggest hits, and he loved to conduct—just as much as rocker dudes love to play air guitar. He also loves big-throated female belters: Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, Bonnie Tyler, Grace Slick, etc. Big country music fan, and to his credit he’s hip to a lot of newer artists he hears on Willie Nelson’s satellite radio station.
And like most (white) North American sons of boomers, I can’t hear CCR without thinking of my dad. I’m a fortunate son of a different kind.
I only recently learned, while conducting a family oral history project, that my dad was a DJ at school dances in London, Ontario, in the 1950s. How did I not know this?! This seemed like relevant information to my life path. Hey, kids: interview your parents. It’s never too late—until it is. So do it tomorrow.
But back to Duane Eddy and his “twangy guitar.”
My dad didn’t have a lot of records he carried from his youth. A few singles, including an Elvis Presley picture sleeve of “Love Me Tender” and a very scratched copy of the Champs’ “Tequila.” Two of the few full-length vinyl records my dad kept with him his whole life—until I left home with them—were copies of Duane Eddy’s first two records (including the one above).
Who is Duane Eddy, you ask? Gen Xers know him primarily for his 1986 version of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” with the Art of Noise.
It was a huge hit, particularly in Canada. Eddy first had a hit with the song in 1959, shortly after Mancini’s original came out. Eddy sold millions of records over a five year period, and then was largely forgotten by anyone who wasn’t a teenager in 1960.
When the Art of Noise hit came out, there was a part of me that felt like a super-smarty-pants because I actually knew who Duane Eddy was, because I’d found him in my dad’s record collection. Not that this obtuse fact would have scored any social points for a 14-year-old boy. But still.
That single led to a minor comeback, including an album featuring Paul McCartney, Jeff Lynne, Ravi Shankar and a couple more Art of Noise tracks. I had this album on cassette. Didn’t know anyone else who did.
It’s no secret that nostalgia goes in approximately 20-30 year cycles, the trickle-down effect of which affects youth in mysterious ways. Four of the most popular songs during my high school years in the late 1980s—songs that we all wanted to learn how to play during breaks in band class—were “Stand by Me,” “Twist and Shout,” “Wipeout” and “La Bamba.” Not to mention the boomers riding chart-busting second winds with new music that we loved: Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Tina Turner, etc.
It’s one thing to go down a wormhole into, say, the Beatles or the Doors—acts forcefed to you through the Nostalgia Industrial ComplexTM. It’s another to dust off something far less known that you find in your parents’ record collection, and have your own relationship with it. Like Duane Eddy.
People of any age today don’t discover music by rifling through records—or CDs, or cassettes. They now trust algorithms to do that. Family members listen to their own music on headphones. Do many people still listen to music as a family, at home or in a car? Do your kids know what you love, and vice versa?
I’m predisposed to listening to new music, but I find myself consciously putting on old favourites in the company of my child. Not for any pedagogical reason, an excuse for me to pointlessly pontificate. No, it’s just because I want them to know, to have it in the air, to have something they associate with me. They can take it or leave it.
One of the most meaningful aspects of my teenage relationship with my dad was when I made him a mixtape of current hits (circa 1984) that he loved and played constantly in the car. As an adolescent seeking validation, I loved being able to share that with him. It meant a helluva lot more to both of us than me giving him a tie for Fathers Day. Similarly, I have an unusually deep appreciation of ’50s and ’60s pop due to a box of mixtapes his buddy made for him, which also soundtracked those car trips.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a necessary generation gap: I obviously love a lot of music my dad doesn’t understand at all. I’m sure his own father had no idea why kids of the ’50s didn’t dig Mantovani.
And while my budding jazzbo child CLEARLY HAS EXCELLENT TASTE, sharing with me plenty of really interesting and compositionally complex video game music, I’m just as confounded by some of the more mind-numbing and sonically offensive amateurish EDM on a two-bar loop that soundtracks other favourite games.
Harrumph! Kids! Could be worse. Could be Post Malone.
I have way too much physical product in my house. I don’t know if my child will ever pick something randomly off the shelf and claim it as their own, now or years from now. I do know that if I died tomorrow that no descendant will be going through streaming playlists on deactivated accounts to learn anything about me.
Share music with your children, any way possible. If you can, play music with your children. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me those gifts.
Happy Fathers Day, everyone. Happy belated Mothers Day. Keep on chooglin’.
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The troublesome title of Duane Eddy’s biggest hit never clicked in for me until I saw the Dixie iconography in this clip, which I’ll blissfully ignore in 2024 because the rest of it is delightfully dorky (and Dick Clark-y), featuring primitive spectacle/stagecraft that must have blown minds in 1959 even though it’s quite obvious the band is not playing live:
For more on Duane Eddy, I highly recommend
’s obit / appreciation: