Rest in peace, Ray Manzarek

February 12, 1939 - May 20, 2013

Thanks for all the wonderful music you have provided us. You will be greatly missed, but never forgotten.

My teenage years were the height of my musical exploration. I would find lots of bands in many different ways and then learn all sorts of useless things about them. I remember I used to go in phases. I had a grunge phase, a cliché rock phase, a reggae & ska phase, a 1950s phase, a rockabilly/psychobilly/punkabilly phase. At the end of all of these phases many of the artists I listened to would fall out of rotation but the great ones would remain and join the bands I grew up on. However something that used to annoy me as a teenager who wanted to express himself as a unique individual (but now I see as a blessing) is pretty much all who I liked, all who I seemingly discovered on my own intuition, all the bands that I thought summarised me at the time; my father already had in his collection. Even now we seem to creepily download the same albums and have a wonderful bond in which we freely discuss and exchange music.

But yes, I would find a band, listen to it, mention it to dad in a smug teenage way and he would walk over to the record cabinet or the CD cabinet and pull out from the disorganised mess something from said artist. I still every time I look find gems I wasn’t aware of in the midst of his collection. What used to annoy me more and still does is the ones he saw live which is also a lot of them. He’s been front row at a Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee concert, he’s seen Billy Thorpe (and met him), Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds in the 1980s, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, he’s even had Paul McDermett jump on his table at a Doug Anthony All Stars gig and drink his beer. But I’ve seen many wonderful things too, most of the time with him by my side.

Regardless of my little soppy rant, above is some of our (mostly his) ever expanding collection. The VHS tapes are recordings from Rage and other TV shows of video clips he liked and recorded with multiple VCRs. Somewhere else is all of the original Live Aid concert and in a different room is all the cassettes. This doesn’t account for all the cream of the crop CDs that are scattered between our cars and the forgotten stuff that has ended up in cupboards.

Simply, this is why I’m a music nerd. I had no choice in the matter.