There are few things which have been as constant in my life as loud. I was going to actually create a wee web radio thing about me and loud but then I thought, having listened to one recently for over an hour, that there is a heck of a lot of effort that goes into one of those things for any extra value over a mere blog post. So we are going to go down my memory lane of loudness multi-media-like with these notes if only for me to figure out if there is anything in loud that can be distilled and compared to me.

• Some time ago I wrote about the album Give 'Em Enough Rope by The Clash and how I won it in grade 9 when it first came out. I think that the first sound on the first cut, "Safe European Home", was the start of my relationship with my own personal loud - the hammered drum before the cutting swath of guitars. On cheap Radio Shack headphones in the rec room, a fifteen year old boy's happy place, lifting the needle and starting over: [3.9 MB .wma file].
• I really didn't start listening to The Ramones until I did an undergrad radio show in first year in 1981 when most of their best work and at least one drummers were a few years behind them. But "Blitzkrieg Bop" fit well right in after our intro, Glen Miller's "American Patrol". Plus you could dance to the Ramones unlike most of The Clash or The Jam. [2.1 MB .wma file]
• In the fall of 1983, when The Pretenders released Learning to Crawl many of my pals were in their last year of undergrad and we treated it as such, even though most of my pals were on the four or more plan. What we liked about "Middle of the Road" and why it got late into heavy rotation when we ran the dances was its ability to hit a peak at the end of a string of five or six sweet sweaty songs. But it was also about being past growing up and being pissed about it: [4.1 MB .wma file]
• Six years later I am back at university and if I had doubts about what was to come when I was 20, I was not having much doubt or much fun studying law. I had to stop listening to The Smiths - it wasn't funny anymore. It is hard to remember how the competition hit me and the total focus but there was something in the screams of Black Francis at the end of "Monkey Gone To Heaven" on Doolittle by The Pixies: [2.8 MB .wma file]
• In the 1990s I can't recall if loud was such a big thing but only as it was not so desperate. Getting out of university and into being a husband, then a Dad, then a mortgage holder. Not really a suit but, still, a business card distributor. Yet, when still pre-kids and pre-mortgage, when waiting for the shop to shut so we could headed out, there was Offspring and "Self Esteem" from Smash to roast. Just loud fun again even though soon I would have a kid and be thirty-three: [4.1 MB .wma file]