ED. NOTE: Welcome to Door Flies 30pen.  Due to the scarcity of remaining Request Line Topics (we’ve already done 180 different themes), we’re launching a new feature to examine the musical evolution of the various members of the DFO writing staff.  Each of us will be sharing 30 songs from our own history and talking about how these songs came into our lives, and how they shaped our musical taste. Enjoy! – Rikki

Rikki Tikki Deadly came to us way back in November with an idea for a post revolving around our musical journeys. The concept was fairly vague and up to interpretation. I took it to mean the songs that have shaped me and made me who I am today.

Before I begin, I have to start with this:

What if a man has no penis but three balls

And one of them lights up and plays a tune?

Does he ever get laid?

Do you fuck him FOR THE STORY?

Dave Attell

It’s not music, but Dave Attell’s Skanks For The Memories is probably the album that I’ve worn out the most out of every album I have ever bought. God Bless Dave Attell.

With that, let’s begin at the beginning…

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Song 1

Vicente Fernandez – El Rey

As many of you know, I was born in Mexico. Although my family moved to the US when I was very young, my earliest memory of music in Mexico is this song being sung by drunk men at the top of their lungs. Please note my family is not included in this group. It’s the quintessential Mexican song and it explains SO MUCH about the Mexican mindset.

Essentially, it’s about a guy that’s down but still thinks he’s the shit. Self-delusional? Check. Macho bravado? Check. Never give up spirit? Check.

If you ever wander into a cantina in the Mexican countryside late at night when everyone is good and drunk and this song is NOT playing, and all the old dudes are NOT yelling the lyrics at the top of their lungs, you’ve traveled too far south and you’re in Guatemala.

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Song 2

Lipps Inc. – Funkytown

Some of you may remember the Goddess series that TWBS and I co-wrote. One part of it was set in the American Southwest and the Mexican Northwest. The reason for that is we both lived in those areas for some time and we were both very familiar with the territory on both sides of the border. Before we settled in Los Angeles, my family and I lived in the middle of nowhere due to my dad’s job and we would make occasional trips to Hermosillo, Sonora. One of my most vivid memories is driving down the main street (the highway that turns into the main street once you get into town) and passing by a record store that would BLAST this song.

We went there multiple times and is seemed like EVERY TIME we visited, this song was playing. Now, when I say this song was BLASTED, I’m talking you could hear it blocks away. The closest thing that I can compare it to is in when I visited Tokyo and walked by a Pachinko parlor. It was FUCKING LOUD.

To this day, this song brings back happy memories. We were in flux as my dad’s assignment was only temporary and we knew we were eventually settling in LA. The lyrics talk about “moving to a town that’s right for me”. Knowing we were headed to LA, it felt like a prophecy. It was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s36eQwgPNSE

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Songs 3-6

My First Visit to a Record Store

Once we settled in Los Angeles, my brother and I started school and my parents would give us money for getting A’s on our report cards. Parenting Tip: It worked! I had a little money and my dad had a record player and so one of my first priorities was a trip to the record store. I can’t remember if it was Music Plus or The Wherehouse, but I remember that I bought 4 records on my first trip. As I have mentioned before, I liked all kinds of music at that age, so you may find the selections a bit odd. I still have the records to this day:

Here are my favourite songs from those records:

The next two deserve a little more detail. Screaming For Vengeance and You’ve Got Another Thing Coming were back to back on the album and if you listen to the lyrics, they greatly affected my worldview. They both view the world as shitty but they speak of never giving up and fighting back against the shittyness. I took those to heart and have carried the attitude of never giving up into my adult life. This album was HUGELY influential.

Early Motley Crue was just plain awesome. This one was my favourite. Yes, I have a thing for long-haired 80s rocker chicks, why do you ask?

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Song 7 – The Anthem

The Smiths – How Soon Is Now?

I started listening to KROQ early on and I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard this song, it blew me away. Even to this day, if it pops up on satellite radio, it transcends time and makes me feel the way I felt when I first heard it. The simple message, “I am human and I need to belong. Just like everybody else does” is so powerful that it doesn’t matter that I always thought he said, “I am the Sun and the Air”. I never get tired of listening to this song.

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Song 8 – I DO want to be The Pirate!

Adam Ant – Desperate But Not Serious

There is a reason that my favourite Halloween costume is a pirate. I always wanted to be Adam Ant growing up. Okay, lame story time: Remember when you would “dedicate” songs to people? Well, I “dedicated” Adam Ant’s song, “Strip” to a girl I liked. It did not work as intended.

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Song 9 – Loving Above Yourself

The Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls

As I became an adolescent and started noticing girls, I fell into an interesting category. I was living in one of the better parts of LA and surrounded by rich people. We were doing pretty well, but not even close to the kids I went to school with. I was born in a foreign country and had joined my elementary school in the 5th grade so I felt like an outsider even though I could speak English perfectly thanks to my parents and my previous schooling in Mexico and I made friends pretty easily. However, I still felt like an East End boy trying to get a West End girl to like me. This song spoke to me directly and made me feel better and hopeful that I would fit in.

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Song 10 – Good Advice

Depeche Mode – Get The Balance Right

Seriously, this should be required teaching for all kids. Just listen to the lyrics. I agree with everything they say in the lyrics. Life is a constant balancing act and you can’t get too full of yourself because you will surely get knocked back down at some point. Again, this song was a HUGE influence on my worldview.

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Song 11 – Party Time

The B-52s – Party Gone Out of Bounds

The thing that is embedded in my brain about this song is that it was the lead-in to a commercial played on KROQ for a club called Old World which, for a young and horny Balls seemed like the ultimate destination. The club was in Huntington Beach which in those days was a heaven of beautiful tanned and toned beach girls. SonOfSpam lived in the OC and can attest to the fame and infamy of that club. Alas, I was too young to go, but I did go to the beach with my friends a lot and it was always HB. There’s something about Orange County girls that’s timeless and classic and this song reminds me of those adventures with my friends. To this day, a girl can be gorgeous and perfect in every way but if she hates the beach, I’m not interested.

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Songs 12-14

The Teenage Years

We arrived in LA in 1980 and I graduated high school in the late 80s. I was SO LUCKY to 1) live in LA where KROQ existed and played amazing music and 2) have lived through that era when a huge volume of amazing music was being created. I could make four different 30-song playlists just solely consisting of 80s music alone. One could be Top 30 Cure songs while another could be Top 30 Depeche Mode songs. I will simply list a bunch of the bands that I was listening to back then: ABC, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Psychedelic Furs, Dead or Alive, Oingo Boingo, Echo and the Bunnymen, OMD, The Go-Gos, Soft Cell, Modern English, Yaz, The Human League, Wall of Voodoo, Talking Heads, Missing Persons, Berlin, New Order, The Clash, Midnight Oil, INXS, Men at Work, Blancmange, King, No Doubt, Billy Idol, Howard Jones, Joe Jackson, Thomas Dolby, The Jam, Bow Wow Wow, a-ha, The Police, The English Beat, General Public, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, Spandau Ballet, Love and Rockets, Sisters of Mercy, Roxy Music, Sparks, Alphaville, Devo, Heaven 17, A Flock of Seagulls, The Fixx, Romeo Void, Haircut 100, and so many one-hit wonders that I can’t remember.

I developed a preference for weird songs. For me, the weirder and more “out there”, the better. In those times, it was better to be weird and different. I’ve maintained that belief the rest of my life. This song is a perfect example:

It’s been said that Frankie Goes To Hollywood could never break out today because political correctness has run amok. People forget they were banned in plenty of places in the 80s. It’s not very “normal” to sing very good advice about delaying your orgasm. That was a great song, but the one that was sexier to me and more out there was Welcome To The Pleasuredome. The video was tremendous. Not to overshare, but my attitudes toward sex were greatly shaped by these songs. I’m sure you are coloured surprised.

Finally, the 80s wouldn’t be the 80s without the constant threat of nuclear war. I mean, it was real and it affected how I looked at the world. This song is not just beautiful but it encapsulates everything I think about what I learned during that time: Live every day like it could be your last. And if it is, fine. But at least you got the best out of life while you lived it.

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Songs 15 – 16

The College Years

I was in college as the 80s turned into the 90s and music changed a lot in those years. New Wave was gone, KROQ embraced grunge, and I started looking in different directions for music to listen to. I thought I discovered “The Next Big Thing” at a show at UCLA when I first saw Mary’s Danish. I still don’t understand how this band didn’t become huge:

While I was at UCLA, I also attended a Jammy Jam where they were showing the second House Party movie and they had music and food. Those movies were great! The music was fun too:

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Songs 17 – 25

The 90s/My 20s

As I left college, real life hit me hard. I remember my 20s as a blur of hardships and a LOT of trips to Vegas or around the world to blow off steam. It was difficult getting a job that could lead to a career. I also went to graduate school during that time. While there was a lot of socializing, I don’t really remember any relationships lasting longer than 3 months. I really didn’t want one either.

I was working so hard on trying to get myself a future that a lot of things fell by the wayside. Luckily, different types of music emerged that helped me through those times.

Right after graduation, I went traveling through Europe and brought a Nine Inch Nails cassette with me. I was on one of those young people bus tours and one day I asked the driver to play it. Everyone went mad for it. It was a huge hit! I guess the Aussies, Euros, and South Africans had never heard of NIN:

The rest of the songs are as varied as the musical styles that I got into. I went back to liking all kinds of music and I went from alternative to industrial to electronic subgenres like trance, ambient, and drum and bass to Rock en Español. The 90s are not generally considered to be as good as the 80s musically but I honestly think they were. It was just different.

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Songs 26 – 29

The 2000s/My 30s

Story Time: I was in Europe for Euro 2000 and ended up in Barcelona one night at the Sonar festival, which back then was a big electronic music festival. At 3 AM, Marc Almond took the stage and sang this song and I went apeshit and called my best friend back in LA and started yelling over the music and raving about the show and the festival and just acting like an idiot. I don’t think I was THAT drunk but he might say otherwise…

One of the best things to happen musically in the 2000s for me was the discovery of a San Diego radio station (94.9) and a cool ass show called Big Sonic Chill. It ran almost the whole decade and played awesome down tempo electronic music. I remember that one of the DJs that ran that show had an angelic voice that matched the music she played. Her name was Midori and I would expect everyone listening to that voice to fall in love with her immediately. This is a perfect example of the songs from that show. Incidentally, her voice sounds very much liked Midori’s.

I wasn’t only into down tempo. I also love super fast electronic songs that you can dance to or even work out to.

Ok, confession time: I had Britney Spears’ Toxic as my ringtone for a looooong time during the 2000s. Fuck you, you watch this video and not be mesmerized!

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Song ?

The 2010s/My 40s

I shit you not, I’ve got nothing. I even looked up “2010s music” in Wikipedia and while I remembered a bunch of songs/artists from that time, I could not point out one single song that grabbed me during that decade.

I do know that I spent that decade working A LOT and climbing the corporate ladder and my social situation has been kinda settled for awhile, so it’s not like I’ve been out to bars or clubs in the last decade and been exposed to new stuff.

But seriously, music in the 2010s was a shit sandwich. Maybe I could exempt some electronic music as it had continued to grow and become more mainstream but even then some of it had become too “pop-y” for my tastes.

More like too “poopy”, amirite?

/ falls off chair and shits shorts.

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Song 30 – The COVID years

Cannons – Fire For You

Thanks to COVID, I’ve rediscovered music through Sirius XM as I’ve been working from home and can play music during work. Mostly I stay on the Chill, BPM, and Diplo channels to find new music although I still listen quite a bit to First Wave to enjoy the songs from the past.

I found out about Cannons this way and I’ve gone through their back catalogue. Lots of good songs and I hope they get success. Being older and having experienced heartbreak, this song really hits home for me:

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That’s it. That’s my musical journey. I’d be interested to see if any of you had similar experiences or have similar tastes. Please share in the comments.