by Chelsea Schlievert Yates

At the beginning of my junior year of high school, I started dating Phil. Unlike my overprotective parents, Phil’s mom didn’t care if we hung out in his bedroom. Sixteen-year-old me thought it was the coolest place in the world: He had one of those “dogs playing poker” black velvet wall hangings, a rotating Schlitz beer sign, Christmas lights strung about, a waterbed and a dusty chessboard set up in one corner, perpetually waiting for someone to come by and make a move. He had rigged the speakers from his mom’s old stereo to the ceiling, and it was from them that I was introduced to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Johnny Cash and Pink Floyd.

Such artists were not of my generation, and at first I was skeptical. There were so many exciting sounds coming out of the early 1990s; why bother with the “oldies”? But Phil’s speakers were insistent, they ignored boundaries set by time and genres. As such, I was re-introduced to a lot of music I had dismissed primarily because I associated it with my parents. The first time I heard The White Album, I couldn’t believe I was listening to the Beatles. Songs like “I’m So Tired” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun” moved in far different directions than “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Love Me Do” — tunes I was much more accustomed to hearing, thanks to my mom and dad’s scratchy old LPs.

Bob Dylan was another one. To this day, I remember being completely blown away the first time I heard “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I’m pretty sure that I picked up my first Jack Kerouac novel the very next day at the public library. And then there was “Crimson and Clover,” the 1968 hit by Tommy James and the Shondells. How had a band I knew only from the oldies stations my parents listened to created something so melty and cool?

Phil’s speakers were connected to one of those multi-disc CD players, and because of it, bands that I was just getting to know in the early and mid-1990s collided with bands from the 1960s and ‘70s. Their convergences made total sense. I loved how Radiohead’s Pablo Honey and The Bends complemented Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and how Blur proved such a logical follow-up to the Kinks. I was surprised I’d never thought to play them together before. There was something strangely Beach Boys at times in Weezer’s Blue Album, and Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground sounded as if they could have recorded a collaborative record together, were it not for the years that separated them.

At the time, and above all, Phil was a huge Pink Floyd fan. I had always associated them with classic rock radio stations and stores like Spencer’s Gifts, where one could buy trippy tie-dyed wall hangings featuring the Dark Side of the Moon prism, but listening to them with Phil was different. First, we would always listen to full albums, not just the songs selected for radio play. Second, we listened to everything we could get a hold of, from the band’s psychedelic recordings of the ‘60s to the concept albums with which they achieved commercial success in the ‘70s to the albums they put out in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

We compared live albums to studio-recorded ones. We watched The Wizard of Oz and The Wall and followed the paths they led us down. (For example, because of his character Pink, I developed a little crush on Bob Geldof — even when he shaved off his eyebrows and looked completely bizarre. I’d always liked The Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and I remembered watching Band Aid and Live Aid on MTV as a little kid but had never really thought of musicians as anything more than, well, musicians. Getting to know more about Geldof introduced me to the notion of the “artist activist,” something that continues to inspire me today).

The afternoons I spent with Phil, Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, David Gilmour and company taught me how to appreciate the idea of the concept album. I always knew there were stories in songs, and I started considering them in relation to each other. I picked up on recurring themes, just like I was taught to do in my English literature class. I started hearing verses like paragraphs, thinking about songs like chapters, engaging albums like books.

I didn’t listen much to Pink Floyd after high school. The band fell off my radar in college and, quite honestly, I hadn’t given them much thought since. But one night in the kitchen a few months ago, they surfaced. My husband, Nick, and I have recently started collecting vinyl together; one of our favorite things to do is listen to our records while we make dinner. Nick is excellent at chopping herbs and vegetables to the rhythm of whatever song happens to be playing at the time.

Nick told me that he thought we needed to have more Pink Floyd around the house. I immediately agreed. And as a result of that conversation, Pink Floyd rocketed to the top of our record store wish list. The band’s albums are rare sightings in the used record bins we scour on a weekly basis at Jive Time Records, our little neighborhood record shop here in Seattle, but just the other day we came across an incredibly clean copy of Wish You Were Here, my favorite of all Pink Floyd’s albums; the lonely guitar riff that starts the song of the same name still gives me chills every time I hear it. As we tested it on the Jive Time’s record player, we couldn’t hide our giddiness. For Nick, the find marked a major vinyl score, and for me, seeing the two businessmen on the front of the album — one on fire, one not — was just like seeing two old friends.

Waiting at the counter to pay for it, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with another old friend nearly 20 years ago. In his Christmas light-illuminated bedroom, as the Schlitz beer globe rotated and the poker-playing dogs assessed the cards they held in their paws, we sat on the floor near his stereo playing disc after disc, listening, discussing, debating and reflecting. Our final conclusion had been this: when it came to down to it, there wasn’t “old” and “new” music; there was just “good” music. And good music, we were pretty sure, would transcend the ages.

Chelsea Schlievert Yates is a Hear Nebraska contributor. She grew up in northeast Nebraska and now lives in Seattle, Washington. Reach her at cdschlievert@gmail.com.