What was your "Musical Epiphany"?

Mine came in 1978 when I was 16 years old. My family had just moved back to Montgomery from Dothan Alabama. Dothan was a smaller town with mostly country and rock radio. Montgomery had a little bit of everything including a local college channel that played gospel and blues. I was driving my MGB when I located an AM channel playing some really cool tunes I had never heard. I played it as loud as it would go. Pretty soon I realize I knew the words to these songs. But how? I had no memory of ever hearing them. I sat in the driveway of my house waiting for the DJ to introduce what he had played, but to no avail. I ran inside the house, picked up the Yellow Pages and called the radio station. The DJ said the songs I was singing were
"Boogie Chillun by John Lee Hooker, and Honest I Do by Jimmy Reed."
For the first 10 years of my life we had a House Keeper that babysat my brother and I. She played music all day long and it had an enormous impact on my life. She would listen to black gospel and blues and as a toddler, I soaked it up. To this day, I have a tremendous love for the blues.
Do you have a story too?

 

I used to have difficulty understanding structures (bars, time signatures, measures, etc.) and to some extent rhythm.

One day my brother, who is a professional musician, told me that “everything happens on the two and the four”.

Ever since then it has become easier for me as a layman to follow along at home.

 

I've been listening to music seriously since I was 8 years old (I'm now 63 ), and I'd have to say I've had a number of epiphanies. My first would probably be The Beatles. Hearing "She Loves You" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" really caught my attention. I immediately got caught up in Beatlemania (Anyone remember The Beatles trading cards?) As they got more adventurous, I became more enamored of strange music.
Hearing "We're Only In It For The Money" was probably my next big epiphany. I loved this from the get go and became a Zappa fan. My first concert without parents in attendance was The Mothers of Invention in August 1969.
Hearing Mike Bloomfield for the first time was a major epiphany. I just loved the sound of his guitar. The first time I heard B.B. King and Albert King, I thought "Wow, these guys sound just like Bloomfield!" I quickly learned that it was the other way around. Before I knew it, I was a rabid fan of Chicago blues, which led to Country blues, to West Coast blues. . . Chess Records, Testament Records, Delmark Records. . .
Hearing "In A Silent Way" was, you guessed it, another epiphany. And then when "Bitches Brew" came out... Just like with blues, jazz became an obsession. So much past history to learn and listen to, so much yet to come.
Soft Machine Volume Two, The Buffalo Springfield, the first Jethro Tull, The Nice, hearing these were epiphanies of a sort. The common thread with all this music was that it made being an awkward teen much more bearable.

 

This would be my first, and thus the most important. It still inspires all roads that have led me to the joys of the world's greatest art - music! Not to mention visual art too!

 

1965 at age 11.

 

It all started with this album:

 

Hearing 'Revolver' for the first time in the mid 90s.

 

More than one:
The Beatles' Rubber Soul showed me that an album can be all killer-no filler.
The Strawberry Alarm Clock's Incense and Peppermints album was my introduction to psychedelia and extended jams.
John R.'s late night show on WLAC Blues Radio out of Nashville got me into soul music.
Nat Hentoff's novel Jazz Country got me into jazz.
Judy Collins' Whales and Nightingales album turned me into a folksinger.

 

Great story and I used to live in Smiths Station, AL, just outside Columbus GA! God Bless Alabama! But back on topic:

I got into music in the early 70s with a cheap FedMart stereo. Christmas 1974, my folks bought me a pair of Koss headphones and the first album I spun was LZ IV. The sound I heard was unreal and unobtainable through the FedMart speakers..... I had never heard true stereo before, never heard LZ IV like that. Those headphones opened my ears to the beauty of recorded music and thus began a life long pursuit to recapture or chase that moment. A true moment of clarity.......KOSS headphones and Led Zeppelin IV.......

 

Listening to 'Selling England by the Pound' for the first time at age 16, after coming from 'Invisible Touch' (of all! ). Those harmonies, song structures and inspirations by antique mythology while combined with lyrics often touching emotional everyday struggles really resonated with me. From there on, I came to listen to music with open ears which is also in large parts due to my music professor in school who managed to open my ears to classical music and to make me appreciate rocky guitar players like Robert Fripp and Mark Knopfler as well (I found them both boring before, having only listened to FM stuff and some Rap).

So yeah, Genesis and my passionate music teacher combined caused my big musical epiphany

 

Since I grew up on just about every sort of music you can image, from classical, opera, musical soundtracks, standards, pop, blues, folk, jazz, latin, and even 'kiddie' songs....maybe my epiphany came the first time I ever heard genuine stereo separation through headphones. It was a King Crimson album, In The Court of the Crimson King. Like atomic particles speeding through my head.

 

As a 13 year old I had no real interest in music whatsoever. I did own a copied cassette a friend gave me with a few dire straits tunes, the theme tune from crocodile Dundee and a comedy song called Ahab the Arab, but it wasn’t something that really caught my imagination the way that Bruce Lee and Horror movies had.
One Saturday (we had school on Saturdays!) ,having decided not to do my homework the previous evening, I feigned illness to get out of going to school and the inevitability of being put in detention. My Mum made up a bed for me on the sitting room sofa and I was tucked in to watch tv while I “recovered”. In 1989 there were only 4 channels on UK tv so I really didn’t have much choice so when “The Chart Show” came on that was what I watched. Little did I know that my life was about to change forever. I couldn’t tell you any of the other artists whose videos were played that Saturday morning but I’ll never forget who was no.1 on the Rock chart.... Alice Cooper with Poison! I was spellbound, something in that song did something to me and for the first time I wanted to buy music. For my 14th birthday that October I got Trash on cassette and for Xmas I got a Walkman and a few other AC cassettes including albums by the original band. Soon after that I was lead singer in a band, then a guitarist, I discovered Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, U2, Fairport Convention, The Levellers, Jazz, psychedelia, avant garde, classical, music concrete, Synthesizers, Theremins, Waterphones and the whole amazing and seemingly endless world of sound!
Some people (prehaps quite fairly) dismiss “Poison” As a bit of a lightweight and overly commercial addition to Alice’s cannon but I can’t hear it without raising a smile. Alice I truly am not worthy!

 

I would like to think it was heartbreak Hotel but I think it was One Night that really did it then Smokestack Lightnin',then Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet.
I was just a kid and had a whole lifetime to find new stuff and did, but those early influences have coloured everything.

 

Hound Dog. 1956. Changed everything for me.

 

The Stone Roses debut album turned my world upside down.

 

I've told this story before, but since you asked.... Born in 1954 I always loved music and rock n roll was around from my sister (approx 20 years older than me.) I had some singles like Rick Nelson, Everly Bros, and being a little kid I liked stuff like the Chipmunks "Witch Doctor" and "Purple People Eater." Got a little transistor radio (AM) for my 9th birthday 11-22-63---the day Kennedy was shot. Fell in love with listening to the radio late at night in bed with the earphone plugged in. I kept hearing a song most nights that I really liked but didn't know the title or the artist, I just liked it.

Fast forward to February 64 and all the kids at school were talking about this band that was on Ed Sullivan the night before, even the teacher mentioned it and we had a little class discussion ( guess that was probably 3rd grade?) A few days later on show & tell day someone brought in a record to listen to...and there it was! That song! "I Want To Hold Your Hand!" So THAT was the song, and THAT'S who the Beatles are.

Ended up with a 40 year career in commercial radio, have literally thousands of Beatles records/cds/tapes/dvds, etc. So my miracle came late December '63-early January '64 and my life was changed. That'd be my epiphany.

 

The beginning of Rock 'n Roll in The Song Remains The Same movie, when Bonham kicks off his hi-hat and the band is filmed from behind and the audience jumps with excitation. I saw it in a movie theatre when it was released in Italy, in 1977. I was 13.

 

Several-

Black Sabbath- Paranoid
CSNY- Deja Vu
Yes- Close To The Edge

 

John Peel's Radio One late night show, listening to it in the late 1970s opened my 13 year old lugs to new and exciting music.

 

What album is I wanna Hold Your Hand, the Beatles on.

 

Mine was at age 16, during my first listen to The Who's Quadrophenia album.

November 2, 1985

 

On the August bank holiday weekend of 1979, aged 12, I went with family to stay in a static caravan at Black Rock Sands in North Wales. On the Saturday night we went to the caravan park clubhouse for the entertainment which would be typical fayre for the time – kid's disco, bingo and cabaret. The cabaret duo came on and I was spellbound by the drummer. He was clearly into his big band swing because I remember him singing The Surrey With The Fringe On Top while playing great. That was it for me. 39 years later, I play drums and sing in a cabaret duo... what's more, we have bookings up to July 2020!

 

Oooh.. a number of them during adolescent years.
First proper CD: Queen - Greatest Hits
Pink Floyd, Nirvana and The Cure - that was my foundation in the age of 12-14.

The Strokes and The White Stripes which turned my head towards modern rock and music in general.

 

I have loved music since I was a small child. First I played my older cousin’s Beatles and Mamas and the Papas records. I was eventually given my own copies of these records at less than 10 years of age. I was an avid record buyer from the time I got my first part time job at age 17.

The big epiphanies:
1) R.E.M. - Murmur, 1983. I was 22 years old and this album changed my life forever. I had played guitar on and off since I was 10, but this was the first time I felt compelled to sit and play along with the record for hours on end and basically taught myself to play by ear. This album opened up a whole new world for me. I’d never heard anything like it. I wanted to hear every piece of music these guys thought was worthwhile and began exploring independent music, which I have done ever since.

2) Oasis - Wonderwall. I had been going through a not-very-interested-in-music phase and then one day the clock radio went off and this song was playing. I sat straight up in bed thought “ What IS this??” and proceeded to follow this band for years. This was the first band I travelled for, and my first trip to London was to see them.

3) Stone Roses - self-titled first album. I listened to this band because the members of Oasis talked about them. This album and its B-sides are the most perfect music I have ever heard. This was in 1995 or so and I joined my first internet music forum and had to pick a nickname and chose brownie in tribute to Ian Brown. I have been brownie on the internet ever since. I finally got to see them play at Madison Square Garden 2 years ago and it was one of the most awesome experiences of my concert-going life.

 

Bowie's SNL performance in 1979. I had just started high school and wasn't fitting in. That night, I realized I didn't have to.