Bonding through music in pre-Internet days

 When I was 12 I finally got a real best friend after moving around from place-to-place with my family and like virtually all of my later friendships, it was based on music.
   Every day in the summer when were 14 Jerry and I would bike downtown to the Cheap Thrills used record store downtown on Bishop to check the cheap bins for early Rolling Stones records.
   We would return with our finds and play the hopefully-unscratched LPs and discuss the relative merits of Between the Buttons versus Aftermath.
   We eventually drifted apart but the pattern would continue: my friendships in those years were always built upon discussions of musical preference.
   By 19, I was in college with a good part-time job and my own downtown apartment but the glue that held it together was a social circle connected through our love of mod music.

Paloma and I favoured The
Surpremes

   My girlfriend and I always had the Supremes' Greatest Hits playing and others in the gang would actively search for new musical fixes: the Merton Parkas, Purple Hearts, Lambrettas all fed the musical adhesive that kept our social group together.
   We drifted apart and my new best-buddy Bernie filled the void and, with a deep voice seemingly built for the radio career he aspired to, would lay down the definitive version of what was good music and he was invariably spot-on.
   He would explain the production and genius of Trevor Horne or Tones on Tail and then eventually shifted to embrace funk, bringing me tapes of obscure bands like Prince Charles and the City Beat Band, which we’d blast before going out to parties around town.

Bernie was, is, always spot
on with his musical tastes.

   Every long chat in those days, with every friend, would eventually end up listening to and discussing newly-acquired tapes or LPs and end up in a discussion of the relative merits of bands like Echo and the Bunnymen (a band I briefly learned to tolerate, although several girls I knew loved them) and New Order, a group I liked but Chris Bickley disliked and Bernie diplomatically criticized for the bassist’s habit of playing his instrument as if it were a guitar.

Mike, now known as Mick
could talk at length
about Brian Jones.

   One day in that small downtown apartment on a street now demolished, a local down-on-his-luck rounder from nearby brought over a record. He asked me to play it, as he did not have a record player. Our chitchat abruptly stopped when he starting singing along loud and with feeling to Declaration Day by Sunnyland Slim. It was more bonding through music: we became good friends after.
   Another neighbour who played in various new wave bands would invite me over for tea and we'd talk until 4 a.m. with all conversations returning to the subject of his love for Brian Jones. I was able to hold my own in these talks because of my earlier exploration of the Rolling Stones, a band I has since lost interest in.
   When Mike moved to London, another musician, Barry, moved in to that same apartment and finally got me over my resistance to the Clash, a band who I considered too much of a conventional Springsteen-like rock band.  (I tried to like them but always hit stop on the first song of a mix-tape, it was that ridiculous song Lovers’ Rock.)
    Barry and I became close friends and would spend hours watching and wisecracking to The Clash Rude Boy movie.

Barry sold me on The Clash

   Such was how my friendships were built.
   Now that I spend almost all of my times with my kids and almost no time with friends, I haven’t had any real musical discussion for some time.
   And if I were to attempt it, it would surely be a hollow, vacuous stab at past glory, as I still appreciate and love music but the absolute hypnotic enchantment it long held over me has disappeared.
   I wonder if young people still get together and build friendships based on musical tastes.
   Much has been said about how social media has transformed friendships and how YouTube how-to videos have made parents a somewhat obsolete, as kids no longer need to dip into their wisdom to ask about how things work.
   But in a small way, I have to thank those who contribute to comments on YouTube. The good ones have helped me fill that social void, at least partially.
   It takes a lot of sifting through useless comments to find one with value, but I have learned a lot from these anonymous people who will never be my friends, but could easily have been in another reality.
   I recently looked up the song Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks to see if anybody else heard the naughty-schoolboy rude version we’d sing, but instead I learned that many people saw it as a song for funerals and told of their touching stories of how it played at their sister’s death ceremony and so forth.
   Reading that was a little bit like sitting with a friend over a beer, getting a new take on a piece of music.
   The crowdsourcing collective musical wisdom isn’t as intimate as sitting with a friend but I can still appreciate that people have given thought to Jacques Brel, Donovan, Prefab Sprout or any other random musician I punch in and share their insights and views on the music.
   Though we will never be friends, it's a throwback to happy moments spent building friendships.