I was listening to Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks a few days back - the excellent Archiv recording with Trevor Pinnock and his merry men - when a fairly obvious thought came to me: It's splendid stuff, but you really have to be in a Baroque kind of mood for the over-the-top grandeur of it all. Then came another, somewhat fresher, thought: Even regarding music I'm a mindless fanboy for, there is some element of needing to be in the mood to get close up and very personal - it's just that those moods are easy to find. So I can listen to Crimso, VdGG, Radiohead, Dylan, Richard Thompson, Elvis (Costello, that is), Vaughan Williams, Haydn almost any time, but not quite every time.
And here's my final thought, dredged from memory: In my early teenage years I listened to whatever it was I was getting into at any time, and all the time, over and over - and never tired of it - especially with regard to my encounters with the giants of the underground scene: Deep Purple, Sabbath, Led Zep, Tull, Crimso (of course, my first love), Floyd, VdGG, Genesis, Strawbs, Yes, ELP and the like. Just spinning the vinyl created the occasion.
I suppose the change began when I developed a primitive kind of discriminatory taste.
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