By Annie gregg, jrn 101 student
For as long as I can remember being alive, music has been playing everywhere I went.
I collected CDs as a child like they were treasures. I’ve been going to concerts since the ripe age of 7 and have never stopped. Most importantly, music has been the one thing that fuels my soul.
The person responsible for this fact is my dad, Bob Gregg. One day, I sat down to ask him how he became such a lover of this art form and its many different mediums.
For my dad, music was more than just background noise, it was a ritual. As a teenager, he could be found every Saturday at his local record store, searching for his next great find. After shelling out just a few dollars, he and his friends would head back to his basement and gather around his Hifi record player to decipher rock and roll’s greats.
As I age, life becomes more complicated, with responsibilities towering above me. The art of listening allows me the space to digest this process, and to feel less alone in it.
Born in 1960, my dad got to witness some of the best of the best hit the scene. Whether it was Pink Floyd, Queen, or even Whitney Houston, he skipped from track to track, dropping the needle wherever his heart was pulling him. He didn’t just listen to these albums, he devoured them.
By the age of 19, he owned more than a hundred records and had been to more concerts than he could probably count.
“I love the surprise, the reveal,” he said. “How do these people marry the right words and the right notes and excite so many people at one time? It’s like magic. The creation is the coolest thing.”
He says he had his first visceral feelings of loving music while listening to artists like Alice Cooper on the radio. He even would often jump to the backseat to lie on the speakers to hear them better. For him, a radio was opening a new portal into the world.
“My mom had a limited supply of music,” he said. “The radio was endless.”
Whether it was transmitter radios, Saturdays at the record store, or speakers in the backseat of the car, his love of music was fostered over decades and still lives on today.
He still enjoys “vinyl nights” with friends, DJing sets at local spots, and most importantly, passing down this devotion to his children.
As his three children, including myself in the middle, came into the picture, my dad’s listening habits changed form. I grew up playing classic rock trivia in the car, where the first kid to name the song was given a dollar. When I started going to festivals and shows at 7, I stuck my nose up at the smell of cigarettes and felt my jaw drop as the lights danced across the stage and the music overtook me.
My house functioned as a fast-track education in the greats of all genres, and something was always playing whether we were having dinner, cleaning, or just lying around.
My dad taught me a lot about the idea of good music, what makes a track build, what a good guitar riff sounds like. But what he might not have realized is that he created the soundtrack of my life and continues to do so.
My dad taught me a lot about the idea of good music, what makes a track build, what a good guitar riff sounds like. But what he might not have realized is that he created the soundtrack of my life and continues to do so.
I have thousands of songs in my own personal library, and I can probably associate a memory with every one of them. Now, I attend shows with my siblings and close friends, building memories to last forever.
Music helped me find self-confidence, experience unbridled joy, fall in love, heal from heartbreak and loss, sit comfortably in bouts of sadness, and much more than I could ever put into words.
As I age, life becomes more complicated, with responsibilities towering above me. The art of listening allows me the space to digest this process, and to feel less alone in it.
There is truly no experience for me that tops going to a concert with my dad. It’s there that I get to share our deep appreciation with thousands of others, every one of us choosing to set life’s worries aside for a handful of others as we sing our hearts out.
And although my taste may have evolved throughout the years, my favorite songs and shows will always be the ones I share with my dad.
Velocity 
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