I grew up in a very conservative and ultra-religious household. This is pretty common in the mid-west and all of my family were devout Catholics. They still are for the most part but my immediate family deviated from the pack as soon shortly after we moved away from that area. As a child, I lived a very sheltered life including attending a Catholic school, going to church several times a week, and even being an alter boy.
Before anyone goes down the road of something sexual involving priests I'll put this out there: Nothing even remotely like this ever happened to me or any of the other alter boys. I guess we got one of the good priests or all of us weren't good-looking enough to molest.
Anyway, I would discover years later that a lot of what my parents were presenting to us kids was a ruse and they weren't actually the people they were presenting to the world. This is a great example of how I think a lot of people are. I don't fault them for this because they were just looking out for their kids but one day after we had moved away from the mid-west, I discovered something in the attic that was pretty telling of my parents' true nature.
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We had a family record player in the living room that was the size of 2 coffins stacked up on top of them. This thing weighed as much as a Volkswagen and once it got sat somewhere, this is where it was going to stay until the end of time.
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Something like this, only much larger
The record-player cabinet had the speakers and the record player contained inside and then as an added bonus on the other side there was a liquor cabinet complete with waterproof ice cube storage. What a bizarre but totally cool combination.
The records that were contained in our public display included mostly religious indoctrination collections of songs for kids, a TON of Elvis records that spanned the gospel years of his career, Sonny and Cher, some John Denver and Dolly Parton, and other rather docile features. One of our prized records was a collector's edition of E.T. read by Michael Jackson.
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Basically, there was nothing even remotely risqué in there and this was by design. What us kids didn't realize was that my parents had a history of being fans of certain music that they had acquired before having kids that didn't fall into their new, religious persona. This music was all hidden away in boxes in the attic. When I discovered them as a teenager, I was a bit blown away.
They had Sabbath, Led Zepplin, The Beatles, and other such things that no good Christian would ever play in their homes. I ended up having a wonderful conversation with my parents about all the records and they had a bunch of great stories and memories involving each of the albums and how they got some of them while my mom still lived with her parents and she had to keep them hidden or she would have gotten into trouble with her also very religious parents. I loved the fact that my Dad, who had told me his whole life about the virtues of certain music, had great stories and remembered most of the lyrics to songs by Black Sabbath even after not listening to it at all for decades.
All of their children were in college or were in high school at this point and we were no longer even attending church service so there was no reason to lie anymore. One extra bonus was that they let me take all the records I wanted back with me to my college city with me. It is very unfortunate that just like any irresponsible college student, I mistreated them and they eventually were all destroyed and thrown out after a flood hit our city. I feel terrible about that because some of those were collector's items and even if they weren't, they had nostalgic value to my parents. I'm pretty sure they have forgiven me for this, and the many other missteps I made in my late teenage years and early 20's.
I was kind of delighted to find out that my rigid and strict in appearance only parents actually had a "cool" side to them as well. They did a very good job of hiding this from us and everyone else because no one had any idea that my parents used to rock out just like all other teenagers did at the time. I would later find out some other insider information about my parents and their rebellious streaks as teenagers and young adults.
I'll get into that in a later episode.
Lovely to see. the good old days
well you can check my page out here's a link.
https://ecency.com/hive-181335/@sleemfit/nensoubl
lol
I've never seen such a thing in my life but as you say, it's a cool thing. Very stylish and useful too, if you have a lotof space.
They were all the rage back in the 60's and 70's. By the time the 80's came around people were starting to get rid of them because cassettes were replacing records. Funny thing about that is that records are back in fashion now but there isn't any really good reason why cassettes ever would be!
I think this was very common amongst religious families as not everyone fits into the same mold. A friend of mine was forced to attend church every Sunday and if he missed the first service had to attend the later one. As soon as he left home he never went to church again as he didn't feel the same way as his parents did. I always believe we should have choices and there is nothing wrong with that.
we went to great lengths to skip church. I would tell my parents that I was going to sit with my friend in the balcony and we would just leave, walk around the neighborhood for half an hour or so and then return just in time for communion so that my parents could "confirm" that I had actually been there. I need to ask them one day if they were aware of the fact that I always left the church but just let me get away with it. Having honest conversations with my parents now that I am an adult is actually really entertaining because as it turns out they were extremely aware of a lot of the things I thought I was getting away with.
That Michael Jackson + E.T cover photo is definitely disturbing XD. Not something I'd feel like listening to.
Forced religion is something I absolutely hate. I was forced to take communion and attend church every Sunday for 2-3 years straight and I hated it to this point in my life. I was forced to do it just because my family is religious, and I regret not sleeping all those Sundays I had to wake up at 7 am just to attend something useless. To this day I wonder what was the point of it all.
Oww man, this had to be sooo nostalgic for your dad.
yeah, the nostalgia moments with my parents as I have gotten older have been great treasures. I suppose they were just doing what they thought was going to put us on the best path possible. For the most part they succeeded I think since all of their kids have gone on to be reasonably successful.
I hated going to church on Sundays and once I left my parents' house to go off to college I have never gone to a service since unless we were visiting the grandparents. All those things you have to repeat after the priest says something are still burned into my memory though!
The Michael Jackson telling of the story was actually pretty entertaining but this was during the "Thriller" days before MJ completely lost his mind.
I still have a lot of the old records that my dad had when we were kids. I lost a lot of the sleeves to a flood as well, but the records are still good and I still spin them occasionally. I have a player setup in my basement with a record collection that is probably somewhere between 200 and 300 records. That is funny story about your parents being super conservative, but also rocking out. My parents were also very conservative, but music was never something that they were too much of a stickler on. I remember some of the album covers my dad had when we were kids were pretty risque'. At the time anyway.
That's an impressive collection you've got there. I think this is one of the only regrets I have about living a nomadic life: Collecting anything is something I can not do since my life needs to fit into a couple of suitcases.
It's one of the few things I collect. Everything else is just more to move.
I remember this crazy traveling preacher dude came to our church one time with a record player and a led zeppelin album so that he could show us that playing it backwards would say demonic stuff. I will never forget it. I immediately went home and showed all my friends by scratching the hell out of my mom's records.
One thing I learned after growing up and traveling abroad is that we Americans have a really unusual brand of Christianity.
As a metal fan that frequently listens to music where the musicians pretend to be Satanists they intentionally put messages in there backwards.
That preacher that you refer to... i wonder what his motivations were though. The effect it had on most people was probably what you ended up doing, it just encouraged the youth to look for Satan even more! :)
Yep, that was the effect that it had on all of us kids. We went through literally every record our parents had trying to find hidden messages. It was one of those fun scary sleepover activities, like Bloody Mary, or light as a feather, stiff as a board.