Songs Of My Life: Bill Bragin
Bill Bragin is a man with many experiences both in the USA and the UAE. As you read ahead, you will see moments of realisation and learning throughout his life.
THE JOKER - STEVE MILLER BAND
“The Joker was the first 45 I've ever bought. It was probably the first record I bought as a child. I was probably 6 or 7 years old when I bought it, I got my allowance money and my parents let me pick out one record. It's a sort of blues rock song and the lyrics have fairly simple rhymes. In the time leading up to this interview, I have relistened to my playlist a lot and one thing I realised is how many of these songs had adult themes that I couldn’t pick up on until I was way older. Steve Miller was someone who listened to a lot of old-school blues so some of the lyrics he used are blues imagery. For example, “I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree”. So Steve Miller was my first vision of rock and, sort of, the first time I got to choose my own songs”
CRAZY HORSES - THE OSMONDS
“So, The Joker by Steve Miller Band has this slide guitar part that sort of reminds me of an excited little kid and I realised that a similar guitar part was in the song Crazy Horses by The Osmonds. So, The Osmonds were sort of like an early boy band. They were a Mormon family band from Utah, and were essentially the white version of the Jackson 5. They were sort of ripping off the Jackson 5, there is this one song of theirs that sounds extremely similar to ABC. A lot of their songs were very pop or were like power ballads, but this song was very different, it’s a sort of fake heavy metal song. And when I was in college, I had a radio show and I used to play it on almost every radio show. It's a song I used to love a lot as a little kid and my first concert experience was seeing the Osmonds live with my summer camp.”
DETROIT ROCK CITY - KISS
Hard rock was a large part of my upbringing. Kiss were making a kind of glam rock, but Kiss did it with a hard rock and metal edge. They all wore different make-up and had different characters. This reminded me of David Bowie, who was also a large part of my upbringing, and his many characters. Detroit Rock City was a song that came out in their 1976 album Destroyer and was played at the first big concert I attended on my own. This song really played with my head. It was about a man trying to get to a show and then dying in a car crash on the way there, but he is the one telling the story to you. The guitar solo is still something I can sing along to, to this day.
Mustapha - Queen
The second arena show that I went to was to see Queen at Madison Square Garden for my birthday. I had my family buy me tickets to the show and the complete Queen catalogue. This was after Bohemian Rhapsody had come out. When I ask myself, why am I here in Abu Dhabi and why I listen to music that is not in English it brings me back to this song. It was probably the first time I heard a reference to Allah on a record. Freddie Mercury grew up in Zanzibar to a Persian family, so he was really connected to this region.
Watching The Detectives - Elvis Costello
This song was part of my introduction to reggae. I first listened to Elvis Costello on his third album and one thing about that album was that it came with a bonus live EP. One of the songs on that EP was Watching The Detectives. The baseline of this song is reggae, and this was around the time when many of these musicians were reggae fans trying to incorporate it into their music as much as they could. Different from the lyrics of Detroit Rock City, these lyrics are more complex. They're very metaphorical so you’re not quite sure what the story is. Elvis Costello, along with David Bowie, has to be one of my favourite artists. I must have seen them in concert 30-40 times. At my Bar Mitzvah, I had a centrepiece at the kid's table that was an Elvis Costello Styrofoam sculpture. He is someone that I have since gotten to know, so he is also one of the musical idols that I know personally.
King of Rock - Run DMC
I might’ve had a few 12-inches and singles, but King of Rock was the first hip-hop album I ever bought. This album first broke me out of being so rock oriented. Even though this song is considered rap rock today, it used only to be viewed as hip-hop. In the early days of rap, they used to sample a lot of rock records. When you listen to King of Rock today, you realise that they blurred the lines between the distinction between what is rap and what is rock. This brings me back to the first song on this playlist “The Joker” by Steve Miller Band. Both of those songs have really simple rhymes, almost like nursery rhymes, and they both have lyrics that brag about how cool they are. So King of Rock is not too far off from the music I used to listen to before and it’s what made me the rap fan I am today.
Rios, Pontes e Overdrives - Chico Science & Nacao Zumbi
Chico Science and Nação Zumbi are from a small town in the northeast of Brazil called Recife. They were the leaders of a musical movement called Maguebeat. Manguebeat consisted of artists from the northeast of Brazil that took the local rhythms and combined them with metal, hip hop and other Western genres. In 1995, I brought them over to the US to perform at Central Park for SummerStage for their first show outside of Brazil. Me bringing them over to Central Park meant they gained some respect in Brazil for what they were doing. This was when I realised my career had reached the point where my choices could have that much impact. When they were in New York, we went over to this hip-hop club and they knew the words to every hip-hop classic that came on. This interaction helped me realise that while they had all the same influence I did, everything they were doing was hyper-local and could only be from the northeast of Brazil. The way they fused together the hyper-global and hyper-local changed the way I view music forever.
Ana Mashoof - The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra
I was trying to find what the “Manguebeat” of the UAE is and who are the ones exploring the hyper-global and the hyper-local. I came across Noon and they were one of the first groups I came across that, to me, sounded like the UAE with three different musicians from different backgrounds. That mixture of hyper-global and hyper-local has been present in each person I bring over to The Arts Center (at NYU Abu Dhabi). They're all doing things with the same idea just within different contexts.
One of the first concerts of traditional Khaleeji music that I went to when I first came to Abu Dhabi was by a group of Bahri musicians from Kuwait, that were part of a conference at NYU Abu Dhabi, Mayouf Mejally. I got to know Ghazi Al-Mulaifi an ethnomusicologist who was studying for his PhD at the time. We went with an NYU Abu Dhabi class to visit him in Kuwait when he had his first concert with his own band, where he started to take the traditional rhythms from the diwaniya of Bahri music and mix it with jazz and that band became Boom Diwan and Ana Mashouf has, sort of, become their theme song, for me. Ghazi now lives in Abu Dhabi and teaches at the University and we’ve done a lot of different projects together like the Cuban Khaleeji Project, which this song is from.
Really enjoyed my interview and making this playlist for @alaawritesablog. We’ve continued sharing tracks ever since.
