Thursday, November 29, 2007

Playback: Remastered

Lately I’ve been having these memories that are really throwing me for a loop.  They’re so richly detailed, so multi-sensory, so intense and compelling that they leave me momentarily wondering which reality is operative.  Usually it’s odors that bring back this kind of whole-body memory for me - coastal bluff smells, or tar, or rhododendron blossoms.  But really, those olfactory memory triggers are much more generalized, evoking an era, a feeling, something (like odors themselves) without clear edges.  These recent memories of mine, on the other hand, have been much more concrete.  I know what’s behind them, too: it’s the music.

Over the past few months a lot of new music has flowed into my household.  That’s always a good thing.  Some of it’s brand new to me, like the Bud E Luv covers of Ozzy classics.  Some is familiar in a non-specific sort of way, like all that Santana that I’ve heard so often on the radio but never owned.  And then, there’s the stuff I used to own, and owned to the hilt, but that I lost years ago to the inevitable depredations of time and its associated relocations and erosions.  These were important tunes, too - music I didn’t just listen to, but that shaped my life as it played for me.  In some cases, one special listening session was seared into permanent memory; in others, I listened again and again under similar circumstances till a path had been literally burned into my brain.  In either case, there’s a past reality behind my present listening, and when I hear those songs again that superseded era returns to me with an immediacy that leaves me groping for artifacts longs since discarded. 

This all seems overly intellectual, no surprise.  Perhaps some specifics might clarify my point:

Leftoverture: I so clearly remember getting the album at a local Warehouse Records, riding home with it flapping in its bag against the pink evening air as my old bike ate up pavement.  I stared at the image of the ancient sage on the cover, memorizing the lyrics to “Wayward Son.” I still know most of those lyrics and that old guy is still a good old friend of mine.  I’d just completely forgotten him till he popped up on my little iPod screen. 

Benefit: Back in the day, when I mostly listened to Gershwin and Rogers-Hart musicals because that’s what we had at home, my good friend Glickfish took it upon himself to introduce me to the larger musical world.  To this end, he stared giving me home-recorded cassettes of spooled ferric oxide tape, Maxell and Memorex lozenges bearing his swift pencil-scrawl on the labels and pasteboard inserts.  There was a time that most of my music fit this description, but the stuff I wore out first was the Tull.  Damn but I liked that Jethro Tull, and I listened to it day and night on my shoddy little top-loading analog-v.u.-metered deck.  Benefit was one of the albums I most diligently replayed and re-replayed.  As I listen now, again, for the first time in 20 years or so, to the breadth of styles and themes addressed on that album, I’m transported from my seat on my bus to the twin bed in the corner of my shag-rugged bedroom.  I can see the op-art wallpaper, I can smell my old dog, and my fingers can feel again that crude little button marked “play.” I sure pressed that button a lot.  It sort of feels now like it’s pressing me. 

Aja: Never let it be said that I don’t recognize quality when I hear it.  At 13 tender years of age, I went to Sears with my Bar Mitzvah money and got myself a stereophonic music-playing device, chunky and woodgrained with soothing green illumination for the radio dial and mode selector.  I could play LPs, listen to both A. and F.M., or utilize the latest technology for enjoying skip-free playback convenience: the 8-track.  Unscratchable, poncho-pocket convenient, and as modern as a push-button telephone, the 8-track offered four full “programs” of about two-and-a-half songs each, switching over from one program to the next with an audible - unmistakable, really - clunk (typically in the middle of a guitar solo or lyrical passage).  Actually, even at the time it felt like a clumsy format but I was too much of a tool not to buy the product that was being sold to me, so I would up with time on my hands and a stack of ungainly 8-tracks in their little cardboard sleeves for my listening enjoyment.  Generally, I got comedy, big bands, bagpipe music and patriotic marches, because I did not know what the hell I was doing, but at some point I stretched my boundaries and picked up some Zappa and some Steely Dan, and I listened the hell out of those bad boys.  It was hot, that summer, and I’d stare at the enigmatic typography of the Aja sleeve as that crazy tape clunked through all four programs, again and again.  Something about that music made me think that life, somewhere, was a lot more interesting than what I was experiencing of it - dangerous and sexy and full of promises that neither my paternal homestead, nor my personal timidity, nor even my dorky technology could entirely keep hidden from me.  And now I’ve got Aja again and it’s still making all those dangerous, exciting promises to me.  They don’t have to be true - I’m pretty sure they’re not, really, not anymore.  But it’s great to hear them again.

21st Century Schizoid Man: This song was and remains a powerhouse, the kind of tune that distinguishes the symphonic prog-rock genre.  Listening to it in my college dorm room at the highest volume I could muster, it scared me and exhilarated me.  But then one day in 1983 my housemate lent me a new toy he’d just purchased - a “walk man.” This was a tiny tiny cassette player, anomalous in that age of enormous ghettoblasters.  It was so small it didn’t even have speakers - just eentsy headphones that, when activated, made it sound like music was actually playing inside your head.  People were starting to use them more and I wondered what the fuss was about.  So one fine fall day I borrowed the magical musical trinket, popped in a recording of In the Court of the Crimson King (on which the track in question appears), and wandered out to the middle of campus.  Once there I slipped the puffy little ‘phones over my delicate shell-pink ears and turned the sucker on.  The sound was deafening, but somehow, finally, correct.  The screaming, the pain, the anomie that was inscribed on every note had finally truly come to life for me and was being acted out by every goddamn person on the face of the planet.  The music had been reified - or, perhaps, finally, I was able to recognize it as it was being performed for me, live on the world stage.  The music ripped the cover off the complacency to which I’d grown inured.  That sultry afternoon it rocked me to my core, and wouldn’t you know it, I think it’s rocking there still. 

I’d typed this all up last night and then froze my screen and lost it all.  Why, I asked myself: Why!??  Oh, I realized today, it was so I could wrap it up with a link to a nice collection of terrible album covers that I found today on News of the Weird - Daily.  You’re welcome - and do please stay as funky as you want to be! 

Thank goodness my role in your Proustian cassette memoir was a positive one ... I feared you’d recall my passing on one of those 29-cent Luigi’s Seaweed Cassettes from University Stereo, the kind that unspooled INTO your deck with a sickening audio burble before wrapping its crinkly tentacles inextricably around the tape heads. 

That said, I’ve been listening to a fair bit of Tull myself lately.  Well, that’s a lie; I never really stopped, except during my first marriage, when most of the things I enjoyed were either expressly forbidden or simply self-censored as implicitly immoral manifestations of my guilty male bourgeois whateverness. 

So, yeah.  Tull.  Sounds pretty great in the not-yet-obsolete CD medium.  I burned a mix of my fave acoustic tracks from the early years, and then EMI came out with a similar (though not quite as good) official comp.  But for the record, here’s a tracklist:

Reasons For Waiting
Living In The Past
Summerday sands
Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day
Mother Goose
Just Trying To Be
One White Duck/Nothing At All
Wond’ring Aloud
Wond’ring Again
Only Solitaire
Life Is A Long Song
Slipstream
Witch’s Promise
Look Into The Sun
Cheap Day Return
Fat Man
Witch’s Promise
Dun Ringill
Nursie
Ladies
Sailor (very rare, I’m told)
Grace

This material REALLY stands up.  Then again, that’s how I feel about pretty much everything they did through about 1976. 

I’ve also been listening a lot to The Band; I only heard their hits growing up but have gradually come to realize how epically wonderful they were.

As organizer of the Classic Rock Singalong I’m rediscovering a lot of radio hits, some of which I sniffed haughtily at in the past.  But seeing the joy on people’s faces as they sing them has cured me of my highbrow tendencies.  And while scouring my collection for classics I chanced upon “Crazy Circles” by Bad Company - how vividly I remember sitting in the very room you describe in your post as you dropped the needle on your shiny new copy of “Desolation Angels.” I still love that tune (I heard it recently on a TV show and felt warm and fuzzy ... but that could’ve been the peach schnapps talking).

Other stuff I remember listening to in your room, before the days of the boombox in Susman’s van:

-"Tiger in the Spotlight,” ELP
-Children of the Sun, Billy Thorpe
-Some Flanders & Swann, probably from your dad’s collection
-Redbone?  That one’s pretty vague.
-"Mirror Stars,” The Fabulous Poodles

In terms of recent music, I love the new Patrick Park record, the 88, DariusTX and a few other things, some of which will be described, in my typically long-winded way, in the upcoming EE newsletter.

But I fear we’ll never have another golden age of pop.

BFF,
Glickfish

From Glickfish’s wife.  You and he will always be each other’s first love, as it should be.

i inherited that 8-track deck from you, as well as some of your tapes.  for years i didn’t know that those songs weren’t supposed to go whhhrrrrrr-KLUNK in the middle.  some of kansas’ “point of know return” still sounds odd to me without it!

Oh the glory of the 8-track, mine being all shades of Stevie Nicks (my father’s music) and Simon & Garfunkle (my mother’s, of course) and i kick myself for not keeping those fat curvy tapes clutched to my chest all these years, and i try to remember what music it was that first busted my soul wide open and all i can come up with is John Denver’s “Country Roads”. What can I say? I was a simple gurl at thirteen.

My hot 8-track player was stolen from the ‘68 Chevy Nova along with Jethro Tull’s “A Passion Play,” James Gang’s “Rides Again,” and Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band.” What would possess someone to throw a brick through my windshield while my car was parked at the dorm?

Someone who knows what an 8-track is. We used to sit around the table listening to the portable one. My first car had an 8track player - I would sneak my dad’s Richard Pryor and listen to it on the way to school.

“Wayward Son” - the other night, while recovering from some minor surgery and doped up on vicadin, I woke up suddenly and began singing this in perfect tune and not missing a lyric. The fella let me go on before I fully woke up and realized what I was doing. I haven’t stopped humming it since.

Thanks for the musical trip down memory lane.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ESSAY ON CHANUKAH, NOW I KNOW SOME THINGS ABOUT IT. IN EXCHANGE FOR THIS I’D LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU SOME HISTORY AND LEGENDS OF CHRISTMAS.
THE ACTUAL DATE OF CHRIST’S BIRTH IS NOT KNOWN. FROM ROUGHLY 340 AD THE ROMANS CELEBRATED IT ON DECEMBER 25. IT REPLACED THE SATURNALIAN FESTIVITIES HELD ON THAT DATE. LATER IN ANGLO-SAXON TIMES, ROYAL CHRISTMAS FEASTS CENTERED ON A ROASTED BOAR’S HEAD AND PLENTY OF MEAD ( A HONEYED, FERMENTED DRINK). STORIES OF CHRIST AND ANGLO-SAXON DEEDS WOULD BE SUNG NEAR THE TABLE.
FIFTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND, THE ERA OF THE CIVIL WARS OF THE ROSES, WAS WHEN NUMEROUS CHRISTMAS CAROLS,LATER TO BECOME TRADITIONAL, WERE FIRST COMPOSED AND SUNG. IT WAS A GOLDEN ERA OF CAROLS.
HENRY VIII (REIGNED 1509 - 1547) LOVED GARGANTUAN CHRISTMAS FEASTS, ONE OF THE REASONS HE HAD A 54” WAIST. AT ONE BANQUET A PLUMB PUDDING 9’ LONG AND 165 LBS WAS CARTED TO HIS TABLE. LATER IN TUDOR ENGLAND, ROYAL AND ARISTOCRATIC CHRISTMAS FESTIVITIES WOULD HAVE A LORD OF MISRULE (A CROSS BETWEEN A CLOWN AND A JOKER) AS A CENTERPIECE CHARACTER.
MEANWHILE IN NORTHERN GERMANY LEGEND HAS IT THAT THE REFORMER MARTIN LUTHER,INSPIRED BY STARS TWINKLING IN THE WINTRY CHILL ABOVE A FOREST OF FUR,
REPLICATED THAT SCENE WITH A FUR TREE COVERED WITH CANDLELIGHTS. THUS THE FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE.
IN ENGLAND,AFTER 1660, WITH THE RESTORED MONARCHY REPLACING THE PURITAN REPUBLIC, CHRISTMAS PUNCH AND CARD GAMES REPLACED THE LORD OF MISRULE FUN OF EARLIER TIMES.
AROUND 1840, QUEEN VICTORIA’S NEW HUSBAND,GERMAN PRINCE ALBERT, BROUGHT THE GERMAN CHRISMAS TREE CUSTOM TO THE COURT, FROM WHICH IT SPREAD THROUGHOUT ENGLAND AND TO AMERICA. THE TRADITIONAL TRAPPINGS OF CHRISTMAS ARE OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND. THIS IS DUE TO CHARLES DICKENS’ STORY,” A CHRISTMAS CAROL”.
I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS. GOD BLESS YOU AND GOD BLESS AND PROTECT THE JEWISH PEOPLE.

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