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  In either case, there’s a past reality behind my present listening, and when I hear those songs again that superseded era returns to me with an immediacy that leaves me groping for artifacts longs since discarded.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!