In January of 1988 Aric, Kris and I moved in to Stately Roach Manor on US Highway 30, just west of New Haven. Like everything else, that place has changed. When we lived there. It was a big green lot covered in grass and trees featuring about half a dozen huge spruces. Today, it is a real estate office and the entire property has been covered in concrete.
There were some mysterious things happening there. One day, while exploring the backyard which extended for some distance to where the smooth lawn dissolved into a tangled bramble that would make Baba Yaga cringe, Mary and I discovered a tombstone. It was negelected and covered in years of growth. We also heard the sound of digging coming from the basement one evening.
Musically, the days of blasting tunes all day long were gone. We all seemed to have grown up a little. We were all working more and partying less. I was living in what seemed like an awesome little mansion yet I was hardly ever there. I wanted to spend every minute with Mary and she lived out a half an hour away on the west side of Fort Wayne.
When I did listen to music, I found myself playing classical mostly. My collection of classical CD’s had grown exponentially and while the anchor points remained Bach and Mozart, I was exploring Beethoven, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and more. I was on the brink of 23 and found classical music was a nice change from what I had been listening to and what was on the radio all day at work. It was a mental shift in My Musical Evolution that I was not conscious if at the time but it has stuck with me to this day. There are certain types of music, mostly instrumental, that help me to focus on whatever duties of the mind are at hand. Mike Oldfield and his Tubular Bells album fit into that paradigm perfectly.
Memory is a puzzle and often some of the pieces are missing. I can remember the day that I bought Tubular Bells at Wodden Nickel. I know that at the time, it was just music from The Exorcist to me. I remembered that back in the College Intermission era, a guy named Jim had the album. That was how I knew it was called Tubular Bells and not The Exorcist. I think the catalyst in this was that Mike Oldfields The Killing Fields album was receiving some attention at that time. I can’t say for certain but I can imagine seeing that right next to Tubular Bells in the bin and thinking “Oh, yeah, that Exorcist song” and buying it. Funny to me now that I never think of The Exorcist when I hear this now.
Tubular Bells was my first New Age album. It would be a year before I would even hear the term New Age Music. In early 1988, it was just a cool, soothing 2 track CD of instrumental music that was cool to do Payroll Paperwork to and I did that several times. In the wee hours of the spring of 1988, I could be found in the breakfast nook with my big Sharp adding machine running payroll and watching the sunrise to Tubular Bells.
Tubular Bells Part One