If I try to not overthink it and just go with my gut, I’d have to say that campus wide, there were a few musical groups that everybody seemed to be into. The Doors and The Grateful Dead would have to be the most universal. What I mean by that is those bands appeared in most of the dorm rooms on posters, t-shirts and the like. I had seen the stylized Doors logo and the red white and blue steal your face Grateful Dead Skull.
The surprise came when I actually put the music to the names. I was very familiar with The Doors although I didn’t know it was them. I had gone to Arlington with my best friend Adam for a long weekend. We were going to camp at this little rustic hunting shack owned by a very interesting Veterinarian named Doc Maxwell. It was tucked back in the woods about a mile and a half from Adams house. Adam brought his boom box and a new cassette he had picked up called The Doors Greatest Hits. I was curious to finally hear what all the fuss was about regarding The Doors.
He popped the tape in and we set of on our hike back to Doc’s camp. I knew the first song Hello, I Love You. Wow, The Doors sing this? Then the next somg Light My Fire. I know this one too. We continued to walk on down the field. People Are Strange, Love Me Two Times, Riders On The Storm. I had heard all of these before but never made the connection to The Doors.
The experience continued on side two. Break on Through, Roadhouse Blues, Not To Touch The Earth, Touch Me, L.A. Woman. I was floored. I had heard every single song on that album I just didn’t know it was The Doors. After that, I was a fan of The Doors. Adam’s brother Allan was also a student at Vermont Academy and a Doors fan. I still recall him quoting “Father, yes son I want to kill you.”
I of course set to picking up The Doors Greatest Hits for myself. I have been listening to them ever since and even more so as The Doors hit the scene again after the release of Oliver Stone’s movie. As I pause and reflect here on The Doors Greatest Hits it occurs to me that none of the tracks on this Greatest Hits compilation could be considered my favorites from The Doors.
That title makes it sound dramatic. In reality, I really only regretted it from late 1982 to late 1985. To understand the original motivation, I need to explain the technological change that happened around 1980-81. The desire to make music portable had created a couple of new devices. On the highly mobile but less sharable end of the spectrum was the Sony Walkman personal cassette player. The Walkman pioneered the concept that a single person can listen to the music of their choosing in virtually any environment with a small cassette tape player and headphones. On the less portable but highly sharable side was the old Ghetto Blasters. Battery powered stereo systems in which speakers, AM/FM radio and cassette deck were combined into a briefcase to suitcase shaped format. Some of those units were quite dramatic. The common denominator though was the cassette. By this time, the once popular 8-Track had all but disappeared. The cassette seemed to be the next evolutionary step.
With this in mind, I made a conscious decision that lasted the better part of two years. A decsion that would haunt me from the latter half of my senior year until I bought my first Compact Disc player in late 1985 when that regret was rendered as obsolete as all of the vinyl records I had accumulated. My friend Adam had a boom box and I had acquired my own personal cassette player. Mine was not the famous Sony Walkman but the Toshiba version which I felt was superior to Sony’s in that mine had auto-reverse and am/fm radio built in in the form of a cassette shape module that drew power from the batteries and pumped radio through the headphones.
So here I am with a couple of great new ways to bring the music with me. Like I mentioned before, I could barely afford records, there wasn’t any budget left for blank cassettes. My course of action was to abandon vinyl records and pursue factory cassette recordings. I know, I know. I too am cringing at the thought even though it doesn’t matter in the least anymore.
Another development that occured at this time was something called Columbia House. Are you kidding 15 albums for a penny and I only need to buy five more in the next three years?! Of course if you are familiar with Columbia House of the early 80’s you recall the endless stream of flyers in the mail that had to be returned or you’d get stuck with whatever the selection was. You’d also remember that a record then went for about $7.50 unless it was Columbia House then it was $17.50. They also had frequent Buy 1 Get 3 Free specials that I took full davantage of back then.
I shouldn’t crack on Columbia House too much. It allowed me to not only acquire a bunch of music in a short span of time, it helped me developed a more risk taking approach to selecting music. I would go on to be an on-again off-again client for Columbia House and BMG for the next 15 years and develop a music selection process called Columbia House Roulette.
The big drawback of the factory cassette that made me regret the decision so much was that the shelf life of a cassette is dramatically shorter than that of a vinyl record. Part of this is due to the mobile nature of the medium. It ends up in less than ideal environments more frequently. Also at play is the nature of magentism. When you live on a planet that has a magnetic field, your tapes are affected because they rely on magentic properties to contain the data that is your music. Everytime you play a tape is is exposed to magentic forces that microsopically degrade the fidelity. Then there is the quality of the devices that play tapes. Some of them were not very good at maintaining the proper tension leading to eaten tapes. Of course the converse is also true. A cheap cassette could theoretically destroy a quality tape deck.
Danger aside, I spent about two solid years filling a couple of those big briefcase shaped cassette storage suitcases with factory tapes that came primarily from Columbia House. None of them survived but eventually almost all were replaced by Compact Disc anyway so it doesn’t matter anyway.
My inital Columbia House order was a mix of new and old. I can’t remember my motivations but I can remember some of those early tapes.
Billy Joel – The Stranger. Mom had the Piano Mansingle, Jamie had 52nd Street. My first Billy Joel purchase was The Stranger. The thing plays like a Greatest Hits album. I played this cassette until the top end squeal was so unbearable that I had to throw it out.
Sophomore year, I had a girlfriend for a few months. she was a sophomore too but was new to the school. That was how we met initially. As a returning student, I volunteered to help the new students as an orienation leader. Vermont Academy new student orientation was a pretty cool concept that gathered all the new students for a few days before school started. They would be grouped into teams and with the help of a few returning students, be put through a bunch of ice breaking ridiculous sports and activities culminating with a three day backpacking excursion on Vermont’s famed Long Trail.
So I met her as I gave her a tour of the campus. It was nice while it lasted but I felt that I was too young and had too much adventuring to do to devote that kind of effort to a relationship. It saddens me to say that I ended it but not because it wasn’t the right thing to do, I just hated the idea of hurting her feelings. I believe that I’ve had what I would call 6 serious girlfriends in my life. I’m not counting all the temporary crushes or date night girls. The 6 were the ones that had some degree of steady longevity and really reached me emotionally. While I’m still Having The Time Of My Life being married to number 6, chronologically, this was number 1.
She had seen my stereo and knew that I could tape albums onto cassettes. She had Styx – Cornerstone on vinyl and wanted a cassette version. We’ll talk about that concept next. Of course, I was familiar with Styx having been listening to The Grand Illusion for a year or two. So I made a copy for her and a copy for me.
Cornerstone did not disappoint. It wasn’t The Grand Illusion but it had those same melodic, multilayered compositions. I wondered how they wrote music like that. Take the first track Lights. Listening to it but just focus on the backing vocals. Somebody had to consciously decide when to add them and what they should say. The song could exist without them but they add a dimension that is so interesting.
I had been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a while at this point. Perhaps it was because I was immersed in Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and adventure campaigns while listening to Cornerstone that to this day, I cannot help but think about all those books and the illustrations when I hear Cornerstone.
Lights
Babe
This was the big song from this album and nowhere near my favorite. I feel sorry for the kids who downloaded Babe and never considered the rest of this album.
Love In The Midnight
Boat On The River
Possibly my favorite from Cornerstone. It has that same sort of Old World feel not unlike Mary Kopkins’ Those Were The Days
Borrowed Time
First Time
This song reminds me of Carolyn in that it came from the album she introduced to me. It also spoke to our youth and the innocence of our uncharted relationship at 15.
I never was too crazy about the song Eddie. It is OK and I don’t mind listening to it, it just seems like it is out of place compared to the rest of the album. It is the Miss America of Cornerstone. It feels like the band concedes one song each album to a rougher more traditional guiatr rock song. It is like the exact opposite of KISS who put ballads like Beth and Hard Luck Woman on their albums.
One of my friends from the Academy was a guy from Long Island named Andy. He had every Jimmy Buffett album there was. Coconut Telegraph had just come out and he played it quite a bit. I think I might have been able to make the Margaritaville connection but apart from that, I had never heard of Jimmy Buffett. I thought The Weather Is Here, I Wish You Were Beautiful was a clever and funny expression. I also like the tropical feel of his music.
A few weeks after my introduction to Jimmy Buffett, I was at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Back in those days, you could buy music in the student store and it always seemed to be cheaper than typical retail. I jumped on the opportunity to purchase Coconut Telegraph.
Does it seem unlikely that a guy could listen to Adam And The Ants then jump right into Jimmy Buffett and back? I’m listening to Coconut Telegraph right now. I listened to Kings Of The Wild Frontier yesterday. The styles are so different. I really like them both like I did then it’s just now, it seems like they clash somewhat like pickles and ice cream.
By the time Coconut Telegraph came out, Jimmy Buffett had already had a bunch of really good music out there. I just didn’t know about it. So for a brief period, Coconut Telegrapgh was not only my entry point into Jimmy Buffett music, it was all there was. Seems almost silly now considering all of his other cool songs. Here again, the listen to the entire album method has made me intimately familiar with every song on this album. Some reached me right away, others grew on me and I’d hate to think of the tracks that I wouldn’t have downloaded after listening to the 30 second sample.
The Weather Is Here, I Wish You Were Beautiful
Island
This song always made me pause and reflect even in my early teens. Incommunicado
Little Miss Magic
A really nice song that becomes more so when you have a daughter of your own.
I find it quite interesting to consider how changes in technology and the medium on which my music resides has changed how I listen to it. Today I listen to my music collection almost exclusively on my computer or digital media players. Occasionally, I’ll burn a mix CD for a road trip. These methods usually revolve around a predetermined playlist or randomized shuffle. Back in the Academy Days, it was completely different. I’d pop an album on the turntable and listen to the entire thing or at least one side start to finish. It was not practicle to listen to single songs from several different albums. The notion of a mix tape was still a few years away. Even when I did make tapes, it was typically just a copy of the album. As a result, I became intimate with all the songs from all of my albums from this era.
One of the early albums of the Academy Days was Adam And The Ants – Kings Of The Wild Frontier. A guy from my German class named Dave Wilder turned me on to Adam And The Ants. I can also point to Dave as the first time I ever heard of AC/DC. I emphasized of because I didn’t hear actual AC/DC just Dave singing Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Actually it would be years before I realized that was what he was singing.
I bought my copy of Kings Of The Wild Frontier at the Coop on a school trip to Harvard.
Dog Eat Dog
Antmusic
Kings Of The Wild Frontier
Ants Invasion
Physical
Los Rancheros
Killer In The Home
I haven’t actively listened to Adam And The Ants for quite some time. It is wonderfully familiar yet I don’t know what to make of it. It undersocres the effect of context. Adam And The Ants were part of the stuff that abhors the vacuum left by the sudden departure of disco. As I look at the videos, it reminds me that at this point I had not seen The Young Ones there is something unmistakenly Rik about Adam Ant’s onstage personna.
So here we are in the aptly named Academy Days era. The era names still maintaining that epic stylized quality. As before with the BFMS era, I’m going apologize for any chronological inconsistencies. The Academy Days officially covered the Autumn of 1979 through Spring of 1983. As we saw in the last post, Heart Of Glass has been designated to carry the torch into this era.
As we enter the Academy Days, I was still listening mostly to Kansas, Styx and Boston. Being on a Low Budget, I found that for a while, 45’s were all that I could afford. So in the tradition of my dear mother who had hundreds of 45’s I collected about a dozen before I realized that I much preferred albums. This preference holds true to this day. Was it developed back in the 1970’s? I can’t say. As you know, mom had a few albums but was all about the singles. I liked the idea that a single song on an album could attract my attention and that I’d discover other songs on the album that I would enjoy as much if not more. I think this philosophy is why I have such disdain for downloading songs.
The arguement from the download a song at a time crowd is Why pay for songs I don’t want? How do you know what you don’t want? You think a 30 second snippet from a song is all that it takes? When I think about all the music that I have acquired over 40 years and the volume of personal favorites that evolved over time it makes me ill to think that I would have passed them by had I not been committed to the album format.
The other aspect is that I believe that an album is a single piece of art. Imagine just downloading the Smile part of the Mona Lisa Painting or the shadowy figure in the hat in the background of Munch’s The Scream. When I was a young metal head shortly after high school, I used to always skip Goodbye To Romance from Blizzard Of Ozz. Today it is my favorite Ozzy song. I never would have downloaded that song based on the 30 second clip that I would have heard at 19. I never would have carried it for years. I never would have heard it again. I would have missed out. I own thousands of albums and don’t have any regrets.
Here are a few of the 45’s that I had briefly before they were replaced by albums.
Neil Diamond – Love On The Rocks
Yes, still digging Neil Diamond
Blondie – The Tide Is High
Barbara Streisand – Woman In Love
As kids we watched Barbara Streisand in comedy films like What’s Up Doc? Even now, apart from this one song, I don’t really think of Streisand as a pop music artist.
Star Wars Christmas – What Can You Get A Wookie For Chritmas (When He Already Owns A Comb)
It happened so fast. Like a flip of a switch, it seemed that Disco was gone. One moment I was in 8th grade Boogie-oogie-oogie-ing the next, I was in high school. I just realized that I left out a peculiar detail about myself. I had not grown even half an inch since third grade. I was 4 feet 10 and one half inches tall in the third grade and I was 4 feet 10 and one half inches tall my Freshman year of high school. [I’m 6 feet tall now just in case you were freaking out.] I really think it was all the coffee I drank on the front porch with my mom when I was in third grade. Does this have any bearing on my musical evolution? I can’t say for certain but I thought I’d throw it out there in case you saw something I didn’t.
So I’m attending college prep school in Vermont with students from literally all over the world. It is fall of 1979 and Disco is starting to provoke some surprisingly violent reactions. Music called New Wave is starting to fill in that vaccuum where disco used to be. I remember the drive from the airport in Hartford, Connecticut. Does that give you an idea about how small these communities were? I had to fly in to an airport two states away. On that three hour drive was the first time I heard Blondie – Heart Of Glass. It still had kind of a Disco beat to it but different.
My First Stereo
I instantly liked Blondie. Heart Of Glass was a great song that served as a kind of transition from the heavily produced disco songs to a more scaled back and sensible sound. Was it the New Wave people were talking about? I liked the almost mechanical aspect of the percussion against the atmospheric quality of her voice. She wasn’t bad to look at either. I bought 45. On my budget, 45’s were about the best I could do. I eventually would pick up a dozen or so before I could make arrangements to get back to where I wanted to be, albums.It was a new start. Like I had left my elementary school friends behind by going to BFMS, I left my BFMS friends behind when I went to Vermont Academy. A few kids from Bellows Falls Middle School also went to Vermont Academy. Likewise, Kansas, Styx and a few more made the transition to high school with me.
Early on at VA, one thing I realized that my room was missing was a stereo that I could call my own. My cousin Jamie had her own stereo that she got for selling magainzes. It had AM/FM turntable and 8-Track. I found one in a Sears catalog that had AM/FM Turntable, 8-Track and cassette. Of course I could never afford something like that. After all it was $100. I called my dad and more or less begged him to get it and ship it to me. A few weeks later and there it was. I set it up in my room and tuned the radio to my favorite now forgotten radio station and this was the first song it played.
Diana Ross – Upside Down
Isn’t it weird the things that you remember? The same thing happened when I turned on the deck that I installed in my first car but that doesn’t happen for a few more years.
My personal music collection had grown somewhat stagnant while I was away at middle school. Like I said before it wasn’t really a priority and my mother wasn’t there to finance any music purchases. Somehow, now that I was in high school, it seemed that the opportunity to buy music presented itself more frequently. I didn’t have a formal job but I would split logs for my Uncle for a stipend. I also became a pro at finding discarded beer and soda containers that I’d turn in to the village market for the 5 cent deposit. Many boxes of pop-tarts were purchased thanks to littering bastards.
Well, we’re about to wrap up the era known as BFMS. Maybe we should do an little recap. What have we learned so far? I liked what I felt was a wide variety of musical flavors. Pop music, Folk music, Disco, Rock and Roll, Classical, Show tunes, and Soundtracks just about anything except for country. For some reason country music like Johnny Cash and those guys just never appealed to me even now. I can appreciate Cash’s role in the musical landscape of our nation and I can listen to it and even enjoy it a little. I just can’t get fired up about it. I like Brad Paisley’s Me Neither. It is clever and funny but songs about daddy lettin’ me drive the truck just irritate me. I don’t know what happened. We watched Hee-Haw when we were growing up. Why can’t I like country music?
Anyway, back to the recap. Up to this point my main influences have been my mother, my cousins and the radio. I lived in the city and spent summers in Vermont. Then went to school in Vermont and spent my summers in the city. I learned to ski and went every chance I got. I loved the extended twilight that you get from living in the mountians. Ghosts, and Star Wars were favorite subjects. Certain aspects of music that I found appealing include, electronic sounds, eerie compositions, multi-layered orchestration, theatrics, the beat, thoughtful lyrics.
If you’ve been following along, you’ve heard a large portion of the tunes that got me to this point. The next leg of our journey takes us to high school at Vermont Academy. There I lived on campus with just shy of 300 kids from all over the world. I was about to meet a whole new realm of influences but before we go there, let’s go back to the Bellows Falls Middle School Gym for one last middle school dance.
Pointer Sisters – Fire
A Taste Of Honey –Boogie Oogie Oogie
Donna Summer – Love To Love You
Donna Summer – Sunset People
Sunset people has long been a personal favorite
Chic – LeFreak
Alicia Bridges – I Love The Nightlife
I find her announciation of Ax-shown disturbing.
Bee gees – Don’t Throw It All Away
Donna summer – The Last Dance
I cannot express how much I have enjoyed reminiscing about middle school and the music that I discovered during that time. I usually don’t spend much time thinking about the past. This project kind of forces me to and I have to say that while I find it really pleasant and I like listening to all these old tunes, there is an element of sadness that come with it. With the music playing and a little thought, I am transported to my past and can vividly recall not only some of the moments in time but the underlying emotions associated. I find myself missing being 13 more than I ever thought I would.
My middle school years were dominated by radio. I wasn’t listening to my KISS records as much and I wasn’t able to really buy anything new. So the radio was it. I’m really surprised that I can’t recall the 2 or 3 stations that I would listen to. I know that they were broadcasting from New Hampshire, Claremont I think. I do know that they weren’t oldies or album oriented rock stations. It was basically top 40 which in those days meant lot’s of Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, and other disco all-stars. It wasn’t all disco though.
Little River Band – Reminiscing
Neil Diamond – You Don’t Bring Me Flowers
Charlie Daniels – Devil Went To Georgia
David Gates – Goodbye Girl
Jennifer Warnes – Right Time Of The Night
I had no idea that Jennifer Warnes would be signing a duet that would be our wedding song just 10 short years later.
Was I getting more sophisticated in my middle school age? A year or two ago, I came to Vermont armed with a stack of KISS records. now with each passing day, KISS became a smaller and smaller piece of my life. The KISS solo albums came out and Ace, being my favorite member of KISS, found his way onto my Christmas list that year. That Christmas began a tradition between me and my cousin Flavia. Every Christmas for five years [starting with this one in 1978] she would buy me an album. In 1978 it was Ace Frehley because I wanted it. For the next four years, she bought me an album that she thought I needed. How cool is that.
Even though I liked the Ace Frehley album and played it pretty heavily for a while, my musical tastes had evolved and I knew even then that The KISS Age had come to an end. It sounds like this was the last KISS album I bought. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even really that long before I bought another one. Of course this was the last KISS album on vinyl.
The next time I was conscious of KISS, it was fall of 1983. I had moved back to Indiana after graduating from Vermont Academy. Am I getting way ahead in the story? Let me just say that the next time I really thought about KISS, I was in record store looking at Lick It Up. KISS were on the cover of the album without makeup! I kept looking it at it in the store trying understand if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. It just wasn’t right. I didn’t buy it. So even though I would eventually buy more KISS Compact Discs and see them numerous times in concert including that record breaking reunion tour in 1996, for all intents and purposes, The KISS Age ended here with Ace’s solo album.
Snowblind
Ozone
New York Groove
I’m in need Of Love
Wiped-Out
Fractured Mirror
Fractured mirror seemed to stand out to my new musical sensibilities. It seemed to lean toward the more complex music I was getting into.
If I try to not overthink it and just go with my gut, I’d have to say that campus wide, there were a few musical groups that everybody seemed to be into. The Doors and The Grateful Dead would have to be the most universal. What I mean by that is those bands appeared in most of the dorm rooms on posters, t-shirts and the like. I had seen the stylized Doors logo and the red white and blue steal your face Grateful Dead Skull.
ike back to Doc’s camp. I knew the first song Hello, I Love You. Wow, The Doors sing this? Then the next somg Light My Fire. I know this one too. We continued to walk on down the field. People Are Strange, Love Me Two Times, Riders On The Storm. I had heard all of these before but never made the connection to The Doors.
