One afternoon, I found myself at Southgate Plaza with some time to kill. I went to the music shop. It might have been a Wooden Nickel. I don’t recall. I liked going to unfamiliar music stores because they often provide an opportunity to find something new. That was the case on this day.
I have been a fan of War Of The Worlds since my early childhood. My mother and I would watch that old movie from 1953. It was a personal favorite. That and The Ghost And Mr. Chicken. Back in my single digit years, it seemed to be on TV once a year or so and mom and I would watch it together. I knew it was based on an H.G. Wells book but I never read it until I was well into my 30’s.
Still, I was fascinated with the idea and here in my hands was a musical adaptation. I had to gamble and get it. I am glad I did. It is a fantastic telling of the tale and generous helping of great music to go along with it. This was another one of those albums that nobody I knew ever heard of.
My brother-in-law Alex knew it. I had to pick him up in Chicago when he came over from England. I had committed the entire thing to cassette and was going to surprise him with it for the long ride home. I was surprised that he not only knew of it but sang along on many of the tracks. I guess Jeff Wayne is more popular across the pond.
A couple years ago, I saw a stage performance of Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds on PBS. I should see if that is available on DVD.
I’ve never been what I’d consider a fan of The Allman Brothers Band. I was only familiar with the name Allman because of Cher. Even now I don’t consider myself a fan of The Allman Brothers Band but they do have a couple of songs that I like and represent something special to me.
In the early spring of 1993, I dressed up like Elwood Blues and too the train back to Vermont to visit my friend Adam. The same Adam from The Academy Days. In the year prior, we had gotten into the habit of writing each other letters. I’m not sure what started it but we’d write each other and included in this writing we started writing this bizarre piece of fiction about a hotdog cart operating dog named Bunger. It was this twisted and barely coherent tale about his problem with the packaging of buns and hotdogs. We eventually called it The Hotdog Equation.
Adam and I spent most of a week travelling around Vermont from Snafu Hollow to South Royalton and beyond. I hadn’t seem him since Aric and I made a quck trip in 1986. While we were travelling he played No One To Run With for me. He said that he felt it described his situation. All of his friends were getting married and settling down or getting to gear on some career path. He felt that he was getting left behind still wanting to do the things we all used to do and there was no one left to run with anymore. It was a poignant moment and the some was good and I understood.
When I got back to Indiana, I had a unusual experience. After a week of hanging out in my old stomping grounds in Vermont with my old Vermont friends, when I woke up that first day back home, it was so disorienting. It seemed like my current life was just a dream. I went out and bought a couple of Allman Brothers Greatest Hits compilations hoping I would find that song Adam played for me. I did but I didn’t really dive to deeply into the Allman Brothers music. In 2012, I would again but for different reasons.
In the early 90’s I really tried to give Rap music a shot. In just about every case, I found that I really liked the music and the way all the elements were brought together. I just can’t get past the vocal tracks. They always seemed to fail. If it wasn’t the words themselves, it was the delivery and most of the time it was both. It seemed like such a parody. I would remark to people that these guys were in the studio being serious on this and thinking that it was so avant-garde. It is so silly, really.
Is it just me? I mean if feel that the guys from Styx can look back at The Grand Illusion and think wow, that was a good effort that we can continue to be proud of. Where Vanilla Ice probably looks at To The Extreme like a bad yearbook photo and hopes that it won’t impact his home improvement career.
I admit that my inital attraction to Ice Ice Baby was the Under Pressure sample from Queen. I’ve listened to and written about 3 Rap albums this morning and they all hit me the same way. I want to tell those rappers to shut up and get out of the way of the cool music that is behind them.
Let’s keep rolling with the Video Jukebox effect. By this time I had a 3/4 Ton Chevy pick up truck. It was 4 Wheel drive with a rugged camo paint job. The guy I bought from had taken out the bench seat and dropped in a pair of bucket seats. This left a rather large space between the seats. I filled this space with a 12″ Subwoofer cabinet. I also added a pullout stereo and a kick ass Jensen amp and some huge speakers behind the seats. To say it thumped was an understatement. When I cranked up the volume, the rear view mirror became unusable.
Nemesis, like 2 Live Crew is disappointing because they can’t shut up. The music, beats, samples and DJ work is outstanding but then they try to rap over the top of it and the message is cheap stereotypical and at a third grade reading level. It ruins what wold have been stellar grooves. Life is so much more than Bitches And Money. Now you’re boiling like a crock-pot doesn’t suggest sexual anticipation. It is an indictment of weak vocabulary.
The song that showed up on the Video Jukebox was the title track Munchie For Your Bass. I thought it was weak lyrically but I still liked it enough to try them out. I was surprised when I got the CD. You see, our old TV didn’t have the ability to play the bass line so I never heard that signature bass line until I played it on a proper stereo. It sounded really good on the sub in my truck.
Droppin’ The Bass
I Want Your Sex –
Munchies For Your BassIt looks like this video was recorded off the Video Jukebox channel. How weird is that?
Another frequent flyer on the Video Jukebox was Pop That Coochie by 2 Live Crew. At the time, 2 Live Crew was getting a lot of publicity for being so controversial. I remember thinking at the time that they were simply trying hard to sell records to young white boys who were looking for Parental Warning label. It seems kind of silly compared to what is going on today.
Pop That Coochiewas another favorite of my baby boy. I found As Clean As They Wanna Be which was reedited version of As Nasty As They Wanna Be. While the lyrics are still pretty sophomoric, I thought the music was good and the sampling and effects were well done. You have to remember that this was still the early days of Rap music’s approach to the mainstream. I appreciate the effort even though I still think they are marketing to 13 year old boys on the 50 Shades Of Grey channel.
My favorite parts are the intrumental tracks like The Caper and the vintage samples like 12″ Long and Let It Rip. Sometimes the lyrics are funny but for the most part they really work against them. I don’t mean to sound like the royal court scolding Mozart for Figaro but the sexual themes are so amateurish that they have to be meant for people who have never had sex.
I think that I would really love this album if 2 Live Crew didn’t appear on it. The beats are good and DJ has skills but I’m not surprised that they have faded from the collective memory.
There were half a dozen bands that I discovered by watching the Video Jukebox Channel in the early 1990’s. Of these, my favorite has to be 808 State. The video was Cübik.
808 State was one of the early electronic Techno bands that I heard. The music was for the most part lyric free and looking at the video was made on a few computers in addition to actual musical instruments. It feels like a mash up of video games and club music with a dash of spacey sound effects. I really enjoy it.
I don’t know anybody else that had heard of 808 State. People seem to like them when I play some. It is hard to believe that I’ve had this album for 20 years. I can definitely see the progression from Switched-On Bach, to Tomita, to 808 State and onto the Techno and Dubstep that would follow.
Sadly this is another of those bands that I never really researched further. I bought their follow up Ex:El a couple years later but that is about it. I still enjoy 90. If you like some good beats and high energy electronic music you need to check out 808 State.
I started this journey almost a year ago trying to remember the first song that I loved. I wonder if my mother would agree with what I came up with? In the case of my son, although he may not remember it, the first song that he really reacted to was I’m Too Sexy. He not quite a year old. He had a playpen that was more to keep the dogs out than keep him in. Back then we didn’t have cable but we had a music channel. I don’t remember what it was called but the concept was a video jukebox. You’d call the number on the screen to select the music video you wanted to see and it would charge a quarter or something like that to your phone bill. Your video didn’t play right away, like a jukebox, it would get added to the queue and would play whenever it was up.
When there wasn’t anything on the main 3 1/2 channels, we’d put the jukebox channel on. Whenever I’m Too Sexy would come on, Zach would get up and dance. Well it was mostly just a bounce while hanging on to the rail of the playpen.
So I bought Right Said Fred’s Up. At first it was because he seemed to like that song so much. It was silly and the video even sillier but I found that the album really good. Again, I’m not going to pretend to be some kind of knowledgable music critic. I’m just saying that I like it. It has a lot of the same qualities of the kinds of music that I was listening to back in The Academy Days. So I bounce this album because of my baby boy. How’s that for influence?
I’ve got to do something. I’ve been writing about New Age for the past several posts and that is fine. I’m satified with calling this era A New Age. It makes sense in that it applies to both the genre and the fact that I had shifted from The Roach Days Revisited into another era of My Musical Evolution.
The part that I have struggled with is that so far, all the major eras of My Musical Evolution seems to have disctinct timeframes and reasonable appropriate titles. For some reason, apart from New Age, this era doesn’t seem to have any clear and present name that seems to apply let alone satisfy.
I’ve been wrestling with why that might be. Part of it might be that after becoming married and having children, my music acquisition rate dropped pretty significantly. It might be that music in general got pushed to the perimeter and forced to take a minor supporting role rather than center stage. Still an important part but the hours of casual listening had given way to the epic of raising and supporting a family.
Another aspect of this may be that when I was buying Compact Discs, I was backfilling material from my earlier eras. I was picking up quite a bit of stuff from The Scratchy 45 Days. This musical reminiscing my be a factor in the lack of musical identity. Perhaps it is hard to put a name to it because in reality, it is still in play. Where all the previous eras of My Musical Evolution have a distinct beginning and end, I feel that I’m still living this last and longest segment.
So here I am begrudgingly calling this era The 90’s. I’m hoping that segmenting it like that will help to move forward. Actually, the segment should be called Married With Children as that name supports the era a little more actively. As you will soon see, even my very young children held influence in My Musical Evolution.
So let’s talk about this Enya album now. It was the early 90’s and I was deep into New Age Music. Depeneding on where you were shopping, Enya would show up in New Age, Celtic, or World. So I had seen here name and a few album covers as I searched for New Age music to add to my collection. Her song Orinoco Flow had gained some attention even making its way into advertising. I feel that here again I must remind you of the absence of the internet and phones that cansample a song and return all you want to know about it. I would hear Orinoco Flow every once in a while, usually on the overhead music systems of retail outlets. One day, I heard it on the radio at work and as luck would have it, they actually announced the artist and name of the song. I wrote it down with the intention of looking for it on my next CD outing. It is a good song and I still enjoy listening to it very much. It would have been easier to find if Enya adopted K.C. & The Sunshine Band’s method of naming songs. It would have been called “Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away”.
I’m sorry that this is such a long post but I need to cover a lot of ground here that just happens to coincide with this album. The next part, I’m sure that I’ve mentioned a dozen times already. It is about the disappearance of the Album and the emergence of the download a track a time. Watermark is another album that I initially bought for the one song Orinoco Flow. I listened to that song. I included it on a few road tapes [Since the big party days were left behind at The Roach Motel, my desire to make mix tapes evolved into travel tapes. I even had people come to me and commision mix tapes for their road trips. More about that later.
So I indulge on Orinoco Flow and then put Watermark on the shelf. This is where the Steve Martin Move L.A. Story comes in. L.A. Story was OK as a movie but there were some really amazing songs on the soundtrack that reached me. For the longest time, I searched for the L.A. Story Soundtrack which as far as I could tell, did not exist. I would watch the film on when it was on TV and soak up those songs. Fast forward some years and I’ve taken Watermark off the shelf and I’m listening to the entire thing. Track three starts and a chill washes over me as I hear on the L.A. Story songs that I loved so much. A couple tracks later and it is another! For years I was looking for them and all this time, they were in my possession. I had overlooked them for several years. If I had simply downloaded Orinoco Flow, I never would have know what I was missing.
Watermark
On Your Shore
Exile I’ve always liked that quote from L.A. Story “Why is that we don’t always recognize the moment that loves begins but we always know when it ends.”
My introduction to Tomita was this version of Holst’s The Planets. I was familiar with Holst and The Planets due to my involvement with classical music and Star Wars. I had originally checked out The Planets because my cousin thought that might like it since I liked the Star Wars Soundtrack so much.
Again, like with Switched-On Bach we see my love for electronic music mixing with classical. I really do like this version of The Planets. I found it in the New Age section but I think that it might have been more by association. A lot of Tomita’s stuff winds up in New Age probably because they don’t know what else to do with it. It is synthesizer driven electronic stuff but I wouldn’t consider it New Age as I had come to understand it. I’m doing the same thing here. I tell myself that I’m filing this asNew Agebecause it was under this heading that it came to me. The reality is that I don’t know what else to do with it.
It really is good fun to listen to if you enjoy electronic music. It reminds me more of Queen’s Flash Gordon Soundtrack than Star Wars though even though there are several bits that sound like R2-D2 might have been contributing back up vocals.
Although this was the first time I heard of the name Tomita I had heard another piece of his for years as I was a fan of the Star Hustler turned Star Gazer program on PBS with Jack Horkheimer. Star Hustler’s theme was Tomita’s version of Arabesque No. 1. Something that I’d discover years later.
Mars – The Bringer Of War
Venus – The Bringer Of Peace
Mercury – The Winged Messenger
Jupiter – The Bringer Of Jollity
Saturn – The Bringer Of Old Age
Uranus – The Magician
Neptune – The Mystic
I kind of think that Neptune is my favorite piece here. The Mystic part translates pretty well.
My second acquisition from the Musik Zur Ruhe series was Volume 10, Leben – Humming Voices. The experience mirrored my jump from Deep Breakfast to The Sky Of Mind. Leben was still a good collection of new age music but did appeal to me like Licht – Flying Clouds did. Where Jean Michel Jarre used synthesizers and bizarre electronic gadgets for Oxygene and Equinoxe, Leben’s artists added more traditional acoustic instruments and voices on many of the tracks. It isn’t bad but the result is a slower more meditative experience instead of the electronic invigorating aura I was trying to recapture.
As I sit here and listen, I can feel my heart rate settling into a calm and peaceful rhythm. Images of a still lake smooth as glass carry my mind away. It would be another eight or nine years before I’d share this music with Aric and Scott and funny enough, it would be on a still lake smooth as glass in north central Michigan in the full color of autumn.
Another big difference from Licht is that Leben is a compilation of several different artists. I like that they have different approaches and different choices in instruments but yet maintain that peaceful meditative style. Now the big question is what will be available to share with you…
Michael Rother – Pulsar
Penguin Café Orchestra – Air
Penguin Café Orchestra – Isle Of View
Michael Rother – Blauer Regen
Penguin Café Orchestra – Now Nothing
So I was able to find some but there are more that you missed. It would be nearly 20 years before I would expand my collection of the Musik Zur Ruhe series. Not be because I didn’t want to but because they are so damned hard to find.
One afternoon, I found myself at Southgate Plaza with some time to kill. I went to the music shop. It might have been a Wooden Nickel. I don’t recall. I liked going to unfamiliar music stores because they often provide an opportunity to find something new. That was the case on this day.
