Memories Dreams Reflections 13: Childhood Music (1980's)

When I was growing up I showed little inclination for developing my own musical tastes. For the first 17 years or so of my life I mostly just listened to the same music that my parents listened to. It wasn’t until I was around 18 or so, during my senior year of high school and my first year of college, that I slowly began developing my own musical tastes and blossoming into my own. During the 1980’s my parents would sometimes watch MTV and I would enjoy watching the music videos with them: the first song I ever fell in love with was the 1981 song “I Am a Camera” by The Buggles, the chorus of which I would sing incessantly. I also had an inexplicable fascination with John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy": during the fiddle section of the song I would pretend to play the fiddle part using a toy stethoscope, if memory serves. But for the most part I just listened to what my parents were listening to back then, which was primarily 70’s progressive rock, groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (or ELP for short). 

ELP’s 1973 LP Brain Salad Surgery in particular was a favorite; I loved the H.R. Giger art on the LP cover and the music itself fascinated me, especially the songs “Jerusalem” (an adaptation of Sir Hubert Parry’s hymn “Jerusalem,” itself an adaptation of the short William Blake poem known as “And did those feet in ancient time”… it’s perhaps no surprise that in later years Blake would become one of my favorite poets and artists) and “Toccota,” the latter being an adaptation of the 4^th movement of Alberto Ginastera’s 1^st Piano Concerto (1961). In Edward Macan’s exhaustive Endless Enigma: A Musical Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Open Court, 2006), Mr. Macan expresses his belief that “Toccota” anticipates 90’s industrial music (therefore, my interest in this song as a child probably paved the way for my later interest in abrasive electronic music). Mr. Macan also opines that the song is ELP’s greatest classical arrangement. My favorite part of the song begins at the 5:05 mark (and stretches out until the 6:18 mark), when Carl Palmer begins playing his infamous synthesized percussion solo, using a special drum synthesizer device. It’s hard to describe it with words, but it sounds like a combination of a malfunctioning computer and the wail of an army of air raid klaxons. When my father used to play that album when I was a child, I used to enjoy lying down on the couch for that part of the song and closing my eyes, and in my mind’s inner vision, I saw images of enormous robots engaged in battle in the center of a city on fire, an antemundane ecpyrosis. Or I should say, these images were summoned by Palmer’s innovative and experimental drum solo.

Some other records my father enjoyed playing would include Fragile by Yes. Another great album… when I was a kid I especially liked the songs “We Have Heaven” (perhaps because it mentioned the March Hare, which instantly made me think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books) and “South Side of the Sky.” Sometimes he would play the song “In the Court of the Crimson King” by King Crimson, which was another beloved track. A greatest hits album by The Moody Blues would often get a lot of airplay: my favorite track to listen to off that one was “Question.” And it would be remiss of me not to mention his adoration for Supertramp’s Breakfast in America album. I found the cover art for this album to be tacky in the supreme but it did have some songs on it that I liked, especially “Goodbye Stranger” (“Take The Long Way Home” being a good one as well). Still, his adulation of Neil Young and The Who never really rubbed off on me.

My mother was also a big fan of bands like ELP and Yes, but she did have some musical tastes of her own. She really loved The Police, and also the nascent solo albums of Sting. My siblings and I quite liked listening to those albums: Sting’s first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), was especially beloved by us, and I think it’s a classic example of 80’s New Wave Art Rock. In fact, if there’s one album that I would say defined my childhood, it would probably be that one. I recall that my siblings and I loved to dance to the title track, which was a short instrumental song. We actually developed a special dance for this song, in which we would stomp around in a circle with our arms outstretched above our heads, like ghouls in a Castlevania game. Another song off the record that fascinated me at the time was “We Work the Black Seam.” I had no idea what the song was about (years later I found out that it was about the 1984-1985 UK Miner’s Strike), but something about the words “The Black Seam” seemed magical in my mind, and I tried to conceptualize just what exactly the Black Seam was: I visualized it to look like a gigantic and shadowy underwater trench teeming with glowing nuclear waste and inhabited by grotesque phosphorescent aquatic monsters.

Years later, during my Goth phase in college, I would look back on the music of my childhood with an air of mortification, and tried to distance myself from it as much as I could. But as I’ve grown older I’ve reconciled myself with most of it (well, with the exception of John Denver, whose music I still don’t really like). Granted, I’ll never put it on the same plateau as I do groups like Siouxsie & the Banshees and Nine Inch Nails, but I wouldn’t say it all sucks. On the prog rock front, it probably helps matters that David Tibet, the mastermind of one of my favorite bands, Current 93, has praised the music of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. To say nothing of the fact that Thomas Ligotti, my favorite living horror writer, has given props to King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King.” In The Book of Lists: Horror (Harper, 2008: edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and my friend Scott Bradley), Thomas Ligotti provides his list of “Ten Classics of Horror Poetry,” and #9 on this list is Peter Sinfield’s “In the Court of the Crimson King,” where Ligotti notes that “One of the great examples of the Symbolists’ rule that poetry does not have to make sense to make an impression. In this case, the impression is that of sardonic grandeur.” (a fun fact: Ligotti’s user name at the Thomas Ligotti Online forums is The Yellow Jester, which is taken from the lyrics to the aforementioned King Crimson song). And I do admire Sting as a songwriter: many of his songs have a scholarly and literary air that I enjoy, and I like that a lot of his songs tell mini-stories, complete with characters and narratives. 

I should mention here that even back in the day, when it came to prog rock I often found the album covers more interesting than the music itself. In regards to ELP I’ve already mentioned the Giger cover art for Brain Salad Surgery but in point of fact I liked the cover art for the group’s Tarkus album even more (though as a child, my father, knowing how much I liked the Tarkus character, lied to me and told me that Tarkus was the good guy and the Manticore was the bad guy, and how Tarkus defeats the Manticore at the end, when in fact it's really the other way around). And the album covers that Roger Dean did for Yes are incredible. When it came to Yes my dad seemed to prefer the group’s longer songs (like “At the Gates of Delirium”) that were always changing and never settling into a groove, but I found them a little too frenetic for me. Hell, even some of the Yes band members felt the same way. In a statement made to Tim Morse in 1995 (as recounted in Morse’s book Yesstories, which was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1996), Chris Squire (the bassist for Yes) is quoted as saying, “Repetition is an important part of rock or pop music. It is the restating of the theme, I suppose, in classical terms. You can’t give people too much new material. We have made this mistake in the past as with Topographic Oceans, making things too varied and scattered.” I myself enjoy music that is very repetitious, both listening to it and composing it myself on the computer. Properly done, it is useful in establishing an almost hypnotic trance state of Dionysian ecstasy. Repetition is what keeps us alive: repetition of heartbeats, repetition of breaths, and so on. Is it any wonder that Andy Warhol is my favorite visual artist? *

* (Much of the above was written back in 2017. Since then I've listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans multiple times and now feel it's one of Yes' best albums).