While I'd initially believed otherwise, one thing that became apparent to me years later was just how influential my father was on my musical sensibilities. I'd never associated a lot of music with him while I was a child, but that started to change in my early teens with his re-entry into contemporary pop music, whether in the form of such pop-rock confections as The Cars' Candy-O or his curious enthusiasm for nearly all things disco (I'd often hear selections from Saturday Night Fever or Donna Summer while riding in the car). This isn't to say that Dad was out in a white suit every weekend dancing the night away, but the sound and the mechanically-precise feel of these records seemed to appeal to him every bit as much as the songs themselves ... and it would become very apparent to me much later that I'd inherited some of his tastes in that regard.Perhaps as a result of his new enthusiasm in modern music, Dad went about upgrading the living room stereo around the tail end of 1979. I don't think he'd purchased any new sound equipment since before my birth as he replaced nearly all of his old components: acquiring a new amplifier, tape deck and a record player from a company called BIC America. Style-wise, Dad did well: the new stereo was sleeker, cooler, and bedecked with all sorts of mysterious buttons and exotic-sounding control settings. By far the coolest addition at that time was the tape deck, which displayed playback levels in a multicolored LED readout and had some bitchin' stop-and-start-on-a-dime editing capabilities that would serve me well while making compilation tapes in high school a few years down the road.
I can't remember many times, if any, when my parents just jacked the volume up and rocked out when I was a tot, but they certainly seemed to do so a lot more after the new equipment was set up. About the only things Dad didn't change around while revamping the stereo were his old hand-made (and absolutely ginourmous) speakers that he'd been using since time immemorial. These old wooden framed warhorses still worked quite well, a fact both of my parents proved conclusively over the weeks and months that followed the installation of the new equipment. In fact, it seemed like the average volume of everything my parents played on that stereo shot dramatically upwards, whether it was ABBA's Super Trouper, K-Tel Records disco compilations like High Energy, or selections from Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Considering the enormous impact the music of Pink Floyd would ultimately have on me years down the road, I should point out here that Dad's purchase of The Wall had absolutely nothing to do with my eventual conversion into a drooling Floyd fanboy (scout's honor!). Instead, this was merely the album that had been playing at the electronics store where Dad had purchased his new components, and he figured that it made for a dandy showoff piece to impress the buddies with ... and impress them he did, many times over. In fact, for the rest of our time in Michigan, not one adult get-together at my house was ever complete without the guys heading to the living room to get blasted out of their chairs by Dad's revamped sound system. Hell, there were times I thought he was going to shake our house apart with it.
The enhanced capabilities of this new stereo did not go unnoticed by our next door neighbor's son, Vic Miller. Vic was one of a revolving cast of teenaged offspring of my parents' friends who babysat us kids when the folks headed out for the night, and I believe I've mentioned before that he was far and away the coolest of all our sitters as far as entertainment was concerned. Vic also clearly delighted in testing the new receiver on a few occasions, I believe by tuning in local rock haven WRIF ("Baby!") and letting 'er rip through a Van Halen song or three. I can also remember a couple of instances where friends of his would drop by and attend these high volume workouts, occasionally providing energetic air-accompaniment to the music (which amused us kids to no end).
It was also, I believe, in 1979 that Dad brought home our first VCR. While this might at first blush seem to have nothing at all to do with this blog's subject matter, this clunky, wood-paneled RCA SelectaVision would actually play a huge role in my musical obsessions to come.With blank video tapes running so expensive at that time (and thanks to the sheer novelty of being able to to review any TV show you ever cared to record), the general rule seemed to be that we would watch whatever we taped quite a few times. It's funny now how this idea seems so quaint and old fashioned: I rarely ever have the time or inclination to do this kind of thing anymore.
Anyway, back then I was primarily concerned with taping Bugs Bunny cartoons, episodes of Battlestar Galactica, and sundry other best-forgotten bits of period esoterica. I'd also occasionally get to sit in and watch stuff when my parents rented (or, on very rare occasion, bought) movies, though generally their kind of viewing fare -- The Godfather, sundry Woody Allen films, etc. -- was deemed unfit for childhood consumption and we'd be banished upstairs for the duration of the feature.
As for the times when we were allowed to watch movies with the parents, the movies were nearly always my mother's picks. While I'd never figured Mom for a musical nut, she had a hard time convincing me otherwise judging by the number of times she'd throw on Grease or Bye Bye Birdie. While neither film did very much to make me a fan of musicals, I eventually had both burned into my memory from repeat airings in our household. While Bye Bye Birdie is absolutely fuckin' surreal in it's doe-eyed, incredibly whitebread early 60's style, I never warmed to the pure show tune soundtrack, nearly all of which makes my skin crawl to this day. On the other hand, I will grudgingly admit a nostalgic fondness for Grease, partially due to its far more rascally sense of humor (some of those jokes took a few years to catch up with us kids) and largely due to the presence of my secret childhood crush, Olivia Newton-John.
Another big musical smash of a far different stripe around our household was Superman: The Movie. My Uncle Ray apparently loved this special effects spectacular more than life itself and would watch it nearly every single time he came over to visit. While I was definitely swept up in the special effects and sheer scale of the film initially, over time I began to truly appreciate John Williams' magnificent score (particularly the awesome "Prelude And Title March"), which had a kind of relentless, uplifting, epic kind of sweep that for me superseded his better-known work for Star Wars (another film we watched rather relentlessly on VHS as well).
In the very early days of video rentals, customers would be asked put down the full price of a pre-recorded videocassette (usually around 70 dollars, if memory serves) as a refundable "security deposit" on top of the rental fee charged by the store. It seems incredible to realize now, but movie companies simply didn't believe yet that people would actually purchase movies on videocassette if given a chance and a decent price point (that thinking didn't become reality until 1986). Thus, if you wanted to own an unedited copy of a theatrical movie on videocassette and you didn't have cable TV yet, this was a pretty rich proposition in 1981. To get around this, my Dad and a friend of his hit upon the idea of renting movies from the local video store and copying them by linking their VCRs together as "master" and "slave" decks and then simply making copies of the films they liked. Since this was the time before Macrovision encoding became commonplace, video duplication was a total cinch to pull off (if a bit time-consuming), and one of the titles my dad wound up keeping was Michael Nesmith's delightful 1981 "video album" Elephant Parts. Above and beyond all of the films I discussed above, this was a work that was quite literally "years ahead of its time" and, looking back now, was perhaps the most influential video cassette my parents ever let me watch.A compilation of primitive, occasionally cheesy, but unfailingly lighthearted comedy and musical bits (nearly all of the tunes sourced from Nesmith's 1979 album Infinite Rider On The Big Dogma), Elephant Parts was silly enough to crack us kids up while aiming a few knowing winks at the adults. I remember liking nearly all of the musical bits right from the start, particularly the unashamedly sentimental 50's crooner "Magic" and the slinky, goofball story of Lucy, Ramona and their long-lost brother Sunset Sam ("Cruisin'"). My favorite of them all, however, was the show-stopping "Tonite," which rollicked through highlights of the video album and eventually took glorious melodic flight as Nesmith sang, appropriately, of life inside of a TV set ("Everybody's made out of little thin lines / And sometimes their fingers are blue/ Mine too!").
Having invoked Elvis' name a paragraph or so back, it seems worth noting that I'd developed a measure of familiarity with his music thanks to a few viewings of ABC's TV-movie version of his life (starring Kurt Russell) that my dad had taped. Any possibility of me becoming a big Elvis fan was pretty remote, however: my allegiances were soon pulled elsewhere by none other than The Fab Four.
At about the same time the music bombardment at home was starting to peak, I was also being introduced to the music of The Beatles by Rob, another good friend of ours whom we'd met thanks to our parents being friends with his. Rob's parents were always far more inclined to listen to modern music than my own, but they were both big fans of the Fab Four, and had managed to pass this along to their son. Rob also had a pretty amazing amount of Lego toys in his basement (which was far less forbidding and cluttered than ours), which nicely complemented the Loc Blocs set owned by Brett and I. While spending the night at Rob's house, we'd literally spend hours building elaborate bases, spacecraft, and what-have-you and then conducting intricate little sci-fi operas to our hearts content, nearly always with some Beatles album or another going in the background.
Just as I was emerging from that nerve-wracking first year of middle school, we had been spending the usual amount of time with Rob, horsing around, playing Dungeons & Dragons and whatever else we did at that age. At some point that summer, Rob had added into his rotation a 45 record he had bought that seemed like half the Beatles catalog fused together (along with elements of Shocking Blue, The Bee Gees and even the freakin' Archies for whatever reason) and grafted onto an unyielding, metronomic disco beat. For a short time, I am very embarrassed to admit that we thought this was the Beatles, and that the Stars On 45 was simply the name of the entire medley. With older ears, though, there is no mistaking that you are hearing a pretty fair impersonation right from the opening snip of "No Reply."
Apparently, "Medley" (the shortened form of the song's true name, which is simply a listing of every single track featured during its running time) was so successful on a worldwide scale that it inspired a cavalcade of copycat follow-ups that went on for a year or so. While similarly-executed tracks paying homage to The Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder managed to garner some airplay, none of these follow-ups were ever quantifiable sucesses on the scale of this one.
As seventh grade loomed before me in the late summer of 1981, it felt at the time like yet another in a series of increasingly-unpleasant school years was lying in wait and another summer vacation was slipping away into memory. What I couldn't have known at the time was that this year would be different: like it or not, I had slowly developing an awareness (if not familiarity) of contemporary music at last, though it was still something I'd never consciously paid much attention to. That would change forever a few short months later ...
NP Pink Floyd Live In Parken-X (Copenhagen 8/25/94)
No comments:
Post a Comment