I used to be such a pretentious knob. Get it?
That’s a joke. The punch line
exists in the use of past tense. I guess
when you think about it, it’s almost impossible to have opinions about things
and not assume that yours are more dignified or important than others. And so we go through life formulating and
believing our own preconceptions about things.
Thankfully though, I’m blessed with the assurance that my opinions are indeed
the correct ones (this is another joke).
I’m pretentiously
judgmental about a ton of stuff.
Possibly you can empathize; I automatically judge someone when they walk
by with a Tim Horton’s coffee. In a food
shop (notice I didn’t say grocery store), I’m judgey Jerry at the checkout line
as I survey the carts ahead of me for their deadly contents; inching my nose
ever higher every time something processed hits the conveyor. You can just imagine what runs through my
head at the sight of someone ordering a commercial domestic beer and heaven
help the character of those who happen to be laying on a beach reading anything
with the words “shades” or “grey” or the like on it.
But the one thing
that over-arched all my other pretensions were the opinions I held about my music. And when I say my music, it is just that. I
have claimed and assumed it as my own and have eventually grown to be defined
by it.
I have always liked
different sounds. Very early on I tended
toward the more obscure. In 1974 when I
was fourteen, I purchased my very first album.
It was bought, like many more to follow, from Reliable - a combination
furniture and record store (I know right?) in Brockville. It was a release I had heard from the German
band Triumvirat titled Illusions on a Double Dimple. It cost five dollars (you could buy five
albums for $25 taxes-in back then) and the album cover featured a pure white
lab rat climbing out of a white egg on a solid white background. It was an hour of pure electronic progressive
rock music fun and I spun it until it was scratched and the grooves flattened beyond
playability. While I’m writing this, I’m
streaming it, having probably not heard it in thirty years yet I know every
note, tempo change and lyric like it was yesterday. Music is fucking awesome!
Triumvirat – Mr. Ten
Percent
So there I went, busting through the doors of Reliable, Triumvirat in hand
having taken the first knuckle-dragging step in what was to be a long and
continual musical evolution.
Allow me but a
brief, almost pertinent diversion. Brockville’s
retail record situation was, I think, kind of unique. We had a Sam the Record Man downtown that was
locally owned and awesome. They wrapped
their albums in plastic sleeves and you could buy used ones and do the same at
home. All the really cool audiophiles
did this. It somehow denoted a reverence
to the device that provided the sounds and as it turned out it really did help
protect not only the quality of the cover but also the fragile disk inside from
dust. Eventually one of those mall
record stores opened up, the name of which escapes me and then we had Brockville
Floor and Wall. So in one small city you
had a combination furniture/record store and a combination flooring/paint/record
store. I never really thought about it
before but for some reason it seems oddly worthy of note.
If you’re like me,
you’ll remember clearly those days? Remember the excitement of buying a brand new album and rushing home,
unwrapping it and laying it down on the turntable for the very first time. I remember the unbelievable clarity of sound
when that stylus hit those brand new petroleum grooves. Nothing has ever compared to that fidelity. The whole process was so perfectly
ritualistic.
This is going to
sound exactly that way we all promised ourselves we weren’t going to
sound, but kids today just don’t get what we went through when we bought music. Unless you had heard the album at a friends
place chances are you wouldn’t have any experience with it. This was fine if the band was a known entity
but if you were prone to experimentation, well that proved a conundrum. If the music was commercial enough you may
have picked up a cut or two on the radio but remember radio stations offering
any diversity were virtually non-existent.
CFJR, the local station, with the tag line – A Thousand Watts that Sounds Like a Million, had a single DJ, Gene
Schimitz that would on very rare occasion play something of interest. On certain nights when the conditions were just right and if you were really fine with
your tuning skills you could sometimes pick up CHOM-FM from Montreal. Oh man those were special nights. Hell, CHEZ 106 from Ottawa, which was the
first rock station that you could consistently bring in didn’t begin operation until 1977. So in essence every time you
bought an album it was taking a bit of a risk.
I had a couple of
early conspirators and influences in my journey – Joey and Dave. Dave was especially influential early on in inviting
us into the club and directing Joe and I toward the more obscure of sound
makers. We started out slowly, leaning
to some big heavy, primarily British sounds like Led Zep (of course), Be Bop
Deluxe, Jo Jo Gunn, Hawkwind, Uriah Heep, Wishbone Ash, Manfred Mann and Rainbow. Once into it though, I quickly grew my chops
and began to experiment with a core group of musical gods that would change my
tastes forever. Gentle Giant, Camel, Henry Cow, Van der Graaf Generator, King
Crimson, PFM (Premiata Fomeria Marconi), Genesis, ELP (Emerson Lake and
Palmer), Rare Bird, Spirit, Yes, Jethro Tull, Brian Eno, Strawbs, Brand X, Renaissance,
Tangerine Dream, all the Gong iterations, Santana, Frank Zappa, Kraftwerk,
Patrick Moraz – these guys were saying something, they were crafting music that
was at once philosophy and theatre and it spoke directly to me.
It just went on from
there because these guys all conspired with other guys and before you knew it
things morphed into a huge discography of names and iterations, some far more
commercially acceptable and some who took a more artistic tact in the kind
of noise they made.
I really grew to love
the non-commercial almost anti-melodic, complex, jazz-rock stuff that proved
more difficult initial listening. While
everything else in my life was pretty well conventional at least I could
radicalize my music. Stuff like Gentle
Giant, King Crimson, Henry Cow and Brian Eno.
There was a litmus test of obscurity that I used back then. Whenever I put something on in the wrong
crowd and there was an immediate uprising, the litmus turned red indicating the
desired acerbic response. I loved this
uprising. It provided an accreditation
of some sort. It fed the hungry
pretentiousness that lay deep within.
As the common man
and woman went shrieking from the room gripping tightly their ears, I would
scream after them how they were giving up the opportunity to listen to the
classical composers of the future. “In
three hundred years” I yelled, “do you think they will be listening to Styx, The
Cars or even the Rolling Stones”? “No,”
I implored, “it’ll be this complex mass of disjointed notes and noises that
will survive”.
Henry Cow – Nirvana
for Mice (Please tread carefully here kiddies)
They just shook
their heads and looked at me with a blank expression and you could see it in their
eyes. They just couldn’t get it and when
I reached this point I was somehow satisfied.
I felt exonerated, special and superior…you know my pretence had become
perfectly satiated and I strove on happily.
Van der Graff
Generator – Still Life (and tread softly here too)
I’m really just
using pretension as an introduction to this.
The pretence was one thing but what ultimately remained was the effect
the music had on me. I can’t in words do
justice to the importance that music has had and continues to play in my life. I don’t think I can explain the emotion that
I feel, how I’ve been moved as close to God as possible when a certain part of
a certain song is playing. 801’s live
version of Brian Eno’s Third Uncle or Van der Graaf’s Still Life or Jethro
Tull’s Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day. I’m moved to tears every time I hear these
songs. It’s inexplicable the sense and
feeling that they and hundreds like them arouse.
Jethro Tull –
Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day
801’s live version
of Eno’s Third Uncle
Maybe this example is
analogous to music’s importance or capability.
How is that I can put on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Night Song, an album that
he recorded with Canadian guitarist and producer Michael Brook. NFAK is a renowned Pakistani Qawwali singer
who passed away in 1997. In some
respects he can be considered one of the most popular musicians of all time having
played single concerts in Pakistan to over a million people. Think of that power. But here’s the analogous part – you take the
words of a devotional Sufi singer, singing in Urdu, not exactly my first
language, mix it with a contemporary guitar based bed and the music is so
powerful that it can take a pasty white Canadian boy and consistently move him
to tears.
Nusrat Fateh Ali
Kahn – Crest
I remember an
interview I heard with Eno, who you may have guessed I pretty well revere. He was talking about a new art installation
he was touring. It was called 77 Million
Paintings. The idea was that through the
use of computer technology he could create random light patterns that virtually
created a seemingly infinite palette of brand new art. No two patterns were ever the same. He said that his interests were veering away
from recorded music because of the static sameness that it inherently
possesses. In this particular instance
I’ll have to put aside my reverence and take exception to Eno’s words. I’m okay with this sameness Brian. I’ll leave my broad tastes to provide the
necessary diversity to the sound.
I think this is what
music is. It an auditory potion that
when appropriately administered allows us to become as truly human as
possible. In no way am I diminishing the
other arts, which I believe have similar qualities but unlike visual art, music
is ubiquitous and accessible and some of it seems to appeal to just about all
of us. It has that unique ability to
make us forget about everything beyond it for a little while, to be enraptured
by it, to be calm and meditative. Maybe
music’s the key to world peace. Idealism
sprouts forth from its place of creation – that being art. How’s that for fucking pretentious.
Anyway for years I
fell prey to the stodginess of pretension and believed the music of my youth
was the extent of things. That the music
of today was shit and nobody was doing anything of any worth. All the while I was inadvertently developing
and instilling a love and appreciation for music in the next generation simply
through my passion.
Radiohead – All I
need
Syd Arthur –
Paradise Lost
From a very early
age I played and then discussed all kinds of my music with Amelia. We
were in the car often as we drove back and forth to Orleans as per a shared
custody arrangement. I’d throw a disk in
and we would talk about the sounds that we were hearing. How the guitar was disguised as a piano in
the background, or how the relevance of the words froze the music in time, or
how music and words could somehow come together to provide hope for any number
of political situations.
Ray Lamontagne – How
Come?
The Tiger and Me –
Dangerous Creatures
Little did I realize
what it was I was creating? Amelia has
developed a keen ear and strong opinions about what she listens to. She’s become as passionate about music as I
ever was and somehow she would like to end up working in the business. The best thing though, is how she has opened
my eyes to what really is happening in the music scene today.
Beirut – In the Mausoleum
Olafur Arnalds –
Only the Winds
The genre blurring, accessibility
and ease of recording that’s provided by today’s technology is producing some
of the most remarkable and touching stuff I’ve ever heard. The fact that so much of it is Indy makes it
all the more special. The idea that bands
today can cut out the boardroom and create what they truly find creative is so democratic and the Internet as a delivery system grants most of us access. I won’t venture into, at least not in this
post, the complexity of the copyright issues and how these guys will make
enough money to keep making their music before being somehow devoured and
destroyed by a defunct system. That’s a really
fun and opinionated topic for another day.
Alt-J – Tessellate
Jose Gonzales –
Storm
All of this kind of
came home to roost over Christmas this year.
We were celebrating with Suzanne’s family and my niece Jasmine out of
nowhere started to talk about the influence that I had provided through her
life. Amelia met Jazz when she was three
and they grew up like sisters. Jazz said
that her love and understanding of music had come from the time we had all spent
together, playing and talking about what we were listening to. It’s one of the most touching things I’ve
ever heard and was a palatable reaffirmation about the importance of cultural
evolution and the contributions that anyone of us can make. Christ it makes we weepy just thinking about
it.
Amen Jerry. I so agree with what you've been sharing in this blog. I breathe music. I can not do my art without music, it fuels me and ignites my paintings with what becomes the extension of me. In fact it was a song that touched me so deeply that found me driving to Wallack's to buy a huge canvas. I had not painted before that. I am so grateful for that moment in time.
ReplyDeleteI love your comments about Amelia and Jasmine and recently had the same conversation with Dean. When we lived way out in the country I played CDs on the long commute. He remembers sitting in his car seat listening and enjoying. He thanked me for introducing him to "real music". I am proud of his music tastes and have learned much from him about genres I wouldn't normally gravitate to. He received a turntable for Christmas and the other day he walked past me with a Frank Sinatra record under his arm. I love that there are some youth out there that are not content to listen to the 'whatever'. I am also impressed with the new young bands that are following their passion, pushing through and making their way for the love of it.
Anna
Hey Anna, that is so cool the story about Dean. I love the idea of a kid open enough to be checking out Sinatra. Hope things are going great for you. Happy New Year and thanks for reading. We gotta get together one of these days right?
ReplyDeleteYes Jerry, long over due for a catch up, I miss you.
ReplyDelete