Something different this time around.
If you‘re a subscriber, you’ve noticed my pieces end with YouTube music videos of thematically appropriate songs. Music is a big thing for me, and a reader suggested I devote a few pieces to the topic. So here we go, with an occasional series I call “Spinal Vinyl.” Let me know it it works for you.
Here we go.
It’s kind of amazing how we hairless apes can be moved - emotionally and physically - by sounds we make. Pressure waves in the air, as insubstantial as the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings, can conjure anything from tears to tapping feet.
The word “enchantment,” derived from the Latin incantare, means to chant or sing a spell. This archaic word connects supernatural influence to song, which is one of the earliest and most believable forms of magic.
1: You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic, Ian Hunter
Music has always enchanted me, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. There’s been times when I’d be at a party somewhere when some piece of compelling music would grab me by the ears and not let go. Even if the music was faint, I’d find it impossible focus on a conversation. The person in front of me would fade into the middle distance like a minor film character, while some riff or melody gnawed on my brainpan like a Jack Russell with a chew toy.
I recall this happening in 1980 at a college friend’s house party, when a rock song thundering in the distance sent a lightning bolt through me. “It’s good for your body, it’s good for your soul,” wailed backup singers as the vocalist itemized the blessings of rock music. What the heck is that? I thought. I immediately had to crowbar myself out of a one-sided conversation about V-8 engines or something equally diverting to identify the track and the band responsible. I sought out the turntable and discovered it was “The Golden Age of Rock n’ Roll” by the British band Mott the Hoople.
Mott the what?
The Hoople.
And that was the name of the 1974 album in question, “The Hoople.” By Mott the Hoople.
(The previous superb album from Mott the Hoople in 1973 was imaginatively titled, “Mott.”)
I later discovered the urgent vocals were courtesy a former labourer, newspaper writer, and shades-wearing front man named Ian Hunter, who by the time of The Hoople’s release was an old man - in rock n’ roll terms - in his mid-thirties.
I soon set out to track down as much Mott the Hoople and Ian Hunter as I could find. The standout album for me remains was 1979’s You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic, in which Hunter joined forces with David Bowie’s stratospheric former guitarist, Mick Ronson, and a collection of stellar session men hailing from Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band, to whip up a flawless record of rockers and ballads.
It’s probably Hunter’s most highly praised album, by both critics and fans. During his absence from the music scene throughout most of the eighties, royalties from The Drew Carey Show (which used a watered down version of the album’s Cleveland Rocks as its theme song) helped keep his keel above water until his roaring comeback with the album Rant in 2000.
As far as I’m concerned, Ian Hunter remains one of the most underrated singer-songwriters of the last 50 years. (Check out the last track of YNAWAS: “The Outsider,” a cinematic song begging for a spaghetti western.)
2: Before and After Science, Brian Eno
Two things about Eno. One: for a guy recognized globally by only two syllables, he’s got an absurdly long full name: Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. Two: not many musical artists are known for inventing their own genre of music, yet the former synth wizard from Roxy Music is widely recognized as the chief architect of ambient music. You can hear the foundations being poured in his third and forth solo albums from the mid-seventies, in meditative compositions like “By This River” and “Energy Fools the Magician.”
Before and After Science - my first introduction to Eno’s solo work - was a revelation to an 18 year-old kid raised on a rhythmic diet of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Electric Light Orchestra. It seemed this masterpiece of studio wizardry came came spinning out of nowhere - a flying saucer in the form of a vinyl disc.
I was reminded how revolutionary Eno’s seventies-era work was a few years back, when an engineer friend showed me one of his prize possessions: a Sythni AKS synthesizer originally owned by Eno, which my friend procured through the producer Daniel Lanois.
This was portable gizmo Eno used on tour with Roxy Music, and on which he composed much of his early, soaring solo work. The inputs could be used as outputs - making it a workshop for all kinds of recursive effects - and it came in a carrying case with a keyboard printed on the surface, meaning a musician could play on touch-sensitive electronic keys dating back forty years before the iPhone (though a museum piece now, it still fetches hefty prices on eBay).
Before and After Science melded Eno’s eccentric and ethereal arrangements to wordplay both clever and cryptic. The album and its predecessor, Another Green World from 1975, occupied a musical space alien to headbangers but amniotic to stoners. I was in neither camp at the time, but as a young music archivist (I bought TDK metal cassette tapes by the boxload to raid and record my friends’ album collections), I was captured by the album‘s stellar musicianship and original sound. Though it was an artifact of its time, it feels as timeless as You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic.
3: A Secret Life, Marianne Faithfull
At the turn of the millennium and at the age of 40, I fell into a depression that lasted about a year. During this purgatorial period, I would often listen to an album by singer Marianne Faithfull that opened with this recitation from Dante’s Inferno:
Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straight forward pathway had been lost.”
I found a sense of solace hearing Faithfull’s ravaged voice recite these verses, knowing my suffering was not unique to me. Although I had little interest in the company of others at the time, and even less in my own, I felt less alone absorbing this recitation of mythically charged words, which carried the promise of leaving a dark forest for a sunlit valley.
The words of Dante and Shakespeare, set to music by a former Mick Jagger girlfriend, were like a salve applied to a wound. I believe I crawled out of depression partly with the help of this and other pieces of music, which came without a doctor’s prescription or adverse side effects.
4. The Swing Era
This isn’t one record, it’s many.
Sometime in the late eighties I was housesitting with a girlfriend at her parent’s place. I noticed a boxed set from Time-Life records, The Swing Era, in her parents’ record collection. There were 14 boxes spanning music from the early thirties to the late fifties, with three discs in each. Figuring there might be a worthy track or two in there somewhere, I randomly picked a disc and gave it a spin on the parental turntable.
What a revelation. These were glittering gems from a musical era that preceded my birth, yet performed and polished in Columbia Records studios in the late sixties and early seventies.
Unlike the “easy listening”* my parents had at home - toothless versions of swing standards by James Last and other icons of the Nyquil crowd - many of the Time-Life compositions were true to the original arrangements and swung as hard as early sixties’ rock bands. I finagled permission to borrow the set, and with my trusty TDK cassette tapes I captured the choicest tracks like prehistoric insects in amber.
For his birthday, I also made some cassettes for my dad, who had played the coronet in a jazz band in his university years. He later told me it was the best gift he’d ever received.
5: The Complex, Blue Man Group
This may seem like a peculiar choice, but The Complex rocked my world back in 2004, owing to its tectonic live performance by the Blue Man Group at the Queen Elizabeth Theater in Vancouver in 2004.
The blue-painted performers played unspeaking, alien naifs, surprised by mundane objects in their environment, which they drummed on and performed tricks with. One of the highlights of the show was two of the blue men beating out the opening cords of The Who’s ”Baba O’Reilly,” with another replicating Pete Townsend’s thunderous guitar licks with a sledgehammer against the exposed wires of a grand piano.
In the Vancouver performance, I was gobsmacked within the first few minutes. I was hardly the only one. At one point I turned in my seat to see at the audience - everyone wore stunned looks and slack jaws.
“The Complex” was a floodlit study of the play between inner light and shadow, cleverly referencing both psychological complexes and urban complexes. The Blue Man Group production - by then a fixture in Las Vegas venues - meshed references to shamanism and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung while mocking the posturing of rock and roll artists, with physical comedy thrown in, for a rhythmic celebration of the human spirit. With contributions from vocal singers like Tracy Bonham, the album still stands on its own, both conceptually and musically.
I just love getting into discusssions about music and bands, your article really giving me a lot of great new musical ideas to think about. My musical horizons are perpetually expanding but I remember how this trend started for me whilst staying with some friends in a small picturesque market town in the South of England in the late 1980's. Two albums they played on their turntable for me really blew the top of my head off; Saint Julian by Julian Cope and Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. And expansive dimension hopping vibes have been a joy for me ever since.
Ha, "...like prehistoric insects in amber." You make me laugh.
Couldn't help but notice...no Leonard Cohen, eh!?