In Search of Lost Sound (part two)

This is part two of my whoever-knows how many part exploration of my musical history.  Self-indulgent to a fault, I know, but at least I'm honest about it!

The first album [well, actually, it was a cassette. I didn't have a real record player, just a little Walkman.  My parents weren't big fans of me buying music (they thought it was a waste of money), so it was easier to sneak a cassette into the house than an album]  I ever bought was Men at Work's Cargo.  No, that's not the album with "Down Under."  That's Business as Usual.  Cargo was their follow-up with songs like "Overkill" and "Dr. Heckyll and Mr. Jive" and "It's a Mistake" that were actually a pretty big deal in the early 80s but have disappeared into the void of time since then (like the band itself).  I don't remember what I liked about the group specifically.  I guess their music was catchy and their videos were silly (yes, I had MTV).  I guess those qualities were strong enough for me to feel the tug of going to the record store and buying the album--something I really hated doing because the store was one of those where everything was behind a counter and I had to call someone over to take it out for me.  Isn't that annoying?  I don't know when stores stopped doing that and let people buy music just be pulling it off a shelf--but back when I was first buying music, I had no choice.

My second album?  Why Business as Usual, of course.  I thought it was a letdown, though.  Beyond "Down Under," it was pretty dry.  Listening to these today, I get the reason they were popular in the early 80s.  Lots of tasty hooks, good beats, fun melodies, and plenty of horns--they took all the popular bits of music from that time and mixed them together in an Australian bag of iconic fun.  It didn't last, but it was fun for a while, which is exactly what pop music is all about.

At that time, I still knew nothing about music other than the fact that I liked it and wanted to hear more of it.  Of course, my taste left something to be desired.  That was, in part, because I was still a little afraid of music.  Long hair, screaming, freaky clothes--those were alien to my rather conservative upbringing.  Guys like Men at Work were harmless and, therefore, perfectly acceptable--not just to my parents (who knew nothing about music and would have preferred it that I shared their ignorance) but to me as well, who, at 14, was a big fan of Reagan and was as straight-laced as you could get.

Ah, but then I bought The Police's Synchronicity.  I remember looking through the cassette's liner notes, noticing all the odd fonts, and thinking, "This is too wild for me.  Those letters look like graffiti!"  At that point, I resolved not to buy any more albums.  Ha! Well, The Police were (along with Michael Jackson) the biggest thing in music at the time.  [Oddly enough, I didn't buy Thriller until about a year later--after I'd been thoroughly indoctrinated in music.  I think I waited because so many of my "rocker" friends hated Jackson's music.]  I remember listening to their music over and over again over several weeks and months.  The music itself wasn't spectacular, but the lyrics--they seemed deep and significant.   Now, I was not well-read, but I tried to be.  I tried reading lots of serious novels and even got through a few of them (like 1984 and Dune).  More than anything else, I wanted to seem deep and intelligent and sophisticated, and The Police seemed all those things.  I even bought Jung's book on synchronicity just so I could learn more about the album's title and its implications.  Synchronicity appealed to me in a big way because it was just the kind of thing that made me feel special, important, knowledgeable.  As naive and silly as that might sound today, it did teach me something about music: that it's not just fun, entertaining tunes.  There was depth there, as well.  I wanted to learn more.

The road to musical knowledge, however, ran through MTV and local Top 40 radio (KIIS FM in LA), so my first few months of serious music listening, reading, and shopping consisted largely of obsessing over the standard hits of the day: Duran Duran, The Thompson Twins, The Fixx, Cindy Lauper, Phil Collins, Howard Jones, and on and on.  This music was a lot of fun to listen to--they had the hooks and those great, shimmering moments of brilliance in them (the big drums kicking in the middle of "In the Air Tonight," the "flex-flex-flex-flex" at the start of "The Reflex," and even the cool synth bridge in Van Halen's "Jump") kept me listening even when the other parts of the songs sucked.  Still, in the back of my head I knew that this stuff wasn't really what I was looking for. 

Closer to the mark was Run-DMC.  I was the manager for my high school's basketball team, and yes there were a bunch of black guys on the team that I became friends with.  They turned me onto rap long before rap was anywhere near popular in mainstream culture.  The first time I heard "Rock Box," I was blown away--it was something completely different, something truly revolutionary.  I felt it even then as a music noob.  It was raw, harsh, angry, exciting, and powerful--and it still holds up today.  Then again, the more rap I heard (I did buy Run-DMC's album), the less I enjoyed the actual rapping part and the more I appreciated the beats and the samples and the fact that they took the best bits from other songs and repeated them over and over again.  That was something I'd always wanted to do with music--celebrate that great, shiny moment of brilliance in an otherwise mediocre song and play that bit forever--and they did just that.  It was awesome.  Of course, it took Public Enemy to turn it into high art worthy of study, but Run-DMC paved the way.

Run-DMC certainly showed me how music can challenge me sonically, but U2 and Bruce Springsteen showed me what music was capable of. Springsteen's Born in the USA and U2's The Unforgettable Fire were both released around the time I started getting into music.  It took me a while to get into both artists, but when I did they truly transformed not only my taste in music but my entire outlook on the world.

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