This is the first of a series of entries I’m going to add detailing my own musical history in an incredibly thorough, obsessive, and self-indulgent way. I apologize for nothing, not even the opening sentence below!
I barely listened to music for 14 years. This was, in part, because my parents weren’t into music much, so I didn’t have many opportunities to learn about or experience music. But there were exceptions, and those exceptions were often rather intense experiences as I look back on them. See, I was an obsessive little kid. When I was 5 or 6, I fell in love with Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” for some reason. I think they played it during a golf tournament or something and I really liked it so my dad bought the single for me. I think I listened to it over and over again on our record player for a week and a half until my sister hid it from me and probably ripped it apart out of sheer frustration.
[Come to think of it, I've always done stuff like that--fixate on one thing and make that one thing consume my interior life for brief but intense periods. I still do that, actually. I've been a huge fan of the iPod since they came out. I've had (I think) four iPods in all, including my current 80 gig that allows me to carry around about a quarter of my entire record collection. A few weeks ago, I bought an iPhone recently and spent a week learning everything I could about how it worked and what programs were available for it--and above all figuring out exactly what songs and albums and videos to add to it from my enormous collection. I wanted to streamline my iPod collection down to 2 or 3 gigs to create a sort of "Best of" list I could carry around in my pocket. I knew I needed whole albums from Boards of Canada and Pan Sonic and Sigur Ros and Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby and Richard Thompson and all my other favorites, but there were scores of individual songs I could throw into the mix to create a truly diverse and inspired collection...stuff like "Do the Mussolini Headkick" by Cabaret Voltaire, April March's "Chick Habit" (heard first at the end of Tarantino's Death Proof), a bunch of songs from Portishead's eponymously titled second album, "What Goes On" from VU's third album (their best, if you ask me), some cool stuff from Wire including their awesome stuff from the last decade, my favorite White Stripes songs (I really like "Take Take Take"), along with some Sly and the Family Stone, Waterboys, Pole, Kimya Dawson, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Amiina, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Gang of Four, Fairport Convention, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seed. Some of this really is my "best of" stuff; others are just things I enjoy listening to right now (and will be swapped out at some future date). So I organized, arranged, picked, and chose all these songs, along with 28 different awesome complete albums, and put them all on my iPhone and was happy until I realized I'd left a few things off and needed to figure out what to take off so I could add those other things. And so I did that for about a week, fixating on what was on the list and what could be on the list, going back and forth on my iTunes from playlist mode to catalogue mode just imagining the many possibilities. I'm still fine tuning the list as I write this, in fact.]
I don’t know exactly what attracted me to “Rhinestone Cowboy,” but I’m certain it had something to do with the moment between the verse and the chorus, the moment of silence between the words “I’m gonna be where the lights are shining on me” and “like a rhinestone cowboy,” the moment when the drums stop and the melody is fading away ever so slightly…until BANG the “like” and the big drum and the strings sweep in. That moment is infinitely small–it’s not even a real silence–but it was powerful for my little ears, in part because it perfectly captures the anticipation that something big is just about to happen. And though I liked the chorus and probably sang along to it a million times (both while the record was playing and when it wasn’t), it was always a little bit of a disappointment, as it didn’t live up to the promise of the pause, the promise that something truly transcendent would emerge from that half-silence, when in fact what did emerge was more music.
Even then, I was looking for something more than just music. Of course, before I could really discover what it was I was searching for, I had to start with the basics. I needed to learn about music. That took a while, as it turned out. My childhood musical focus was limited to what was in the house–stuff like The Muppet Movie album and the Annie cast soundtrack. I’d hear things on TV or on the radio or at a a friend’s house, but I never had much of a referent, a place to go and learn more (this was decades before the Internet, obviously).
So I really cherished those albums I did have, those songs I did understand. And, like with the Campbell song, the moments that stood out, that propelled me to listen to songs over and over again, were small, almost innocuous things like the almost out-of-tune banjo picking at the beginning of “Rainbow Connection” or the high-pitched parts of “Tomorrow” (when the voice is almost floating too high to hear) or, later, the rumbling synth cymbals at the start to Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire theme, which even today gives me chills (the movie too). I listened to each of these songs innumerable times, often waiting for those unusual moments–waiting to hear something that I didn’t quite understand.
So I liked music–I understood that at an early age. However, I didn’t really capitalize on this interest in any meaningful way until one moment in high school when I went to an assembly where some kids were performing a bunch of skits and other things. Towards the end, one guy came on stage and lip-synched and danced to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” I didn’t know much about Michael Jackson; I didn’t even know what lip-synching was. But the music slapped me in the face. That beat, that groove, that voice… where did they come from? Is there more of it?
That did it. That woke me up. I had to hear more.
Originally posted 2/16/08
