Sunday, June 8, 2014

Are We Living In a Land Where Sex and Horror Are the New Gods?



1984 was another transitional year for him, a year that in many ways saw as many changes as had 1981, the year he left Boston for Atlanta.  In 1984, he left his job with the state and started a new career with an environmental engineering company, a firm for which he went on to work for the next 20 years.  He learned how to make a living by consulting, he traveled the country, and he vacationed in the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, The Art of Noise's debut album came out that year and heralded "the dawn of a new pop sensibility where sequencers, samplers and drum machines held sway" (Charles Waring).  He was fascinated not only by the sampling and the sound of the Fairlight Synthesizer, but also the plasticity of the songs, which were endlessly remixed and reissued.  He became accustomed to the 12" single format upon which those remixes were released, and collected not only Art of Noise singles, but the numerous mixes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs produced by the Art of Noises' Trevor Horn as well.  His conception of pop songs expanded from a fixed sequence of notes and words and sounds to a suggestion of any one of an infinite number of mutable possibilities that could be rearranged, mixed up, and blended with other sounds, possibly even DIY-style, implying new roles and a new relationship to music for non-musician listeners like himself. He likes it that the video above embraces that same DIY attitude and involvement.


FWIW, he first heard both The Art of Noise and Frankie Goes To Hollywood on Georgia State's WRAS, Album 88.

It wasn't all vacations and record stores for him that year, however.  To his surprise, he had fallen in love with that co-worker who had moved down from Boston and had become his girlfriend, but 1984 was a transitional year for her, too, as she had accepted a job offer in Denver.  So 1984 also witnessed the start of the long, painful dissolution of the attempted long-distance relationship that followed. Throughout the year, an undercurrent of melancholy and loss darkened the mid-80s party atmosphere, and lingered around him for the rest of the decade.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Girlfriend Is Better


The pictures from the past two years convey a much more yuppified impression of his early 80s persona than was actually the case (for the record, the cowboy hat was being worn ironically, although he still has it to this day).  In truth, he was barely getting by, managing a redneck well-drilling crew in South Georgia and struggling to survive on the meager state-employee salary. By 1983, though, he was handling rattlesnakes and Speaking In Tongues.

Generally speaking, he was a big fan of the band Talking Heads back then.  Thirty-one years later, he was quite pleasantly surprised to hear that young, local bands would be performing a song-by-song cover of the album Speaking In Tongues in its entirety.  Reviewing that show, he wrote:
From my perspective, Talking Heads' artistic pinnacle was their previous album, Remain In Light, but Speaking In Tongues still holds a special place in my heart.  I was 29 years old when the album came out in 1983, and for some reason, it's always felt to me like "my" Talking Heads album - the one written and recorded by the band with me in mind. This is purely projection, I know, but it was released when I was at that precipice in life when I was finally old enough to critically discern and select among the bands to which I listened but still young enough not to feel self-conscious about my enthusiasms, and to believe that the band was performing, if not for me directly, at least with someone like me in mind.  In any event, I loved the album and played it incessantly for several months of 1983.
The picture above was taken by one of those friends who had also moved down south after he had arrived. She became a co-worker, and even though the girlfriend he left behind in Boston never moved down, the co-worker who did eventually became his new girlfriend.   

Friday, June 6, 2014

Roles Give You Cramps


In 1982, one of his favorite records was Sense and Sensuality, the second album by the British post-punk band The Au Pairs. He knew that he would have been the first person excluded from singer Leslie Wood's radical feminist politics, but he still liked her music, her smoky voice, and her attitude, although he generally preferred their first album, 1981's Playing With A Different Sex. But the more experimental follow-up album is what he remembers hearing when he remembers 1982.  It was the soundtrack for the year.

Life was going pretty well for him in 1982.  He wasn't making very much money, but that was okay.  He had once imagined that the girlfriend he had left behind in Boston was eventually going to come down and join him in Atlanta and he gradually came to realize that wasn't going to happen, ever, and he occasionally felt a sense of loss over that, but that was okay, too.  He was making new friends, and a few friends that he had known back up north had also moved down to Georgia as well, so that was cool.

He has no idea where this picture was taken or by whom, or why he was dressed that way, except, of course, it was the 80s.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Shaky Knees


And we take a break from the way-back nostalgia ("favorite songs from 1979 through 1981") to engage in a little bit of more-recent nostalgia with this recap of last May's Shaky Knees festival.  

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

My Life In The Bush of Ghosts


The lean, bearded, Fiat Spider-driving, cowboy-hat-wearing, 27-year-old incarnation of myself had left the girlfriend and their little apartment in Boston behind to set out for a new life in Atlanta, Georgia.  It was 1981. He was young.

Wordy Rappinghood may have been the fun party song of the year, but this is the music he primarily remembers listening to in 1981, on cassette, generally while driving around in that little, unreliable car.



Robert Fripp & The League of Gentlemen - The incredible Sara Lee on bass, while Fripp lays down all of those polyrhythms that the punk rockers of the time were hearing in their heads but didn't have the chops to play.



After No Pussyfooting (1973) and Music For Airports (1978), in 1981's My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, Eno redefined for him for at least the third time what music was capable of doing, and exponentially broadened his horizons.  He owes Eno so much for how he thinks about and experiences music to this day.    

For those of you keeping score at home, I expect this nostalgia kick to end pretty soon and regular posting to resume shortly.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Chemistry


It appears that I've somehow backed myself into posting a retrospective of favorite songs from long-ago years.  Hearing The Slits (1979) reminds me of undergrad days in Boston, and Wordy Rappinghood (1981) reminds me of being a young man out and about in Atlanta.  Fourth World, Volume 1 conjures up memories of the transitional period - post-grad Boston, before I left for a new life in Georgia.  This is what I remember listening to in 1980 and how I recall that in-between year.