Music.
Memory.
For me the two are inexorably linked. There is no easier way for me to go into the press of my biography and pulling out an old edition of my self, put it on, remember what it was comparable to bear that self every day, and look where and how that ego does and doesn't fit any more than to put something on from the past.
In detail with pieces that become division of my emotional history like I talked about in Mood Music.
One album (and I use album specifically because it's so even to that now-archaic form) that falls into this class is the final full album by the Peter Gabriel-fronted Genesis:The Lamb Lies Low on Broadway. For me, this is an album that I associate very close with winters during both my freshman and sophomore years of college at Oberlin. I pass to be listening to this now and as I hear to it, all the story and significant associated with this album get second to me.
When I speak around this blog as a travelogue about my experience of music, the history of how I came to be listening to the Lamb Lies Low on Broadway so often during those days is an example of what I mean. The way to those days tromping through the snows of Oberlin, listening to Peter Gabriel regale us with the grotesque story of Rael and his experiences in a nether-world copy of mid 1970's New York City on my cassette Walkman is a round-about one that passes through so lots of my personal musical history.
To get to those days, you get to get even farther back andunderstand first, that up through seventh grade, under the shape of my fairly strict Catholic upbringing, I was positive that any music other than classical music was, truly, music of the Devil. Ironically, my father was a huge Beatles fan: this was a type of me being more materialistic than my mother like Alex on Family Ties(though I would secretly, guiltily listen to about of her Beatles albums when home alone, but that's another post). Even once I had drifted some from the Church, that prejudice was sublimated and transformed by way of some classical musicsnobberyto conclude that spell it may not be the Devil's music, non-classical music, most especially Rock and Pop forms, had no redeeming artistic merit.
My position on music would be changed by the chance meeting one day on a bus from summer school classes between 7th and 8th grade. I was winning a family on computers (itself a portend of my after life) and happened to see a kid named Chad Clark. Chad has since gone on to a successful living in music starting several bands over the days including currently Beauty Pilland running his own studio. This meeting though was before Chad started to follow his involvement in music seriously. Even so, he was often more intimate with non-classical music than I was and base my outright rejection of it all as closed minded and quite silly.
Chad was a really significant person for me: after that encounter he became my better supporter and was the foremost non-Catholic friend I always had. He would also go on to be best man at my wedding.He challenged the basics of pretty much everything that I believed at that time. Not least of which was my rejection of non-classical music.
Over the flow of the following few years, as Chad's interest in music increased and my mind opened up, I would be open to more and more possibilities around non-classical music. I could come to take that at least some of it could be fun to hear to. But my position on the aesthetic merit of it compared to classic music was however intact.
And then, sometime around my freshman orsophomoreyears in high school (it was complete 20 years ago so dates get fuzzy) Chad introduced me to Peter Gabriel's solo run and made the type that here was somebody that put real sentiment and gravitation into his lyrics and music. The low album I always heard of his was Security. Peter Gabriel's lyrics are always deeply thought out and the encounter with Peter Gabriel would cause thick and sound impression on me in many, many ways (again, for future posts). Here, the key matter is that Peter Gabriel convinced me that there could be intellectual and artistic merit to non-classical music, though I generally considered him to be the sole one to deserve that gravity and respect.
During the future pair of years, I would gather all of Peter Gabriel's albums (and yet use his haircut as a pattern for my own!). I would finally arrive to see that he had been the singer for Genesis before Phil Collins. But it was a literal brain-cramp for me to see how someone this wise and who thought so deep about things could have been the vocalist for the band that was at that time fronted by someone inflicting Sussudioon the public at that time.
At some point, though, Chad started to assure me how "Old Genesis" was very dissimilar from what we were hearing now. He told me how when Peter Gabriel was partially of the band, they would do concept albumswith underlying themes and that Peter Gabriel would narrate, tell stories, play roles and be in costumes. Sometime during these talks, he introduced me to the phrase "progressive rock" to denote Old Generation and early rock groups who were stressful to have meaningful, mature music that had more in green with the classic tradition than with Sussudio.
Taking a chance, I went forward at one direct and bought a cassette of Nursery Cryme. As the tape started performing "The Musical Box"
and I heard the detailed guitar work, the flute, the lyrics with their ring of fable and myth, and a good story being told, I realised that there was something new here, something far more thoughtful than Sussudio.
I would keep my explorations, learning about King Crimson and aggregation as lots of their material and Old Genesis as I could lay my men on, building a decent (though hardly complete) collection by the sentence of my freshman class at Oberlin. I still had bought a cheap keyboard off of Chad to withdraw with me to school, with vague thoughts about composing music on the lines of Peter Gabriel, Old Generation and King Crimson.
As my 1st semester at Oberlin came to a close, I eventually got myself a transcript of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadwayat Sarge's Records, the one book shop in town. I bought it on vinyl, one of the utmost actual vinyl albums I would always buy. I promptly recorded it ended to cassette and added it to my walkman walking music around campus.
While an extremely odd album, I was in bed with it nonetheless. Songs like Carpet Crawlers
and Anyway
had a certain lyrical quality and delicate quality that suited them good to the cold, snowy winters at Oberlin. Many was the sentence I would put the 120 minute tape in my walkman and walk, thinking about living and bang now that I was 19 and done my 1st semester of college and living on my own.
The upcoming twelve months would work out to be hugely transformative for me. I would suffer a supporter I cared about deeply to suicide, see my last high school romance end (even though we carried it on while I was in college, it was yet a high school romance), and get my first adult romance. I throw my vague thoughts about pursuing music (going to a train with a professional quality conservatory will fire any such thoughts out of you quickly) anddecided to earn a change in my way and watch my bliss (as Joseph Campbell would say) by becoming a comparative religion major (which itself was somewhat influenced by Peter Gabriel).
Another modification was that this was really the final new stuff from Old Genesis I bought: everything else I've gotten ever since has either been live albums, my replacing albums in new formats, or acquiring the post-Peter Gabriel albums that nevertheless had Steve Hackett on them (A Joke of the Tailand Wind & Wutheringwhich miss the lyrical depth but nevertheless are musically interesting and not yet the pop nightmare that would target the Phil Collins era of Genesis). My point of progressive rock exploration would downshift in its importance for me after this.
Certainly, there were many former changes during those twelve months too: you get up a lot fast those first pair of days of college.
By the time winter rolled around again the following year, my sophomore year, my innate feel of nostalgia returned and I launch myself playing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway once more to mark the changes of the year. I had a real literal sensation when listening to it of what had changed, of how late adolescence had shut and early adulthood had started somewhere in the intervening twelve months. The medicine was however wonderful, lovely, still had that winter quality I loved. But now, it wasn't live and vibrant like it had been: now it was instead a reminder, a museum piece.
Today, twenty two days later, more time has passed than I had been awake when I was listening to this and mark those changes. As I'm in the thick of changes in my life, as I receive a very real sense that adulthood is becoming true middle age, I feel myself listening, feeling the memories of those early freshman days, feeling the memories of those sophomore days, recalling the sense of nostalgia I felt that sophomore class for my freshman class and savvy now that I had no thought what the campaign of store and nostalgia can actually be like.
I even enjoy this album, but it will forever be a mark of the past, of two different selves that I can go game to when I want. But there are no more memories to be made with this album, it's already carrying all the storage it perhaps can.
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