An old roommate back in 1990 took me with dragging feet to the local McIntosh dealer in W. Newton MA. "You like music, Rich, so you gotta hear this!" He asked the dealer to put on Telarc Rite of Spring and turn it up! He had been there before, and was already hooked. I had drooled through Tech-Hifi catalogs but had never heard serious audio before. He looks at me and says, "See Rich? I told you it is awesome!" with this sick grin on his face. I say yeah, it's great but oops I don't have $100k. I enjoyed the power of the sound, but it was a very stimulating overkill sound as 'hifi' was back then, and I was very self conscious about the price of this mountain of blue meters and shiny black jewelry in the demo room with the sliding glass doors. But the impression stuck to me. A couple months later he bought home his first "hifi" system from that little shop - an Adcom 2 ch amp, a Rotel CD player and I don't even remember what kinda of bookshelf speakers, and he gave me his "broken" old Technics 40W receiver which my son still uses now. He also got a nice TV, so we would pile in his room to listen to Kate Bush trading the sweet spot, play Mario Bros. games and watch Desert Storm live. He later married a severely arthritis crippled girl who was a sex phone actress and drove a handicap converted minivan like Fast and Furious movie. They moved to TX where she became a forensic detective and he bowled some 300s. Last I talked to him he had a pair of Quad 63, McIntosh tube amps and all vinyl. He is the most obsessive person I have ever met. He had an original Civic CRX with racing tires and would go race the speeders on Rt 128 in the middle of the night, just waiting for them. He took me to an outdoor go kart track once as a surprise because he thought I wouldn't go if I knew where we were going, and he was probably right. Now my boys both race karts. He was extremely alive. 100% balls to the wall, always on, always thinking about the next thing. Now he is a photographer with the best fanciest German film cameras, developing his own, etc. Totally obsessed. I imagine the Quads and the bowling are now long forgotten, as I know is the wife. I am blessed to have known this great man. When we lived together he was just a kid, 5 years younger than me, also just a kid. But he was a pure liv-er already then.
A year later a girlfriend was big into Kate Bush. She was a magic scarlet red headed angel that saved me from a life of misery. She ignited a process through which I undid all the shit I hated in my life and I finally jumped out and started off to where I am now. She once kidnapped me up to the White Mountains of NH, we drank cheap Beringer white zinfindel with Dizzy Gillespie's portrait sketched on the label, in promotion of the Beringer Jazz Festival from that summer. She was a jazz singer (aren't they all...) She sang Moonlight in Vermont while I played trumpet. She gave me a haircut in the tub with a bic razor, god it looked awful, but it worked for herand that worked for me. Always in the background Kate Bush. The girl is now a single mother of a mentally ill child, both wards of the state, helpless "victims." I have a picture of her shooting magic at me with her hand deep in the NH woods, young, powerful, sexy, confident, fickle, maddening. I thought she might be a Kate Bush alter ego, like a fairy witch.
Then a year later, my future wife, just back from college in Europe starts listening to... you guessed it. The same records as the scarlet tinkerbelle from Marquette. I remember listening to a lot of Kate Bush while driving from Thousand Oaks to Sedona for our honeymoon, and driving back to New England to live with my newly widowed Mother in Law and start our new life together. And many times in the years since.
Lately I have been asking Julie if she feels like listening to Kate Bush, but she hasn't been in the mood, pretending to be too grown up, buried too deep in work and the shit of modern life for such daliances of youth. So tonite I put this on, Bush's last record from 2005 that I bought Julie when it first came out. The songs are still weird, with a modern production flair, but they have the same feel and serve the same purpose as the oldies. Lured out of her work-hole she appeared with a grin and thanked me for playing this.
I dare not put on "The Kick Inside" or I would lose it. Powerful memories in those grooves. Sometimes it's not the music or the sound, it's the life and the people that happen along with the music.
It is good to have a "In case of emergency break glass" record that can open the floodgates and release a storm that has been building up. Something that brings back the feelings and lessons from the past that need to be applied in the present.
I was a bebopper. I was still playing jazz gigs and recording. I was not interested in music like this. But it was drawn to me. This music happened to me, forced in from the outside, or drawn in from the inside, causing emotional attachments to be made to the music without my awareness. I still don't particularly care for it as music per se, which makes it all the more powerful when I do hear it because it is always fresh. I never choose it for myself. But this week I think I will find the time to spin some, just to see what happens.