Music

Ad Stellas Per Musica

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars is an overview of music of the 1970s that referenced, overlapped, or otherwise advanced science fiction. As such, it gives us a unique musical history that sidesteps much of what dominated the Seventies, but which was central to what made that decade unique in contemporary, pop, youth, and/or rock music, however one registers the soundscape of the period.

His take-off point is Davie Bowie’s appearance as a kind of avatar of unapologetic science fiction concepts through music, especially his Ziggy Stardust persona. Given the chronology, I can’t argue with that, even though at the time I was only marginally aware of Bowie, and when I did notice him I was not especially impressed. But Heller touches on many of the bands and performers who did exemplify that strain of music for me.

Reading Strange Stars, I’m reminded of how much it is possible to miss, even while—or perhaps because of—living through it all. For instance, George Clinton and the whole Funk movement passed me right by. I was aware of its importance only in retrospect. Likewise with a great deal of Glam. It seemed to me at the time to miss the point, but I can’t say why exactly since I paid it little attention, intentionally or otherwise.

But Heller is right that the Seventies encapsulated the emergence of science fiction in popular culture in ways it never had before, and in popular music it came to the fore in unique and unexpected forms. There were precursors, of course—the instrumental bands like the Ventures and the Tornados, the novelty acts, and then the whole psychedelic movement that gave us bands like Pink Floyd, which, despite Heller’s dismissal of them in later albums due to a lack of overtly SFnal lyrics, remained aesthetically connected to SF compositionally—that led to a flowering and full embrace by 1969-70.

Heller searches for and finds ample connection to science fiction through lyric content, Easter eggs and unapologetic references to classic SF and thematic explorations, and certainly all that was present, especially in a lot of Bowie from that early period of his career. But for me, it was the composition and performance itself, regardless of lyric content, that spoke to my geeky SF fan backbrain. All those novelty songs from the Sixties, which Heller catalogues, never said “science fiction” to me because musically they were still products of 1950s rock’n’roll and rather cheesy and absurd, albeit amusing and catchy.

He catches this when he tags Bowie and, especially, King Crimson as the first full on manifestations of a SFnal aesthetic. What I recall listening for was, in a way, a departure point, perhaps a gateway into a future like those I found in novels by Heinlein or Clarke or Norton or Asimov. As the decade continued, I felt that many of these bands were acting as guardians at the gate of a tomorrow we might actually live in. If we were mindful. If we were careful.

So for me, it was Yes that signaled the future. Yes and Genesis (up to A Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Especially ELP with Emerson’s embrace of synthesizers and compositional experiments like nothing else in Rock till then. I heard this music in the same way I read science fiction, as manifestations of different worlds.

Emotionally, I imagine that the first time I heard Tarkus I felt—reacted—the same way audiences back in 1913 heard The Rites of Spring. Something so unexpected, so divergent, so….tomorrow….that it was like a wrench.

For whatever reason, Bowie didn’t do that for me, for all that I liked Space Oddity. But Heller’s thesis is valid just the same. After Star Trek it became a popular aesthetic movement that more and more took on the surface, at least, of science fiction. The music perhaps has been an underappreciated aspect of that. I remember as an earnest adolescent searching for the next bit of music that fed that need for the next phase of civilization. (I found a great deal of it in what later became known as Electronica, especially with Tangerine Dream, whose albums were all racked in Rock along with James Taylor, Chicago, The Doors, and Joni Mitchell.) When I settled down to listen to an album or go to a concert, I was looking to be transported. Often it was just rock and I loved all that offered, but there were those acts and albums that, for me, were gateways in the same way many of the books I read were.

I very much enjoyed Heller’s book. It took me back. I learned things I never knew (like that the backing band for an obscure album by Ramases, Space Hymns, which is a curiosity more for its cover art than for its music, later became 10cc), and so many creations I never knew about. One is limited by time and, often, money. I didn’t have the budget to acquire most of the albums I would have loved had I known about them. It was a rich period of musical ferment and worth a new look. You could do worse than use Heller’s book as a guide.

Formative Times and Moving Forward

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It is true, the music that first inspired you tends to be the touchstone for the rest of your aesthetic life. Those songs encountered when the hormones begin their rampage through your limbic system and set all your neurons dancing form the core of what you seek and appreciate going forward. For perhaps five years, what you listen to will anchor you. Five years between, say, 13 and 18. Or 15 and 20? Give or take, that half a decade will be the source you return to till senescence sets in.

If one is very lucky, that music will be excellent. I suspect the difference between someone who keeps listening to those pieces over and over for the next 50 years and someone who goes on to find new music, expanding from that initial thrill, is entirely dependent on the quality of that initial exposure.

Yes, I’m going to indulge in a bit of snobbery now. Sorry. I believe there really is a difference between forms, performers, and examples. I’ve known people who, over the course of thirty or more years, always—ALWAYS—opt for that old Bob Seeger album over and above anything else and seem impervious to everything else. For them, the nostalgia—and the ritual—is everything.

Recently I filled my CD changer with a selection of older albums. Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s, the first Jefferson Starship album, Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin’s Love Devotion and Surrender, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first album, and Live Cream Volume II. All these albums I first encountered during that particular phase when I was discovering MUSIC. 

With the exception of one track, nothing on any of them made the Top 40 of the day.

All of them are complex, unpredictable, indeed unusual by the popular standards of the day. The Santana-McLaughlin was one of those records I played over and over again. The intricacies of construction, the use of key changes and tempo modulations, the inherent expectation that the listener was going to do nothing else but listen…

This was the sort of music that set my taste for life. But it was still a starting point. From there I found my way in jazz, into classical, into electronic, into the variations of rock, into some forms that defy categorization. What seemed to me an obvious trajectory was to keep looking for newer works (meaning new to me) that teased those same responses to the tonal pageant on offer. 

Which of course initially meant following those musicians where they led, but along the way trying related artists, then stepping out of that stream altogether into new waters. Admittedly, without ELP and Yes I might not have discovered either Stravinsky or Sibelius. But once discovered, the library doors were opened, and the treasure of centuries lay before me.

But I confess, there is something about those works heard then that hold a deep fascination for me still. Those anchors still hold. It may be bias (and if it is, fine, I welcome it) but when I listen to those albums from back then, parts of my aesthetic are triggered in ways no other music manages. Even those works I no longer listen to very much if at all, when I hear them, a part of my spirit wakes up. I have no doubt this is as much a kind of imprinting as any other emotional attachment may claim. The question I have is, why do so many people remain locked in those periods, and others…don’t?

I suppose one could ask the same question of books and films. I suspect it has to do with the kinds of questions posed by those initial encounters. They leave one attuned to the next thing—or not.

As in other areas, I was always out of step with my peers. I tried to get enthused about the songs they seemed so turned on by, but for the most part the Top 40 model left me unsatisfied. On their part, they lacked the patience for what I preferred. And then there’s the whole cultural mode of music as background, as if its only function was as wallpaper, a room in which to carry on conversations or drink (or smoke), and for too many people the notion that one should shut up and listen was just odd. (You do that with classical stuff, don’t you? Yes, that’s why I don’t listen to it.)

We went to a club once because of the band playing that night, one of our favorites, and it was annoying that here were these superb musicians, doing amazing things, and yet the hubbub of ongoing chatter was constant and dismaying. They were missing something marvelous, and yet it seemed more important to talk about what-all even in the presence of brilliance.

I’ve always wanted to share my enthusiasms. It takes a while to sink in that in some instances, no one cares. Not that way, at least, and by pushing the issue you just seem weird.

But nostalgia, whatever it is, has its place. It is useful and pleasurable and I wanted to talk about it a bit. For me, it’s a special place, but was always just a starting point. All that I have heard since those first few years of being immersed in so much beauty has given me the standards…perhaps that’s too definite a word…the basis, then, to continue to find more beauty. 

Thank you for indulging me. 

Fifty Years of Blue

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Anniversaries of album releases usually do not prompt me to comment, other than a personal “My ghod, has it been that long already?” Part of it has to do with my ongoing assessments of important albums—the fact of the work means far more than when it first appeared. But lately I’ve been worrying at a musical issue which has brought distinct periods into focus and after listening to some of the commentary on the 50th Anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s Blue some thoughts have finally come into focus.

So. Blue is fifty. To my embarrassment (somewhat) I was largely unaware of this album the year it came out. I was not then particularly invested in Joni Mitchell. Folk music, broadly speaking, was not of much interest to me. There was overlap, certainly: Crosby, Still, Nash & Young, Tom Rush, and Eric Anderson all impinged by way of other forms, and created a gestalt in which a wide array of artists were “known” even if not necessarily actively listened to.

Joni Mitchell always felt like an outlier.

Given that my predilections, as time has shown, were jazz and classical, most of the contemporary music I embraced turned out to be progressive rock and, initially, fusion. The majority of my listening fell into those genres, but I have always been open to other things, and so in my library, over the years, can be found a fairly eclectic range which today includes a considerable (expected) classical and classic jazz selection, but also electronica, pop, and, yes, some folk. The combination of folk, pop, and jazz brought me, for better or worse, finally and fully to Joni Mitchell through her Court & Spark album, which was the point where she began to fully experiment with jazz.

That album was the second one after Blue. For The Roses, the between album, brought in the musicians that formed her ensemble for Court & Spark, though the jazz flirtation was not quite as obvious.

It was, however, a bend in the river. There were other albums around that time that signaled a change in the music, as in the culture, and it is that bend of which I wish to speak. because once around it, the music was different, even as it followed the same forms and even trajectory.

I used to accept the general wisdom that I will always privilege the music that first impacted me and meant something to me and that the perceived “lessening” of newer music was entirely an artifact of nostalgic comparison. That music written and recorded in 1979 would never resonate with me the way something a decade earlier does.

But I’ve come to realize that this is entirely confined to what we call Popular Music, which as the Seventies progressed absorbed what a decade earlier was revolutionary music. We knew then that what Frank Zappa or Country Joe and the Fish or the first three albums of both Santana and Chicago were doing was sharply different from Popular Music, which was represented by people like Fabian or Bobby Sherman or, more problematically, the Monkees (whose trajectory was the opposite of the other two groups mentioned, in that as the four principle members took more and more control over their music their product became more and more experimental). What divided these examples then was the same thing that came to enervate the music as a whole as we grew closer to the Eighties. Basically, the Form was preserved and repurposed, like fashion, to meet the less profound tastes of a wider audience. Not even the content was necessarily changed, only the sincerity of the art, and that is something harder to pin down and define.

It could be said that the culture changed along with it. The music had always, in certain quarters, followed (and in some cases led) what was happening more broadly. In the case of the rock scene, the Vietnam War ended. The music that had been anthemic to both the counter-culture and the antiwar movement transformed in the anthems of the party that followed perceived victory. In essence, it didn’t mean the same thing anymore. And, consequently, it floundered.

So newer forms took center-stage and left much in a kind of no-man’s land of more or less empty musical rehash.

I finally realized that, while certainly nostalgia plays a part in this, given sufficient exposure it can be detected in other genres of which one has no such sentimental attachment. With exceptions—and there are always exceptions—every revolutionary period can be seen to precede a period where form is all and substance less important.

As I noted earlier, there were certain albums that marked the shift, the “change of season”, if you will. I always considered the Moody Blues’ Seventh Sojourn such an album. There was a elegiac quality to it, a kind of farewell to what had gone before. An ending. The Moody Blues broke up afterward and the members embarked on a number of solo projects. When they reformed, good as Octave was in many ways, it was different from everything they had done before. Something was missing—or added. Easy to dismiss it by saying they had “gone commercial” but that doesn’t explain it all. What they had to make music about was changed and perhaps they didn’t know how to codify it.

Court & Spark was that kind of an album. Altogether lighter, less profound, less…vulnerable.

The difference could not be more obvious when compared to the earlier Blue, which was, for want of a better word, Naked.

Let me get this out of the way now: I think Blue is brilliant. Powerful. As good as Mitchell had been up to that point, everything about her art came together in Blue. Subject matter, lyric phrasing, melody, everything. You cannot listen to it without recognizing something important happened here. Even if you don’t like it particularly. In that, the spareness of the recording allowed it to be more than at a glance it seemed capable of being.

She made it through one more album and experienced a kind of breakdown. She had spent of herself too freely, perhaps, invested in the music (and in life—perhaps the one requires the other) a bit too deeply. After a hiatus, coming out of it, she reinvented herself and we have the Next Phase Joni Mitchell.

Blue was the river, just before the bend.

Once I finally really “heard” Joni Mitchell, I went back to immerse in the rest, and I found Mitchell to be one of those artists for whom Form is simply one tool in the box. The important thing is the substance expressed. Unlike those who somehow misunderstood what was happening—to the culture, the business, themselves—she had no problem adapting not only her presentation but the delivery of her message to the changing zeitgeist. She understood that music—any art—is a lived thing, and a reduction to any single aspect of it can strip it of any useful power.

Joni Mitchell’s single guiding principle, if you will, was to use music to say “This is how I feel.” She has always been careful to make sure the music matched the emotion and to be honest about everything it contained.

Which led to a number of reinventions, as one might call them.

You can tell when an artist gets it “right.” Fifty years on, we’re still talking about it—because we’re still listening to it.