0.7.1 - What's the story, morning glory?
If I make an effort, I've got a pretty good memory (a statement which would make Catherine roll her eyes were she to read it). It is true, I promise - I'm admittedly scatterbrained and inattentive and I say yes with my mouth to things while my brain is elsewhere and twenty seconds later I have to ask what I've agreed to - but if I take the time to learn something, usually it lodges in my memory banks pretty easily and stays there for a long time. Personally, I think that talent came specifically from my time doing AmDram. I had never tried to learn lines, whole blocks of text that I had to deliver verbatim and on cue, before, and it would take me weeks to get 'off book', and even then, I'd end up learning 80% of the lines correctly and what I thought the other 20% were, even when they differed massively from what was on the page. To this day, one of my recurring anxiety dreams involves me arriving at that community center for opening night of a performance and only knowing the first 15 minutes of the play, and having to make excuses to head into the wings to look at what my next set of lines is.
This was the late 90s, the very concept of me turning to the internet for help would never have crossed my mind - the internet existed to allow me to play Phantasy Star Online on my Dreamcast, not to provide useful acting tips. I certainly wasn't going to ask anyone in the group for advice, I was 22 and incredibly stupid. What I do remember, in not very clear detail, is watching a TV show about (I think) magicians and I guess what you would call mentalists, and on that show, someone said they would take lists they were trying to memorise, (Pi to 2000 places etc etc) and recite it and record it with music in the background; the impromptu 'song' became the framework which they used to recite things from memory.
I was desperate; I would have drank shots of vinegar every day for a year if someone had told me it meant I'd remember my lines correctly. I didn't need acid stomach cramps though - I had a two-deck cassette recorder, a crappy microphone that plugged into it, and several classical music cassettes which had no lyrics on them. So I would spend my time recording myself, reciting my lines for classic bedroom farces and comedy murder mysteries, over the background of Holst's Planet Suite and Chopin's Symphony No 9, and then I would walk to work and back with my walkman on, listening to the sound of my own voice projected over some of the most recognisable classical music of all time.
It worked. I got pretty good at learning my lines, and everyone else's lines, and the cues, and stage directions. The more I did it, the faster I got - I'd annoy everyone by being off book first, or learning long and complex fast paced dialogue pretty quickly. In the end, I'd done it for three and a half years before I stopped - but the damage was done. I'd turned my brain into a sponge for words spoken to music, and since then, lyrics catapult themselves bodily into my psyche with any amount of repeated exposure. I know it's nothing special really, and that its now a well known mnemonic device, but at the time I thought I was magic.
In the back of my mind, however, I knew that the seed of this unremarkable superpower had been planted many years before, by this quartet of concept albums which I hold mostly responsible for my fixation on lyrics and narrative in music, my enjoyment of top-down concept albums, and no small amount of the general stew of adolescent anxiety which has remained steadfastly with me in the same way the songs and lyrics have.
I'm a sucker for an album with a narrative. I love all music (as my genre-hopping posts I hope has illustrated), obviously, but like a supergroup or a cover version, there's something about the concept part of a concept album that immediately grabs my attention. If you tell me that - let's pick a band that I wouldn't run to listen to all of their stuff - if you tell me there is a new Travis album out, I'm probably going to go "oh, they're still putting records out?" and that will be the end of my engagement with it. If you tell me there's a new Travis album and its a 15 track story of a young boy getting caught up in a bank heist which goes catastrophically wrong, I'm probably going to make the time to listen to it, because I need to know how those things work together. They are few and far between, especially ones which are explicitly a narrative, outside of musical theatre cast albums (which are fine, and are probably coming some week in the future, but they're not what I mean). I think my excitement at the idea of a concept album might cause a large part of the listening audience to roll their eyes and look for something else to listen to. They're definitely out of fashion, and you have to have a certain level of inspiration and narcissistic delusion to pull them off.
This image of former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters appears here by complete coincidence
I was born in 1976, and my parents version of keeping their toddler amused with an iPad was to sit me down near their hifi system, put headphones with a long lead on me, and leave me listening to a record they had selected. I know The Wall was one of them for several reasons; I've heard the story from my parents on several occasions of them coming to find me crying listening to The Wall and when they asked me what was wrong, I said 'Pink isn't well' which was apparently devastating news to me. This is a lyric from In The Flesh, which is a song and mock authoritarian rally which features both the homophobic F slur and a racist C slur, ideal material for any toddler. It was a different time, the 1970s. Secondly, I remember being devastated that my father was going to see Pink Floyd perform The Wall live at Earl's Court in London and he was not taking me, his not yet four year old son with him. He brought back a tour programme from the show, which, along with the gatefold sleeve art booklet which came with the original vinyl double album, provided let's call it a strong visual theme to go along the listening experience.
I think Gerald Scarfe should have just illustrated children's story books
From one formative childhood experience to another, let's talk about Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War Of The Worlds (we will be abbreviating that from hereon out, for the record). I think there is an established canon of media that people of a certain age saw too young and it freaked them out in a meaningful way. Nightmare On Elm Street, Predator, Aliens, Robocop, Candyman, Hellraiser, I have heard stories from various people about them seeing these films as a pre-teen when they very much should not have done, and having that first traumatic experience where they understand that Very Bad Stuff can happen. Having introduced that concept to your young brain, it becomes hard to think about much else.
This album is that for me. I can't think exactly how old I must have been when I heard it, but just like The Wall, this was another gatefold sleeve double album, with enclosed art book which provided brilliant, surreal, terrifying images to accompany the haunting depiction of a bystander watching the sudden collapse of civilisation while powerless to do anything other than document it. I wonder what that must feel like*. I listened to this album, wondered at the glorious art, drawn in by the Richard Burton narration and the wailing guitars and quiet, lonely piano. But it scared me, this album full of death and loss, the very definition of the prototype horror story in places; and like many things that scared me, it brought me back again and again. One night, during the school summer holidays when we stayed with my Aunt while my parents had a break from being parents for a couple of weeks, I remember waking from a nightmare, of green eyed aliens and fighting machines striding across the world; I remember my Aunt coming into the bedroom, asking me why I was upset, and when I explained, she comforted me by telling not to worry, because the Earth was actually going to be destroyed in 2012, and I would be 36 by then - a long way off. Did I mention there is a history of mental instability in my family? Yeah.
More comforting images for impressionable minds
There has been reams of musical commentary written about the phenomenon of the Rock Opera, and the place of The Who's Tommy in its genesis. It's undeniable that it stands perhaps as the best known example of the narrative concept album (though, like The Wall, there's obviously a film and stage show and ballet and probably a teen sports anime which all use the music and story). I never loved Tommy the way I did the two records mentioned before, but on reflection, since I was not the master of my listening choices often, I wonder if this was a parental judgement. I certainly listened to it around the same time as the others, but certainly less frequently. This album didn't come with a book of pretty pictures to look at, but it also pretty blatantly features songs about bullying and physical and sexual abuse of a young boy so it might be that this was where the line was kind-of drawn about what you let your 7-9 year old son hear about on repeat. It's equally possible I just didn't like it as much as the others included here, so it languished a distant fourth in my affections and my memory.
Television hasn't been kind to The Who's legacy, specifically the CSI series of shows reducing their back catalogue into meme-worthy tv credit songs, but I was never much of a The Who guy to begin with. I know their songs, I've listened to Who Cares more than a few times, but I'm not excited about them, and maybe this is just another outcome of a weird time in my young life listening to The Who be not quite as exciting to me as Jeff Wayne or Pink Floyd. I spent ten minutes here trying to come up with some awful pun as an excuse to post the David Caruso meme, but none of them were remotely good, so I just gave myself permission not to do that, and move on.
I guess you could say...I'm Free**.
YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Sorry.
Finally, I want to talk about Harry Nilsson's The Point! because I think it's easily the least well known of the four albums, and artists. For the uninitiated, Harry Nilsson was a brilliant singer/songwriter with an amazing voice and sense of humour, and huge stage fright and performance anxiety issues which meant he would generally only release studio albums; no interviews, no tours. You will have heard him doing Gotta Get Out over and over again if you watched Natasha Lyonne's Russian Doll on Netflix a few years ago; he also wrote and performed Without You, which everyone thinks is a Mariah Carey song. He was gifted, and funny, and had a huge love of narrative in his songs, which I immediately connected with.
Before I talk about The Point! specifically, while I'm sure that YouTube is mostly a net negative for the psyche of the species as a whole, the fact that this thirty minute studio performance, recorded at the BBC, is preserved on there goes a long way to balancing the scales. My parents owned this on VHS cassette, and I have watched it many, many times, and I'll watch it again as soon as this post is published. It's an incredible portrait of a musician having fun with his songs, while performing some of the most uplifting and heartbreaking melodies every composed. Of everything in this article, if you only have 30 minutes, this is where I would spend my time.
There's an interview where someone asked Harry Nilsson where he got the inspiration to write The Point!, which is a musical children's story/modern parable about Otherness, and his answer starts with "Well, I was on acid, and..." which you would think would explain a lot of the unusual narrative flair this tale has, but honestly, if Nilsson was tripped out of his mind when he wrote this, it has surprisingly strong central themes and message for a story for kids. The entire album is narrated and told by Nilsson, intercutting the songs and story together in a way that mostly makes sense, though perhaps my favourite transition involves Nilsson saying the characters journey from one place to another takes exactly the same amount of time as singing a song, and then proceeds to sing an unrelated song just to transition the characters between locations. That's the kind of surrealist logic that your adult brain looks askance at, but your child brain has no problem with, something which holds true throughout the story.
It's really just a series of vignettes of strange events and characters all talking in slightly obtuse language about things, and then bees attack, and there's some singing. But the context free transitions (suddently, bees / then, they fell down a hole / all of a sudden, they were back at the capital city) maintain both the quality of a children's tale which maximises fun over reality, and the strange and dreamlike quality for adults. There's not a great volume of songs on here, but what there is maintains an incredibly high bar of quality. I still sing Think About Your Troubles and Life Line and Are You Sleeping? to myself from time to time when the mood takes me. And what's not to love about a story about the only child without a point in a city of people with points on their heads, showing they are just as capable as pointed people, overcoming prejudice and adversity, and finally determining that everything does have a point, so they must have one too?
Finally, a message for children we can all get behind.
* I originally thought about doing this having seen a poster on BlueSky post the lyric "what's so bad about living underground // it hasn't been so great living up here if you want my opinion" from Brave New World. I said at the time I'd been thinking a lot about that quote, the one I've really been thinking a lot about, from the same section, is "We drank, and he insisted on playing cards. With our species on the brink of extinction, with no hope but a horrible death, we actually played games."
**This is a half joke because its the title of a The Who song from this album but it's late and I am tired and I couldn't think of anything else.
