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ADVENTURES IN MUSIC
by Mike DeCapiteWar Child, Jethro Tull, I bought this record in junior high, maybe seventh grade. I got it at J.P. Snodgrass. On Sundays they advertised their sales in the paper. Could it be that albums were $3.99 and $4.99 on sale? I could walk there, it was about a mile away on Shore Center Drive across from Value City. J.P. Snodgrass sold jeans and records. They had a logo of a balding, bearded Victorian-looking man in profile with a curling pipe which appealed to stoners at that time. (It was equivalent to the appeal of a tophat in a rock & roll context. There was something defiant in it, something cooptive about claiming a tophat out of its customary context, whatever that was. At one point or another I bought or considered buying records by acts as diverse as Leon Russell, Marc Bolan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Roy Wood’s Wizzard because they all wore tophats.) J.P. Snodgrass had a long shallow bin of albums along one wall with new releases displayed above. The rest of the store was jeans and probably denim jackets. I never bought jeans there. I never wore jeans in those days. I wasn’t allowed to wear them to school and I wore old sturdy pants out to play. I never had enough money for albums. I used to daydream about winning a shopping spree at a record store and I’d list and relist in my head the albums I’d get. This would have been the absolute height of good fortune to me. One Sunday the paper listed Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby on sale. I don’t remember if I got it right away, I seem to recall choosing it over something I’d wanted a long time because of the cover—Lou Reed in one of those tuxedo t-shirts that were popular at the time, holding a bowler—I thought that was very cool, it probably reminded me of Cabaret and so I associated it with a certain strain of gender-bending decadence, which would have been correct, but I was disappointed that the music itself was so mild. My ear wasn’t yet tuned to hear danger at that level of subtlety. It was tuned to David Bowie and Alice Cooper. It was sharp enough to hear through Kiss though. I bought their first record because of the cover, the makeup, expecting the music to live up to the cover’s promise of theatrical necrophiliac faggotry but wasn’t fooled by the music itself, which was pretty generic. War Child appealed to me because of its classical, historical, and bardic pretensions, the richness of its arrangements and sense of sweeping old English circus gesture, I bought into Ian Anderson’s Elizabethan Bum act or Fagin Act or whatever it was, I dug his leotards and knee-high boots and codpiece and frock coats and frizzy mane and probably would have made the mistake of dressing that way to school if my mother’s very conservative ideas about clothing hadn’t intervened. (During my sixth-grade fascination with Sly Stone she’d foiled my plan—after telephone calls to three tailors—to dress for school in a skintight black-leather-&-silver-lame jumpsuit.) Plus, “Skating away on the Thin Ice of a New Day” really sounded like skating away. “Bungle in the Jungle” was a hit on the radio then. Hearing it reminds me of being taken out for my birthday to a sit-down restaurant that served ribs with my buddy Alex, and then to see a show, either Liza Minelli or Marcel Marceau. One sounds as improbable as the other, but I asked and was taken to see both. Alex and I were flabbergasted that a mime of Marceau’s renown was doing the old mime chestnuts of riding an invisible carousel, climbing an invisible ladder, and trying to escape from a shrinking box, it’s one of my earliest memories of seeing through hype, though I guess mimes will be mimes. Liza Minelli I’m not sure how I got mixed up with. I’d seen her television special “Liza With A Z” and was bowled over by the force of her talent. And then I saw a picture of her in the studio singing background vocals for Alice Cooper, my true archangel at the time, which was all that was necessary to secure my respect. The artists you listen to intersect with other artists. The cheesier the music, the cheesier its intersections. So with Alice Cooper I got Liza Minelli. It was a couple steps up, artistically, to David Bowie, and from him I got Jean Genet—I read in an article that “Jean Genie” was a euphemism for Jean Genet and read The Maids—and, less fortunately, an interest in mimes. Mimes were popping up everywhere in those days. There was also the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, little-remembered now but at their peak of popularity then. Alex Harvey wore a horizontally-striped shirt, that was his big gimmick. His shtick was that he was a Scotsman who’d been press-ganged into Naval service. Why there was a mime on board I don’t know, but there he was—Zal Cleminson, a mime guitar player. So there you go, mimes, tophats, harpsichords, flutes, bagpipes, rattling military drums, and off we march across the battlefield of adolescence, armed with superior intelligence and highly-refined taste.