There is some music that imprints on you so specifically that almost 40 years down the line, I still remember it. Stuart Swezey (of the Desolation Center shows) opened a bookstore in Silver Lake called Amok Books. In the late-80s it's the best bookstore in LA and one of the few reliable places that had flyers/zines/etc. on whatever underground was going on in the city. I drove up from OC and stopped in whenever I could - at least several times a month. One Saturday in Summer 1987 Stuart was playing something that sounded like...
OK, remember the scene in Close Encounters where the secret government synthesizer player plays the five note melody at the mother ship and what it replies back with? Now play the Velvet Underground at it.
The music sounded unbelievably great - groovy, compellingly alien, cool as hell. I made note of the album and a couple weeks later found a copy at Rhino Westwood. You couldn't miss that bright pink font:
CAN
>>DELAY<<
1968.
Several years passed before I learned that Can even made any other albums.
Now I'm trying to remember my gateway to Can, and failing. I might have even come to them via Thin White Rope, whom I loved so much at the time; they covered "Yoo Doo Right" on Sackfull of Silver. I worked in a used record store in the late '80s and early '90s, though, so I heard a ton of music that wasn't close to current, and most of my colleagues were older heads who introduced me to a ton of stuff I probably wouldn't have heard otherwise. You are so right about the radically different ways that we all engaged with music in the pre-Internet era. So much depended entirely on happenstance!
A friend of mine got his music education primarily from the classical section of the wonderful St. Louis City public library. He worked his way through them all, I think.
Fantastic, Nate! I love when the unheralded, the "post-peak," or even the fan-derided reveals more than all those would imply. This album is definitely fits that bill. I had to aquire it as what I think was a semi-bootleg CD in the late 90s, and if I recall it wasn't even included in the reissue program of the early 2000s. Guessing many rock fans, outre or butt, were still problematically allergic to anything with funk or, Fender forbid, disco in its genes? But my awakening to Can in my late teens coincided with jumping feet first into funk, fusion-era Miles Davis, and via post-punk, disco. So even if the record only had "Safe," it would've hit me like it did. (Though I remember being mad at the album closers being such a silly little fart...). My love for 'Can' lead me to the Phantom Band, whose first album is basically a direct continuation of 'Can' into even sunnier territory--for any other old who reads the comments and still responds positively to recommendations from humans over robots... Thanks again, Nate!
There is some music that imprints on you so specifically that almost 40 years down the line, I still remember it. Stuart Swezey (of the Desolation Center shows) opened a bookstore in Silver Lake called Amok Books. In the late-80s it's the best bookstore in LA and one of the few reliable places that had flyers/zines/etc. on whatever underground was going on in the city. I drove up from OC and stopped in whenever I could - at least several times a month. One Saturday in Summer 1987 Stuart was playing something that sounded like...
OK, remember the scene in Close Encounters where the secret government synthesizer player plays the five note melody at the mother ship and what it replies back with? Now play the Velvet Underground at it.
The music sounded unbelievably great - groovy, compellingly alien, cool as hell. I made note of the album and a couple weeks later found a copy at Rhino Westwood. You couldn't miss that bright pink font:
CAN
>>DELAY<<
1968.
Several years passed before I learned that Can even made any other albums.
Now I'm trying to remember my gateway to Can, and failing. I might have even come to them via Thin White Rope, whom I loved so much at the time; they covered "Yoo Doo Right" on Sackfull of Silver. I worked in a used record store in the late '80s and early '90s, though, so I heard a ton of music that wasn't close to current, and most of my colleagues were older heads who introduced me to a ton of stuff I probably wouldn't have heard otherwise. You are so right about the radically different ways that we all engaged with music in the pre-Internet era. So much depended entirely on happenstance!
A friend of mine got his music education primarily from the classical section of the wonderful St. Louis City public library. He worked his way through them all, I think.
Fantastic, Nate! I love when the unheralded, the "post-peak," or even the fan-derided reveals more than all those would imply. This album is definitely fits that bill. I had to aquire it as what I think was a semi-bootleg CD in the late 90s, and if I recall it wasn't even included in the reissue program of the early 2000s. Guessing many rock fans, outre or butt, were still problematically allergic to anything with funk or, Fender forbid, disco in its genes? But my awakening to Can in my late teens coincided with jumping feet first into funk, fusion-era Miles Davis, and via post-punk, disco. So even if the record only had "Safe," it would've hit me like it did. (Though I remember being mad at the album closers being such a silly little fart...). My love for 'Can' lead me to the Phantom Band, whose first album is basically a direct continuation of 'Can' into even sunnier territory--for any other old who reads the comments and still responds positively to recommendations from humans over robots... Thanks again, Nate!