Weekend Music: Basement Treasures

(This weekend’s effort comes courtesy of Peej, the same fine talent that brought you the Cover Girl edition last month.)

So what do you do when you are a just barely teen living in a country where access to new music is limited by the availability of such music (even on the black market), the ability to get to the place where you can finally make the acquisitions, and having to deal with a lack of blank tapes so you can’t make copies what you have and do exchanges with your friends to expand your library–leaving you desperate for new sounds?

You get bored and start to look around your family’s basements to see what you can find… and come across a treasure trove of LPs from the ‘wild’ youth of your aunts and uncles. LPs from the mid 60s to the mid to late 70s. LPs that you find as fascinating as the albums by Pet Shop Boys or a-ha or that all female group everyone is raving about (which you keep telling them translates to an article of jewelery, by the way), because it’s not the time yet to scoff at the music from that era and besides, you never cared much for anyone else’s opinion, anyway.

My cousin and I must’ve found 40 or 50 plus LPs and a good smattering of 45s (not counting the classical ones; but we’ll leave those aside for now). I might be tempted to think that I became enchanted with the music because anything new [to me] would have sounded good, back then, but that’s not it. The music was really good; the lyrics were better. For me, and my even more desperate need to get my hands on ANYthing written in English (I almost cried when I came across my parents’ volumes of the 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana in one of those basements), finding all these lines that read like poetry by themselves was like so much icing on the cake.

I still have the first mixed tape we made from those LPs, which was incidentally the first mixed tape I ever made. And I still think it’s one of the best. Every single song on tape was chosen lovingly and put in order with such careful thought–I guess we lived our own High Fidelity moments right there in that basement.

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It’s hard to say why I like these four the best of all the songs we put on that tape. A couple of years later after making ‘the tape’, I read Carson McCuller’s ‘A Heart is Lonely Hunter’ and I felt such an affinity with the young girl in the book, Mick, who loves music but doesn’t know how to describe why she does out loud. Except that Carson McCuller’s does so beautifully, especially when she describes Mick’s hearing Beethoven’s Third for the first…if I remember correctly in one part she describes the opening as “…God strutting from side to side…”

Well, these weren’t exactly heralds from heaven above and certainly no Beethoven’s Third…but you know, I think, for me, they were just as powerful as that symphony was to Mick.

(It always amazes me that McCullers was only 23 when she wrote that book.)

Interestingly, I when I moved to States and started to collect the LPs myself and learn more about the various artists, I realized there was a sort of six degrees of separation going on with all the the songs we’d put on that first mix tape (although that’s ultimately true of most of the music of that time, especially British bands), including the four I liked so much. See the end of this epistle*, if you are so inclined to find out…

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1- First up, is what I thought sounded like the best love song of all time (and I still do). It wasn’t until a few years ago that I found out that it truly was a love song, or rather a love letter from Keith Reid to his then girlfriend. If all you know of Procol Harum is A Whiter Shade of Pale, then listen up:

Quite Rightly So (Procol Harum; Shine On Brightly)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adduhMtTrRY[/youtube]

2- I think it was the surprise of the lyrics so late into the song, and the memorableness (is that a word?!) of them, despite the brevity, that really caught my ear. Of course, the anticipatory guitar runs aren’t half bad either.

A Small Fruit Song (Al Stewart; Zero She Flies)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS_sk8bmHzo[/youtube]

3- This is the one I can’t find anywhere. I think there is a cover of it on Youtube, but this is one of the very VERY few songs which I simply don’t want to listen to as a cover. I can’t see how I could not fallen for this song: a mutinous, hormonal youngster experiencing all the usual angst of impending teenhood and EXTREME puppy love while being stifled and controlled emotionally outside of my home at every turn? Please. This one was made for me to listen to over and over, and try to sing to myself all the times I was SO misunderstood and SO miserable and it hurt TOO much to breathe and god did he just look MY way?!

(Turn it up a bit; it’s a bit low on volume)

The Gardenof Jane Delawney (Trees; The Garden of Jane Delawney)

4- Finally, this was right in line with what my dad calls my marxist-socialist-hippie inclinations, even at that age. (My dad said he thanks god every day I was born too late to be part of the Mojahedin–specifically the Peykar offshoot– movement in Iran when we lived there. Because he thinks their professed goals and ideals would’ve been exactly the type of thing to suck an idealistic teenage me in.)

Streets of London (Ralph McTell; Spiral Staircase)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctb-SrwL884[/youtube]

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* So here is the six degrees of separation, sort of:  Ralph McTell’s song is in part inspired musically and lyrically by a song of Al Stewart’s…Al Stewart worked with Trevor Lucas on some of the more interesting guitar arrangements for his third album, Zero She Flies…Trevor Lucas was married to Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention and the two heavily influenced the work of Trees, including Bias Boshell’s songs for the band’s first album, The Garden of Jane Delawney….Brian Boshell later became a guest keyboardist for The Moody Blues, whose successful single, ‘Nights in White Satin’ was one of the main reasons Procol Harum were backed by their music label to release ‘A White Shade of Pale’ . . .