4 1975🔗

In the summer of 1975 we moved from northern Ontario to Kitchener, a midsized city in southwestern Ontario, only an hour’s drive from the largest city in Canada (Toronto). There was more than one high school. There was a large shopping mall and several department stores. There was more than one radio station and one television station. There were FM radio stations, with greater fidelity and stereo. The public library had contemporary records one could borrow! Up north, I had been slowly clawing my way out of the little box I’d been placed in by my peers, but I still didn’t realize that most of the onus was on me to change, rather than expecting a new environment to provide for me. Nonetheless, still in high school, I set about trying to be a human being, and made at least a little progress.

I was helped immensely in that effort by J, who I met because he wrote some reviews of albums I was interested in, in the newspaper of my new school. I wrote him a letter and he found me and responded graciously, offering to lend me what I inquired about and much more. Though he was in the grade above me, we rapidly became the best of friends. At first, the influence was mostly one-way, but it was not long until I was pulling him in new directions. We were major influences on each other through our late high school and undergraduate years. Our paths diverged when he moved to Toronto and I went off to grad school, but we continued to correspond for several years, first by physical mail, and then by e-mail.

When I left the north, my musical world was defined by what I heard on AM radio, and what I managed to borrow from acquaintances. I had on tape multiple albums by Elton John, Rick Wakeman, and the Doobie Brothers. While I would continue to listen to those for a while, they were largely supplanted by what I would be lent by J, essentially mainstream SW-Ontario-favoured rock of the mid-70’s, with some quirky outliers because he used to purchase and read the music magazine Creem.

A lot of that would be supplanted three years later, in my first year as an undergraduate. So what still remains that I am proud of?

Somewhere in one of the tranches of records that J would lend me before the end of the year was the first five Roxy Music albums, all there were at the time. To my eternal shame, I did not like them. I had heard their single "Love Is The Drug", which got radio play that fall, but the sound of that song is fairly atypical for them. Bryan Ferry’s vocal mannerisms evoked unpleasant memories of the cocktail crooners that dominated variety shows when I was a kid. It was not until a friend in university cited Roxy Music as his favourite band that I gave them a serious listen, and liked what I heard. It wasn’t long before these albums took their proper place high in my pantheon.

They are an irregular bunch, with no clear evolutionary path. The first (self-titled) one is plagued by terrible production, which even remastering in the CD era could not save. But there are some very catchy songs on it. The second ("For Your Pleasure"), my intellectual favourite, is the most avant-garde, with a couple of tracks that stretch out to allow extended instrumentals and sound design. The third ("Stranded"), my emotional favourite, is the most driving, with guitarist Phil Manzanera seemingly given free rein to indulge his psychedelic tendencies. The fourth ("Country Life") takes a strange turn into decadence, but the fifth ("Siren") is probably the most friendly to new listeners, without pandering too much. Roxy Music took a hiatus after this, and their later work is not to my taste.

Brian Eno, who was not a trained musician but made weird synthesizer noises and did tape and delay treatments for Roxy Music, left them after the second album, and put out two quirky pop albums ("Here Come The Warm Jets", 1973, and "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy", 1974). I don’t believe I heard these until late in university, and it took quite a while for these to rise in my estimation.

David Bowie was active in this period, though starting to lose it. I would have heard both the earlier singles "Space Oddity" and "Changes" in 1975, as well as the radio hit "Fame". That fall he recorded "Station to Station", the one album that he could not remember making afterwards. I would get more sense of what he was capable of with the compilation album "Changesonebowie", which I borrowed from the public library when it was released in 1976. He would continue to surprise me intermittently over the next forty years.

Stevie Wonder also went through the high arc of his career at this point, with the albums from "Music of My Mind" (1972, his first where he had complete artistic control) to the double album (plus bonus EP) "Songs In The Key Of Life" (1976). I would hear mostly the radio hits ("You Haven’t Done Nothin", "Boogie On Reggae Woman") but I bought a cheap compilation of his early Motown work in a New York record store, and I would buy "Key of Life" there for a friend, who let me copy it to tape. I don’t think I owned all five of these albums until the summer of 2010.

I was a fan of Rick Wakeman based on his solo albums, but I knew he had played for the prog rock band Yes, and I found their 3-disc live album "Yessongs" (1973) at the public library. This was compiled from tours to support "Fragile" (1971) and "Close To The Edge" (1972), but I would not hear those albums for a while. My CD copy of "Close To The Edge" was in the last remaining, highly culled and curated batch of CDs that I finally got rid of in spring 2023. I still have a rip, of course, and I would still happily sit down and listen to it in its entirety.

I had gone through considerable change, and the next few years were a period of consolidation. I was still experiencing music that was mostly mediated by large commercial interests. It would take me a while to realize that I would do better to focus on more liminal work.