6 1978
1978 was my annus mirabilis, but it certainly didn’t seem like it at the beginning. I had alienated J, my closest friend, picking a petty and unnecessary fight with him. I had alienated the more intellectual math students who had started with me, some of whom I had met while still in high school, because I thought their world too hermetic (it was ironic of me to point fingers like that). I even alienated people by letter.
The unlikely source of my deliverance would be someone I met through the university’s science-fiction club. His first name also started with J, so I’ll call him J2. He was no substitute for J; he was irascible and opinionated, and would never be a close friend or confidante. But in conversation, he learned that I was interested in music, and invited me over to his place (an apartment above the used bookstore which had been my main source of reading since I moved down south) to listen to his latest acquisitions. Though he was only a year ahead of me in school, he had a considerable collection of vinyl, much of which was previously unknown to me.
More importantly, he followed the UK music papers (NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker). They guided his purchases, and he lent me back issues. It felt luxurious to have such sources of information, even though I hadn’t heard of most of the bands, and couldn’t understand some of the slang. At the time, there was still a gap between import and domestic record releases. Big names like the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin would get simultaneous releases, but more obscure UK acts would not initially get North American release; their albums might be imported, slapped with an "import" sticker, and sold for higher prices, and if there was enough interest, they might get a domestic release. Things would be complicated by the UK practice of often leaving singles off the album, whereas in North America, they were often included to boost sales. Record labels would do even more heavy-handed rearrangement or remixing of tracks for later domestic releases.
You would think that I would be ripe for conversion by "Never Mind The Bollocks", the first album by the Sex Pistols (released in the fall of 1977) but that did not do it. I thought it sounded horrible at first, but it was sociologically interesting, so I taped it (on cassette, which at the time was a much inferior technology, and it was what I reserved for less important work not worth wasting a reel-to-reel tape on). I also wrote a review for the university paper, but they did not print it (they had printed other reviews of mine), probably because it was incoherent and (though they would not have known this at the time) full of inaccuracies and assumptions. I still have a typed copy of that review somewhere. I also still have a rip of the album, but I never listen to it. It has its place in both my history and the broader one, but is less significant in both.
The record that did it for me, also lent by J2, was "Talking Heads ’77", their debut album, released in September 1977. It was a perfectly-aimed thunderbolt through my musical centre. I honestly did not know what to make of it, but something in it called to me. My sister, six years younger than me (so in seventh grade at the time), asked me why I was playing it so much. I said that I was trying to decide whether I liked it or not. She thought it "weird" (wrinkling her nose) but she, like me, was eventually convinced.
Talking Heads didn’t try to be sophisticated or ornate like the prog rockers I favoured at the time. They went in the other direction, stripping things down to basics, putting together simpler elements in off-kilter ways. I wouldn’t encounter Fauvism until a few years later in Paris, but it would remind me of this music, with its bold colours and lines. Something of art brut as well, but the band were not naive, and not trying to pretend that they were. They had a deliberate effect in mind, neither conventional nor an angry reaction to convention.
If Talking Heads opened the door to a new world for me, then Elvis Costello tore the door off its hinges and made sure it could never be closed again. I had seen his December 1977) appearance as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, cited in the years to come as one of the best TV musical moments, because in their second number, they started into "Less Than Zero" before Costello stopped the band after a few bars, said into the mike "I’m sorry, there’s no reason to play that here," shouted hasty instructions to the band, and they all swung into "Radio Radio". I had never heard any of it before, and it sounded great.
My review of his first album, "My Aim Is True" (released in North America in November 1977, though J2 would lend it to me in early 1978) was published in the university paper, because I could be more articulate about it. I compared it to a Platonic ideal of a rock record, but one that had been left on a radiator to warp. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was due to the mismatch between Costello and the uncredited studio musicians hired by his record label (itself rather shambolic). The musicians came from the American country-rock band Clover, later to gain fame as Huey Lewis and the News. While Costello wrote some outright country songs at the time (some of which would surface on singles), his best work was short, snappy, and energetic, and the band wasn’t quite up to it.
Costello relied more on traditional rock elements, but subverted them with speed and wordplay. In retrospect, I was probably drawn to his angry nerd image, though the repeated hints of failure with women in the lyrics were probably not a good influence. His second album, "This Year’s Model", the first one recorded with a band he assembled (the Attractions, who I had already seen with him on SNL), seemed on first listen to be light years beyond the first, with an open, spare, precise sound. It had a North American release in the summer of 1978. In retrospect, I would consider it the best of his albums that I’ve heard. I would see him twice that fall in concert, in Toronto and then Hamilton. Hearing the songs from the first album played by the Attractions made me wish they would re-record it entirely.
Other albums that seized me that spring were ones I wrote about in the 1977 chapter: the second Jam album and the first Clash album. These, though, went onto cassettes, unlike the three albums above which were recorded onto 1/4-inch tape; I was not yet ready to put punk on an appropriate footing. That would happen when I went off for my first work term (my program alternated four month terms of school and internship) in the summer of 1978. It was my first time living away from home. What did I take with me?
Well, too much, because my father (who had been an auto mechanic before shifting to teaching the subject in high school) bought me a cheap clunker of a station wagon, and my mother packed it for me. Besides too much clothing and too much kitchen gear, there would have been a pair of speakers, a receiver (amplifier with AM/FM radio capability) to drive them, one of my father’s reel-to-reel tape players, and a cheap cassette deck. Was there a turntable? Probably not. I owned only a few records on vinyl, and I don’t remember when I bought my own turntable.
The job was in a research lab in the wilds of the upper Ottawa Valley. I would be living in a dormitory in a nearby small town, with my own room but a bathroom shared with the person next door. The dorm was filled with interns from other Canadian universities. Continuing my trend, I pretty much botched things socially. When I was angry or frustrated, I would tend to pop on one of the punk cassettes rather than the more mainstream music I had on reels. Apart from the occasional new song I might hear on an "alternative" FM station out of Ottawa, I made no musical progress that summer. J and I had hastily reconciled just before my departure, and we started our letter-writing phase, which would blossom as I kept departing on such internships.
Part of the difficulty in socializing was that I didn’t care for beer at the time, though it was the cheapest alcohol one could buy at a bar or club. Another part was that I didn’t care for disco. More accurately, I hated it. I associated it with mindless hedonism and tacky display; musically, it sounded simplistic to me, basic basslines and repetitive thumps. It would take me years to watch the movie Saturday Night Fever (I could not avoid its soundtrack at the time, which was ubiquitous) and realize the subtleties of its plot, to learn about the roots of disco in funk and R&B and its importance in the gay community, and to grudgingly come to some appreciation of some of the best songs of the genre. But the main place the other students went to socialize, in that small one-horse town in the summer of 1978, was a bar playing disco, and I never went there. I did learn to drink beer, though, and I now quite enjoy it.
As if to mirror my social disappointments, there were musical disappointments in the later part of the year, even as I returned to Kitchener-Waterloo and my fruitful troll through J2’s ever-increasing record collection. Bruce Springsteen released "Darkness on the Edge of Town" in August, nearly three years after he had won my devotion with "Born to Run". I heard it played in full on that Ottawa FM station (even though it wasn’t at all "alternative"), and bought a copy as soon as I was near a record store. But it was more depressing than inspiring. He would still put on a terrific concert in Toronto the following summer, but he had started to recede in importance for me. The only album of his I still own and can listen to is 1974’s "The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle", an energetic urban fantasy by a Jersey kid finally living in the big city.
The second Talking Heads album, "More Songs About Buildings and Food", was also released at the end of the summer. While I found much to like about it (notably the cover of Al Green’s "Take Me To The River", which got some radio airplay), I didn’t think it nearly as charming as their first. I blamed the influence of producer Brian Eno.
Eno was also my villain for another sensation of the fall, the band Devo, who released their debut album "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo" at about the same time. This is ironic, as I would later learn that they largely resisted Eno’s production ideas, to their later regret. Their robotic gestures, plastic mockery, and jerky style came to mainstream notice when they were musical guests on the popular sketch show Saturday Night Live in October. I was a regular viewer but missed that episode for some reason, and decided on the evidence I had that they were just too gimmicky and not musically interesting.
I would change my mind about Devo in the summer of 1979 when two friends who wanted to see them in Toronto offered to pay for gas and my ticket if I would drive them. I said I’d go but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I was completely wrong; they won me over with a great concert, and I came to appreciate the album, though I never cared for their subsequent, more poppy work. Singer Mark Mothersbaugh had a successful parallel career in film soundtracks, including many for Wes Anderson.
Given my attitude towards Brian Eno, it’s not surprising that I overlooked his solo work and collaborations at the time. I knew he was doing experimental work, but ignored it, despite my natural affinity. In the spring of 1978, he released "Ambient 1: Music for Airports", the first of his work to use the word "ambient", though he had done earlier work now referred to that way. I did not notice at the time, but over the next decade or so, it seeped into my consciousness, and I picked it up on CD some time in the ’90’s.
My opinion of Brian Eno has improved, but I still don’t hold him in as high regard as some do. I think he’s done some very good work, but also things (both in his own music and production for others) that fall flat for me. He’s an intelligent man who is not afraid to try something new, if he finds it interesting, and I will still take a look at any new project of his. For someone who continues to be active more than fifty years after he first started working in music, that may be as good as it gets.
I couldn’t lend J the new albums I most liked, but I could lend him the cassettes. I remember going over to his house and his returning them to me by flipping them one at a time onto the couch I was sitting on, saying, "Shit. Shit. Shit." But a year later, he had all of them on vinyl, and more, and for most of the time we were in touch, we could always talk about music.
The final disappointment of the year was the release of the second Clash album, "Give ’Em Enough Rope", in November. They had previously released a string of brilliant singles to follow their ragtag (but excellent) first album, but the second one, overseen by a conventional producer with considerable expectations on the part of the label and fans alike, just did not deliver for me. I borrowed and taped it, but I did not replace it on CD as I did for many albums of the time, and I don’t have a rip of it currently. I’m not even sure I can remember some of the songs.
I got to see them before that, in the fall of 1979, at a shambolic concert held, for reasons I have never been privy to, in the O’Keefe Centre (now the Meridian Centre), for decades Toronto’s main opera and ballet house. So I can say that I saw them at their peak, which for me was the single "White Man In Hammersmith Palais", the last of a string of good singles between the first and second albums. It was not the last time I would see them, but it never got better than this.
I was on the right musical path, but still at its beginning, and it would take a while for my old passions to subside. Tape is reusable, and I would tape over what I didn’t want to listen to (though this was awkward when two albums would fit on one side of a reel). My musical collection resembled a reverb tail, stretching out behind me into the past.