Posted By William Heise on July 12, 2010

So I’ve been meaning to get around to my defense of the 80s over the 70s as a great era of musical innovation, so here goes. I’ll start out with my experience in college.

The 60s and 70s were great, and their influences endure (see my post on Higher, which reworks very old and respectable ideas) but I didn’t connect with the music of my youth. Music, then, was a social vehicle for me in high school; my friends were listening to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, so I did too. I didn’t develop my own taste until college.

When I got to college, I was not a follower of others, as I had been in high school. I was for awhile a leader of taste (yeah, I know it’s hard to believe). Everybody was listening to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—it was 1980—but I showed up with an album that no one at Ripon had heard of: Pink Floyd’s Meddle. So one day, we started listening to albums and we started to debate the question of which song was the best song to listen to when one was stoned—remember, it was 1980. Several people played their favorites, and then I put on “Echoes” from Meddle. And everyone agreed that I had excellent musical taste.

So I went home and bought more music that I had heard on the radio that I thought would be good for stoners to listen to. I brought back The Talking Heads Fear of Music and Remain in Light.

At first, my friends resisted my excellent taste in music, but then I had them up and listen to Fear of Music, which has a song called “Drugs.” Here it is, for the curious:

My favorite song on all my Talking Heads albums was The Great Curve. This would still rank towards the top of my 10 favorite songs (I have never compiled such a list, and, if I did, I suspect that there would be over 750 songs in my list of my top 10 favorites of all-time). Anyway, here it is:

The reason I liked this song so much was that it stepped away from the notion that there were some people in the world who had “it” (and by “it” they meant musical taste). Not ever having been a driver of musical taste, I was looking for an area of music that I could call my own. The Talking Heads were experimenting with African rhythms and a complex counterpoint.

Wikipedia has this to say about that:

The members of Talking Heads wanted to make an album that dispelled notions of frontman and chief lyricist David Byrne leading a back-up band. They decided to experiment with African polyrhythms and, with Eno, recorded the instrumental tracks as a series of samples and loops, a novel idea at the time. Additional musicians were frequently used throughout the studio sessions. The lyric writing process slowed Remain in Light’s progress, but was concluded after Byrne drew inspiration from academic literature on Africa.

This was different than the relatively simple compositional form of the lyrics of Robert Plant. Plant was still using the double-entendre for his lyrics when he composed the lyrics to Achilles Last Stand—Jimmy Page’s favorite Zeppelin song. But the African rhythms were a lot more complex than Plant’s lyrical structures and allowed a lot more of the chaos-in-free-play (that’s my name for it) than we—or at least I—could hear in any Zeppelin song I had ever heard. They could start out their song with a relatively straightforward rhythm and add elements until they had a cacophony of overlapping sounds. I could listen to one section of the music, or I could listen to the whole thing. And I never got bored.

So for about a year, I was one of the ‘beautiful people,’ never a comfortable position for a man who had been to the greatest anti-beautiful people rally ever.

But then I met Leroy Plock. Leroy was a musician from Nebraska. He was into better music than I was (by far). I became his roommate during my second year at Ripon.

So one day, I was listening to one of his David Bowie albums—Aladdin Sane—and I heard the following solo (2:00-3:30):

That solo changed my life. I was not a very musically savvy person (I was not savvy about anything when I went to college), and I asked Leroy about the utterly chaotic (to my mind) music that I had just heard. He listened to it and said he thought it made sense to him in spite of being played off the background rhythm.

So I lost my desire to be a leader of taste among my fellow men. I started listening to Leroy’s jazz albums, which at the time were way over my head. Leroy himself was a huge fan of Keith Jarrett’s, and he would listen to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert recordings all the time. I have only recently discovered them and I absolutely love these improvisations. Read more about them here. This piece of music is sublime, and I would put it in my top 10 pieces of music of all-time. Here’s the second section (of 3) of a piece called “Part I”:

But at the time, I thought Leroy’s taste in music was far over my head. I just didn’t get Leroy’s fixation on Keith Jarrett. But I retreated from my leadership position and became a follower once again. Leroy Plock was the most powerful force in my musical education, and he remains so to this day.

But at first, I started listening to tamer stuff than Keith Jarrett. I started out listening to recordings like this one, by The Jeff Lorber Fusion, entitled “Chinese Medicinal Herbs.” The careful reader will recognize my interest in drug use, here. I didn’t quit using drugs until June 3, 1984 at 2:30 AM. That’s another story altogether. Anyway, I still like this song, so I thought I’d post it for you.

I also like Lorber’s “Tune 88,” which gave me an early introduction to funk:

I began reading some standard novels for 1980 (like Steppenwolf) and dropped out after reading The Glass Bead Game. I was determined to educate myself.

I learned a lot of things during my first failed trip to college.

• The first was that I was over my head, not only musically but in everything else.
• The second thing was about how much I was missing out on by my inability to relate to other, and to my mind greater, music than my own fairly narrow view.

I was determined to break out of my narrow listening patterns—as I was determined to break out of my narrow reading patterns. But first I had to catch up with the rest of the world.

I started out slow, since I didn’t have a very good vocabulary, I looked up every word I encountered that I didn’t know. Within a couple years I had found my stride and was reading Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God. During that time, I stopped listening to music altogether. My television broke in 1984, so I missed the music video revolution, which was powered by musical synthesizers, rather than talented musicians.

The 80s were good to me, and when I started listening to music again in the 90s, I found that the musical instruments themselves, and the methods used to produce sounds, had changed. More on that next week.

Categories: What I'm Listening to This Week
Tags: