Strange Maine 4/3/11

When I stepped into the shop this afternoon, Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air was on the turntable, and "holy shit this is awesome" quickly gave way to "no way am I playing this for my baby at home." If she can't have electronic cause-and-effect toys, why should she be allowed to listen to this sort of music? Riley's aesthetic innovation is formally parallel to my pre-teen discovery that I could ball up and eat the crustless middles of slices of white bread. This record was released in 1967, and Paul certainly put it on for his friends; he may have even walked home from some mod boutique with it under his arm. The blueprint for 1000 modern-day touring acts, many of them from Baltimore.

I was pleased to find a copy of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). I don't usually buy records solely on the basis of their appearing on Top Ten lists, but I made an exception for #2 on the Vatican's Top Ten Pop Albums of All Time. With Revolver as #1 and Dark Side of the Moon as #3, one can surmise only that the criteria called for expressions of morbidity. But unlike those records, which, by summoning and organizing energy into improbable artistic forms, enact life's battle against entropy, If I Could Only Remember My Name accelerates the decay of once-rich musical structures into increasingly generic rhythms and modes, enacting death rather than representing it, approaching the final heat death of the California sound. The harmonies of "Tamalpais High (At About 3)," the album's best song, help us imagine how McCoy Tyner might have sounded to himself while taking LSD with Trane. Once we've overlistened to all the best and second-best music of an era, we must become archaeologists of garbage.