Office of Future Plans’ Vinyl District takeover continues, and today J. Robbins gives us a bit of a glimpse into his…uh – world:
Dear Reader:
Please forgive the following stream of consciousness, if you can. I started thinking about vinyl records, and I got sentimental. That’s all I have by way of explanation.
My favorite records between the ages of 6 and 10 years old:
Edgar Winter Group: Frankenstein
Black Sabbath: Iron Man
Elton John: Crocodile Rock
Rick Wakeman: Journey to the Center of the Earth
Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House
See a common thread here?
Anything that seemed remotely connected to superheroes, monsters, reptiles, or science fiction went immediately into heavy rotation. Which must have been torture for my parents, because at this point there was no iPod – not even a Sony Walkman – to enable private communion with my weirdo muse.
There was only vinyl on the family stereo, or cassettes which I could take with me in a hand-held mono player whose sheer bulk could also have served handily to render potential attackers unconscious (kids as tweaky and inward-looking as I was always need to consider this possibility and plan accordingly).
Ah yes, almost forgot The Doors: Killer on the Road (his brain, after all, was squirming like a toad).
After my parents took me to see Star Wars at the Uptown Theater in 1976, a long list of soundtrack records, including not only John WIlliams’ score but all of Bernard Herrmann’s London Records re-recordings – The Mysterious Film World of Bernard Herrmann, The Thrilling Film World of Bernard Herrmann, The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann … you get the drift) joined this ragtag company. I have heard a lot of people describe a record album as a world that takes shape inside your headphones; this is probably even more true if most of what you listen to is soundtrack music, on records that even characterize themselves as Worlds.
Once again, spare a thought for my long-suffering parents, who had to share these many Worlds with me, often at blazing volumes.
I carried this music with me in my head, everywhere, all the time. God help me, I even transcribed it for piano. Movie scores, when they are doing their job, are incredibly effective at evoking and eliciting all sorts of feelings, and the people who did it best often made incredibly cool, out-there musical choices. Weird orchestration, sound effects as the score, serial composition … so, it was a great education in a lot of ways. Listening to it now, a lot of it is beautiful, rich music on its own terms, and it still holds up. Herrmann’s score for Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, for example, is an absolute heartbreaker.
However, as a young man ages, he goes through certain changes. He might want, for example, to meet girls. He might consciously desire to piss off his parents instead of just making them worried that he’s … unusual. He might find himself interested in something more like A LIFE. Bernard Herrmann is great, but he’s not much help in these areas.
So I owe an even bigger debt of gratitude to Dischord Records, Fountain of Youth records, a ton of labels that were only ever nominally record labels to begin with (WGNS recordings, R&B Records …). Before I found punk rock I thought records were given to us by the Gods. How did they choose whose music we could hear? It was completely arcane. I am not sure I can describe how it felt to realize that people made records, that people I might know could make them anyone could make them. ANYONE could make a World. OK, not with the London Philharmonic Orchestra … but maybe you could get a delay pedal. Close enough for punk.
Office of Future Plans | Harden Your Heart
I doubt this revelation (or perhaps this rambling) will translate all that well in the 21st century, since at this juncture everyone is making all sorts of worlds all the time. Still, it’s heartening to me as I type this that though lower-case seems more fitting and contemporary, I still go for the bold type.
Office of Future Plans open for Dismemberment Plan Sunday night at the 9:30.
