The summer my taste in music changed

When I was in eighth grade I thought I was pretty cool because I liked the Moody Blues. I’d heard them on my brothers’ eight tracks in the car and I thought that was hip. Guitars and powerful voices WITH AN ORCHESTRA. Or at least a Mellotron. Anyway, no one else my age listened to them – they were old! – and that was part of the appeal. Because I was a dick. Other kids were listening to Journey or Zeppelin and I just sadly hadn’t come to appreciate them, yet.

But in the late afternoon of one eternally long adolescent summer afternoon, with a dry, warm breeze blowing along the long shadows of yellow and green, my friend Mark invited a few of us to his house to listen to his brother’s album by Frank Zappa.

I’d heard of him. Heard he was weird. Just didn’t have the resources to try it without hearing it, first. So I wanted to try this.

We all got high, and Mark put on the album Joe’s Garage, Acts II and II, side one. On comes a guy speaking through a megaphone about the First Church Of Appliantology, and a song launches about being taro-fied and I learn the phrase I love to use to this day, “It’s just a token of my extremes.”

The song is about a guy named Joe going to see Dr. L. Ron Hoover [sic]. The good doctor tells Joe that in order to solve his problems, he has to learn German and go fuck an appliance. Dr. Hoover tells Joe a bar to go to – The Closet – where he can accomplish this, and then asks for 50 bucks.

The song has a long fade out. At this time Mark tells us the best part is coming. “You are not going to believe this next song.” In between, a guy called The Cental Scrutinizer tells us that Joe has walked in to a bar called The Closet and started to hit on dancing machinery covered in marital aids.  Then Mark gets up. The next song starts. It’s hopping.

It’s in German, and Mark mouths the words. I do not know what is going on. I am stoned and Mark _______ is dancing like a child acting in a vaudeville show, lip-syncing a song in German. Oh, and I AM STONED. I’M IN EIGHTH GRADE AND I AM LISTENING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MUSIC I HAVE EVER HEARD. AND I AM STONED.

It gets to the middle of the song and the singer takes a break while Joe notices one of the appliances noticing him. The machine hits on him with classic come-ons, and propose to dance with Joe. Joe has a better idea. Mark is ready to lip-sync again as Joe repeats what he had said in German, earlier, but now in the English words that changed the trajectory of musical taste, forever.

FUCK ME, YOU UGLY SON OF A BITCH! You ugly son of a bitch!

FUCK ME, YOU UGLY S-

The four of us exploded into laughter for the obvious reason, but because I am a dick, I thought I heard something more. Rather than just the shock of saying a vulgar word in middle school that could get you suspended – the power that word once had! – I felt for the first time what irreverence means. I had crossed a rubicon.

The song went on, introducing a new phrase and repeating it four times each:

STICK IT OUT! Stick out your hot curly weenie!

Till it squirts, squirts, squirts, squirts, FIRE!

Don’t get no jizz upon that sofa, sofa.

The next song involved the two of them enjoying sex until Joe pees on the machine, destroys it, and is immediately confronted by The Central Scrutinizer that he is under arrest for destroying government property.

I remember going home and calling Mark when I got there to ask where his brother got the album. “Two Guys,” he said. A department store near my house that I went to, often. Got caught shoplifting there, once. I went there the next day.

But this time I marched down there with my semi-honestly earned allowance – I had to be reminded frequently to do my tasks – and I bought the thing. A double-album. $11, if I recall correctly. I had the money and then some.

As I walked to the cashier to pay, I bumped into my brother. Six years older than me. He looks at me, “Hey! What are you doing here?” I never thought liked me. Not that it made me special, he hated EVERYONE. What shook me was that he sounded nice for once.

“Getting this Frank Zappa album.”

“Oh, I hear he’s kinda weird. I might have to tell Mom and Dad about this he said.”

But he did something weird when he said that. He smiled. I knew he was joking. I read his face properly for the first time. I don’t know why that strikes me.

“Well, I’ll see you later. I gotta go to work.”

I went home and listened to it. I had to listen to it in the living room, where the phonograph was. I had headphones so I sat in a chair nearby and listened. I went past the songs I was already familiar with and made the gut-wrenching, soul changing discovery of what heroin must be like: Frank Zappa guitar solos. They were meaner than anything I had ever heard. Odd-metered phrasings, influenced by middle eastern sounds and atonal scales. I did not know these things then, but I sensed their presence, somehow, and had to learn the currency for them.

I told my friend a few weeks later, when school started, what the whole album was like. He never listened past the first three songs he’d played for us, really. He said it seemed boring but he was happy I liked it.

I was now turned down a path less traveled a lot of people had walked down before me but were not here now and I could not find them. I believed there must be other people who listened to him, and I had to find them.

Taking a Music Theory class in tenth grade, I started to find them. First, we were learning about fundamentals – rhythm, harmony, antecedent and consequent phrases, melody, chord progressions, scales, modes. We learned these along with the history of Western music, with its roots in Greek tetrachords, up to the present day, and all the changes in how each fundamental was used in each genre and age. When we got to Jazz, something unlocked in me.

I got an explanation for how music works, and how it was unfolded to make music incredibly new, visceral, and and intellectually stimulating. Because now I got music. Before, I had just dug the whole, big, sound. Now I could hear inside the music and appreciate the craftsmanship and ingenuity of some musicians.

During this time I picked up a Jazz album from the library. I had to hear this stuff. It would piss off my father because he absolutely hated Jazz. More than Rock and Roll.

I stared at the meager collection, and saw an album called, “Sunday Walk” by Jean-Luc Ponty. Jazz Violin. I liked violins. Jazz violin? Let’s try it. I took it home and dropped it on the turntable without the headphones.

Four acoustic instruments – drums, double-bass, piano, and violin – impeccably recorded live from a performance that, from my father’s JVC walnut console phonograph and reel-to-reel, sounded as if it was happening in front of me. My hearing sucked but this record was so well done I could hear the rosin dust settling on the face of the violin as Ponty sawed those strings.

I now got it. I heard how the chord progression changed and the soloist followed it. I heard how the how the melody was introduced and then played with, in turn by ever instrument. I got this and I loved it for some reason. I understood how it was put together – and I respected it.

Our project in that class was to explicate some music of our choice using the knowledge we’d picked up that year. One student in the class, a year ahead of me, wore a King Crimson shirt – Discipline, the red one with the knotwork. I had heard of them. “What’s it like? I asked. “I’ll make you a tape,” he said. He had friends who introduced me to Killing Joke. I was forever freed from top 40 radio. I would also never have another normal conversation about music for the rest of my life. And I am still a dick.