Synergy

Eventually, summer came, and I took what was a fairly customary trip out to Seattle to visit Oma and my dad. In order to make some money (those pennies got spent on something when it became clear the record was never going to come in), I agreed to mow Oma’s lawn. She offered me ten dollars to do it, but I was wary because of another ten dollars I had once made doing yard work and how much work there actually turned out to be. But, I jumped at the chance, since I had no others.

Sure enough, there was more there than met the eye. The lawn wasn’t that big, but Oma owned a push mower. And most of the lawn was on a steep bank that surround two sides of the house (which was on a corner). Oma was very concerned about the appearance of her lawn and I had already been scolded many times for sliding down the bank in my youthful exuberance, so I had to use the push mower to mow the bank without actually stepping on it. This proved to be nearly impossible. Either I stood at the bottom and tried to push the mower straight up the hill. Not likely. Or I stood at the top and tried to mow down the hill without the momentum taking the mower out of my hands and running it into the street. Also not very likely. Plus, when I hear “mow the lawn”, that’s what I thought the job was. But when Oma said “mow the lawn”, she also meant trim the bushes and weed the flower beds and edge all the sidewalks and rake and sweep and so on and so forth.

Eventually, however, I finished to her (sort of) satisfaction, and she gave me the money and drove me to Tower Records. The car hadn’t stopped moving when I leapt out and ran into the store. I had never really spent any time in record stores (why would I?), so I was a bit lost, but I saw a section in the back marked Import, so I made a beeline, and started flipping through the S’s. Imagine my heartbreaking disappointment to discover that there was no Synergy section. I thought I was going to cry. I had waited months, holding the precious flame of my memory, and now, here I was, with money in hand, in a giant record store in a major city, and I couldn’t find what I wanted. It just wasn’t fair. As I was contemplating my bad fortune, Oma made it over to the racks and asked if I had found it. I shook my head sadly. “No,” I said, “it isn’t here. If it was, it would be right there.” And I flipped past the Sylvester partition to show her the empty space where Synergy should’ve been. Only it wasn’t empty now. In my haste, I had flipped right past it, for there, in neat black letters, was the word SYNERGY. My heart leapt into my throat. There were two records in that slot. With shaking hands, I picked up the first one. It was a strange, psychedelic cover with what appeared to be melting buildings or something on it and it was called Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra. Holding my breath, I gently slid it back into place and, hoping against hope, I picked up the second record and looked at it. The cover was very simple – just a close-up photograph of a red switch flipped on. Across the top, in the vibrating font used on the other album, was the word Synergy. And below it, across the bottom of the cover, was a single word. Sequencer.

This was it! The holy grail! I had finally found it. Practically leaping out of my skin with excitement, I ran to the counter, nervously handed over my ten dollars (as it was an import, that was barely enough to cover it), the cashier nonchalantly rang it up, and slipped it in a yellow bag with my receipt. He handed me the bag, smiled joylessly, and said, “have a nice day”. I grinned back at him maniacally, assuring him that I most certainly would, and dragged Oma out of the store so we could go home and I could listen to it.

Oma talked to me on the way home, but I have no idea what she said. I stared at the cover, reading all the fine print, in blissful communion with the record. There were lots of little pictures of intriguing electronic equipment on the back, and the entire album seemed to have been put together by just one guy, somebody named Larry Fast from New Jersey. We finally got home and I leapt out of the car and ran into the house and put the record on the turntable, fired it up, and put the needle down on the last track, called (Sequence) 14 (like much Synergy, great track, terrible title). I knew I should probably listen to the record in order, but I also knew that the last track had to be what I heard in London, for it was the only one long enough (11:14) to match what I remembered.

There’s this thing that often happens when you see something remarkable, or you eat a fantastic dish, or you hear a piece of music that blows you away and then you don’t see/eat/hear it for a long time. Your memory, which always tends to make things better than they were anyway, starts to embellish, and pretty soon it becomes the most spectacular movie/burrito/song you can possibly imagine. Then, if you get the chance to experience it again, you are almost invariably disappointed. My mom once choreographed a dance piece based on her memory of an Impressionist painting she had seen in a museum in Detroit. I was with her, months later, when she finally made it back to that gallery and she was absolutely crushed that the painting wasn’t nearly as evocative as she had remembered it, and she almost wished she hadn’t bothered to look it up again. After all these months of waiting and anticipating and imagining and remembering, there was every reason to believe that I was going to be disappointed by what was really on the record. I am overjoyed to report that that is not what happened. As soon as the piece started, I got goose bumps all over, and the music picked me up and carried me out to the edge of the galaxy, just like it had those many months before. I sat at the piano, as it was the closest seat to the speakers, and put the record jacket on the music stand where I could study it, and let the music have its way with me. I was profoundly, deliriously, unspeakably happy.