Synergy

After absorbing Sequencer, I went back to the Tower (grass keeps growing) and picked up Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, the first, and, at that time, only other, Synergy album. By then I had figured out that Synergy was not British (Fast was from New Jersey, not Old Jersey), and I picked that album up at a friendlier, domestic price. Since I bought Sequencer as an import, I have come to know it by a different cover than what was released stateside – and I’m grateful for that. The US version is a gaudy, faux surrealist painting that is cheesy as all hell. I much prefer the British version, which is framed on the wall of my studio where I can look at it every day and be reminded of what’s really important in this world. Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra is another fine album, although not quite as polished as Sequencer. In addition to a number of originals, it also features a lengthy interpretation of Richard Rogers’ Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, an admittedly unusual piece to realize electronically. With these two albums under my belt and an insatiable appetite, I was well on my way.

I started hanging out at the Seattle Laserium, trying to follow the path laid out by Synergy. I had zero musical knowledge and had to follow any lead, no matter how faint or, ultimately, fruitless it turned out to be. Since Laserium is where I first heard Synergy, that’s where I went for further inspiration. Through that venue, I stumbled across Jean Michel Jarre and Vangelis, and I was on my musical way.

I also started pursuing other leads. If Fast was the synthesist for Peter Gabriel, then Peter Gabriel needed to be listened to. If some guy from Nektar gave Fast some “invaluable percussive aid”, then Nektar needed to be listened to (er…). And if Fast showed up on a obscure, “all-star” sci-fi concept album called the Intergalactic Touring Band, well, then that had to be listened to as well. As I soon discovered, in order to have a good record collection, you have to buy a lot of crap.

This was especially painful because I didn’t have a lot of money, and couldn’t buy records very often. My mom had recently instituted a new allowance, designed to allow me to go to the movies once a week if I so chose – although I was therefore supposed to pay for movies I wanted to see. I got $10 a month, which would get me into four movies (those were the days), and then I’d have to wait a month for the next payment. Well, fuck movies. I immediately took my allowance to the best record store in town (unfortunately, it was a small town, but I had learned to stay away from Camelot Music and found a couple of better options downtown) and spent it all in the first couple of days of the month on a new album.

Going to buy my monthly album was a moment of supreme joy and crushing agony. After all, I could only buy one album generally – two if I got lucky and found a couple of promising cut-outs – and that had to sustain me for a month. I would often spend an hour in the store, holding two or three records and debating their perceived merits until I finally picked one and took it home.

As frustrating as those early days were – nothing worse than blowing your month’s wad on a piece of trash – I really knew my collection back then. Because I could only get one record a month, I gave that record lots and lots of chances, playing it dozens of times before that month was up and I could go back to the store. I knew my collection inside and out – to the point that once I was playing name that tune with my high school friends Eric and Allen and I was able to name the song before it had even started because I recognized the surface noise that preceded the track (it was the single of ELO’s I’m Alive, from the notoriously campy Xanadu film starring Olivia Newton John, as though anybody cares). Because I had so (relatively) few records, I gave each of them lots of chances, and much music grew on me because of that. Now, with a couple thousand CDs and records, I’m much less patient with new material, and I don’t know my collection at all. There are dozens of discs you could pull out and play for me and I’d have no idea what they were. That was not the case back then. There’s a very good chance that I never would’ve picked up on Peter Gabriel if I hadn’t been forced to listen to it so many times because I had so little else to listen to. Gradually my ear was stretched out to accommodate his sound and that, as I have stated elsewhere, has made all the difference.

My summer in Seattle ended, and I came back home with my new treasures, a man transformed. Now, I had a mission. Now, I had a passion. That it was a passionate mission that nobody I knew really appreciated or understood, that many would often make fun of me for, bothered me not a whit. The music brought me so much pleasure that I couldn’t be concerned with whether anybody else understood it or not. And here I learned another supremely valuable lesson. This may be a funny lesson to elucidate several hundred pages into a project like this, but I learned that there were things words could not do. There were places in the heart where language had no reach. This music did something to me that was entirely beyond my ability to verbalize. And it wasn’t, as I discovered, because I lacked the appropriate vocabulary. There was something there that could not be explained or, more fundamentally, could not be understood in terms of words. It was then that I learned that words are a tool for communicating, but, in some cases, a pretty poor one. That if words were capable of successfully communicating everything you needed to communicate, then that’s all there would be. There would be no art, no music, no theatre. We wouldn’t need them. But, the fact of the matter is, we do need them. Words describe reality, but they are not reality itself – the map is not the territory. We need other ways to communicate, more subtle, more universal, more general and more specific ways. And that is why we have music. And art. And dance. To communicate that which can not be spoken. Every month when I went into the record store, I picked up more nonverbal vocabulary. I stretched my emotions. I became more human and more spiritual at the same time. My intellect, which had always been the source of my greatest pride and support, was starting to take a back seat to my emotions, to my soul, to that which I felt inside, to the music that was pouring in and starting to trickle back out.