Ultravox – Sleepwalk
As most people seem to do, when I moved to LA, I changed my look slightly. I eventually ended up growing the requisite mustache and goatee, but initially I tried experimenting with hair gel (not particularly radical, I confess, but the longest journey begins with a single step). Standing in the local Vons, I was faced with a dilemma. I decided to go with LA Style gel (when in Rome), but I couldn’t decide which of their formulas was right for me. Specifically, I couldn’t figure out which version had the strongest holding power, Extra Super Hold or Mega Hold. In a similar vein, who has the better voice, Bono Vox (from U2) or Ultravox? Linguistically, I’d have to go with Ultravox, but I think Bono wins for actual ability – especially against the early incarnation of Ultravox.
When I was in my early fevered days of record buying, I would grab on to anything that seemed promising – even if it was the record sleeve (in general, a really dangerous way to buy music – what they say about books holds doubly true for albums), or, in one case, a single chord. One day, I walked into one of the two worthwhile record stores in Traverse City (not Camelot), and heard a record playing while I shuffled through the racks. The music was fine, nothing outstanding, but nothing horrible either. And then there was this one piano chord in the middle of a song that was so delicious, that I bought the album (the Australian band Split Enz’s True Colors) because of it. Turned out to be a good gamble – True Colors is a solid album, and my favorite from down under (you can keep your Men at Work or INXS (which stopped being a vital musical form when lead singer Michael Hutchence accidentally asphyxiated himself while masturbating, which has to be one of the most embarrassing (and, consequently, under-reported) deaths possible)).
In another illustration of the random nature of my early record collecting, I walked into Full Moon Records one day with my month’s allowance burning a hole in my hand and they were playing side two of an album called Three Into One, which was a condensation of the first three Ultravox albums into one greatest hits package – except that there weren’t any hits on it – certainly nothing I'd ever heard on the radio. I was instantly captivated. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I hadn’t walked in during side one, or I wouldn’t have paid it any attention. I ran to the appropriate rack, but couldn’t find it. Following a hunch that I had learned to hone during my early shopping days, I went to look for it in the import section. Sure enough, there it was. I sighed. It was just too expensive to take a chance on, so I reluctantly put it back in the rack, but I filed the name away for later.
A couple of months later, I was back scouring the racks when I ran across the brand new and – more importantly – domestically released Ultravox album Vienna. The cover was suitably new wave – a tasteful black and white photo of the band looking dapper in suits and standing in odd poses facing oblique angles – and, after debating the merits for a few minutes, I decided to take a chance and bought it. Another lucky break.
Up until that point, there were two types of music that interested me. My first love and greatest passion was synthesizer music, especially the lush, orchestral music of Synergy. My favorites of the genre – Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis – tended towards long pieces with flowing textures. Sequences abounded, but the rhythm of the music was pretty subdued. Although the tonalities were all excitingly different, the structures were based largely on classical models, in which melody and harmony prevail over rhythm. Although the reasons for this had largely to do with keeping a large orchestra together and capable of articulating complex vertical chords, the result was that this became a sort of highbrow way of approaching – and listening to – music. Consequently – and I know I’m going to get heat for this – classical music is largely an intellectual exercise. Certainly there is a strong emotional element to some of it, but the emotions are usually contemplative, reflective ones. I know there’s lots of exciting classical music, but it seems to have its most profound effects when exploring sorrow and wanting and loss. Sure, there are your Rite of Springs that, inconceivably today, caused riots during performances, but it seems that, for the most part, classical music invokes tears and joy more than rage. It is emotional, but refined emotions, appropriate for ladies and gentlemen of good breeding.
The other music that I was starting to get interested in was rock (whatever happened to the roll?). And here, the opposite was true. While there are some great, heartbreaking ballads in popular music, most rock goes for the visceral excitement created by the glorious cacophony of clashing guitars and crashing drums. Taking a page from its uncle jazz, rock is all about the beat. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing – except by the time it came to rock, the beat didn’t swing so much as pound, and it’s that pounding beat, mimicking the heart in extreme emotions, that fires the fuel that feed the feet and causes teenagers the world over to burst out of their civilized shells and let the monster within loose. A good rock beat makes the blood boil and the libido swell. It’s id juice, and that’s why so many parents are afraid of it.
Anyway, these two camps were distinctly different. Sure, rock used synthesizers, but only to ornament or augment, never as the main course. And there was certainly rhythm in synthesizer music, but it was subdued and refined, and subservient to melody and harmony and, especially, timbre. I wasn’t a big rock fan, but I was learning to appreciate the beat and its power to blow the funk out of my brain and twist my body into spastic convolutions. Synthesizer music was music for my head and rock was music for my body and never the twain did meet.