Yello

Despite the fact that I don’t listen to the radio and I don’t read music magazines, there’s very little important music that I’ve discovered on my own. Eric brought the first Art of Noise EP (Into Battle) home from the record store in which he worked and ignited that passion. My long lost friend Bent turned me onto the whole Fats Comet/Tackhead collective. Friends know that I’m passionate about music and I always do what I can to turn them on to new stuff and they usually reciprocate. Buying music completely blindly is a very risky proposition. Covers can be misleading and what looks good on paper often sounds terrible on plastic. But there are a couple of notable exceptions. Sometimes you can trust, somewhat, a label you’ve come to know and, in the late ‘80s, I’d often carefully study any On-U or Nettwerk or Zang Tuum Tumb discs I ran across. But, occasionally, a completely blind purchase will turn out to be surprisingly wonderful. I bought Thomas Dolby’s phenomenal Golden Age of the Wireless album without knowing anything about it and it has become one of my all-time favorites (that is, the long deleted original version, before they shoehorned his surprise hit She Blinded Me with Science onto it and muscled out the sublime Leipzig and Urges). And I bought Negativland’s Escape from Noise album solely on the strength of the cover and some of the instruments that were supposed to be played on it (including bomb parts, half-speed violin, processed animals, and Booper bee) and discovered my favorite collective of media terrorists. But by far the most serendipitous blind purchase I made was in Chicago, at famed Rose’s Records, when I took a chance on an unknown quantity called Yello.

The album was their first, Solid Pleasure, and I can’t tell you exactly why I picked it up. It was on Ralph Records, the Residents’ notoriously weird San Francisco-based label. The Residents were mostly good in theory, but too outrageously weird to listen to for long, although I enjoyed the discipline and variety of their Commercial Album, in which each of the forty songs is exactly one minute long. And a classmate of mine in high school choreographed a truly weird dance piece to an even weirder song from a Snakefinger album on Ralph that, while not wholly appealing, was still impressively bizarre – and included his song You Sliced Up My Wife, which I appreciated because it was shortly after Debbie Boone’s horrific You Light Up My Life had finally released its incomprehensible hold on the top of the charts. Rose Records was perversely arranged not my artist or genre but by label release number (!), making it rather difficult to find anything, and I stumbled onto the Ralph Records section one day early in my year at the University of Chicago and looked through it, trying to get the courage up to buy something new. The Residents and Snakefinger were known and not entirely appreciated weirdnesses, so I peered at a few other releases and tried to divine the contents of them from their jackets. One of them, Solid Pleasure by Yello, caught my eye, partially because the only instruments listed on the back were vocals and electronics and tapes and effects (3 out of 4 ain’t bad), and partly because there was a sticker on it quoting some record review that said that if all things were equal, Solid Pleasure would be as popular as Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side of the Moon, which I loved (I mentioned this later to my stepfather Frank and he pointed out that if everything were equal, then everything would be as popular as Dark Side of the Moon, an undeniable bit of logic). Still, it looked like a likely candidate, so I took a deep breath and plunked down my money and took it back to my dorm room to listen to.

And I hated it.

Well, I didn’t hate it, but it certainly wasn’t love at first listen. It opened with the promising Bimbo, but then quickly slid downhill. There were some interesting sounds on it, and some intriguing music, but most of the tracks were indelibly marred by colossally irritating vocals. There was one highly propulsive dance track at the end of side one called Bostich in which the vocals, though they didn’t make a lick of sense, fit the sound of the song and added to its momentum. And there was a pleasant and evocative instrumental called Blue Green that I took to immediately, and there were little moments throughout that were wonderful, but most of the album left me pretty cold and I filed it away after a few listenings. I did, however, take moderate pleasure in putting Blue Green on tapes for my friends, partly because it was an engaging track and partly because I liked the way the title would look when I wrote it on the tape cover: Blue Green – Yello. Ha ha ha.

I bought Solid Pleasure early in my year at Chicago, before I really knew what I was in for. After everything had blown up and I moved into a single room and quit all my required classes and threw my academic career in the toilet, I bought Claro Que Si, Yello’s second album. The death grip Chicago had on me was starting to loosen up. Winter was finally breaking up and the wind for which the city is so justifiably known was starting to be less like a knife and more like a caress. I was taking an electronic music workshop and an introductory art class and a filmmaking class, and was much happier for it. Being out of the poisonous forced relationship with my roommate helped immeasurably and I actually had a couple of friends I really liked and who seemed to understand and appreciate who I was and what was important to me. And I had discovered the near north side of Chicago, a much cooler and funkier neighborhood than downtown or the south side, where U of C was. One of the landmarks for me up there was the Wax Trax! record store, also home of the industrial label that bore their name. They had all kinds of wonderfully weird music in stock and I no longer felt like a complete Martian when I went in there. They were always playing something interesting, whether it was the new Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark album or the latest single from New Order, and I felt gleefully at home whenever I made the trek up there.

I don’t know what prompted me to buy Claro Que Si. I wasn’t particularly crazy about Solid Pleasure, but thought it showed promise. At the very least, I thought I might be able to get a good instrumental out of it – something along the lines of Blue Green. Claro Que Si was pretty much what I expected it to be – more of the same. Lots of interesting music and exciting electronics paved over with some really grating vocals. But, as predicted, there was a great instrumental on it, the evocative, slightly tropical, somewhat cinematic Homer Hossa. I really can’t say why I stuck with them and gave them as many chances as I did, but my perseverance was about to be paid off in spades.