Deciding that records were really fun, but with my father wanting me nowhere near his expensive Hi-Fi system, my Sister and I were handed down my mother’s portable record player from her art school days. It was like a little suitcase, with one mono speaker in front. You’d flip it open, plug it in, and you’d be off. There was a space in the lid to lock your favourite eight or so records in place, and a multiple speed selection switch: 16 - 33 - 45 - 78.
Lacking any records of my own, my father gave me a copy of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘The White Album’, 'Sgt Pepper' and a bunch of other psychedelic singles that he obviously thought were now old hat compared the ultra-modern futurism of the ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack and that interminable Jeff Wayne’s ‘War Of The Worlds’ thing. His taste was so bad compared to the great selection he gave me that I often wonder if they actually were his records to begin with.
I’d lie on the floor, put on these records, and just *vanish* into a whole different world of backmasking, spooky echo, weird sound effects and Random Interjections Of Classical Instruments To Prove You’re Not Just Making Pop Music For Kids. The end result being that they’re perfect records for kids, because there’s always something new happening every couple of seconds, and, like most children’s entertainment, it probably involves talking animals.
The flipside of which was records actually aimed at children, which, even as a kid, made me feel eye-rollingly patronised. If there’s a record that talks down to children more than Burl Ives’ ‘Little White Duck’, I’ve yet to hear it. Or, worse still, The Chipmunks. I’ve never understood the obviously-cross-generational-appeal of hearing the popular songs of the day completely Phoned In by an uncaring backing band, whilst some barely-intelligible squeaky voices sing the melody, or possibly ‘Hail Satan’: I mean, who could tell? It still was nowhere near as hilarious to my sister and I as all fifty seconds of ‘Wild Honey Pie’.
Now *that’s* a confronting record for a kid. It stopped us dead our (vinyl) tracks, until the only obvious reaction was outright hilarity.
“This is *so* stupid,” I’d say. “It just goes BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING and then stops.” (It totally does!)
My sister thought about this. “It sounds like Mrs. Mason,” (our sour-faced elderly nemesis from two doors up), “on a trampoline”. Which meant I had to skip the needle back again, at least for the mental image alone.
“Nope - it sounds like Mandy Simpson running after the school bus”, (who was our school’s ‘Glandular Problem’ Poster Child).
So my sister put it on again. After 20 seconds: “Nah-uh, it’s Boo chasing cars”.
This was the Red Setter from the house across the street, an animal that wasn’t definitely wasn’t like normal dogs. I once saw it knock itself unconscious running headlong into a brick wall, and it didn’t even have the excuses of a) not seeing the wall; or b) to have been chasing a cat or something. We thought it was dead, which would have been OK with me, meaning it might be now safe to walk to and from school without it endlessly trying to hump the legs of every kid who passed, except it was taller on its hind legs than most teenagers, leading to a horrible daily ritual of the slowest screaming kid being basically rugby-tackled by Boo and sexually-assaulted, (which is why I often chose to walk home with Mandy Simpson, thinking that at least this way I wasn’t the slowest, but had to give up her corpulent protection when she mistook my doggy-lipstick-induced-cowardice for romantic interest and asked me to ‘Go With Her’).
The Scary Twins dared Hot Gossip to poke Boo with a stick, which, as every kid knows, is the only sure test of determining if Something Is Dead Or Not. She outright refused, claiming she’d been ‘gotten’ up near Old Ray’s house a few weeks ago. “It was horrible,” was all she would say. Further coaxing only made her add, “And *wet*. No-one else was game either, so in clear violation of the end of every childhood ‘faithful dog’ movie that ends with snot-nosed-yet-stoic-beyond-their-years youngsters shooting and / or burying their canine companions, we simply went elsewhere and decided Boo was someone else’s problem.
All that being said, even then I thought my sister was clearly wrong. ‘Wild Honey Pie’ doesn’t sound like a running Red Setter: that always sounds like the theme from ‘Roobarb’. Still, I doubt These Kids Today ever have these kinds of discussions about, say, a Lady Gaga record.
After our eighth-listen, our sides were sore with laughter, and the tenor of discussion changed.
“I don’t get it. Why on earth would you make a song like that?”
“Don’t you know anything?” She sighed loudly, so worldly-wise with her nine-and-one-half years of experience. “They were On Drugs”.
I only had the vaguest idea of what Drugs were exactly. I mean, Fat Albert might have taught me that Smoking Was Bad For Some Vague Reason, but he also failed to explain to me why everyone did it anyway, especially Everyone’s Parents. Sure, there were many exaggerated schoolyard legends about the Drug Horrors of ‘Go Ask Alice’, but I figured that was just something Teachers made up to scare children into behaving, like ‘Struwellpeter’ or ‘The Diary Of Anne Frank’.
Something was clearly wrong about what I’d been taught: if the Beatles had been using drugs, then how come none of them had written terrible books about the horrible things that happen to you on drugs, conveniently getting the manuscript finished before those horrible things killed them, requiring Someone Else Entirely to step in on the last few pages and say “By the way, she’s dead”, which I never thought was much of a twist ending? It’s not like ‘Go Ask Alice’ is revealed to be a cookbook.
Still, I spent many more hours listening to these various psychedelic singles, and soon thought I had drugs all figured out:
- they made you dress like a Day-Glo Victorian General;
- they let you talk to the animals, but in a far less crap way than Rex Harrison, (which gave me hope that maybe I could tell Boo that No Means No);
- you were always having a lot of fun, probably getting to bathe in jelly and custard on a daily basis;
- and you made thoroughly awesome fun music in a playful spirit. This was far preferable to me than being as lame as Kiss, whom everyone at school was obsessed with. To my childhood eyes, all those guys needed was some drugs and then they’d be much more fun.
Which, in a very apt circular fashion, brings me to the ‘The Parisian Roundabout’, whom, on first glance, I assumed was some kind of Carousel-based metaphor, and secretly-hoped was close to the Magic one, thinking that if some animal has something to say, then it might as well be Dougal. As an adult, I still like to think they were chasing some kind of circus / fairground metaphor, rather than naming themselves after something as mundane as a giant traffic island.
The band was formed in late ’66 by former folk singer Bob Dilettante, critically-regarded as one of rock’s premier lyricists, despite poor album sales for titles such as ‘The Ripsnortin’Bob Dilettante’ and ‘Byway 61 Resurfaced’. A chance meeting with ex-British Invasion hopeful, Reggie Van Gough Gough, lead to the formation of band designed to meld baroque music (via Reggie) with literature and art (via Bob) into ‘ultra-groovy pop’.
By the time they roped in bassist Davis Mavis and drummer Bongo Snarkey to record their first album, Bob was already growing disillusioned with the record company asking him to rewrite his lyrics into ‘something simple that teeny-boppers would want to hear’, culminating in being presented with a re-recorded main vocal ‘purely for consideration’ sung by an anonymous singer that changed the chorus from descriptions of painting to being about ‘a boy wanting to kiss a girl’. This was an offense to his notions of high art, (even if the results sound more like pretentious bubblegum), and he left the band, which had no choice but to dissolve after Reggie soon after lost two fingers in a serious mishap whilst changing mellotron tape banks.
To make matter worse, the single was banned by the BBC for the line ‘I long to trip into your world’, meaning the song didn’t sell, and remains a cult classic occasionally referenced by cultish power pop figures like Jellyfish and Matthew Sweet, who counted the Roundabout as ‘possibly as big an influence as the Banana Splits’. A mid-80’s cover version by English Goth Rock band ‘The Gloomy Doomed’ did go Top 10 in a few Eastern Bloc markets who undoubtedly mistook an attempt at faux-period recording as being The Now Sound of Western Teens!, but at least it stopped them listening to Nena Hagen. Briefly.
I still love this. It makes me want to be On Drugs, and Lots Of Them, but only those far-out 60’s drugs that made you into some kind of playful and silly love child of Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear, instead of what drugs actually turned out to be: boring people sitting around doing nothing except having slow, boring, endless, unfocused conversations. It’s basically like being trapped in a room with Paul McCartney during the Let It Be Sessions as he tries to explain his vision of the album to you in excruciating detail. There’s not even any Jelly and Custard: just a sour-faced Yoko Ono inflicting everyone with her mundane, puerile notions of What Constitutes Art. As such, you can see why records like ‘A Painting Of Eloise’ can only prime a curious child for disappointment.
No comments:
Post a Comment