Over the weekend, while Joe slipped in and out of real fever dreams (he got up to 103 at one point -- the kid runs hot), I slipped in and out of my own, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the first LP I ever listened to front to back on headphones. I remember sitting and listening to it absolutely all the way, breathing through my mouth with nerves when I flipped the record, as it was (of course) a friend's Dad's stereo, back when the mere existence of two speakers demanded respect -- and the size of the speakers was a a strong indicator of their value.
In fact, I touched the record this time off and on for a week, listening to it for the first time when I saw Rick Wright was dead, then again on the way back from a conference in Los Angeles. I still marvel at the stellar power of "The Great Gig In The Sky," smirk at "Money" (which was what passed for profundity before I had a driver's license), and sit flat on the ground for "Eclipse" and "Breathe" and "Brain Damage." What I wonder at now is that this ever sounded iconoclastic or "bad" (that's "bad" meaning "good"), that it ever seemed like something the good kids wouldn't pick. This is is tame now, and consequently, maybe, more accessible in its most meaningful layers. The lyrics and the samples are more affecting now, drifting up from the time capsule. It's a lovely, sweet document from the vault, a gentle bit of unremarkable poetry from the pens of gentle men who found themselves with a vast stage and a vaster audience.
What it led me back to, via the book, was Tangerine Dream's Rubycon, which I remember buying in a stack of records from Plan 9, along with whatever else was there. I suspect Rubycon had a good review from Dave Marsh, on whom I relied for much of my selections, thanks to a guide my parents had bought me. I liked a fair amount of Tangerine Dream, but not this, if memory serves -- I think I found it "bloodless space music," to quote from memory Marsh's review of Jean-Michel Jarre. And listening to it now, what I hear is much more compelling, but also much weirder. There's a sameness to the layers of sound, an undifferentiated sort of metamorphed thick ambery syrup. It's like there was much more difference when the tracks were laid down, but then they were fused, and now we can only tell there are different tracks because we can see them, but they sound the same. Or we can't see the difference, but we can hear it.
Rubycon doesn't even have the decency to be a concept album -- it's two tracks, Side One and Side Two, and there's no more sense to the division than among the four dual tracks of a stereo 8-track. It's a compelling loop, though, and I found myself treating it like a long walk -- the kind where you're walking a familiar trail and thinking, "right, I remember this bend -- around it is that hill, no, wait, around this bend is the hill, or maybe the next bend, or the one after that, there it is, the hil -- wow, this is a pretty walk." I listened six or seven times in the weekend, which is probably more times than I ever listened to the record when I owned it (bet I didn't get 10 cents for it when I finally let it go -- ebay where wert thy sting?).