The Baffling Music I Listened To In The Days Of My Sappy Youth (Before I Discovered Punk Rock and Everything Changed For The Better) (Part 4)

That slamming sound you hear is from the collective jaws of my readers hitting the ground after hearing me admit to once liking the oddball collection of studio outtakes Garden in the City from Earth-mama songstress Melanie. If you're unfamiliar with her work, she's the aural equivalent of a doe-eyed pastel-shaded Margaret Keane painting.

I was introduced to her granola-infested oeuvre through a friendship with my high school's Freshman rebel. He seemed to abide alone (the parents he professed to live with were always away on mysterious "camping trips"), he sometimes smoked cigarettes and frequently got sent home from school for refusing to wear shoes. His unexplainable affection for this LP of boho folkie musings should have given me pause, but his outsider status amongst our age group drew me towards it all the more--it seemed to me just one more intoxicating swirl of icing on the iconoclast cake.

At the time, my alarming ignorance of rock history strengthened the assumption that Don't You Wait By the Water was a vérité recording of purist backwoods blues and that Lay Lady Lay was a Melanie original (after finally hearing Dylan's "cover", its curious lack of flute freakout left me wanting). Listening to the painfully sincere title track as an adult causes my eyebrows to arch ever upwards: why the freaky pronunciation of the word country? How can you befriend a cloud? To paraphrase Carla Bley's reaction to The Shaggs: that song brings my mind to a complete halt.

Although Garden in the City was not a chart-topping mega-hit, Melanie would later find fame via her soft-porn pop hit Brand New Key, as well as renewed celebrity amongst indie hipsters after being recruited by Stephen Merritt as a vocal guest of The Sixths. Garden's closing track (People in the Front Row) cemented its place in the pop pantheon after being sampled by Australian rap act Hilltop Hoods.

My shame over once favoring this musical transgression has never wavered. As soon as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame installs confessionals, I'll be the first one in line chirping my Act of Contrition.

The Baffling Music I Listened To In The Days Of My Sappy Youth (Before I Discovered Punk Rock and Everything Changed For The Better) (Part 3)

Back in the early punk years, there was nothing more hilarious than the sight of a dinosaur prog act clawing desperately at relevance by cutting their hair, sporting skinny ties and attempting to write more concise, less grandiose rock opera concept albums. Funnier still, picture Yes convincing themselves that lyrics about winged horses and "dancing with the spirits of the age" would be perfect fodder for their 1978 LP Tormato, believing it would resonate with the angry youth culture of the era. For reasons I'm still working out via weekly shock therapy treatments, I somehow convinced myself I needed this album. Imagine the pimply teen Disco:Very getting misty eyed over the mawkish spoken-word finale to Circus of Heaven ("No candy floss, taffy apple...no clowns..."), fist raised aloft in solidarity with the Animal Rights anthem Don't Kill the Whale. I was never a believer in space aliens, so why my befuddled attraction to Arriving UFO? And while Release, Release is somewhat (ahem)...punky in places, it also veers off into the band's standard mode of virtuoso whack off. Eventually, much better music wrestled my tastebuds to the ground, but I sometimes still think back to this vinyl skeleton in my closet and flog myself to sleep as punishment for the sins committed to the ears, the very ears now retaliating by slowly diminishing my ability to hear properly. Parasitic bastards. Let's see how well they survive on their own when I have them removed next year.

The Baffling Music I Listened To In The Days Of My Sappy Youth (Before I Discovered Punk Rock and Everything Changed For The Better) (Part 2)

My 10-year-old ears should have been sentenced to Death by Injection for making me believe I liked Unborn Child, the painfully dreadful 1974 album by Seals & Crofts, an album so abysmally awful it doesn't even have camp value. Who could forget the goofy cover art, which illustrates the visceral thrill of receiving The Gift of Abortion as personified by a blob-shaped Rainbow-Being sporting enlarged disembodied horror movie peepers? I consider it a masterpiece-- the Mona Lisa of fetus extraction portraiture.

The 11 tracks on this album are fairly straight forward, lacking any poetic florishes: Ledges is about ledges. Windflowers is about windflowers. Rachel is about a female (or about a pet which keeps running away) named Rachel. Big Mac is about eating a Big Mac (or about eating a Big Mac which keeps running away). But it was the title track, Unborn Child, which caused a mountain of controversy. This Anti-Choice Kumbaya instantly divided their fan base, dialating and evacuating the stem cell of the audience, suctioning its precious breath, terminating its life before it had a chance to be fruitful and multiply. This chart-topping track generated so much heated argument, it was later left off the band's Greatest Hits album to avoid further furor (you might say it was aborted from the collection). Although I played this album endlessley as a boy, it was some months after its release when someone patiently explained to me what the title song was actually about. That, my friends, was the day I found My Loss Of Innocence, like stumbling upon a box of Girl Scout cookies smothered in KY Jelly.

In conclusion, I should admit I still find myself singing some of their earlier classic tracks in the shower (Summer breeze/Makes me feel fine/Blowing through vaginas in my mi-i-ind..."), but I would be remiss in not mentioning some fans liked Seals & Crofts back when they weren't famous, back when they were two country-blues aficionados, long before their folksy bluegrass leanings were somewhat diluted by the pop machinery of the '70's. Me? I liked Seals & Crofts back when they were still in the womb and there was still a chance they'd be eliminated in a back-alley clothes hanger hoe-down.

The Baffling Music I Listened To In The Days Of My Sappy Youth (Before I Discovered Punk Rock and Everything Changed For The Better) (Part 1)

First in a series.
Religion and I never got along, even during my tenure as a pre-pubescent squirt, yet I found myself drawn towards hippy-dippy retellings of The Bible. Sadly, like millions of record-collecting dullards of the '70's, this meant owning the original motion picture soundtrack to Godspell (purchased at a thrift strore, I recall). The faux-funky gospel-tinged stylings of Light Of The World were somewhat alluring to my white-bread suburban ear canals, while All For The Best seemed, at the time, to be an absolute ovation-rendering showstopper. I was convinced it was The Most Perfect Foot-Tapping Showtune Ever Written. I never quite understood what Beautiful City was about...I still don't. I also seem to remember thinking All Good Gifts was telegraphing some important messages about...Thanksgiving??? Perhaps it was advising us to be nice to snails, being grateful for the foods we toss out after eating too much...? I never had a clue. Back then, the lyrics of By My Side seemed so deep and earnest. Today, it gives me the same painful shudder I experience upon hearing certain tracks by R.E.M. (circa Green). I was in the 4th grade and a total know-nothing. Please forgive me.