Looking back at 70s music

I've really enjoyed writing Gilly Frank's Record Collection, for a lot of reasons.  One major reason is that it's been a good excuse to explore lots of music of the 70s.  Something I'm a bit fixated on with music of a given time frame is that there's a difference between the experience people had with music when it was being produced, and the experience we have looking back at it.

Basically, a record collection that was built during the 70s would be very different from a collection that is built about the 70s.  A person today, setting out to collect "the 70s" would have a solid list of great albums to collect, in a host of genres.  But a person living through the 70s would have a hodge podge of albums and singles - many of them still popular today, but many others that fall into that grey area of bands that never quite made it.

I think a really good example is Starcastle.  They've got a great sound.  Listening to it, I think maybe they were trying to take the sounds of prog rock and make it a little more accessible.  The songs are a little more structured.  When they were producing and touring, people loved them.  Their records were pretty popular.  But I'm pretty sure you're not going to hear a Starcastle song on the radio very often.

Another interesting band from the 70s was Hawkwind, who I think was entirely inspired by the scifi/fantasy works of Michael Moorcock.  I'm just going to throw that out there.  Warrior On the Edge Of Time is pretty good, and to me it feels like a cross between Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull.  Because of the flutes.

More about Yes

Just listen to this:

That's all I've got for the day.

Music

Gilly Frank's Record Collection is about a girl that inherits her grandmother's record collection, and discovers it holds more than music.

Have you seen those memes going around the internet that list out things that happened twenty years ago, so that people in their 40s feel incredibly old all of a sudden?  Like, "Did you know that Terminator 2 came out more than 20 years ago?"

http://xkcd.com/891/

That got me thinking about music, time, relationships, and people.  A grandparent of today could easily have been into all kinds of great music of the 70s.  Ten years ago, grandparents in popular media were more likely to have been ex-hippies, Beatles fans, or attendees of Woodstock.  Now, we're looking at people who grew up with Disco, punk, prog-rock, hard rock, early metal, and early new wave/goth.

So growing up, Gilly was mostly exposed to these types of music because of her close relationship to her grandmother.

The song that really started me thinking about music, and time, and people, and relationships was "Hold On" by the band Yes.  This is the second song on the album 90125, and it came out in 1983.  This was the eleventh album by Yes, so anyone who loved them through the 1970s would have picked it up.  The band had broken up in 1980, and gotten back together in 1982, and this was the result.  It was different from their work in the 1970s, but sing Jon Anderson has a pretty distinct voice, and there's some great prog-rock jams and intricate musical work that takes place on the album.

The hit from this album was "Owner of a Lonely Heart," and it probably still gets radio play.  "Hold On" is strange, amazing, and epic.  It's not a perfect song by any means, but it has qualities that I think would be worth exploring, if you were in a band that was making music today.  There are other moments on this album that I think would provide a similar springboard, like the first 6 minutes of side 2, with the great build during "Cinema" and the transition into "Leave It."  I like the song "Leave It," but like "Hold On," it's not perfect, and some of the vocal stuff that happens is a little kooky for my tastes.  But listen to it.  Invest yourself in the moment that occurs at about 2:00 - 2:30:

Starting something

I've been writing for a long time.  

I like to write.  Sometimes I love writing, and sometimes I hate it, but I always like it.

I don't know where it all comes from.

Sometimes I imagine myself underwater.  I can see this muddled world around me, and I have a sense of something happening above me, but i can't reach it.  If I relax, though, it's like I float up a little bit, and the top of my head comes out of the water, where the air kind of chills it.  I can feel it prickling with cold and at the same time filling with images and thoughts and ideas.

I started writing as a kid.  When I was ten, I wrote some detective stories that were partly inspired by Calvin and Hobbes (the strips where he's a detective), and partly by the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams.  When I was sixteen I read The Prophecy, by Kahlil Gibran, so I wrote a series of symbolic anecdotes called The Traveler.

I just finished my first novel.  Well, let's call it my first novel.  Maybe there have been others, but this is the first one I'm working toward publication with.

It's called Gilly Frank's Record Collection.