Flaming Pablum

Happy Fathers Day

Taken from Slate's collection of great Magnum photos of fathers.

"This Mission is Too Important for Me to Allow You to Jeopardize It!"

About two years ago, we spent the summer at my sister's house out on Long Island. During the course of same, my kids became very attached to a toy that formerly belonged to my brother-in-law's kids; specifically Alphabert's Sonic Phonics. Essentially an interactive learning device, the toy featured two animatronic robots who speak, giggle, gesture and roll their eyes while conducting reading, recognition and pronunciation games. While it's a highly sophisticated game, rife with myriad eye-catching features, it's also somewhat boundlessly annoying. When not emitting a shrill series of digitized jingles, the two little robots are prone to exhort, chirp, coax, plead and unsolicitedly opine. Creepily, after doling out a series unheeded commands like "Press a Button," "Let's Jam," and "Try Again," the machine will actually switch into a sort of panic mode. "Hey, where'd you go? Let's keep playing!" Eventually, it will deduce that its target audience has toddled out of the room and will summarily shut down. It's truly an amazing toy. But, like I said, it's wicked annoying.

At the end of the summer, my sister and brother-in-law graciously offered to let us take the toy back to the city with us. Yeah, thanks a lot! Just what we needed. I should also point out that this is not the first time my sister has done this. In any case, the kids were thrilled, so Alphabert & his demonic purple sidekick joined us for the drive home. Hooray.

I'm not quite sure how or why, but Alphabert took up residence in our bedroom. I guess the intention was that we could ration out sessions with the high-volume toy that way, as opposed to letting the kids have it in their room (where'd they never cease playing with it). That may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in short order, both Charlotte & Oliver were routinely coming into our room in the early morning to fire up ol' Alphabert for rousing sessions of giddy headache-inducement. But what could I do? They loved it. I wasn't going to be the nasty Dad that took away their favorite toy.

Time passed. New playthings came and went, but Alphabert somehow never fell out of fashion. Oliver especially warmed to Alphabert's music function, tirelessly hitting the keyboard with his stubby little fingers to repeat one of any nine-dozen irritating ear-worms (imagine an infantile Kraftwerk playing electronic ditties like "The Farmer in the Dell," "Daisy," "Three Blind Mice" and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" in maddening perpetuity). Inevitably, Oliver would get up and scamper off, but Alphabert would continue his dedicated clarion call. "Where'd you go? Let's keep playing." Either Peggy or I would reach the end of our patience and hit the big red "off" button, or Alphabert would do the math and figure it out itself.

Very recently, however, there was a problem. The big red "off" button stopped working, and instead of turning itself off, Alphabert would start the cycle all over again. We didn't notice at first, but after it'd been going (and going and going and going) for over an hour this morning, even Charlotte commented on how annoying it was. I started stabbing at the "off" button, with no success. The two little robots glared it me, delivering little taunts and incongruous asides as I fumbled with their apparatus. I figured I'd just remove the batteries and that would be that. The problem there was that that task required a screwdriver. My nerves rattled, I sprinted to the closet to fetch one.

There's a pivotal scene in Stanley Kubrick's seminal sci-fi classic, "2001: A Space Odyssey" wherein intrepid astronaut David Bowman is forced to dismantle HAL 9000, the intelligent supercomputer (prone to speaking in a chillingly dispassionate voice) that has gone quietly berserk and taken control of his spaceship. As Bowman gingerly removes HAL's circuitry, the murderous machine regresses insanely, singing a disturbing rendition of "Daisy" (Daisy, Daisy/Give me your answer do/I'm half-crazy over the love of you...) before finally being shut down. In a disquietingly similar episode this morning, I finally managed to silence Alphabert after testily removing the four AA batteries from its candy-colored backside. It's now sitting dead-eyed and motionless on the dining room table. Charlotte and Oliver have been eyeing it dolefully, but at the moment, we have no intention of putting those batteries back in.

Venom Re-Injection

Prompted by that recent Thurston Moore interview about black metal, I've been exhuming my old Venom albums from my high school days, much to the decidedly pronounced disdain of the rest of the household. I first heard the fearsome Newcastle trio in the summer of 1984. I was on a month-long bicycle trip through Massachusetts sponsored by the network of American youth hostels. The rest of the group was comprised of New York City kids like myself, trucculent Long Island teens and a smattering of Bostonian youths. It was an odd mix, but somehow we all managed to make it work. I showed up on the first day, I'm somewhat sorry to say, wearing a Motley Crue t-shirt (the white Allister Fiend model, if you're playing along at home) and was instantly approached by a metalhead from Boston named Josh. We became swift friends, comparing notes on favorite bands and giving each other recommendations. Having only recently discovered Motorhead a couple of years earlier, I waxed rhapsodic about how they rendered virtually every other metal band entirely superfluous (sure, it sounds like hyperbole, but it's still a strong argument). Josh quickly opined that if I enjoyed Motorhead, I should run -- not walk -- to the nearest record store to check out Venom. It was a good tip.

Venom first reared their hellish, hirsute heads in the early 80's, finding a cacophonous middle ground between the burgeoning NWOBHM scene (that's the New Wave of British Heavy Metal) and the second generation of British punk bands. Much like their predecessors in Motorhead, early Venom sounded virtually indistinguishable from their punk counterparts at the time. Venom classics like "Rip Ride" and "One Thousand Days of Sodom" sound right at home next to, say, "Give Me Fire" by GBH or "Dead Cities" by the Exploited. Where more celebrated NWOBHM stalwarts like Iron Maiden prided themselves on meticulous musical chops, Venom were simply more interested in the powerful roar and stealthy athleticism of playing hard and fast. As such, while Venom may have lacked the comparatively note-perfect precision of Iron Maiden, their own devotion to clamor and stealth arguably won them a more varied audience than `Maiden was able to attract. Venom even toured alongside American hardcore royalty Black Flag at one point. Again, much like Motorhead, Venom were one of the few metal bands that (some) punks dared to espouse (before the lines became blurred a few years later).

Beyond their sonic signature, however, Venom are invariably most notorious for being the most ludicrously extreme proponents of Satanism. Where rock veterans like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and others flirted, hinted and portentously intoned about Satan, Venom came right out and amorously embraced him. Choice Venom song titles include "Leave Me in Hell," "In Nomine Satanus" and "Satanachrist." There was no need to play any Venom records backwards; the blasphemy and florid devil-worship were all very much to the fore, thank you very much. Shortly after the first Venom album, Welcome to Hell, hit unsuspecting record store shelves, their California counterparts in Slayer upped the ante with a decidedly American take on demonic thrash-metal (although with a more pointedly po-faced stance). Venom also turned out to be a sprawlingly seismic influence on the troubled Norwegian black metal scene, inspiring a legion of grim outfits like Bathory, Mayhem, Darkthrone and countless others. For a riveting breakdown of that violent, scary and seemingly impenetrable phenomenon, let me enthusiastically recommend Michael Moynihan & Didrik Søderlind's authoritative tome, "Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground." It's a gripping read even if you're a fan of innocuous piffle like Joni Mitchell et al.

Therein, however, lies the part I never understood. While I thrilled to Venom's abrasively unfiltered endorsement of abject evil, I cannot imagine how anyone in their right mind would have ever taken it seriously. Sure, the trio made a crushingly loud, untethered racket and dressed like bondage-parlor attendants, but Venom never struck me as being anything more than a hoarily entertaining cartoon. How an entire community of church-burning, murderous Scandiweigans failed to see the humor in Venom continues to stump me. I mean, come on -- they have a track on At War with Satan (my favorite album of theirs) called simply "Aaaaarrgh." It sounds exactly what you think it sounds like. It's comedy gold.

After picking up At War... on Josh's recommendation, I swiftly became a frothy-mouthed Venom supporter, taken to adopting a low, guttural growl whenever invoking their name and painstakingly replicating their needlessly-ornate logo on my school books. I dutifully sought out their back catalog, combing through dusty import bins to claim their pentagram-stamped vinyl. Though only their first few albums feature the original line-up -- that being the hilariously-monikered Cronos on bass & vocals, Mantas on guitar and Abbadon on drums (real names Conrad, Jeff and Tony) -- Venom were tirelessly prolific. There seemed to be countless e.p.s, live albums, compilations and bootleg recordings. I snapped up a few, but the only Venom albums anyone really needs (and I'm using the verb "need" very loosely) are the first three. I remember buying the endearingly silly Canadian Assault e.p. on the strength of the live material (later appended as a full concert to their Official Bootleg Live album in 1985, festooned with a cyclopian wolf on the cover, naturally). Captured live, Venom was an exhilarating musical fiasco. Much like No Sleep `Til Hammersmith by Motorhead and It's Alive by the Ramones, these recordings feature Venom bashing through their songs with little or no regard for finesse. The band members play in a frantic rage, as if only fleetingly aware of their fellow players. For much of the proceedings, Cronos literally strums his bass. Suffice to say, it's awesome.

As a sad side-note to this saga, being that all my Venom vinyl now resides in storage, I recently went out in search of Official Bootleg Live on compact disc to rehear those moments. Tragically, most of the local mom 'n pop shops that would have handily fulfilled my quest in the past have since vanished. Rocks in Your Head in Soho? Gone. Route 66 on Bleeker? Gone. It's Only Rock N' Roll on West 8th Street? Gone. Venus Records on St. Marks Place? Gone. Stooz Records in the East Village? Gone. Subterranean Records on Cornelia Street? Gone. Midnight Records on 23rd Street? Gone. Second Coming on Sullivan Street? Gone. Free Being Records on Carmine Street? Gone. Sure, there a couple left (although Generation Records on Thompson Street and Bleeker Bob's both failed me), but they're few and far between these days. Hell, virtually all the big chains like HMV, Virgin and Tower are all gone as well. Of course, I could very simply punch a few keys on my computer and have it delivered to my door from Amazon with relative ease. Pardon me, but that's no fun. Give me a record store staffed with knowledgeable music-heads every time. Moreover, I could probably find much of what I'm looking for on iTunes. But truthfully, I fucking hate that. I want to hold the definitive artifact in my hands and pour over the liner notes, lyrics and cover imagery. The lovingly painstaking art of fervent record-collecting -- a practice that brought nebbishy like-minded misfits together in the physical realm, literally elbow-to-elbow whilst rifling through record shop bins -- has been forever soiled by the rise of the internet. Thanks, technology! But I digress.

As much as I feverishly championed the endearingly silly Venom, I begrudgingly stepped away from metal fandom in the fall of 1985. I've spoken about it before, but I made the heartbreaking decision to forsake my heavy metal LPs for the great trek to my freshman year of college (I simply couldn't crate all that vinyl to the midwest). I left behind stacks of records by bands like Twisted Sister, Ratt, Grim Reaper, Helix, Blue Oyster Cult, Saxon, Fastway, Hanoi Rocks, Dio, Def Leppard and the like. A few crucial titles by bands like AC/DC, Van Halen, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Metallica still made the cut (no record collection should ever be without copies of Paranoid by Black Sabbath or Ace of Spades by Motorhead at any point), but by and large, I'd sworn off the more ridiculous metal bands for good. I did however, include Venom's At War with Satan as -- to my mind -- it fit as snuggily alongside my shouty hardcore records as it did among the bedenimed metal cretins. I needed to be able to play tracks like the furiously splenetic "Rip Ride" should the appropriate moment arise. Ironically, Venom actually came to New York City that year (playing alongside the Cro-Mags). I still have the flyer, though. I've even considered framing it.

Over the passage of time, my tastes didn't so much mature as broaden. My inclination towards stentorian heavy metal was tempered by my newfound appreciation for other genres of music. My metal albums were now fighting for elbow room alongside LPs by disparate bands like the Cocteau Twins, the Violent Femmes, XTC and the Beastie Boys. Moreover, while I still cherished the giddy idiocy and high-impact sonic assault of vintage Venom, their particular brand of blasphemous bombast was swiftly surpassed in the wake of more extreme bands. No longer the last word in slavishly juvenile, offensive music, Venom suddenly seemed tame, quaint and almost cuddly.

In time, I just associated Venom with the past. I kept my copy of At War with Satan on disc, but spun it with less and less frequency. I still have an old Venom t-shirt (featuring the cover art of Welcome to Hell), but rarely find a reason to wear it .... unless I'm trying to get out of jury duty, or something. I stopped following their progress (Mantas and Abbadon having long since left the fold). Then, in 2004, I was happily surprised to find Cronos contributing to Dave Grohl's metal side-project, Probot (Cronos' track -- the album opener, "Centuries of Sin" -- is far and away the most satisfying song on the disc, to my ears). Shortly after that, Venom came out of hibernation and released Metal Black in 2006. I was working at MTV News at the time, and our youthful metal writer Chris Harris gamely gave me a copy. Having not heard any legitimately new Venom music for over a decade and change, I dutifully spun it. Refreshingly, while the band's musical chops had honed slightly, their penchant for robust preposterousness (especially on the lovably inane title track) remained undiluted. They've since gone onto release another disc since then (the spartanly titled Hell), but I've capably resisted the urge to spring for it.

But with my memory jogged by that Thurston Moore interview, I've suddenly had a massive hankering to crank up the Venom again. Oddly, I've started to see their name invoked in unlikely circles. Yesterday afternoon, I was crossing Astor Place and saw a portly gent sporting the Welcome to Hell t-shirt. In a boutique on University Place called Environment 337, I unexpectedly happened upon a basket of "vintage rock pins." Amidst a clutch of Duran Duran and Culture Club buttons, there was a Venom pin (a picture of the boys wielding axes and scimitars and grimacing accordingly). I bought it on the spot, of course. Out to dinner with Peggy and our neighbor Bruce at Danal on Fifth Avenue the other night, I actually ordered a Newcastle Brown Ale, Venom's hometown bevvy of choice.

But my search to prize a copy of Official Bootleg Live on compact disc came up fruitless. The what's-left-of-Kim's on 1st avenue didn't have it. Bleeker Street Discs didn't have it. Norman's Sound & Vision on Cooper Square didn't have it. Other Music on 4th Street didn't have it. Even Hospital Productions, an otherwise outstanding new hive of all things black metal in the East Village -- a store that owes its very existence to Venom -- had nothing for me. I found this to be all wholly unacceptable being that the album in question was only re-released as recently as 2007. Time was when New York City was a veritable treasure trove for music collectors (of every genre). Not so anymore.

So, my quest continues. For a quick taste of what it is I'm looking for, here's some video recorded at the same show as on the album. For the layperson, however, while you may not enjoy Venom's music, you'll probably get a kick out of the fabled Ecstatic Peace 7". The story behind this legendary piece of vinyl is that Venom played a show in New Jersey with Black Flag, and Black Flag roadie Joe Cole taped the performance and excised all the music, leaving only Cronos' between-song banter. Cole then gave a copy to Thurston Moore, who thought it was so hilarious that he pressed up a few hundred copies and released them on his indie label, Ecstatic Peace. It's since gone on to be an insanely valuable and much sought after curiosity. The Beastie Boys even sampled it on Hello Nasty. I've never seen an actual copy of it, but it sells for insane amounts on eBay. However, I did track down an MP3 of it for your amusement. HEAR IT HERE AND PLAY IT VERY LOUD.

Oh, and Hail Satan.

Stuff You Might Have Missed

Have you seen the missing child?

Glen discovers death metal parrots.

Lady Liberty grapples with an eight-armed groper.

Ephemeral New York goes back to the Peppermint Lounge.

The return of Holden Caufield? Not so fast! (also, J.D. Salinger digs the new "Terminator" flick).

Are you ready for the Queens renaissance?

This Just In ....

Another disappearance on 11th street? The wife just popped out on her way to have dinner with some family. Right as I was putting the kids to bed, she phoned from just a couple of blocks away to say that the Dean & Deluca on the southeast corner of East 11th & University Place looks closed and gutted. Moreover, there's a warning notice on the window from the board of health. No great loss, but do we think it's gone for good?

Addendum: As of Friday afternoon, it's back open as if nothing had happened.

Great Moments in Advertising

Who knew the Muppets started off so violently?

Revenge of The Stone

It's about 2:30 am I'm swearily sleepless and testily uncomfortable for the sixth night in a row. Remember this weepy saga of a couple of weeks back? Well, to make a long story short, it turns out that I ain't out of the woods yet. I haven't yet passed that kidney stone. After a week and change of rather pronounced discomfort (I shan't go into any of the wince-inducing intricacies of the situation), I went back to my wiseacre of a doctor to tell him I was still in trouble. In turn, he sent me (finally) to a specialist; an Icelandic urologist with far too many consonants in his name. He, in turn, sent me across the street to St. Vincent's hospital for a cat scan to make a proper diagnosis (something that should have happened weeks ago). The cat scan itself took no time at all (although unspooling all the red tape of registering at St. Vincent's hospital took a goddamn age). At last, I had a lab technician tell me that yes, it is inarguably a friggin' kidney stone that's been turning my life into a facsimile of Hell, albeit a "small one." Yeah, easy for him to say. It may be small, but it feels like I have a disconsolate blowfish swimming around in my innards.

In any case, I get to talk with my Icelander doc again tomorrow, who -- I'm truly hoping -- will have some swift course of action in mind. I'm not sure how much more of this torture I can withstand.

Now go drink another tall goddamn glass of water.

Hungry Shark

This picture pretty much speaks for itself, although what it says I really have no idea. Sunday afternoon on Union Square. Click on it to enlarge, but his sign reads: NEED $ FOR SHARK FOOD (HE'S DOING POORLY!)

Before The Invasion

A little while back, my friend Glen forwarded me these pictures of the old Cooper Union building (y'know, the one they tore down in order to create a landing pad for that hulking, alien mothership that is currently parked there) just prior to its demolition. I meant to put them up at a time, but ended up filing them away on a desktop folder. I came across them this morning while searching for pics for an upcoming entry on the band Venom (oooh, I bet you can't wait for that one). In any event, here's one last glance of what once was.

Thus Quoth The Raven, ...

Here's another post that's liable to confuse and/or alienate readers who share my taste for the rockier musical fare of bands like Killing Joke, Cop Shoot Cop, Motorhead et al, but in much the same scenario as the one documented in my recent entry devoted to rarified Bahaman calypso storyteller Blind Blake, I've dug up another musical chestnut from my distant past that flies squarely in the face of that which conventionally rocks. But first, we have to turn back the clock to about 1976.

I was in fourth grade at St. David's, a private grade school on the Upper East Side. As was customary for each school year, my class was obligated to put on one full-scale school play. Our teacher was a guy I'll call Mr. McTell (not his actual name, obviously), and he decided that it'd be a great idea for us to put on a (very loose) stage adaptation of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." McTell also wanted to spice up our production with bits of music and -- somewhat worryingly -- dance. Furthermore, McTell saw fit to take some rather strenuously liberal changes with Golding's text, inserting a somewhat ludicrous plot device involving a mad wizard who summons demons. Even to my nine-year-old ears, it all sounded frankly dubious, but who was I to complain? I served two roles in this ambitious production (now dubbed "The Island"). First, I was cast as one of the lost boys. My big scene involved me running onstage feigning panic and exhaustion after my character had evidently been foraging for food. My other role involved helping paint the backdrop for the scenes involving the afore-cited wizard (played with heroically graceless geekiness by my friend Charlie). Mr. McTell -- who, in retrospect, should be applauded for at least trying to push the envelope at a relatively stuffy, posh school for little snot-nosed white kids -- asked us to paint something suitably "demonic." Somewhat predictably, we (myself and three other classmates) decided to replicate the colorful sleeve art of the then newly released Kiss opus Rock And Roll Over. The end results may have lacked the garish pop-art symmetry of said classic record cover, but we all felt that it did the job, however incongruous to the already-flimsy plot of the play. We also had to paint a giant, cardboard cauldron that poor Charlie would have to stand behind (on a ladder) to mock-stir with a broomstick. Again, it was all a very ambitious package.

Channeling his inner-Twyla Tharp, Mr. McTell selected a gaggle of five or six boys to play a gang of dancing demons. This involved them wearing tight, black leotards (causing no small amount of embarrassment among the guys) and a bit of sinister face paint. The de facto leader of the demonic dance troop was our classmate Zach, who actually had a credible dance background. If I recall correctly, the demon boys had two scenes wherein they had to dance; once during the "conjuring" scene and another during the play's indecipherable denouement. The choreography amounted to little more than lots of arm-waving, grimacing and springing, but it all sounded pretty good in theory. I frankly don't remember who came up with the ideas for the actual music, but we settled on the 7" version of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" (then recognizable for its fleeting placement in "The Exorcist") and -- for the conjuring scene -- a weird little number called "The Raven." Built around an ominous bass line and a creepy vocoder, "The Raven" scored the scene wherein the demon boys did their first dance, with Charlie acting as the evil wizard behind them, faux-stirring our giant cardboard cauldron in front of our massive, sloppily-rendered approximation of a Kiss album cover. I don't recall how sophisticated the sound system was, but I remember my classmate Ralph on turntable duty. At some cue, Ralph dropped the needle, ushering in that bass line, prompting Zach and company to slither out from behind the cardboard cauldron and do their dance. We were all pretty incredulous, but it actually seemed to work pretty well during rehearsals.

After what seemed like months of preparation, the day of our performance arrived. For my only big scene, I actually generated some big laughs when I rushed onstage, but my moments in the limelight were short-lived. Our classmate Dave was in charge of lights and misread some cue, cutting the scene short by about three minutes. The loss of the scene was no great tragedy, being that the entire script was a meandering, meaningless mess to begin with. At last, we all got ready for the big conjuring number. Charlie assumed his teetering perch above the cauldron and delivered some mumbled monologue about unleashing dark forces to deal with the meddling castaways. On cue, Ralph dropped the needle on the "Raven" record and out pumped that ominous bass line. Zach and company sprang into action, with eyes bugged and limbs flailing. For a few moments, it actually looked pretty cool; five or six shadowy silhouettes prancing and posing in the gloom while a sinister voice kept braying "Thus quoth the raven NEVERMOOOOOOOOORRRRE!"" At the time, I was pretty much only interested in Kiss, but this record was really growing on me, despite still not having the slightest clue who it was. The rest of us watched from backstage, subtly headbanging in unison and beaming that we were actually pulling this inane stunt off.

Then it happened. I don't know who actually missed their mark or flubbed their blocking, but it suddenly resembled a macabre game of "Twister." Someone's elbow hooked around someone else's kneecap and a scrum ensued. In the tumble, someone knocked against the cardboard cauldron, which also came crashing down, revealing poor Charlie wobbling atop his ladder, still clutching his broomstick. The scene turned into a complete disaster. Dave cut the lights (while "The Raven" kept playing) and we scrambled to get the next scene ready. Despite the fiasco, we soldiered on. With confidence shredded, the demon boys got back into position for the closing melee scene between them and the castaway boys. This was very loosely choreographed -- "Just act like you're fighting," was the directive from McTell -- and scored by the rockier bits of the single-version of "Tubular Bells." From the audience, it must have looked like a mess anyway, but we had our second brush with catastrophe when Ralph dropped the needle on the record and it skipped all over the place. I remember glancing over at the sound booth and seeing Ralph in a panic and Zach with his head in his hands. Down went the lights and curtain again and we were finally finished. I'm not sure if Zach ever recovered.

Anyway, it's all pretty funny in retrospect, but it was horrible at the time. Of course, most grade school plays are horrible, but that's beside the point. In any case, I wasn't able to shake my fascination for that "Raven" song. I probably just should have just asked Zach who it was, but perhaps I was concerned about inadvertently making him re-live the trauma. A couple of years later, though, someone gave me a beautiful glossy book for Christmas featuring all the album covers made by Pink Floyd's preferred design team, Hipgnosis. Whilst paging through it I happened upon a sleeve that looked precisely like the one I remembered "The Raven" coming in; a green cover with a strange sort of ribboned mummy design. Turns out the band responsible for "The Raven" was the otherwise lamentable Alan Parsons Project. It was the second track on their debut album, Tales of Mystery & Imagination. I made a mental note of it, but didn't exactly race out to the record store.

Fast forward a few more years. I was visiting the campus of Denison University in Granville, Ohio for a prospective-student weekend. I'd read about the school and had a relative or two attend it, but really didn't know much beyond that. I spent much of the ensuing two days strolling about the school, trying to picture myself there. At one point or another, I found myself perusing through the on-campus bookstore. In the back of the place, I happened upon a shelf filled with cassettes for sale. Oddly, they were all cheap looking Portuguese knock-offs of random titles that were only going or couple of bucks each. I decided to splurge and pulled out the debut album by The Tubes, We Gotta Get Outta This Place by hopeless Brit Oi band Angelic Upstarts and -- what's this? --- Tales of Mystery & Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project. Finally, I'd be able to hear "The Raven" again.

On the flight home from Denison, I popped the Parsons tape into my Walkman. By this point in the proceedings, I knew who Alan Parsons was. A beardy knobtwiddler and engineer for the august likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd (he's the Alan of "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" on Atom Heart Mother), accomplished producer Alan Parsons created this unimaginatively-monikered collective initially for the purposes of musically interpreting the literary canon of Edgar Allan Poe. Only later on did the `Project become a going concern, crafting perfectly pleasant albeit brain-deadeningly boring radio fodder like "Eye in the Sky," "Games People Play" and "Don't Answer Me." Still, I remembered how captured I'd been all those years prior in grade school by "The Raven." I hit play.

After a mood-setting instrumental (featuring a portentous intro by none other than Orson Welles reading "A Dream Within a Dream"), that familiar bass line oozed out of my headphones, followed immediately by that creepy vocoder, and I was transported right back to that side of the stage in fifth grade. Just as histrionic as I'd remembered, "The Raven" still managed to make the hair on my neck stand up. I re-wound and played it again five or six more times. To this day, I don't think I've ever really listened to the rest of this album, or least not beyond the following track, "The Tell-Tale Heart," featuring vocals by the legendary Arthur Brown.

While I find most of the ersatz-proggy soft rock of the Alan Parsons Project to be a chore for the ear, I'll always cherish "The Raven," if only for its timeless ability to take me back to those few confusing weeks of 1976. It's also simply a great tune, pre-figuring the overwrought melodrama of the British Goth era by a good decade. It popped up on a random iPod shuffle the other day, and I'll be damned if I didn't crank it way up and belt along with it. Hit play below and see if you don't feel inclined to do the same.