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.
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