The Joy of Discovery: Oasis and Other Revelations

I kinda live under a musical rock.  Although I spend hours every week, every day listening and have a constant hunger for new sounds, I’ve never been much of a radio guy-- lots of commercials, other people deciding what hits my fussy ears, predictability, and more singles than album cuts are the most prominent reasons.  Instead, I get connected with new musics in other ways.  I use Pandora as it works around some of the stated radio objections nicely, friends turn me on to new tunes, I study album covers, sleeves, and liner notes, and then make connections, I read about stuff in magazines and newspapers, I take chances on interesting looking things in record stores, etc.  This mode of operation means I have often come to bands after they’ve already crested in terms of creativity and / or popularity—from the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd on through to Nirvana and the White Stripes I frequently “discover” bands and musicians long after other people have done so (true story: I bought my first White Stripes record and the next day they announced they were breaking up).  But whenever I find someone new—whether they’re at the peak of their powers at the time I first hear them or whether I first hear them years after they have come and gone—the sensation is electrifying, and best articulated by the Late Great Lester Bangs:

“I saw myself… varooming off… in anticipation of the revelations waiting in thirty-five or forty minutes of blasting sound soon as I got home, the eternal promise that this time the guitars will jell like TNT and set off galvanic sizzles in your brain ‘KABLOOIE!!!’ and this time at least at last blow your fucking lid sky-high. Brains gleaming on the ceiling, sticking like putty stalactites, while yer berserk body runs around and slams outside hollering subhuman gibberish, jigging in erratic circles and careening split-up syllables insistently like a geek with a bad case of the superstar syndrome.”*

It’s like discovering gold or hitting upon a great new invention, except better— you’ve come upon something very valuable and gorgeous, are not sure where it might lead, but the roads ahead are exciting to contemplate…

This week, 20 years after they arrived, I discovered Oasis (again true story: Rolling Stone notes this week that the band is about to release a 20th Anniversary Edition of it's first album, Definitely Maybe). On Tuesday, an Esquire blurb flitted across my radar screen which featured a list of “The Hold Steady's 10 Rock Albums Every Man Should Own.”  Of course, I’ve never heard of The Hold Steady (apparently a current NYC rock and roll band—maybe they’re on the radio?) but the first record on their list was the Stones’ Exile On Main Street and so I took the list seriously from the get go.  3^rd on the list was Oasis’s Definitely Maybe (I had at least heard of Oasis, but never actually heard them, if ya’ know what I mean), and the blurb included a link to a cut from the album: “Supersonic,” which grabbed me immediately.  Promptly marching over to Laurie’s Planet of Sound, I found a copy of Definitely Maybe in the used CD racks and varoomed home hoping for the described Bangsian Revelations.  And sure enough: the plaster and masonry crumbling guitar riffs and wailing and shrieking guitar leads, the seismic rumblings of bass and drums, and the dry, acerbic lyrics delivered via snide vocal sneerings and leerings left me rolling on the floor with my eyes rolled back into my head, foaming at the mouth, teeth and nerve endings ablaze, gloriously gasping for breath.   And so now the happy process of assimilation begins.  Who’s in the band?  Where did they come from?  When was this recorded?  Who do they connect to and how?  What’s the band’s history?  Are they still rolling?  And, most exciting of all, what other albums do I now need to get?   Digging through the album packaging, Rolling Stone blurbs, and other web notes, I learn that Oasis is a creation of a pair of typically volatile rock and roll brothers, providing a kind of British answer to Nirvana starting in the mid-90s.  Their history is classically rife with strife, melodrama, and abuse, but I am overjoyed to find that they have rich back catalog that I can work my way through (already digesting copies of Be Here Now and Dig Out Your Soul).  Again, I’ve found something very valuable and gorgeous, am not sure where it might lead, but the roads ahead are exciting to contemplate.  This process calls to mind other thrilling discoveries I’ve made over the years…

8^th grade— I think her name was Pam.  Me and my friend Eddie met her and her friend, Jenny, at the mall for an afternoon of futile, inept flirtation— department stores, clothing shops, ice cream, whatnot.  It would amount to nothing, except: while passing through Marshall Fields I did stop and buy  Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from the dorky record department there. Though I knew of the album and had seen the ubiquitous cover, it was another thing for this 13 year old geek to hold it in his hands, eyeball it up close and personal, have a copy for his very own.  I remember unwrapping the thing there on some benches at the mall, pulling out the stickers and the poster, reading through the lyrics in the gatefold.  The clue that the date itself would amount to nothing was that the girl was utterly uninterested in my purchase.  No loss there.  At home, though, I slapped the platter down on my turntable as soon as I walked into my room and…  wow.  Holy shit.  Never heard nothing like that before.  The doors were blown off.  Anything was possible.  Rock and roll could take you anywhere, be about anything, and include almost any kind of sound.  Dark Side and the rest of the Floyd catalog helped shepherd me through the trials and travails of adolescence.   A gold strike, for sure.

As a senior in high school, I started hanging out with some guys who were into jazz.  Mostly they were players themselves— drums, sax, trumpet.  They listened to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Pat Metheny.  One night my bass player friend John sent me home with his copy of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. His directions were to put on some headphones, close my eyes, turn out the lights, and listen.  The intimate communication and interplay between the 4 musicians, the complex harmonics, rhythmics, and melodics of their playing, the passionate, fervent, persistent, painful, searching, focused, mesmerizing, and triumphant flow of the composition— all delivered instrumentally and acoustically— represented a type of journey upon which I had never embarked before.  I spent the bulk of my college years exploring musical roads that ranged out from A Love Supreme: the solo piano improvisations of Keith Jarret, the big band swing of Ellington and Basie, the avant-garde howlings of Ornette Coleman and beyond.  I’ve since returned to the rock and roll mainstream, but the journey that started with the discovery of A Love Supreme has paid more dividends than can be expressed and leaves me a more informed and appreciative listener of all musics.

And so the process of discovery never gets old: from Floyd to ‘Trane to Oasis and everyplace between and beyond, I still troll the racks in search of that thrilling moment when I hear something unlike I’ve ever heard before, which, to paraphrase Iggy Pop, grabs me by the throat and punches me in the face with its power and beauty.  The joy of The Chase, indeed. What are some discoveries that you remember in particular, that have been important to your ears?

*from the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs