Music saved my life.
Okay, so maybe that's the most hyperbolic, cliched way to start a column, but I'm new at this, and I'm desperate for your attention. Webmeister extraordinaire Brandon put out a call for contributors to Trouble City, and I figured, why not? I'm a screenwriter. I love throwing words around. And I have plenty of time on my hands as I sit here waiting for an invisible virus, in conjunction with my country's Pumpkin-In-Chief, to kill me.
So I jotted down a few ideas and pitched them to Brandon. He zeroed in on my idea for a semi-regular column about the albums that impacted my life. Like a more concrete version of those "Ten Albums In Ten Days" threads that pollute Facebook and other sites. (Full disclosure: As of this writing I'm currently doing one of those at my brother's invitation. It may have been what put the idea in my head.)
I can imagine that you're asking yourself: what are this guy's qualifications? You'd be surprised! My bona fides are as follows: I love music. Aaaaaand... that's it. (Told you you'd be surprised.) I'm not from a family of classically trained singers, I wasn't born with an innate genius that took me to Berklee... I just love music. It's that simple.
And as I've gotten older, I've looked back over my shoulder and been amazed at the impact certain albums have had on my life, how they shaped not only my musical taste, but also how they serve as potent, joyful, and sometimes bittersweet milestones that take me back to a very particular event or point in time. I'm sure that almost everyone reading this has at least one album that hits them in the feels. (Side note: I might extend this premise to cover individual songs, too, if I can find the right hook.)
I invite you to come along with me as I virtually crate-dive into my music collection. But this isn't going to be just a song-by-song analysis of a particular CD. No, I'm going to be folding in my own thoughts and feelings and experiences as they relate to the disc being discussed. And I guess legally I have to issue a ***TRIGGER ALERT***: Be prepared for opinions that might not jibe with yours. (Oh, I hope I can make this last until I get to my Matthew Sweet column... I can't wait to see how my opening line goes over...)
And now, on to business. How am I going to kick off this inaugural column? By introducing you to the very first album I ever bought myself, with my own money: the first soundtrack album from the greatest band in rock and roll history…
…QUEEN.
Look at that logo. Glorious.
Yes, the soundtrack to the 1980 film Flash Gordon, produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by Mike Hodges. A movie that has become more of a punchline than a classic. But no matter what opinion you have regarding the quality of the film, I refuse to accept any criticism of Queen's contribution that doesn't declare it THE GREATEST SOUNDTRACK ALBUM EVER RECORDED.
Entering high school in August of 1980, I was musically a blank slate. Sure, there were songs from my youth that I liked... a combination of what my Mom listened to and things that cropped up on the radio when we were in the car. But because my parents weren't very pop cultured, and I had no older sibling from whom to absorb influences, and I was the only kid my age in my neighborhood, my musical taste hadn't gelled in any real way.
Then I met Tom.
In my Social Studies class, Kevin, my friend from middle school (who died of cancer a few years ago... time is short, my friends, don't take it for granted) introduced me to his friend Tom. Tom was a quiet, unassuming guy. But a few days spent interacting with him revealed a funny, smart dude who was almost my lost soulmate. Tom loved movies. He was artistic. And he was the first person I'd met in ages who also loved comic books like I did. But Tom was a little more plugged in to pop-culture-at-large than I was. Specifically, he had a broader musical exposure than I did. And thanks to this musical maturity, he introduced me to the band that would change my life.
The greatest band in rock history. Please don’t bother arguing the point. If you disagree, you’re wrong.
Dear Jebus, Queen blew my mind. The first time I went over to his Mom's apartment, he played for me his double-A single of "Fat Bottomed Girls" and "Bicycle Race". Then he went on to play tracks off of "The Game" and "A Night At The Opera". I was hooked. I mean, slavishly and forever hooked. Over the next couple of months we dug into "News Of The World" and "Queen II". ("Queen II" will also feature in a future column...) Our every waking moment together, in and out of school, involved digging Queen like a couple of teenyboppers.
So imagine how psyched we were when we discovered that Queen were providing the soundtrack for the upcoming Flash Gordon movie! I'd missed the debut of "Bohemian Rhapsody". I'd missed the success of "The Game". I'd missed seeing Queen live in my area by a few scant weeks. (To this day, not seeing Freddie Mercury live is one of my biggest disappointments.) But here was my chance to experience another Queen milestone, an actual soundtrack to a big-budget science-fiction movie!
December finally arrived, and off we went to the theater. I honestly can't recall if we saw it the first weekend, but we definitely went during the first week. (And a few more times after that.) As cool as the visuals were, Tom and I were concentrating on the soundtrack. All the various songs and instrumentals were a perfect complement to the Technicolor imagery on the screen. We bounced out of the theater recalling our favorite bits.
Look into my ring… You will love the movie… You will praise the movie…
The infamous title track was, unfortunately, not a big hit here in the US of A. I was lucky enough to tape it off local radio one night while doing my homework. I listened to it over and over and over and over and over. The pulsing drumbeat, the crashes of lightning, the unmistakable wail of Brian May's Red Special guitar, the powerful vocals... WOW. And they folded in sound bites from the movie! The entire song was like nothing I'd ever heard before. And it made me desperate to own the entire suite of music. There was only one place that itch could be scratched: K-Mart. To the Chevy Impala!
Despite not really having an allowance, I had cobbled together somewhere in the neighborhood of eight bucks, all in crumpled bills and loose change. I cajoled my Mom to take me to K-Mart so I could buy the album. Excited beyond words, I yanked it out of the rack and ran to the register. The total with tax came to something like $7.47. I thought I'd help the cashier by giving her "exact change". But I was so discombobulated by my geeky enthusiasm, instead of giving her seven in bills and forty-seven in change, I gave her all eight bucks. Which meant, after a few moments of her trying to figure out what this bowl-haircut-sporting dope was thinking, she had to hand back fifty-three cents. Which completely invalidated trying to help her not have to give me change. To this day, when I see that album cover, or the movie logo, I remember that moment. (Ah, developmentally stunted youth. How I miss you.)
AAAANYWAY... I commandeered our big Fisher console record player and proceeded to spin "Flash Gordon" incessantly for weeks. And those weeks bled into months. I tortured my family with my obsession. (It didn't help matters that Tom gave me Queen's self-titled first album for Christmas and a tape of his "Fat Bottomed Girls"/"Bicycle Race" single so it was all Queen, all the time well into the spring.)
Sometimes soundtrack albums don't work. As individual pieces of orchestral music, they can lack the power they create when they're paired with the visuals. But "Flash Gordon" is different. Being a mix of songs, instrumentals, and movie clips, it's more than just an album, it's an "audio movie". Since I was a kid in the olden days before "owning a movie" was an affordable thing, my only options for experiencing Flash Gordon at home were twofold: one, renting the tape from a video store (and the VCR, in a big armored case that could have sheltered the Tesseract); or, two, putting on some headphones and listening to the soundtrack in the rec room for the umpteenth time. Guess which option I chose on a regular basis? Even if you haven't seen the movie, you can get the meat of the story through a spin of the album.
No one but the pure in heart, can find the Golden Grail. Boy, do I miss this man.
And “Flash Gordon” stands apart from the Queen discography as one of their most stylistically diverse albums. There are pop songs ("Flash's Theme"), rock blowouts ("Battle Theme", "The Hero"), goofy synth pop jams ("Football Fight"), oddly affecting and haunting instrumentals ("The Kiss", "Escape From The Swamp") and a Brian May arrangement of "The Wedding March" done on guitar. (I would have used myself if I weren't afraid my lovely wife-to-be would have killed me.) The only other modern soundtrack I can compare it to is Prince's "Parade", which was also an amazingly stylistically diverse album wedded to a critically maligned motion picture, Under The Cherry Moon.
As the years have passed (and oh so many years they've been), I've found myself listening to "Flash Gordon” as a whole less and less. Usually I revisit the movie once a year, but my temperament has changed such that, instead of going through the entire album, I'd rather revisit my favorite tracks.
That being said, it's still a potent memory. One look at the cover, and I'm fourteen years old again, sitting in Tom's bedroom, listening to records, and drawing the Frank Kelly Freas robot from the "News Of The World" cover. To some, "Flash Gordon" was just a mediocre collection of songs from a band that had crested their peak. But to me, it was a key that unlocked a door I walked through happily.
Maybe Flash wasn't the savior of your universe, but he sure was the savior of my universe.
YEAH!!!
(One last thing: This August it will be thirty-five years since I met Tom. And despite some ups and downs, we're still friends to this day.)
BIO:
Don Stroud is not the famous world-class surfer and actor of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and struggling amateur screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.