School

I was writing with a friend and we were talking about musical styles. I told him the story of when I first wanted a quality stereo system. I was walking through a Hi-Fi shop (ha.. that’s what we called them then) and they were playing a half-speed mastered disk of Crime Of The Century, Supertramp’s first LP. The song that was playing was SCHOOL.

My friend is a few years younger than I am and he didn’t know the song. I quickly did a youtube search and found it. I turned up the monitors and played it for him, relating my recollection of my first hearing..

I was walking past a set of speakers at the end of the first verse while the guitars were slowly building. There were the sounds of children playing in the background as the tension in the music slowly wound up.. they were laughing and yellling. As the guitars wound up... I was dead center between the speakers.. a little girl screamed, just a split second before the band kicked in, and when they did. It was Electric!

I stopped in my tracks and turned 90 degrees and stood there for the remainder of the song. Wow. Within a month I owned a thousand dollar stereo component set. It was the best money I ever spent.

As I relived that moment with my friend, I couldn’t help but think this was before click tracks and midi, and pro-tools, and autotune. Before engineers could individually move wave-forms around independently on their individual tracks. Before they could cut and paste cuts in place and comp vocals and instrumental takes with a swipe of the mouse.

This was the definition of synergy. As we listenened to the band go from full on jamming, back to a break-down half-way through the 5 1/2 minute song, my friend said, “this would never happen in today’s music” . I’m hoping that’s not true. I’m hoping that there’s room for this type of magic to happen again. Even though it might be on ear-buds, instead, I long for my kids to feel the way I felt the first time I heard that little girl scream.




The moment I spoke of occurs at 1:44