First Day of Winter (Edgar)

[ornoth]

With everything else that’s going on, I figured I’d kill some time with a more spontaneous, stream of consciousness post.

It’s purely conjecture, but one of the things I think people enjoy about my blog is when I relate stories about experiences that might be a little uncommon. And since most of my friends and readers are younger than I, one way to do that is to talk about when I was young. Here’s one such story.

I suppose everybody can probably identify with the experience of hearing a particular song for the first time and knowing that from that point forward, everything would be different. I have been fortunate to live through several such episodes, but one that happened back in middle school in the early 1970s has always stuck with me.

Imagine, if you will, a time long before music used computers and digital signal processors. Beyond that, imagine a time before synth-pop, before synthesizers had even been invented. A time when “keyboards” meant only one of two things: a piano or a harpsichord.

It was a time when music was looking for a new direction. Led by the Beatles, the protest music of the 1960s had given way to a muddy, directionless jumble of drug-addled metal, drug-addled glam, and inane balladic mainstream pap like “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be”. Even the Beatles lost their vision, gave up, and went off in separate directions, seeking the elusive new sound that would appeal to an increasingly disaffected audience.

That’s what music was like in the 70s, when I was in grammar school: Elton John against Black Sabbath. ABBA versus Alice Cooper. Hall & Oates and Kiss. The BeeGees and Judas Priest.

It was in that environment that I went off to school one morning and got pulled aside by Burd, one of the class delinquents. He was playing a recording for a group of kids: Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein”.

It was heavy. Ridiculously massive guitar hooks, topped by a funky sax solo as well as a call-and-response drum solo. It was crazy heavy, but melodic, upbeat, and emotional. But featured on top of it all was this strange new wonky sound I’d never heard used this way before: the synth.

The frontman—albino musical prodigy Edgar Winter—penned the track to specifically highlight the potential of the synthesizer as the lead instrument in a composition, a role it had never previously been used for. He was the first person to strap a synth around his neck for use on stage, which would eventually lead to the development of the keytar.

As soon as I heard “Frankenstein”, I knew music had changed. The synth was so different and so plastic, at one time being an incredibly flexible artistic tool, but also capturing the increasingly sterile, dehumanized nature of life in America. The fact that I’m writing about that song today—more than forty years later—is an indicator for how powerfully it affected me.

Within a few short years, artists around the globe picked up the synth: Kraftwerk, OMD, Gary Numan, Brian Eno, the Cars, Ultravox, Devo, and of course the Buggles. By the end of the 70s, the synthesizer had done what the Beatles couldn’t. It had finally given music a new identity: New Wave synth-pop; a new medium: the music video; and a new channel: MTV.

I might not have foreseen all that hanging around before class that morning, but I knew that song represented a major change in the musical landscape. And I wanted more. Thankfully, lots of people felt similarly, and the synth became the signature instrument of the 80s.

Listening to “Frankenstein” today, I’m just as moved as I was as a child. Sure, camp has accreted on the outfits, the hair, and the symphonic style of the 1970s. But the composition and execution still retain most of their original energy and power.

If it doesn’t seem quite that impressive to you today, that’s probably because musicians have been following in Edgar Winter’s footsteps for the past forty years. But trust me, back then, this was fresh, innovative, and unlike anything we’d ever heard before.

So that’s one of the things I remember…

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