I remember the moment when ambient music first got a hook into me. I was a 12-year-old loner prone to contemplative walks through the latchkey afternoons of my pre-adolescence. I had received my birthday present for that year from Aunt Pammy-Whammy, my non-biological, “fun aunt” who proudly smoked a joint in photos from my first concert ever (Crystal Gayle at the Cotton Bowl). Pam was one of those “signpost connections” that every kid needs growing up to point them in cool directions. She had been attendant at the aforementioned epochal live show, she would give me my first copy of Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay’s “The Day the Laughter Died”, an album that I have never not had a copy of on me throughout the ages of the Walkman, the Discman, and the I-phone. But before all of those intervening years of comedy gold would pass, she gave me a potentially more important birthday present—a cassette by my first ever favorite band. A cassette with songs that will forever transport me back to imaginary lands that were terrained within my neocortex through endless solitary walks with a Walkman, after school, forever in sunsets or gloom.
The valley is deep but when I go there, I can still hear that one track with all of the freshness that I felt when I took it in for the first hundred or so times during that first year. It is a desert song. It is a whistle in the drywood. There is the lizard pulse thrum. There are the guitar notes like wind chimes made from stray bits of junk tchotchkes. There is a whispering like the wind that isn’t human. The hard-on of a lead singer is not involved. It doesn’t go anywhere, though it does transport me somewhere with faithful regularity. This was my initial contact with Brian Eno and it came about through his work with the biggest rock band on the planet for the next twenty years of my life.
I didn’t know any of those details at the time but I would quickly begin learning more about that one track on that one album that that one band made right before they swallowed the world. The promotional campaign for the album rolled out on MTV and I watched the half-hour special on the recording of the album whenever it aired. MTV survived on reruns of anything even remotely resembling what we call ‘content’ today so my fascination for my first band was endlessly nurtured. And one of my favorite scenes from the making of this album has the lead singer out of the picture. Guitar hero #1 is holding that beautiful black Stratocaster with the maple neck and the black pickguard that sent a shiver through my every wet dream of being in a band. Guitar hero #1 is losing his hair. And so is the wispy gentleman next to him, the one with his hands all over the volume pots on the beautiful black guitar. Somehow the two of them are playing THE SONG…together…on this one guitar.
My young head swirled in possibilities. Then (!) the half-bald blonde guy picks up a silver box in one hand and puts it to the strings. The terrain of the desert in my imagination was instantly defined in latitude and longitude by the sound of the E-Bow on the Edge’s strat. The caterwauling moan created by the infinite delay machine is like the smell of my mother’s cooking. I know everything that it signifies. Invisible coyotes clip through the windblown scrub in my brain. There is smoke in the sky, though I do not know from where it came. It is the 4th of July.