The First Time I Heard… Level 42

Everyone has a band that they have followed near-obsessively over the years, even though 99% of the general population has never heard of them, or was only ever aware of one song they did. Such is the case with me (and, as you'll see, my brother and wife) regarding Level 42.

Who was Level 42, you ask? Well, for most of their career, they were a four-piece jazz/pop/fusion combo that specialized in English lite-FM funk with a pop edge. They were led by frontman Mark King, who is still considered one of the best bass guitarists in the world, and backup vocalist/keyboard wizard Mike Lindup. Rounding out the group were brothers Philip and Boon Gould, who played the guitars and drums respectively.

Now, if you didn't grow up in England, you probably have only heard their first single, "Something about You", which made somewhat of a splash on the radio in the grand old year of 1985. But not many folks knew that it was the lead single from their fifth out of a career total of ten albums. I certainly didn't know that the first time I heard them...

It was the summer of '85, and I was spending the summer afternoon doing what I pretty much always did, which was to hole up in the spare room where my typewriter was and try to hammer out the great American fantasy novel. As usual, the proceedings were going poorly. My brother stuck his head in the door (he had been in our shared bedroom next door) and said, "Hey, you should come listen to this new song on the radio." He had just weathered a long bout of mononucleosis, and spent nearly the whole time on the downstairs couch, watching MTV, the fledgling Weather Channel, and Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting. He had seen this particular song’s video, and was just now hearing it played on the radio.

I was a little reluctant to go -- because, frankly, the most boring music in the world is the kind you haven't heard yet -- but I eventually followed him and heard "Something about You" for the first time. It was such a breezy song, I remember, with an arpeggiated slap-bass line, syncopated keyboards, and soaring falsetto vocals. It was one of those rare instances where a song just grabs you on the first listen. I spent the next few weeks continuing to hunt for it on the radio, or even see if it was still in rotation on MTV.

I think, musically, this was a turning point for my brother and I, having not been indoctrinated into the world of pop music until MTV hung out its shingle in 1981. I jumped in right away, and basically never turned the channel off until around 1992, so in '85 I was heavily in its thrall. It was the beginning and end of modern music, as far as I was concerned. I wasn't even aware of college radio at the time, and wouldn't be for a few more years. But here was something that I liked that wasn't firmly designed to be part of the mainstream, something that I kind of felt like I discovered -- well, that my brother discovered...

From this point, let me digress into another facet of the power of music in one's life. I'm sure that everyone has songs or albums that they can listen to and suddenly be pulled back into a youthful time in their lives. Every song is loaded with sense memories of where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, what it all felt like. I think the reason Level 42 has stuck with me through all these years, and I why I always enjoy listening to them, is that, starting with World Machine, the album that "Something about You" came from, Level 42 had three consecutive albums that are strongly welded to my teenage years by these sense-memory ties.

Like I said, World Machine came out in the summer of 1985, the year I was first beginning to evolve into the music-purchasing juggernaut that I would later become. So although we bought the 45-rpm single (oh yes, those were the days), neither my brother nor I really considered buying the whole album yet. It wasn't until that summer, while we were on vacation at our grandparents' house in St. Mary's, Ohio, that we happened to hear the album’s second single, "Hot Water", on Nick Rocks (my grandparents were not in a section of the country that had called their cable company and told them that they wanted their MTV yet). Shortly after, we actually made the mile-roundtrip walk to the nearest retail outlet (a K-Mart, I believe), and bought the cassette.

We listened to it constantly for several weeks after that. Since "Something about You" was the first song on the first side, and "Hot Water" was the first song on the second, we spent a lot of time fast-forwarding from one end of the tape to the other, until we realized that there was a lot of good material in between too, and then the whole thing became the soundtrack of what remained of our summer. The album closer, "Lying Still", epitomizes that summer for me. It's a chilly song, I can't think of any other way to say it, and it still brings back many warm summer nights with its ending hum, punctuated by an icy cymbal chime.

One of the most exhilarating periods of falling in love is learning your new paramour's background, immersing yourself in the whys, hows, wheres and whens, piecing together what got them to where they were when you finally caught up and realized they were awesome. I hadn't yet done that with my wife-to-be, so I had to settle for the musical equivalent, purchasing Level 42's entire back catalog, which then consisted of four studio albums and a double-live. It was fun delving into all that music, from the somewhat low-fi, unsteady jazz of their self-titled debut, through the hits that England had already enjoyed a few years before, hearing the whole evolution.

Then came the dry spell, which lasted until the fall of 1987, when World Machine's follow-up, Running the Family, was released. I was excited to see some attention paid to it on MTV, which aired the video for the lead single, "Lessons in Love", several times. It was a bigger sound this time around, less jazz, and more fusion-y pop, aimed at filling stadiums instead of arenas. While there was still little interest in America, the band did produce a concert video, which MTV aired as part of their late-Saturday-night concert series, and which I videotaped. It’s still the benchmark for how a rock concert should be performed, seeming both intimate and epic at the same time. There are still versions of some songs from that concert that I prefer to the album version. Plus, there was an extended bass solo piece that showcases Mark King slapping the heck out of his bass, but not after strumming chords and plucking it like a virtuoso.

While World Machine epitomized summer for me, Running in the Family was fall. I was just starting my junior year of high school, had met my wife (although I didn't know it yet), and my brother and I were starting a tandem venture into social lives. We ran with the same crowd – thankfully, music and drama geeks tend not to discriminate when it comes to age or what school year you're in -- and this was the album we always played while getting ready to go out with friends or to an evening rehearsal. The opening synth chords of "Lessons in Love" still sound like a heraldic call to me, raising the curtain of an evening of possibility and guaranteed fun.

Things had changed a lot by the time the third album of this personal trilogy came out. Staring At the Sun didn't make it to America until October of 1988, and by that time Amy and I had worked on the school musical together, started dating, spent the summer watching movies, and then made a half-hearted preemptive breakup as she went to college in Florida, while I stayed behind and started my senior year. I was still with the majority of my friends, and taking on more responsibility in the extra-curricular groups I was in, but it almost seemed like a backwards step, just because she wasn't there.

That's the frame of mind I was in when my family drove to New England to visit my uncles. While Michigan was still mostly warm, autumn was well underway in Connecticut. I became acquainted with Staring At the Sun during the drive, and as a result to me it still feels just like that trip, overcast, chilly, drizzly, but with pockets of familial warmth. The album, like my mood, was joyous and hopeful, but still tinted with regret. For every "Heaven in My Hands", which opens its go-for-it call with a literal blast of trumpets (well, synthesized trumpets anyway), there are songs like the title track, a melancholy wash of regret at love missed. But songs such as "Silence", with its refrain "Don't be afraid/Love will always come your way", kept me optimistic. One song in particular, "Tracie", seemed to speak to my current situation, because its lyrics are aimed at a former love and basically asks, "I forget, why did we break up anyway?"

When Amy came back from college after a semester away, Staring at the Sun became an unofficial soundtrack for us, flipping around the meanings of all the songs -- the sad songs became the past, the upbeat ones embodied the future. I still love listening to it now, and vividly remember the songs in both emotional states, both in that New England fall, and that holiday season when everything I thought was lost came back to me. Of course, Level 42 didn't stop there. They went through some restructuring after Staring at the Sun, and went on to release three more albums (so far), which I’ll at least summarize:

Guaranteed: Nice work, some of it appropriately epic-sounding, but it also seemed like it could have been made by a dozen other bands. I credit this to the departure of the Gould brothers, who were replaced by what seems like a gaggle of other musicians, songwriters, and producers. It should probably be complimented on how it was able to stay true to their original sound given the situation.

Forever Now: Much better. Stripped down to just two of the original members, Mark King and Mike Lindup, with songwriting assists from Boon Gould, this felt like a return to form. Level 42 is great at setting up a groove and just riding it out, and this album glides effortlessly along for almost 75 minutes.

(Honorable mention: Mark King's solo album One Man. A solo album really in name only, it's very much in the Forever Now vein, although a little sadder in tone. But that just makes it especially nice when the closer "Changing of the Guard" comes along, which asks the musical question "Is this the end of the old guard?/I wouldn't count on it!"

Retroglide: The "reunion" album that lacks a lot of the punch that the previous nine albums had. I've listened to it a handful of times since it came out in 2006, and it hasn't really made an impact yet. I could name some of the tracks, but I'll be damned if I can recall what any of them sound like.

One thing I forgot to mention was the part of being a music fan that has really ceased to exist in the 21st century, that of hunting for rare b-sides and import releases. In the case of Level 42, I managed to snag a single compilation, a remix album, and an "early tapes" collection while I was over in Germany in 1992. Wandering through record stores is something that I really miss from growing up.

So, now that I've waxed poetic about them for a few thousands words, aren't you interested to hear Level 42 for real? I'd have you start where I did 28 years ago, with "Something About You". And then I'd ask you to think about what music vividly takes *you* back to when you were young, and go listen to it. Try to capture some of that magic and energy again, even if all the memories aren't all good. Because that's what makes us who we are.

The Goldenest Age

Last summer I took a solo trip to the gas station to fill up my mother-in-law’s car while she was here visiting. Since I didn’t have any cassette tapes with me, I ended up scanning the radio stations and ended up listening to the tail end of “Prairie Home Companion”, which I’d never heard before, aside from sitting through the movie, which most people will agree doesn’t count. One thing in particular struck me about Garrison Keiller’s monologue, which happened to be about strawberries, and that was the sound of his live audience. I’m guessing that most of the people who attend his shows are well over 50, and if that’s the case, then I have to report that you can’t determine the age of a person by the sound of their laughter. It could very well have been a crowd of (admittedly, low-key) twentysomethings listening to him, judging by their collective sound.

It got me thinking about external versus internal age, and as I creep further into the territory where it’s more and more common for me to clearly recall things that happened thirty years ago(!), I’ve decided that where I am, here just over forty, is actually a great place to be. There are spectrums of attitude that we move along as we get older, and they all seem to progress from being in a “collective” state to being in a “reflective” state. By this, I mean that we start out primed to accumulate experiences, while the older we get, we tend to get just as much – if not more -- enjoyment from remembering and assimilating those experiences.

What comes to mind when I say that is a writing project that my cousin and I undertook when we were in our twenties. We traded off writing short chapters of a weird fantasy novel, and a pattern quickly developed… my cousin would add these wildly, seemingly tangential plot twists into the mix, and I would then spend the next chapter figuring out how to fold it into the canon of what we had already written. Clearly, he loved the freedom of taking whatever creative idea his mind latched onto and lobbing it to me, and I loved making it fit into the existing story. It tells a lot about our personalities, I think, and also illustrates the difference between the “collective” and “reflective” states that I mentioned. Oh, and by the way, we’re starting to undertake this experiment again, now in our forties.

We’re definitely most collective when we’re young. At fifteen, the only thing that matters is what’s new, what’s got buzz, what can we be the first to experience. That feeling comes at a time when we’re still restricted in where we can go and what we can do -- and rightly so, since we still think we’re invincible. This fact might be ironic, or it might even be fuel for the fire. At the other end, late in life, is the reflective state, something that I’ve seen in older people. It’s the familiar warmth of cloaking yourself in a cloud of nostalgia, where you can sit back and reminisce, editing your own life for clarity and content, figuring out where later developments originated from, where your most formulative moments occurred. While there’s a danger to being too adventurous when you’re young, there’s also a danger in old age. Sometimes that web of recollection gets so thick that not even a hint of anything new comes in. I doubt that a typical person of eighty-five lives in a world that has changed more than marginally since they were seventy-five, no matter how much the world has moved on in the interim. In these cases, there’s such an accumulation of life, things and places and people to love and sift through at will, that there’s hardly any room for more.

At forty, I’m realizing that I’m poised on the tipping point between these two states, able to appreciate the value of nostalgia, but also still itching to see what the next thing coming around the corner is. Music, for example. I’ve got a long YouTube “watch it later” assortment of new music that I want to give a listen, but at the same time I’m also happy to spend an afternoon letting an 80s playlist randomize on my music player.

There are other spectra of experience I started thinking about too, and the longer I look at them, the more they all seem to converge right around this spot where I stand. For another example, I’m just as likely to enjoy travel and action over staying at home relaxing... I probably naturally passed that point back when I was twenty-five, but it’s been revitalized thanks to a four-year-old who makes it almost impossible to sit for an extended period of time. Now there’s a reason to head to the park, or the pool, or the zoo, which just makes me remember how much fun it is to go out and be collective again.

Relationships are yet another vector. Youth is full of passion, the headlong rush to get to Whatever’s Going to Happen Next, a relentless exploration of everything love has to offer, quiet moments of intimacy interspersed among days and evenings full of raucous adventure and uncertainty. Later on, though, it’s the slower shared moments that matter, the ease of being who you truly are with the person you love, without the pressure of having to be anyone else other than who you are, even that means sitting and not having to say anything. From where I stand, I can feel the pull of both, being both beckoned forward and eased back in equal measure.

Of course, I don’t know whether the vantage point I have is unique, or if everyone feels this way at some particular point in their lives. I suppose the ideal thing would be to stay in this state as long as possible. There must be some people who out there who spend the majority of their lives in it. I’m resolved to do just that, to stay in it as long as I can. It’s really having the best of both worlds, isn’t it, the constant process of accumulating and assimilating all at once?

Infinitely Jested

I recently finished reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which you can often find on “Longest Novels in English” lists. I read it on and off for almost six months. It's a hard novel to explain, although it happens mostly in only two locations, and mostly involves just a handful of characters (although there are literally hundreds of ancillary characters you can attempt to keep track of, too, if you’re so inclined.) I have to say, it's an entertaining read, one that I'm sure will be influential in the coming years when I think about the possibilities of the novel, the forms it can take, and what a novel can ultimately be about. It's long-winded at times exhaustively descriptive, especially if you’re not into the jargon of both training for and playing tennis, but you can tell through it all that the writer is finding this jungle of words he's hacking his way through highly amusing.

One piece of wisdom stands out to me, though, and when enough years have gone by and I've forgotten all the details and maybe even the broad themes of the novel -- although I'm pretty sure that, unlike many other books, just rereading passages from it will rather easily recreate the neural pathways this gargantuan thing has tunneled into my mind – it will stick with me. I'll try to explain it in the less than three closely typeset pages that it took DFW. It all boils down to this: there is no reciprocal emotion for idol worship.

Let me clarify... there are people in all our lives who we idolize, the people (maybe movie stars, maybe rock gods, maybe authors, maybe political/religious figures, maybe star athletes) who we look up to and are in awe of. We buy their tickets, or their CDs, magazines with their covers on them, or whatever extensions of these people exist in our personal world, just to feel like we're closer to them, to experience what it is they have to say or what they have to show us. They kindle something in us that makes us long for them, to be near them, to maybe even be them. This is the centerpiece of American celebrity, this belief that being famous will make us stronger, will make us more *us*.

But here is the kicker, one that should make us reevaluate who we are in relation to our idols. The celebrities that we love are, for the most part, totally excluded from this collective longing we have for them. Being loved by millions of fans doesn't make you feel any more worthy, or secure, or whole as a person. If anything, it makes you even more isolated, more numb to actually experiencing life and love as it's meant to be experienced. As confident and self-assured as they may seem, that feeling (if they have it at all) isn't provided by the adoration of millions of fans. If anything, it exists in spite of it.

American culture seems based on this fallacy, that being famous will make you happier. We keep striving for it, even as we are told over and over that it’s not what we think it is. Fiona Apple can stand up in front of an audience and say, flat out, “This world is bullshit” (meaning, the world of Celebrity) and we won’t believe her. We believe the illusion because we want – and some of us *need* -- to believe it, that our talent and our good works will get us noticed, will make us worthy of being loved.

This, I think, is the heart of what Infinite Jest is about, and if it is I'm amazed that DFW was able to convey it to me as I read it, and not make it clear only in retrospect. Many of the characters are young students at an elite tennis academy, and they're preparing for a possible life of stardom knowing full well that most of them won't get there, and if they do they'll only survive it if they ignore it. Other characters are recovering drug addicts of one kind or another, living at a halfway house near (and sometimes working menial jobs at) the tennis academy. Each of them is learning to turn their psyches inside out, going from the self-absorbed, self-gratifying stasis of addiction into a life where each moment, each day you have to validate your own existence to yourself. All the characters are either moving from anonymity to stardom, or stardom (at least in their own heads) to sober anonymity.

I think that DFW's novel is a powerful, sly meditation on how we choose to assign meaning to things in our lives. Should it be ourselves? Should it be the love of others? And there are other questions, too: What does a person amount to, really? Are we simply a swirling mass of the various entertainments we ingest, movies or sports or drugs or whatever? How is it possible that we can even be able to deal with the pain and uncertainty of living?

I find myself thinking that these are things that DFW must have thought about all the time. A person just doesn't write a 480,000+-word novel in the span of three years without being passionate about the subject. He actually ended up committing suicide, perhaps because of the very fame he seemed to be working his way toward acceptance through writing Infinite Jest. I'll definitely be reading more of his works, to see if this was the theme that forms the through-line of his life.

But for now, I feel easier about putting aside the hunt for fame that fuels so many people’s ambition. There’s a truer path, and that’s understanding, accepting, and honing one’s own true talents. If we focused more on that as a culture, just think of what we could achieve.