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.
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