Buffalo Music
Sometimes I think that if my life had a soundtrack, it would be Mannheim Steamroller's Fresh Aire I - IV.
Oh, I know that these albums are little more than Disneyfied classical with a godawful gloss of 70's pop synth, a beautiful and technically proficient version of the sort of thing you'd find on a generic "Romantic Interludes" album: the modern, the medieval, and the classical all thrown together in a softcore New Age orgy. I also know that, good as they are, they paved the way for the soul-neutered drivel that plagues metaphysical bookstores to this day.
But I grew up listening to these albums. They were my first introduction to music. Revisiting them brings back powerful memories.
I had scarlet fever in the middle of a sweltering summer. It must have been over a hundred degrees, and the inside of the cadmium-red Ford EXP was violently hot, but even smothered under my blanket and huggy pillow I was cold. The Dream was playing on the 8-track, and I focused on it while Mom drove me to my grandmother's house. I stared into the EXP's rearview mirror with growing fascination. Something huge was following us, scuttling just behind the receding treeline. We were being stalked by a giant crab. I had such a high fever I was hallucinating. I couldn't have been more than four.
A year or two later, I remember standing in front of the five-foot-high speakers the first time my parents played Fresh Aire IV. The G Major Toccata opened up like an assault. One hard slam and every hair on my body stood up. The massive push of the keyboards catapulted me into a storm of sound. It's still one of my favorite pieces, exultant and terrifying in its bigness.
The smaller, silly pieces were good, too. The Cricket, with its opening chorus of insects, its cheesy medley of synth chirps and sci-fi space noises, inspired me to draw pictures of an army of bugs doing battle with a battalion of toads riding on cats. Toads firing laser beams.
Midnight on a Full Moon was my favorite at the time, with its joyous notes chopped out on a toy piano to the accompaniment of exultant horns. At once powerful and absurd, it was my one-way ticket to a wild Russian sleigh ride complete with wolves, flying horses, and really neat clothes.
But most of all, I remember the buffalo.
We often took long car trips through the countryside when I was young. Our favorite destination was Woolaroc, the 3,500-acre ranch retreat of oil baron Frank Phillips. It's a wildlife preserve, museum, and gallery now, one of the absolute coolest things in Oklahoma. I spent hours of my childhood in a darkness full of guns, shrunken heads, and taxidermy, my parents lifting me up to look at paintings.
And after the mummy-haunted dark, the drive home through brilliant sun and song. The Osage Hills are beautiful in any season, but the mixture of woods and fields becomes magical in the height of summer; the heat raises gnats from the grass and the sunlight burns the green in every leaf to a shimmering gold. We would drive home with one of the Fresh Aire albums playing, and watch the wildlife.
A captive herd of buffalo roamed the grounds, and even half-tame they were terrifying beasts. They grazed near the roadside like the black-eyed prehistoric beasts they were, in their mats of unraveling hair. With their massive shoulders, sloping spine, and silly little tails, they seemed at once laughable and monstrous. They were always there; their breath and bodies steaming in the falling snow as they stood grouped for warmth, or rain streaming from their hides in April as they foraged for new grass. And in the summer, the thick smell of them would come through the air conditioning vents, mingling with the music.
Because of the drives, we came to call those four albums "buffalo music," and I still think of them that way; they are evocative of fearlessness and freedom and long summer rides in the car, of peaceable quiet as we rode wordless as the buffalo, the music the only speech we needed.
Later, I came to appreciate those albums for the imagery they suggested to an overflowing brain. Long after the toads and laser beams, Fresh Aire II became the soundtrack for the imaginary world I created with a dear friend. I still have a hand-drawn map of that land hanging in my living room. To this day, that album recalls what little joy I had in my teenage years, and all the love I had for a place that does not exist. I will write something set there someday, and I hope that wherever he is, Chris doesn't begrudge me that.
I've been listening to all four albums over the past couple of days. The music creates a perfect triad of nostalgia, sorrow, and pleasure. Nothing brings to mind my parents' presence more powerfully, most especially my mother; no music is more deeply connected to the good parts of my childhood; and yet even those good memories are now inverted.
It's not my favorite music but it's some of the most personal music I have. And even as it gives me pleasure, it causes pain. Pain to know that summer is gone, that those times of buffalo chewing in the yellow heat, of stories passed between friends, will not come again. I have become estranged from my companion and my inner homeland, my mother is gone. Death, time, life, have introduced a sharp note.
It's a dissonance, but it's a consonance, too, these differing notes of memory. It is beautiful to play the memories back all together, like a perfect fifth. But nostalgia can shift to sorrow, that one off note intrudes, and then I feel myself reduced by grief.
Here I am on the cusp of 30, between books, between projects, moving from one life to another. Transitioning. More adult than ever, still not quite there, I am caught between memory and my next movement, suspended in paradox. Restless. A diminished fifth; almost consonant, almost harmonious.
That's me, though, isn't it? Forever singing the devil's note, just a few steps shy of the divine interval.
That's all of us.
Oh, I know that these albums are little more than Disneyfied classical with a godawful gloss of 70's pop synth, a beautiful and technically proficient version of the sort of thing you'd find on a generic "Romantic Interludes" album: the modern, the medieval, and the classical all thrown together in a softcore New Age orgy. I also know that, good as they are, they paved the way for the soul-neutered drivel that plagues metaphysical bookstores to this day.
But I grew up listening to these albums. They were my first introduction to music. Revisiting them brings back powerful memories.
I had scarlet fever in the middle of a sweltering summer. It must have been over a hundred degrees, and the inside of the cadmium-red Ford EXP was violently hot, but even smothered under my blanket and huggy pillow I was cold. The Dream was playing on the 8-track, and I focused on it while Mom drove me to my grandmother's house. I stared into the EXP's rearview mirror with growing fascination. Something huge was following us, scuttling just behind the receding treeline. We were being stalked by a giant crab. I had such a high fever I was hallucinating. I couldn't have been more than four.
A year or two later, I remember standing in front of the five-foot-high speakers the first time my parents played Fresh Aire IV. The G Major Toccata opened up like an assault. One hard slam and every hair on my body stood up. The massive push of the keyboards catapulted me into a storm of sound. It's still one of my favorite pieces, exultant and terrifying in its bigness.
The smaller, silly pieces were good, too. The Cricket, with its opening chorus of insects, its cheesy medley of synth chirps and sci-fi space noises, inspired me to draw pictures of an army of bugs doing battle with a battalion of toads riding on cats. Toads firing laser beams.
Midnight on a Full Moon was my favorite at the time, with its joyous notes chopped out on a toy piano to the accompaniment of exultant horns. At once powerful and absurd, it was my one-way ticket to a wild Russian sleigh ride complete with wolves, flying horses, and really neat clothes.
But most of all, I remember the buffalo.
We often took long car trips through the countryside when I was young. Our favorite destination was Woolaroc, the 3,500-acre ranch retreat of oil baron Frank Phillips. It's a wildlife preserve, museum, and gallery now, one of the absolute coolest things in Oklahoma. I spent hours of my childhood in a darkness full of guns, shrunken heads, and taxidermy, my parents lifting me up to look at paintings.
And after the mummy-haunted dark, the drive home through brilliant sun and song. The Osage Hills are beautiful in any season, but the mixture of woods and fields becomes magical in the height of summer; the heat raises gnats from the grass and the sunlight burns the green in every leaf to a shimmering gold. We would drive home with one of the Fresh Aire albums playing, and watch the wildlife.
A captive herd of buffalo roamed the grounds, and even half-tame they were terrifying beasts. They grazed near the roadside like the black-eyed prehistoric beasts they were, in their mats of unraveling hair. With their massive shoulders, sloping spine, and silly little tails, they seemed at once laughable and monstrous. They were always there; their breath and bodies steaming in the falling snow as they stood grouped for warmth, or rain streaming from their hides in April as they foraged for new grass. And in the summer, the thick smell of them would come through the air conditioning vents, mingling with the music.
Because of the drives, we came to call those four albums "buffalo music," and I still think of them that way; they are evocative of fearlessness and freedom and long summer rides in the car, of peaceable quiet as we rode wordless as the buffalo, the music the only speech we needed.
Later, I came to appreciate those albums for the imagery they suggested to an overflowing brain. Long after the toads and laser beams, Fresh Aire II became the soundtrack for the imaginary world I created with a dear friend. I still have a hand-drawn map of that land hanging in my living room. To this day, that album recalls what little joy I had in my teenage years, and all the love I had for a place that does not exist. I will write something set there someday, and I hope that wherever he is, Chris doesn't begrudge me that.
I've been listening to all four albums over the past couple of days. The music creates a perfect triad of nostalgia, sorrow, and pleasure. Nothing brings to mind my parents' presence more powerfully, most especially my mother; no music is more deeply connected to the good parts of my childhood; and yet even those good memories are now inverted.
It's not my favorite music but it's some of the most personal music I have. And even as it gives me pleasure, it causes pain. Pain to know that summer is gone, that those times of buffalo chewing in the yellow heat, of stories passed between friends, will not come again. I have become estranged from my companion and my inner homeland, my mother is gone. Death, time, life, have introduced a sharp note.
It's a dissonance, but it's a consonance, too, these differing notes of memory. It is beautiful to play the memories back all together, like a perfect fifth. But nostalgia can shift to sorrow, that one off note intrudes, and then I feel myself reduced by grief.
Here I am on the cusp of 30, between books, between projects, moving from one life to another. Transitioning. More adult than ever, still not quite there, I am caught between memory and my next movement, suspended in paradox. Restless. A diminished fifth; almost consonant, almost harmonious.
That's me, though, isn't it? Forever singing the devil's note, just a few steps shy of the divine interval.
That's all of us.