Complete Discography vol. 1
With the Complete Discography series I will examine how my favorite albums actually made their way into my life. I hope to post one of these every two weeks along with any other WPC content, the next installment with highlight The Fire Show’s swan song, Saint The Fire Show.
Complete Discography vol. 1– Radiohead’s Kid A
It was the year 2000, things were changing. High speed internet was becoming more widely available in the form of DSL and cable hook ups, that’s what I heard at least. I had a dial-up modem on the family’s shared desktop in our unfurnished basement that I would use at night mostly to talk to my friends Dan and Mark and read a few things about music, put books on reserve at the local library, look for slow, slow porn and use this new program everyone had been talking about: Napster. My transfer rate was, at best, 2.3 kbs/s so downloading full albums wasn’t really something I could do unless I knew I was going to be at the computer for a good two hours, so I spent most of my time within the realm of Napster simply typing queries into the search function and seeing how many returns I could get. Sometimes when I recognized a person’s name from a few searches I would take a look at what they had in their personal libraries and write down a few names of bands and albums and then research them a little further, read a few reviews, try to find a few snippets, repeat on and on.
The buzz started coming through in August. Articles, message board posts, chat forums, seemingly everyone at all of my internet haunts was talking about the new Radiohead record. Snippets of songs were finding their way onto Napster, live versions from shows in Europe even claims of a completed and mastered album floating around out there somewhere waiting to be tracked down. It was a burgeoning music nerd’s dream come true, it was a steeplechase, it was a treasure map with an X of indeterminate value, it was a scavenger hunt without any completion list, just the knowledge that one day the thing we were all looking for would be presented and easily accessible to all and only then would we all know how close we came. I wanted in.
Of course I’d heard of Radiohead. I knew the videos and singles of The Bends. I’d listened to Ok Computer a few times with my friend Jarrod while he explained to me how difficult the guitar parts really were. I wasn’t devout by any stretch of the imagination but I’d liked what I’d heard, the band held a certain level of intrigue in my mind that contributed to the overall mysterious feeling I was getting from all of the hype so I jumped onto the bandwagon, I joined the club. I downloaded a few live cuts, things that didn’t even distinguish the tracks and were only thirty seconds long, but I still listened to them, studied them even. It turned out I didn’t really like them. They sounded muddled and distorted, atonal and cold. When the album came out that October I decided the chase was the best part and didn’t even go into Best Buy for the kill.
Fast forward to December, a week shy of Christmas and my sister and I are doing the typical let’s walk around a store together and each point out what we want to one another routines that I’m sure were part of anyone with siblings collective experience between the ages of 14 and 18. I don’t remember what she picked out, maybe something by Dave Matthews or John Mayer, I was having a little more trouble because I was quickly finding out the kind of music I was getting into wasn’t all that available in the big chain stores. I walked by the R’s and there it was, a whole goddamn row of them. I picked up the album for a second and looked at it, kind of sneered at the snow capped mountains and small plumes of lava gracing the cover. I turned it over and read the song tittles, I only recognized “The National Anthem” from the things I’d downloaded. My sister came up to me as I was looking the disc over and said something like, “Did you finally find one?” I shook my head and then handed her the disc. We each checked out at separate counters and headed back home, wrapped the CD’s we’d just bought one another and stuck them under the tree to sit there for a week when we’d exchange our gifts with a smile and a faint, “Thanks”. But something was nagging at me as I looked at the disc sitting there under the tree. I really wanted to hear it. I asked my sister if she didn’t think it was kind of silly that we should leave them sitting there and maybe we should just trade them off then and there, but she declined, she wanted to wait until Christmas and I didn’t argue with her. I just waited it out and fought off temptation to just download the thing at a rate of two songs a night so that I could listen to the whole, complete thing a day early.
By the time Christmas morning came I was downright anxious about the whole thing. The family exchanged gifts, ate our traditional breakfast together and despite how much I wanted to pull away for an hour to listen, I didn’t want the grief of “ruining” the families time together so I fought off the urge. After breakfast we broke off from one another for a while to get ready to head over to my Uncle’s house and it was here in these few moments that I got my first taste of the record. I put it into my little Magnavox boom-box I had to slam the lid down on to get CD’s to read, turned the volume down to the setting I’d had marked to know it wasn’t audible outside of the closed door and pressed play. The opening synthesizer bars of “Everything In It’s Right Place” rattled the cheap plastic speakers, and as the track unfolded I was almost sure the thing was skipping in the player but somehow the sound was still coming through. I stopped it and restarted it, but it sounded the same. This time I waited until the vocals came into the mix and I realized it was supposed to sound like that so with a disappointed look on my face I backed away and went back to trying to button my right cuff. I didn’t even make it through the title track before I had turned it off and was a little mad at myself for not pointing out that lone copy of In On The Kill Taker to my sister while we were in Best Buy the week before.
Christmas day passed by the same way it always had. We talked with our extended family members about what was happening in our lives, how good the Rams were looking and how everyone’s job or education was going. As I was half listening to everyone’s stories I kept hearing the opening bars of “Everything In Its Right Place” repeat over and over in my mind. The breakdown of “Kid A” and the treated, “We’ve got heads on sticks / you’ve got ventriloquists” keep looping around in my mind as I talked to a few of my cousin’s husbands Aunt’s about what I liked about working in a library. The sounds I’d heard from my brief exposure to the album just wouldn’t seem to let go. I didn’t really like them but they were still in my head, they still stuck with me somehow and part of me respected that. It wasn’t good, I thought, but it was memorable, it was different.
When we got home that night the four of us kind of milled around a bit in the living room, Mom and Dad found a movie they wanted to watch on television that I didn’t really care about so I borrowed my Father’s Walkman and took it back to my room. I left the lights off and opened the mini blinds so I could see out into the street. I loaded the disc into the player, put on the standard issue headphones, the ones with the arc across the top made of thin metal, and I pressed play. I listened to the whole record that way, staring out of the window with only the Christmas lights hanging from the gutters aglow. It wasn’t snowing, it just flat out looked cold outside, a breeze would come through and rattle the evergreen outside of my window, and occasionally I would put my hand against the glass to feel the chill of the air outside.
It was then and there I fell in love with Kid A. I loved the spiraling bass line of “In Limbo”, I loved the fact that the word “spiraling” was even in the lyrics of the song. I loved the horns of “The National Anthem”, I loved how the soft wilting “Treefingers” melted into the opening of “Optimistic” with its haunting little croon buried in the mix, I even loved the “hidden” piece at the end of “Motion Picture Soundtrack” that sounded like some kind of computer generated orchestra warming up, getting in synch.
Eight years later the disc is still one of my absolute favorites. It is an album I find myself returning to in any season and in any situation, which is a rarity when it comes to my record collection. I can still listen to it and be taken back to hearing it for the first time there in my childhood bedroom, but at the same time I still discover new things buried within it’s labyrinth of sound with each new listen.
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