A Child's Fragile Eggshell Mind

When one is a young, impressionable child, many things such as movies, TV shows - even commercials - and of course songs, can have an extraordinary effect on us. They can take us on Looking Glass trips that upset us and shake up our cloistered view of the world. They can be unsettling and scary, but can also open our eyes and free us to become more daring and creative. Here are ten songs that for various reasons disturbed my complacency as a child/adolescent and made the world seem both more frightening and more interesting. The title of this post comes from a Doors song (not on this list):

'In Every Dream Home a Heartache' - Roxy Music.
The sinister music pulled me into a dark world. The lyrics (about a sex doll) are darkly comic, but the music is pure horror.

'Woman Is the N%^&#$r Of The World' - John Lennon.
This appeared on his infamous 'protest album' The title itself seemed so audacious; I couldn't believe someone would write something like that. And the lyrics, about worldwide female oppression, really opened my eyes.

'Ticking' - Elton John.
Very jarring to have a song about a guy that snaps and shoots 14 people to death (based on a true event in Queens) appear on an Elton John song that I purchased because of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me". Not ready for that one! It frightened me so much I avoided listening to the album. I wasn't quite ready to deal with the horrors of this world.

'American Pie' - Don McClean
Long before I had any idea what the song was really about, the references to 'Satan laughing with delight' and the Holy Trinity catching 'the last train for the coast' made it seem so apocalyptic and sinister that it absolutely transfixed me.

'Eleanor Rigby' - The Beatles.
What else to say? I can still remember the puddles of tears that flowed from my eyes the first time I reaallly listened to this song.

'Aqualung' - Jethro Tull.
The song - or the whole album. The album is an existential, atheistic manifesto of sorts. But the title song's brash imagery; 'snot is running down his nose', 'eyeing little girls with bad intent', etc., pushed boundaries, and changed my ideas about what it is 'okay' to say in a song

'Don't Fear The Reaper' - Blue Oyster Cult.
Pretty obvious. This song weirded everybody out.

'A Day in the Life' - The Beatles.
The strange, eerie melody and skewed arrangement sets this song apart, and of course raises it to the pantheon of all time great rock songs. But the lyrics, 'he blew his mind out in a car' which had been preceded by 'but I just had to laugh; I saw the photograph', made the Beatles seem very dangerous and scary to me.

'Angie Baby' - Helen Reddy.
This wasn't a song I liked by any means, unlike the others here. But it got a lot of radio play when it first came out, and I was quite young. The story of a strange 'special' lady, who captures a man and shrinks him into her radio, where he remains her prisoner, really creeped me out, and I remember that creepy feeling returning each time the song happened to come on the radio.

'Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner' - Warren Zevon
This song introduced me to a world I didn't even know existed as a budding teenager, the world of mercenary soldiers. The proper nouns in the song, 'The Bantu', 'The Congolese', 'The Land of the Midnight Sun', 'Biafra' etc. spoke of a world so much bigger than I had ever considered from my shelter in Columbus Ohio. And the story of a ghost, moving over the landscape of the various insurrections and civil wars taking place all over the world (which I had thought/known very little about) was so absurd and surreal that it was truly unlike any song I had ever heard before. What sort of mind creates a song like this? I wondered.

Part of the reason I am an artist today, and one who creates in the way I do, is attributable to the effects these ten songs had on me.

A(xl) Rose By Any Other Name

"Man, that Led Zeppelin sure plays some kickass guitar!" I suppose one has to be of a certain era to appreciate the humor inherent in that line; there was a time when American kids really did confuse British band's names with their members. Hence, Ian Anderson, the eccentric creative force behind Jethro Tull, actually was Jethro Tull in the eyes of many fans across the pond, and Led Zeppelin was a guitar hero who sang like a banshee. This was milked for full comic effect in the classic line, "Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?" from Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar". John Entwistle, bemoaning how his band wallowed in relative obscurity in the U.S. before their breakthrough rock opera, observed that many newly hip fans came to think of Tommy as a golden haired hunk who cut a double album titled "The Who". 

   This isn't all that hard to understand, what with so many hard rock acts of the period giving themselves names that sounded like personal names, while at the same time British singers such as Elton John and Mick Jagger going by names that, at least to North American ears, sounded unusual enough to actually be band names. Whether name-resembling or not, during the late sixties to mid seventies a band name consisting of two words generally connoted a hard, riff laden, kickass sound. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Iron Butterfly, Jethro Tull, Thin Lizzy, Uriah Heep, Alice Cooper, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, etc. If you liked your hard rock with a Dixie twist, you had Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet to wreck your eardrums with.

   Some of the band names were actual names, from history, literature or elsewhere. Jethro Tull was a British agriculturalist from the 17th century. Uriah Heep was a character in "David Copperfield". Alice Cooper, which was the band's name before singer Vincent Furnier adopted it as his own, was supposedly the name of a 17th century witch (what IS it about the 17th century?) . Actual member names have been used as well. The Van Halen brothers, Eddie, Allen and Wolfgang (yes, Wolfgang) would have been crazy not to adopt their family name as their band's name; it was just too perfect.  Similarly, John Bongiovi had only to do a little tweaking to create a name similar to his hair metal forefathers, and Voila! Bon Jovi was born.

   Over all these acts, Led Zeppelin reigned supreme, so their influence was unquestionably the greatest, not only with respect to their sound, but with naming as well. Their own reason for dropping the "a" from "lead" (the name was suggested to Jimmy Page by Entwistle) was logical enough: it was so fans wouldn't mistake them for "Leed Zeppelin". The trend caught on. In deference, the quirky misspelling of words (which had already been done by The Beatles) became de rigueur.  Soon we had Motley Crue, Axl Rose (lead singer of Guns&Roses), culminating in surely the most shameless name ripoff in rock history (after The Monkees), Def Leppard. Like a hawker in Hong Kong barking out, "Get your authentic imitation Rolexes!", these British glam metalists, with their missing "a" and double "pp"s, could hardly have been more brazen.

   Hard rock is not the only genre characterized by similarities in band names. During the latter part of the same era, a lot of crap bands emerged, "perfecting" a soulless brand of music known as power pop. Many of those acts had names related to locations or traveling, i.e. Boston, Kansas, Foreigner, Journey and Asia. Taking us a bit further afield were Starship (whose original name, Jefferson Airplane, was strikingly similar to that of their California hippie brethren Buffalo Springfield, right down to the syllable structure and double "ff"s) and Styx. Styx is a location, being the mythical river to hell. And if "Mr. Roboto" isn't the music playing on the ferry that takes you across it, then some demon isn't doing his job well enough!

    A certain power trio from Canada who, although they managed in the space of their first two albums to rip off nearly every Led Zeppelin cliche in the songbook, were a little more original in the name department, opting for a single word, Rush. Perhaps the timing was off. Perhaps if Geddy Lee and his bandmates had formed their group today, they would have selected a name every bit as sinister sounding as Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden or Molly Hatchet. Naturally, they would have had to misspell one portion of the name for form's sake. Imagine twenty thousand lighters being hoisted skyward by stoned teens, as our axe wielding heroes emerge from backstage; "Cleveland!!!! Are You Ready??? Let's welcome...... Rush Limbah!!!!"