High School Soundtrack: 1975-1979 (Part One)

For some reason, my upcoming 30th High School reunion has caused me to do a lot more reminiscing than 20 or 25 did. Lately I have been thinking about the music that I used to like back then. If you look at the charts, the most popular artists were Elton John, the BeeGees, Andy Gibb, Donna Summer and Rod Stewart. It was the era of disco and bland, syrupy pop. However, that wasn't what I listened to.

The Triumvirate

The three most formative bands of my teen years were Kansas, Styx and the Electric Light Orchestra. What they had in common were more of a symphonic sound and (what appeared to my unformed teenage brain to be) deeper lyrics.

ELO's Face the Music (1975) was the first record which really blew me away. From the first strains of "Fire on High" which featured creepy strings and voices played backward to rocking guitar, it furnished the perfect overture for a stunning concept album. (The backmasked vocals say "The music is reversible, but time remains the same. Clever, but not profound). My friend David Dettman could talk for hours about the Electric Light Orchestra, explaining how their founder was shot by someone who feared that he would destroy classical music and how they were going to change the name of the band to the Electric Laser Orchestra, but someone leaked the information so that the plans had to be dropped. Alas, ELO degenerated into pop and then into disco within a few short years. Their later work was overproduced and overly commercial.



Styx was another favorite of my high school years. The Grand Illusion (1977) featured lyrics which appealed to an alienated youth:

so if you think your life is complete confusion
'cause your neighbor's got it made
just remember that it's a grand illusion
and deep inside we're all the same

--"The Grand Illusion." Their signature tune, "Come Sail Away" was clever. It started off with an almost classical piano riff exploring sailing as a metaphor for carrying on amidst life's disappointments while building to to a crescendo about climbing into a spacecraft with aliens. It was a bit silly, but it was very dramatic.



However, the band that made the deepest impression and which I still listen to today is Kansas. Leftoverture (1976) and Point of Know Return (1977) appealed to me for their orchestral arrangements and searching lyrics. Although I didn't know it at the time, the lyrics in songs like "Closet Chronicles" and "Dust in the Wind" reflected the spiritual searching of Kerry Livgren in his pre-Christian period. The theme of searching for truth was very appropriate for me at the place I was then--and remains profound today.



Two of the high spots of my high school years were seeing Kansas and Styx at the El Paso Country Coliseum (where they would later hold our high school graduation ceremony for all 800+ of us). The Coliseum will always be a place filled with memories of really loud music and the smell of smoke and spilled beer. (My parents showed remarkable restraint in not burning my clothes after those concerts or asking more probing questions about why they had such a peculiar smell to them.)