I
High school kids these days
have what they call “lip sync”
competitions, wherein two
dozen students or more
choreograph complex dance
numbers while a smaller
group of young people
pretend to sing the vocal
along with the elaborate moves.
When I was a kid, a “lip sync”
was called an “Air Band,”
and consisted of
smaller numbers of students
pretending to be the band members
of the group to whose music
they were syncing. That’s right.
A kid pretended to play the drums,
another kid pretended to play bass,
and one or two other kids
played the guitar. And someone
was the lead singer.
In my sophomore year in high
school, I was Doc Neeson
and I fronted a lip sync version
of Angel City. I had seen
the band live a few times,
loved Doc’s manic presence,
wanted to be him, in a way,
and I could do a pretty mean
impression. Lots of jumping
up and down, crazy hand gestures,
maniacal eyeball stares,
while my bandmates rocked
out with tennis rackets for guitars
and the drummer played
imaginary air drums, I think.
My classmates ate us up.
We loved that feeling
and we won the contest
almost every time.
II
Australians, playing a kind
of punk alternative to AC/DC,
musically similar, less bluesy,
brainier, lyrically darker, more
literary, Angel City wore their hair
short and for their first two
albums, I was a rabid fan.
The perfect fusion for my
budding transition from
hard rock kid to new wave,
they gave me the key ingredients
in my most formative years
for my own musical soup.
These first two records hold up, I find.
Not a single throwaway, laden
with hooks, great guitar solos,
a hard rock sophistication unusual
during this era of mindless party music.
Notes on the vinyl editions: In Australia the band was known as The Angels, but in the American market, the band was called Angel City, probably to avoid confusion and possible legal issues with other bands with the same or similar names–Angel, for example. Both of my Angel City records are used, covers throughly worn, but records in almost perfect shape. Face to Face, Epic Records, 1978, stamped on the back cover: “For Promotion Only, Ownership Reserved By CBS, Sale Is Unlawful.” Darkroom, Epic Records, 1980.
Postscript in Bullets:
- This is the 8th poem in a series of poems about records in my collection, a response to the attempt to listen to every record I own, A to Z, and write a poem-like thing about every artist represented. This may take a long time. It’s taken me a week so far, and I’m not yet out of the A’s.
- All the poems in this series will have dumb titles to make these pieces easy to distinguish from other kinds of poems.
- The poems may or may not be a direct response to the listening, might be tangential, discursive, journal-like, biographical, like this one. I’m finding I am less satisfied with the output when I end up writing purely descriptive pieces about the music. I prefer the associative approach, even though it is less obvious that I have actually listened and not just remembered. But that’s not really the point, I think, is it? The listening is just for me. The writing, however, hopes to find an audience. So I want to try to do what’s best on the page, what’s most engaging or artful. I will try to do better.
michael jarmer 