#609: B is for The Bears

By the time I get out
of the B section of the
alphabet, It turns out
that Adrian Belew will
have appeared three
times in three different
poems representing
three different artists.
This is his second arrival,
as the front man and
collaborative songwriter
for a short-lived,
once-reunited, four
album-making band
called The Bears.
As much as I was
interested in almost
everything Belew did,
I didn’t get my first
album by The Bears,
the 1987 debut album,
until recently, or, say,
within the last decade,
when I took my son
to the the record store,
told him he could choose
something, and he picked
it out of the stacks,
probably amused by
the silly cartoon of the
band members on the cover.
Pleased with the luck
that my son would grab
something I was also
interested in, we took
The Bears home with us.
If I had bought this
record in 1987, I think
it would have become
a favorite. It’s rocks nicely.
Not at all proggy,
although it does have
plenty of Belew’s guitar
pyrotechnics, it’s a power pop
album and it sounds
atypical of the 80’s,
unless you compare it
sonically to something
like an XTC record;
it sounds remarkably
out of its time, as all
truly great records should.

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Notes on the vinyl edition: Probably an original pressing, The Bears, Primitive Man Recording Company, 1987, used copy, purchased for $6.00.

Note on the writing process: Still disappointed how most of these poems about artists in my record collection don’t really feel like poems at all, but paragraphs arranged as lines on the page. I’m tempted to just start writing them in paragraph form, but there’s something kind of satisfying, and easy on the eyes, to see them in this long, skinny way. Any thoughts? I’d love to hear from a reader or two. I figure, that if I’m able to make it all the way through this project, I will have stumbled occasionally onto a real poem, hopefully one for every letter, and I’ll end up with a nice chapbook worth of decent poems about the records in my collection.