Music Writing by Carson Arnold
MY HOURS ALONE WITH MOOD-MUSIC
Ask anybody, they'll tell you all I can talk about lately is mood-music. You know, cocktail music, EZ listening, lounge sloth for the nighttime hubba, Starlight Singers, FLY ME TO THE MOON!...There's little credence in this genre, in fact, half of it is pretty disgusting-- flipping through a free bin and encountering Lawrence Welk's terrifying face can launch emotions of both homicide and suicide, and out of the two you can't quite match. And don't whip me up anything past 1964-- the culture itself was over and retreated into beach-party chaos and hot-dog organ; Herb Alpert in the cake, etc. It's the fifties that count. Radio land. All that delicious sound lost in the swell of closed doors and living-room heaven. Ma and pa who'd have their collection spread like a dish rack on the carpet. And it's important. Seriously-- there's no way we'd be blessed by one revolutionary spasm of rock, free jazz, and punk scream without some white candle of muzak's puff 'n magic. It can't live without the rock, and rock can't function without it. That's right, thank god for it all, yessir, for some of last century's greatest figures arose from rebelling against its powder-poof tranquility. I can still see during the last half-hour of daylight, even today, old women closing their curtains, peeking out just enough to see their grandkids wrapped in goth-metal fad, pacing up the street. And who knows what either of them think when their eyes finally meet.
Still, no one wants the music. Usually someone who's purchasing anything associated with elevator muzak is looked upon as a weirdo. A creep. A loser. You spent three hours and only bought two dollars worth of stuff? Get out of our store! Believe me, I know. I could hitch a ride to any town and toss through its thrift-shops, and by day's end, build myself a room in the thousands of the most weirdest and forgotten marshmallow albums...and no one would care. In fact, if I died, and my mood-music archive was inherited by friends who took them on as an act of financial survival, they'd be sleeping under bridges. Hell, it's probably the only aspect classical conservatories and a heavy-metal concert can safely agree upon: TO HELL WITH MOOD-MUSIC. Which only binds them closer together.
My fascination with the era probably began years ago when I found what I thought was a "sampler" at a tag-sale, only realizing later it was just a cheap keyboard that could retain sound for a few seconds. I felt like a king for a few days anyway, and went out and scraped up all the cocktail music I could locate under fifty cents, in attempt to muck around with the recordings with, "hey, band, my sampler!" Actually, most of the dust-covered spines were recovered from my grandparents' old stash who were seconds away from hiring a kid to haul it all to the dump. These were sacred recordings-- those twilight alleys of 1950 piping-- man and woman-- dancing-- not a care (but a lotta worries). Popular Music Will Live Forever, The Best Of Radio; sugary material of lounge bliss. The men were always wax figures, and the women, cheeks sucked in, a cross between vuluptious and scary, making you realize the only thing that exists today are their wigs, and where are they and who's wearing 'em now? Anyway, the best of my collection I placed under my desk supporting this typewriter, which, every now and then fell over as I reached for titles such as these:
1. Mood Music-- for Listening and Relaxation
2. Soft Lights/Sweet Music
3. 101 Strings-- Mood Vienna
4. The Look Of Love
5. Drifting and Dreaming
6. Lush Instrumentals
...To name a few. These aren't essential tremolos of EZ listening, but some of the more brighter tones of dreamy, if not erotic, RPM. Weightless strings such as these echoed throughout the plastic timber of interior vacuum. In the early fifties, a small town boy from Iowa riding the slow train into the big city would stare at the massive skyscrapers in disbelief, wondering how the blue empire ticked. Chicago is a good example of this occurrence, where everything is titled and the sun never fully reaches the street. Inside the buildings, it was no more than an eternal broadcast of mood ventilation, up and down, right and left, the music averting all form of human communication, setting a theme to the model cliche, and drowning within its own perfume. Post-war. The refrigerator. Suburbia. No surprise, a few years before, half way around the world, the same tactic had been used in the concentration camps-- disposing the event into a calm and languid state, easing all morals as they inched their way to, with a brass or string section behind them, complete inhalation (never mind when the Titanic plunged under, so they say, a classical quartet began playing on board). Psychiatric wards, same thing (though my nearby one denies they do; which was difficult to ask without sounding like I should be comitted myself). Some say it all started back when they first installed the elevator, where, no way anyone on the top-floor was going to step into one, riding down fifteen uncomfortable floors with a burly bell-boy who looked like he'd mug 'em in a second. So, the boys let the shafts drip with la-la melodies, and in the lobby, even more! and out on the street, hail a cab, and even more!! come home, even more!!! Or at least that was the plan. Some of it succeeded, but instead of being a musical conformity (which Stockhausen might nail as a "great composition", and I might agree), scrubbed into TV screen-cream. The characters in the elevators remained the same, but the silence where they had to deal with one another was forever abolished. Just lean back into the syrup sound and search for your face in the tabloids.
I can't really see this happening today, though, maybe for good reason. The meditation's been bulldozed over into a thousand other familiar facets. Just dig deep into your pockets. As was disco, the loud downtown bass gurgling from thug-boy cars are indeed an example of lounge crib. Wha'cha doin', homeboy, nuttin'' but chillin'? I once spent an afternoon walking through the aftermath of what I would call "mood graveyard"-- left to entertain dead-malls living for Christmas, candle-shops, outlet centers, and all around them, potted plants no one's watered... 'cuz no one's around. It's a sad sight. The places seem to yearn for those "heavenly voices", but are squelched by its own tragedy (ultimately only making real classical music more beautiful and astounding). All you can hear is that faint, kitchy silicone soft-jazz tinkering from the lobby, which first, is absurd, and goes against all cocktail qualities, simply because no living person is actually playing a single note-- well, maybe that cheesy saxophone. Secondly, the only other place you'll ever hear that rubbish today, besides walking along side mom's searching for holiday presents, are porno films. Hooray.
But my mood is dead. Maybe no one's in the mood, or maybe I'm just a cultist, who knows. But the whole thing's an empty ship, everyone who put three fingers into one of its compositions died ages ago, and to try and contact any remote source of its creditentials, and you're left gasping on hold, making friends with a computer named Julie. I once called a lot of Wal-Mart employees asking what their opinions were on the music they played, and they all seemed oblivious that there was actually any music on. Even the house of one of the large mood-music archivists was burnt down recently by one of the California fires. Lost everything, I hear. And it's funny, think 'ol Percy Faith would ever think his records would be scraped up by acid-heads who look at 'em like it was the coolest zonk for their trip-hop duo? Never. And while we're on that subject, today's stoners probably wouldn't mind tripping to the Boston Pops just as they would dub-regaee. Ironically, the genre has become metaphysical-- throw it into any situation, and it almost swims. The cinema picked that up a long time ago with Henri Mancini's exotic bubbles. Same goes for all that Brasilian Impressions by Dick Hyman and his bosa-nova tease. Of course, the coolest example is in Fellini's film Juliet Of The Spirits, where Guiletta Masina wanders as a host and guest through assorted dinner parties, as told by the aura of cocktail music and fashion, illuminating the sexual taboo and her own hallucinations (or are they?). Better, during one point (Nina Rota film score; excellent), Masina takes a sip of liquor from her admirer, asks what it is, where he replies: "Sanqrilla quenches every thirst in those who drink...and even the thirst that is unconfessed. They call it the drink of oblivion."
Peter Sellers was around many who boozes this same drink in The Party, where he winds up being the only person who ain't boozing at a dinner bash that goes bezerk by dawn; butlers drunk, elephants walking in, the Russians are coming; a mockery of mood in the pink. By the credits, everyone's high and drenched in soap-suds laughing.
Any swing to try and incarnate mood since, like Brian Eno and other ambient ghouls, have always adopted it as an hybrid item, a transparency from something else (Eno even explains within the liner notes of Discreet Music how his bedridden experience hearing harp music at low volume inspired the landscape of his album. Odd, I've probably listened to mood-music and harp three times more than Eno's stuff). But c'mon, you had to be ignorant to create the real thing, it had to be from composers whose fathers were pals with Debussy and then named their son "Roger Roger", who later went on to develop national TV themes for a weird and white audience throughout the fifties. Babies were to be conceived and born via the filters of sprinkle stardust and champagne singers. No wonder, this was my grandparents' time. And as I leaf through their collection right now, they had albums manufactured for everybody-- usually directed towards the male-- music to work to, music to come home to, music to strip with your mistress to, music to vacation to, and music to go to church and confess all your weekly sins to. And as long as Doris Day and Rock Hudson kept pumping the screen, all was peaches and cream. This panavision mush showed on its cover-art, too-- the Dick shaking a martini behind the couch looking down at Jane, sitting with her knees bent (and notice how women would always stare elsewhere in the photos), Tom and Harry upstairs sleeping, the whole innuendo in dire tan. And all you'd hear was a wordless chorus with a song cooing, "Look For The Sliver Lining". Suddenly you got the shivering sense that the curtains swaying behind the tall landscape would never stop its wee nocturne.
Thus, kids, Black Sabbath was born! Which was great! Rock on! Yeah! Really, I don't see the difference between Billie Holiday sweeping away with Ray Ellis than I do much of the ten-record treasury, Mood Music-- for Listening and Relaxation. Nelson Riddle, Sarah Vaughn, some of the prestigious sounds were reminiscent to cocktail's sweetness, even Ravel's lighter pieces can be confused with it. Anyway, this is the ultimate bee-sting of mood chill, and my favorite album of instrumental floss. And don't worry, it's not worth a damn! Not a penny! Boxed with every available tone setting like Candlelight and Wine, Cocktail Piano, Fiddle by Firelight, it's a honeymoon tango. The closest thing it ever got to sex was a finger swerving up a muted bass. You gotta love it, though, it's cute. The color of the flower on the cover, the little flap that flips over the titles with not one mention who's responsible for the recordings-- beautifully weird. Across mine (I own a few), someone had scrawled the directions on how to play poker, where I immediately wondered where the albums had journeyed from through the last fifty years; what it had seen. Probably nothing-- the music's still waiting for daddy-o to annually light the woodfire, for drinks to be served in the dining-room, waiting to sing. And forget about culture, as close to ethnicity as these albums got was some Hawaiian uke cha-cha-- never mind black people (oh forgive me, Count Basie in M-Squad...What was that Sinatra lyric, no mud in my river or something?). Anyway, this compilation will probably go down as some form of either decadence or pride, as if questioning: do you dislike it because millions have bought it, or because you know such stuff is so easy to ignore? My reasons for being attracted to it, remain flaunting the sap in me. It's atmospheric-- then again, what else is music? People put music on when they're in the mood. Just somewhere along the line some jerk decided to cut to the chase and master something that manipulated all emotions. Or tried. There was a dashing ethereal escape listening to the dreamy drifts of the albums. The other night I was sitting humming to Music For Dining and decided to splice it all up. I was mad. I plugged in my old 4-track recorder, and began transferring each record's opening twenty-seconds until they bled together, playing simultaneously. The results were amazing. Not only did it sound good, it was as if nothing had changed, the key was all the same. Every beginning rushed into that ocean-spray symphony and lush harmony that repeated and repeated and finally gave way 'neath its own exhaust. With Cocktail Piano, I individually recorded that alone, then threw on Erik Satie, Gurdjieff, and a Beethoven sonata (and may I note, all very soothing scores), and again, it was remarkable. When I muted the volume with the Cocktail melody, everything else tattered into chaos, yet when I raised it back up, the music returned with a sense of rhythm enhancing all four. This isn't to prove much besides to say I own a 4-track, and a sampler. But in a round way, as I look over to my vinyl collection that's spread like tissues upon the floor, it's hard to imagine music functioning with as much essence without a little milky reflection floundering in the foreshadows.
Another thing. Say you grabbed your butterfly net and chased down this country's worst and never recorded songs, and adapted them to EZ listening-- inflated them into a mammoth strings section-- I promise you it'd be quite fascinating. Why wouldn't it be? millions of albums have been sold-- from Stan Getz to Zappa to John Zorn to Mike Patton of Faith No More-- who've all borrowed from its twang. Most so, Patton, who recognizes what I was referring to earlier about heavy-metal. And check out your TV. Retro's in style, bro.
You can almost still catch it within certain elderly communities of Cape Cod. Especially in someone's home where they have a vintage radio whose dial feels like it's never been turned past that one station that's decided not to discontinue their 5 pm cocktail format airing Terry Baxter and his orchestra. Keeping the geezers alive, I guess. Though you never really hear it get switched on, we all know it's sorta there.
See you in the elevators...
-Carson Arnold December 15th, 2003