The brap I had been looking for

 

Photo credit: Michael J. Thumm

sometime in 1977 my friend Neil showed me his new KISS album, Destroyer. I was blown away.  That album art was just WOW! Four bad ass dudes strait out of some outrageous syfi movie. In the scene they were leaping up atop some ruble in a triumphant pose. Behind them a burning city. Neil told me that this band KISS had vaporized Detroit with fire. Oh Wow, I thought, this music is going to be crazy awesome! Then he played the record, and wouldn't you know, I was immediately underwhelmed! I felt I was drowning in boring pop radio singing. So many words, and that ho hum melody. The six year old critic in me could not get my head around how an album cover with such promise, could dispense something so sonically disappointing. I suppose it was my first step into appreciating how to not judge a book by its cover.

When I got back home I was still day dreaming of that magnificent album art. I told my mom what I had witnessed. She immediately said she did not want me listening to that acid rock. What is this acid rock I thought to myself. Surly acid rock was not that boring radio drivel my friend Neil had just played? So mysterious this phrase “acid rock”. I was intrigued. The term had peeked my interest. However if acid rock was anything like that kiss album, I was easily not interested.

10 years later after a long stint of listening to country and western music (thanks mom and dad), my friend Mike found my imagination. In his dark cigarette smoke filled bedroom, a noise had crawled out his compact disc player. Have you ever heard of Skinny Puppy he asked? Mike was making me nervous. He was my “new friend”.  This noise was not the Def Leopard so many of my classmates had boners for. 

In my mind, what had erupted out of Mike’s speakers sounded like an attack ship on fire! The soud pierced the nicotine filled air with of Mikes dark bedroom with eyeball slicing green lasers. Its sonic tempo laying waste to a far away regiment of kill-bots at Tannhäuser Gate. Clearly craftsmanship like this was not the work of a half baked American rock band. 

Here I was realizing my poor mom’s fears. Although I was aware this was no acid rock, I was entranced by a sonic landscape possibly more insidious. I was allowing myself to be transformed by music that resembled the howling of a vicious dog enduring a terrible acid trip. I was taken by lyrics that one could only describe as inspired by a mange infected one eyed hell hound who eagerly sought to eat all the cum dolls of every homophobic heavy metal boy in the Dallas Fort Worth Area. I had become lost within the imagination way to many science fiction novels had distorted my brain into.

However when I came back to earth I felt as if I had been blessed by a great rock’n’roll band. At least, I must have been somewhere in a stupor. Maybe it was just my inner weirdo getting his freak on. Regardless as it turned out Mike is a really good dude. And he sent me on my way with some Skinny Puppy on cassette. As one might imagine that tape immediately transcended its self into the tape player of my 1980 chevy Monza, where it stayed in heavy rotation for weeks.

This was the music I had hoped was on that KISS record my friend Neil had played for me so many years before. And here it was pulsing through the speakers of my car,  I had fallen in love with dark electro-industrial music. I had found the brap I had been looking for.