Ever since I was disappointed by Space Oddity I have been trying to figure out why I was disappointed by Space Oddity. I can see that it has lost its luster but I can't see why! It was like sending a friend off to baseball camp as a shortstop and having them come back as a beret wearing poet. Not to imply that all poets wear berets or that all beret wearers are poets but I am implying that something happened when I was looking the other way.
If you would like to take the sensible route you could point out that I am probably the one that changed, not Space Oddity. You could argue that the album stays the same while I (theoretically) do not. Yeah, I thought of that too so I started experimenting with other records in my collection. I was trying to figure out if there was some sort of identifiable trend occurring or if records just start to suck for no reason.
Not long before my ill-fated listens to Space Oddity I had played Scoundrel Days by a-ha and thought it was excellent. Much to my surprise, it was not the bad kind of excellent, which is the kind of excellent where the music is terrible but it dredges up fond memories of buying Teen Beat. That is what I expected from a-ha but instead I was impressed with the songwriting. Then within a couple of weeks I had a problem with Space Oddity. How did that happen?
I assumed that a record from the middle school years would not hold up as well as a record from the post-high school era. You know, Teen Beat memories and all. So I started my record listening experiment even though it wasn't a true experiment because I didn't have a control group and a variable group. Plus if I had controls and variables both would be based on my opinion and that isn't very scientific.
Instead, I used a random sampling method. I started playing albums from different phases to see what was still appealing. Since I had such good luck with a-ha's second album I decided to try their first smash hit, Hunting High And Low. Oooh! Check out the attached memories! The hours spent trying to draw the members of a-ha! Handsome Morten in the video for Take On Me! The video for The Sun Always Shines On TV with the mannequins! What was up with the mannequins? Hunting High And Low would fall flat, how could it not? It came with baggage.
Wrong! I was so wrong! I still like that entire album in spite of this drum part in Love Is Reason that sounds like a Casio keyboard programmed to do the Hand Jive. But even with the electronic drums the songs are still solid. And that sort of drum sound was the style at the time so I can't fault them for that. I was just glad that all of the songs (and not just the singles) were good.
Next up: Muscle Of Love by Alice Cooper. Did I remember that one kindly because it was one of my vehicle's only 8-tracks in 1996? Or, worse yet, did I only like it then because I got it for seventy-five cents at the Salvation Army in Mankato the day me and Linda went to Mankato to see the Monkees and then I made her stand by the bus with me until we got autographs from Davy Jones? Answer: none of the above. Or, all of the above. While I fondly remember how I acquired my first copy of Muscle Of Love, that album still rocks. I played it three times in a row once I had it on the turntable.
I considered giving some Soul Asylum a spin but decided it was unnecessary. When I wrote my Soul Asylum story a few months ago I played both And The Horse They Rode In On and Hang Time to see if they were as good as I remembered. Hang Time is still the greatest record ever but And The Horse They Rode In On made me antsy. I can't quite put my finger on what went wrong, but I don't like that one as much as I thought I did. And The Horse The Rode In On makes me fidget and wish I was listening to something else. Like Space Oddity, I never expected that to happen.
I also tried Tim by the Replacements and The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths. They are both still winners but I noticed that Tim is dangerously close to wearing thin. That causes a whole new dilemma. Do I let it sit for a couple of years and go back to find it has gone the way of Space Oddity or do I keep it in the rotation in an effort to keep it fresh? I guess I'll worry about that another day.
After Tim and The Queen Is Dead I gave up on the random selections. I never did spot that trend I was trying to find so I still have no idea why some records get stale and some do not. I purposely selected albums that I thought I would still enjoy and ones that I expected to be less appealing and I liked them all. I suppose I could dig deeper into the collection, but right now Muscle Of Love is sitting next to the turntable and I need to play it again.