Red Octopus Morning
CDs and then iTunes and streaming have radically changed the way we listen to recorded music — maybe almost as much as the technology to record music has changed the way we listen to music, period.
I’m old enough to be frustrated by the seemingly haphazard character of most music streaming services — you can compare the “listen to whatever plays next” experience to radio, but I remain unconvinced that the algorithms determining playlists do it with the finesse of a really good DJ: it’s an art, not a science. I’m also young enough to be enamored of the “skip” button — why listen through a so-so song when you can get straight to the good stuff? — and the “replay” (if it’s good, I wanna hear it again!).
The experience of sitting down and listening to a single, entire album all the way through — a carefully-constructed musical narrative — is something largely lost along the way, and maybe not practiced much any more; I think for the most part that went out with cassette tapes, and I largely don’t miss it.
There is, however, ONE album I will play uninterrupted, unaltered, from beginning to end:
Red Octopus (1975), by Jefferson Starship
I confess I don’t usually sit and listen to this album (or any album); it isn’t one I listen to while working at my desk, but while going for a walk (sometimes) or (habitually) while cleaning/reorganizing my apartment. Not that I do the latter all that often (I started to say “nor near as often as I should,” but the truth is that between working multiple jobs and managing chronic illness, I “tidy up” my personal space as often as I can allow myself the time to do it), but Red Octopus is (somewhat ironically, given the album’s lyrical content) the sound of home and family comfort and relaxation to me: the sound of “downtime” from outside pursuits but attention to the building of a life worth living.
Miracles was my parents’ “our song,” and I was maybe ten or so when my dad got the R.O. cassette tape for what was then a fairly new cassette player at our house; Red Octopus remained a staple of Friday and Saturday afternoons through most of my adolescents. It’s the soundtrack of sunny days and nothing wrong right now.
I remember being rather shocked, years later, when I listened to the Miracles lyrics with a more critical ear — on the road trip to start graduate school in Oregon, with nothing better to do but stare at the window at the long hours of Missouri as they rolled into Nebraska — and realized what my parents apparently thought “family-friendly” listening material … but, to be fair, Jefferson Starship probably deserves a fair amount of the credit for making this particular family.
If you haven’t listened to an entire album lately, all the way through … Red Octopus is a good way to get back in the groove.
