Black Cloud Smiling at Me

Music is a big part of my life. Since I wasn't, in the words of Leonard Cohen, "Born with the gift of a golden voice" and I have yet to learn how to play an instrument (even though I gave the guitar a try as a teenager), I have had to enjoy it from the sidelines. I'm okay with that. I listened to records and the radio from an early age, because back then we didn't have the opiate of cable television to dim our imagination and steal our creativity. Personal home computers were years away and the Internet, like flying cars and time travel was a science fiction dream.

I was nervous and anxious by nature as a child and there was some turmoil in our family, which added to this. I was, like most young kids, also afraid to go to bed in the darkness of my room by myself. Each night, I would try to get to sleep, but every sound would be magnified in my mind as a creature that was after me - vampire, monster, burglar, kidnapper, alien, you name it, in my young mind it was either under my bed or lurking just outside my bedroom window.

In the early '70s for Christmas, I got a pea green colored, box-shaped portable radio as a gift. It plugged into the wall, and it had two dials on its ridged face - one for volume and one for tuning. Nothing fancy, but we couldn't afford fancy so I was okay with that. Most likely, I didn't even know fancy existed.

I was able to find a local FM station that was either a top 40 or top however many they had back then for radio formats of the time, and that is where the dial stayed. That radio became my audio night-light. It shouted down all of those spooky sounds in the dark that had taunted my childhood imagination from the crevices of my room, and beyond the dark, intimidating panes of my bedroom window.

One song that really made an impression on me and shaped my musical taste as I lay in the darkness of my bedroom, the only person still awake in my house, if not the entire neighborhood was Whole Lotta Love

by Led Zeppelin; specifically, the portion of the song at about four minutes in when that blood curdling voice came groaning out of my tiny green innocuous box of a radio in a howling scream: "Way down inside... Woman you need me..." angry guitar and drums,followed by a long descending scream without musical accompaniment as if the singer, (who I assumed at my naive age was a woman, because only a woman would have such a high-pitched scream) was falling into a dark bottomless pit, until finally the voice was answered with more hostile guitar and drums.

There was something about that song and the environment in which I first heard it, that scared me, but also excited and enticed me at the same time. It introduced me to the power and pull that a good song can have on the listener. I had a visceral reaction to that song as a child.

This is why it is hard for anyone to say with any certainty what makes a good song. There is no cookie cutter formula, despite the marketing strategy of most of the record companies and radio stations today. Lyrics play a big part, but so does the music, how it is arranged, and how either the lyrics or music, or both touch you on an emotional level.

Your life experience and situation when you first hear a song also contribute to how you receive the song. Everyone has a different reaction. Had I first been exposed to Whole Lotta Love in the light of day, surrounded by other people, my reaction to it would have been different. Your best friend may hate a song that you think is the best one ever released because his life experience and situation is not the same. This may be why people seem to choose and defend their musical taste, like they choose and defend their religion. They don't know why they are right about either they just know they are, so obviously, everyone else must be wrong.

To take the religious metaphor a step further, the musical equivalent of the church, the commercial radio stations, at some point became just that - too commercial, both in running too many commercials and the deejays (the musical equivalent of the clergy) playing songs with commercial appeal over lyrical or musical quality. These same songs are played over and over again across multiple stations with no effort to push the creative envelope or expand the artistic landscape.

It has gotten to the point that you can tell time by what song is being played. Classic rock stations are notorious for clinging to a handful of songs by an artist or band and not venturing away from this list. This is true even for bands that have extensive, quality discographies. For example, at least on the classic rock stations, if the deejay goes into a commercial break and says he will be right back with some classic Pink Floyd, you can pretty much count on it being Run Like Hell, or if they promise classic U2, it will most likely be Pride in the Name of Love, or Where the Streets Have No Name. There is nothing wrong with either of these songs, at least not the first 3,000 times they played them, but is it unreasonable to expect a little creative ambition and initiative? What is preventing the deejay from playing something else from these artists' vast libraries, like The Final Cut, or The Gunner's Dream by Pink Floyd, or Running to Stand Still or Bad by U2?

Sometimes, the classic rock stations give the illusion they are playing some rarity with a feature they give a fancy title like Deep Cuts. It is here that they play a song from "deep in their musical vault" that isn't necessarily rare, but may just get less of a rotation, so the audience may have only heard it 1,500 times before instead of 3,000. However, occasionally, one sneaks through, (maybe the deejay was in a rush to get back after a long bathroom break and snatched up the wrong album/disc and played it before he realized what he had done).

Whatever the reason, I was recently introduced to Black Cloud by Trapeze from 1975 (complete with the the cowbell in all of its glory) during one of these Deep Cuts features. I have logged many hours listening to classic rock stations, and I had never heard this song before. This is no surprise in a city where the radio stations' musical offerings in various musical formats have less variety than my iPod.

At the moment, I only have a little over 2,000 songs on my iPod, but I can play a better selection of music on my hour long commute to work, than all of the radio stations in this city combined. As sad as this is, it was on one of these stations where I first heard Black Cloud, so I guess I have to at least credit them with that, whether it was a fluke or not.

This song, like Whole Lotta Love, is not a lyrical masterpiece, but it is one of those songs to which I had a visceral reaction. However, instead of hearing it for the first time in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, I heard it after a long day at work on my frustrating commute home. I was probably cranky because it wasn't Friday yet and I knew I had to be back again early the next day to tackle a pile of unfinished work. I was expecting the next song to be one of the same old classic rock songs that inexplicably get too much airplay. Instead, Black Cloud car jacked my soul at a traffic light that day and continues to linger there as a reminder of how music can help you deal with life's black clouds whether they be imaginary childhood monsters lurking in your bedroom or real adult monsters lurking in the cubicles at work, or along the path of your commute home.