Phenomenologists like to talk about the play of presence and absence, how an absence can be a presence of a sort. When I first saw both Tarkus and Fragile, I experienced something that I wouldn’t have the vocabulary to describe until a number of years later. I was used to covers on which the most prominent features were images of the performers. My exposure even to the Beatles was rather spotty I was vaguely aware of how their covers had gotten more strange, but I think the main one that I actually owned at the time was the U.S.-only release, The Beatles Again (a.k.a. What was so special about those covers? Admittedly, the background against which they seemed special to me was quite limited. When my friend played them, I was not at all surprised that they sounded like something totally new (to my ears, at least). Nor was it “classical,” the other main category in my classification schema at the time. This was not “popular” music that I had heard on the radio. I knew not only that these were different, but also that the difference was important. As I look back on it now, seeing those two album covers corresponded with some kind of awakening within me. Two of them stand out in my memory especially vividly: Tarkus (Emerson, Lake & Palmer), and Fragile (Yes), both released in 1971. But the album covers that my friend showed me that day were different. The Beatles, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (remember Whipped Cream and Other Delights?), Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel. Oh, sure, we had albums at home, including a few that were mine, which I played on my little portable (mono) record player. I don’t remember any details about how we became friends, or what had happened before we went into his house. We went into his house, and into his room. THINGS, in a pregnant sense (in German one would say Sachen). He seems to have been places, to have experienced things. He was one of those friends you have when you’re younger, who seems to know so much more than you do about so many things. I’m guessing it may have been the Spring of 1972, in which case I would have been twelve years old. I’m not sure what time of year it was it might have been Spring. I remember it being a “nice” day in the small town where I grew up.
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