Some Propositions concerning the Lounge Lizards

Preface: The problem with being an engaged music listener is that it’s completely unscientific. Unlike being, e.g., a deranged baseball fan, or a hardcore weather person, or a day trader. Those pursuits have their elective affinities, but they also depend on rigorous templates of factual material. The deployment of these facts becomes an important part of the obsessive lifestyle of the cathected individual. In the case of popular music, however, this absence of statistical abstracts gives rise to annoying compilations of top-ten lists, desert-island discs, accounts of various shows. Concerts especially. It’s one of those High Fidelity–style games, talking about the gigs you’ve been to. Guys do it a lot. Ap­parently, going to concerts involves a masculine manipulation of worldly impediments. You have to wait in long lines, you have to exercise Machiavellian crowd-control instincts, or you have to exhibit first-rate scalping prowess. (“I just waltzed up to that black dude and got two third-row tickets off him five minutes before the show, only fifteen bucks!”) You camp out. You wait until the lights go down, and then you somehow connive your way down to the row where the industry suits repose. In these pages, I attempt to replace the High Fidelity–style obsession with a more serious apparatus, one which ideally gives the concert to which I address myself a stately, serious treatment. Please see below.

First Proposition, that the best concert I ever saw in my life was a gig by the Lounge Lizards, on April 12, 1992, at the Merkin Concert Hall, New York City. This concert was part of the New Sounds Concert Series, svengali’d by one John Schaefer, the host of the radio program of the same name, broadcast each night at 11:00 p.m. on WNYC, public-radio affiliate in my fair city. I first heard Arvo Pärt on New Sounds, first heard Górecki’s Third Symphony and David Hykes and La Monte Young and Ingram Marshall and a lot of other stuff. Some of this music has probably been lost to history, alas (viz., A. Leroy’s placid and hilarious “Home Sweet Home”), especially now that you can no longer listen to archives of the really old episodes.

Second Proposition, that a certain period of music by the Lounge Lizards amounted to some of the most transportative music ever recorded. See, somewhere in the midst of my enchantment with the New Sounds show, in the late ’80s, I heard this saxophone solo playing over the airwaves. It was late one night, and I was barely awake. My delusional semi-sleep was a recombinant mixture of hypnagogic voices and New Sounds, and I heard this saxophone playing....