The Ranting Room

It's was so mysterious and exciting for 2 young teenagers in the early 70's to discover a prog band by walking into a record shop. It was a hands on experience. The interest was mainly the music and not the catagorization. The mystery could not unfold by turning on a computer and researching the band. I hate this state of feeling sorry for myself, but there is a death to the original exciting interest because it has been replaced with internet. It's self pity to long for that to return. It's so strange how American kids would be 10 times more mystified by stumbling on to a European band then...where today the information is reached by turning on a machine. There are great/fine points to the progress of the net...yet the mystery has vanished and I miss that more than anything in life. I always thrive to discover a Prog band where upon a lack of information is available on the net....just to feel that mystery once again. Am I off balance with this concept or do other's feel this way? Time for meds maybe?

The internet has opened up the world in ways we couldn't even have imagined back in the 70s.

 

In 1972 I went looking for an album that was released a mere three years earlier, I had the band's debut release from 1967 but being a cash-strapped teen no one had bought their followup album for me and pocket money didn't stretch that far - but in 1972 I had a Saturday job that paid money and I could buy albums when I wanted and didn't have to wait for record tokens at birthdays and christmas. Alas by then the album had been discontinued and, since it was not a big seller on its release, most of the unsold copies had probably been returned to the factory to be melted down and used for the next Donny Osmand or Brotherhood of Man album. By 1972 it was known as a rarity and a collectors item - I didn't need a internet to tell me of it's existence, nor of the existnece of the band, I knew they had split up and were no longer recording, interest in the band had died away with no likelihood of there ever being a revival or reissue, my only recourse was secondhand record stores and the small adds in the back of the NME and Melody Maker. Over the next twenty or so years my search continued - I found it once at a record collector's fayre with a price ticket of £200 and walked away empty handed, frustrated and disolutioned. I didn't covert it for its monetary value and collectorbility - I just wanted to hear it, I loved their first album so much I needed to hear their second, but £200 was a lot of money (two week salary if I recall correctly) and all I was going to do with it was take it home, put it on the turntable and actually listen to it, not hermetically seal it in shrink-wrap and store it in a wall-safe as some family heirloom to sit and acrue value... and there was always that nagging doubt hanging over the album - records and bands are obscure for a reason... (and this reason was self-evident) ... because they didn't sell enough albums, perhaps it wasn't as good as the collector hype.

 

 

By the mid 90s everything had changed - there was a boom in reissues as smaller record companies could buy back-catalogues of lesser known bands from the bigger boys and release long forgotten albums on CD - they didn't have to worry about selling 10s of thousands of copies to recoup production and promotion costs, their business plans were smaller-scale - they could sell a few thousand over the Internet and make still a profit, especially now the baby boomers who bought those albums in the 60s and 70s where now fast approaching their midlife crisis and would be ripe pickings in the nostalgic reclaiming of their youth frenzy. And the Internet, for all its faults and errors, was (and still is) a marvelous playground and adventure park to discover that nostalgic youth-hood once lost - sure we have to slap down some of the young'uns who get above themselves, but then so do many of the old'uns, in an environment where no single "power" controls the information we become the editors who discriminate the plausible-facts from the barefaced invention and half-remembered anecdotes.

 

 

And one of the first things I ever did when I got "online" back in 1993 was to search for this album and this band, and precious little there was to be found, but it got better. It took a few years for the ex-singer to put a website together , and it took a rising light of the Dutch metal scene to re-discover him, and it took a while for the band's back cataglogue to be issued on CD, but eventually it was. And none of that would have happened without the Internet.

 

 

So for the past 15 years I have owned a CD copy of the album I so desperately searched for in the preceeding 20-something years, and yeah, it's not so great and there was a reason it didn't sell so well, but I have it now and can listen to it whenever I like.

 

 

Regarding my friends who suffered S.R.A.  and other cults that inflicted bizzare torture tactics upon them, witnessed death of their friends through Satan cult rituals.....their testimonies are warnings to people who have not the awareness and are not willing to see the signs of these sadistic nut cases. It's never explained with this kind of emotion unless...you, yourself,... were attacked, abducted, by a cult. It shouldn't be discussed because to be honest, many people find it to be farce. So...from that point of view, think about this: You and your friends were abused, a couple of deaths in the witch family through rituals, you were drugged and thrown into a pit of dead snakes, etc...and now the world is laughing at you ..while many cult leaders, sadistic members, walk away from murder, torture, whatever?..and are still living in the community and will never be convicted because they were careful to not leave marks and there is no physical evidence to bring into a court of law. So...people are laughing at us, the victims, for telling B.S. stories, ...while these sadistic maniacs are living in society and probably still performing the same acts as they did when I was a kid. I mean?  Don't you find that within itself farce? ridiculous? impossible?  Let's say for a moment that you believe my story....and discussed it with me at a campfire. Would you consider the series of unjust events to be laughable in a sick way? Because....I do and I also find the outcome of these crimes to be pathetic.

Ya, Facebook is a weird thing...people get sucked into it and it becomes an addiction.

A few months ago I did an internet search looking for old friends I hadn't seen in years.  I found 5 of them now had facebook accounts...so I made a facebook account too so I could ping them.  I got 2 responses.  I traded a few emails with one and it only confirmed why I stopped being her friend in the first place   The other worked out, we rekindled our old friendship and discovered we only live a couple hours away from each other and we're going to hang out on labor day weekend.

Then I promptly cancelled my facebook account and plan to never return 

 

 

nah nah, it's all internal fear and etc which pisses me off more! Since it could be so easy to just stop this all, but I just can't/won't