Genesis, Selling England By The Pound

The summer between eighth and ninth grade saw a lot of change on the microcosmic level. Our house got new carpeting and, in a landmark concession on my parents� part, central air conditioning. Riding this ameliorative wave of consumption, my normally frugal parents, who bought new cars only slightly more often than they conceived children, indulged another luxury: a brand new 1991 Dodge Caravan (deep blue), with air-conditioning and a tape deck. We were riding in style now, I�ll have you know. That summer also saw me catapulted from Iowa to Maryland to Pennsylvania to Colorado and back again.

Flush with familial accomplishment (my father was so proud of the new car that he literally waved to the owner of every other Dodge Caravan we passed on the road), we piloted our new plush cruiser the 971 miles to Greenbelt, Maryland, docking at my grandmother�s house to hold court with my mother�s many siblings and their children. Eager to extract himself from this tableau whenever an opportunity to do so presented itself, my father was more generous than ever in his offers to take my brother and me to the movies, the zoo, the Smithsonian, the pool, the video store, the park, the convenience store, the the abandoned crack house, the Senate floor�any venue, really, that didn�t share airspace with in-laws.

So I�m not really sure what movie he had taken us to see the day that I tracked down Selling England By The Pound in a Sam Goody at Beltway Plaza. I think it may have been Bill & Ted�s Bogus Journey. (That right there, if nothing else, should give you some idea of the sacrifices my father was willing to make for his sons� happiness.) My triumph at Sam Goody was even more improbable given that I was able to find the album on cassette (this was over a year before my parents finally capitulated to a compact disc player in the house), and that I was able to find its immediate predecessor, the sublime Foxtrot. I walked up to my dad and told him my dilemma: Sam Goody had two awesome Genesis albums on tape! Which one should I get? My father, not possessing my mother�s German fastidiousness, said, �Why not buy them both?� and handed me the money necessary to do just that. That day, I had the best father in the world.

That�s how I ended up subjecting my family to interminable presentations of Genesis� two finest albums on the hi-fi cassette deck of our minivan. When my father drove me up to Pennsylvania so I could stay with Wes in his cabin in La Porte, Foxtrot was warbling along most of the way. When Wes� parents took us to see Terminator 2: Judgement Day later that week, I hit another jackpot at that mall�s music retailer: Nursery Crime, the album that immediately preceeded the two aforementioned albums. I was playing with a full deck now, people. Wes and I loaded our WalkMen with these cassettes�for he was just as fascinated as I was by this early, Peter Gabriel-led incarnation of the same band that somehow gave the world �I Can�t Dance��and boarded a flight for Estes Park, Colorado, where we would meet up with Mark at Rocky Ridge music camp for two weeks of piano lessons, theory classes, and above all, inept adolescent flirting.

It�s hard to believe now that songs which sound so familiar to me now, drum parts I mastered in high school, arrangements which are complex but not insurmountable�that all these elements could collude all those years ago to launch my ephebic musical apprehension to new heights. But they did, and occasionally, if the mood is right, if I�m concentrating and sufficiently nostalgic and maybe making a long enough drive to listen to the band�s early catalog in its entirety, I can recapture some of that magic. We never fully get it back, the awe and fear that accompanies our first really big musical discovery, but we have the artifacts, the albums to give us the suggestion of that apocalyptic moment, however long ago it may have been. My artifact is Selling England By The Pound still, thirty-one years after its release and thirteen years after I emerged from that Sam Goody, victorious.

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