Alan Parsons Project: Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1976)
And thus began my love affair with the music of APP…
I first heard this at my buddy Gary’s house the summer immediately following our high school graduation. He had, in my mind, an absolutely killer system: a Kenwood KR-7400 receiver, Infinity 1001A Speakers, and a Technics SL-1400 turntable. I remember sitting there just mesmerized as this album played.
Gary and I had been friends since grade school. I remember him being a brilliant kid and we shared the same dry sense of humor as we moved into high school. We stayed in contact for years after graduation. He worked in high school as a stock boy for one of the local supermarket chains, and as I understand it, he went on—following the American dream of old—of rising up in the ranks, eventually becoming store—and later regional—manager.
We lost touch after I moved to Tucson in ’85. Though a mutual friend we briefly reconnected via email a couple years ago, exchanging photos and a brief outline of what had happened in our lives over the past 40-odd years. I never heard back from him after the second round of emails, but he seemed uninterested in rekindling our friendship. I have a feeling that in the intervening years he—like so fucking many of my absolute best friends from that period—had found religion and/or taken a political hard right and judged my lifestyle unacceptable. (There’s a reason you can never go home again.) But I’ll always be grateful to him for introducing me to the Alan Parsons Project.
*There are a couple different dates on the internet as to when this album was officially released, but I’m going with this one.