Transistor Radio Summer #3

"...elbisrever si cisum ehT" ~ Electric Light Orchestra

Back to the basement with this one, on a lazy summer's day, it was time for a "laser light show" with the brother closest in age to me.  The song we always played?  Fire on High by ELO.  It was right around the mid-70's.

 The first part of this song is rather jarring then and now.  It is eerily reminiscent of a series of experiences I had much later.  The entire song in retrospect mirrors the aspects of a spiritual emergence.  When you journey through your darkest fears, on the other side is Light.

This piece carries reminders of "the backward masking" craze.  If you weren't an evangelical, you might have missed all the excitement - the PTL Christian cable network in particular warning evangelical children and teens not to listen to songs with backwards messages from Satan.  And of course we all immediately started destroying our records and stereos that way.  The song Stairway to Heaven will need to wait for another day...

Around this time I experienced real lasers at the museum and thought going to a laser light show in the planetarium was even better than astronomy (which I already liked quite a bit).  We were blessed to have an old-fashioned planetarium - now they are all digital and not nearly as effective.  But back in the cool confines of our basement around 1976, we created the best "laser light shows" of all - with music, flashlights and creativity, plus the volume turned up high.

P.S.  I almost never hear this song anymore, and it came on just the other day.  I was thinking about blogging about it tonight, and there it was again...