The Annotated Mixtape

In 1901, Mrs. Elise Boyer Hall, president of the Orchestral Society of Boston, paid Claude Debussy five thousand francs to compose a rhapsody for saxophone—an instrument then some fifty years old, though it had yet to acquire much role in classical or popular music. Mrs. Hall informed the composer that she would perform the rhapsody herself. She had begun playing the saxophone after typhoid fever damaged her hearing: her late husband, a cocaine-addicted surgeon who had himself died of typhoid following an erroneously diagnosed appendectomy, suggested that learning the instrument might help prevent further impairment because of the pressure it would exert on her Eustachian tubes.

Debussy had “described the composition as ‘ordered, paid for, and eaten’” for some time, but had done no work on the rhapsody when Mrs. Hall arrived unexpectedly at the composer’s Paris home in the spring of 1903: “[This] lady, who is not satisfied being American but also allows herself the bizarre luxury of playing saxophone…ask[ed] me for an update about her piece!… I had to get down to it,” he complained in a letter to conductor André Messager. To his wife, Debussy wrote that he was “trying to finish this goddamn piece as quickly as possible,” and that “la Femme-Saxophone” “will never suspect how much she bored me. Does it not appear indecent to you, a woman in love with a saxophone, whose lips suck at the wooden mouthpiece of this ridiculous instrument?”

Still, the composer began work on the rhapsody. Debussy biographer Edward Lockspeiser notes that in the “following year, 1904, Mrs. Hall gave a public performance in Paris of another work she had commissioned, the Choral varié by [Vincent] d’Indy. Debussy ‘thought it ridiculous to see a lady in a pink frock playing on such an ungainly instrument; and he was not at all anxious that his work should provide a similar spectacle.’” But the events of Debussy’s own life in the weeks following Mrs. Hall’s performance offered Parisian society sufficient spectacle: he left his wife and fled to Jersey with a married woman (who would shortly become his second wife, and with whom he’d soon have a child); his first wife shot herself in the chest in the Place de la Concorde, but survived; Debussy, gossipers claimed, left his first wife for the wealth his second wife possessed. The scandal and subsequent lawsuits consumed the composer’s time; he wrote to a friend that he would “try to find again the Claude Debussy of old,” but admitted that he was not working as much as he would have liked.

By 1905, Mrs. Hall’s rhapsody existed only as a sketch; in 1911, the composer, suffering from cancer and, according to biographer Oscar Thompson, “apparently abandoning the task in despair,… sent the rough draft, obviously incomplete, to Mrs. Hall.” Mrs. Hall, now almost completely deaf, received the orchestrated score in 1919, a year after Debussy died.

Among the more gruesome situations of the early-to-mid-1980s—at least, among those I witnessed—was the sudden vogue for saxophone in pop music. This trend inspired at least a few of my classmates to pick up the saxophone as part of that same elemental urge prompting most kids to plug a scuffed-up, detuned Stratocaster clone into a borrowed amp and spend an afternoon plucking out “Smoke on the Water” or, more ambitiously, learning the barre chords to “Stairway to Heaven.” The kids selecting the saxophone attempted some other strange template of cool, or felt a need for devotion to one’s instrument that a casual guitarist never requires.

I can’t use modifiers such as “blistering” or “furious” to describe a saxophone’s music the way I might apply them to a guitar solo, can’t equate a spit-soaked reed with a bloodied finger callus, can’t explain how or why the instrument’s unusual sound infected kids’ minds: and none of these kids, I’ll hazard, were listening to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, or Sonny Rollins, nor their parents’ old Stax and Motown records. I can easily envision a bored kid somewhere in America right now strumming a guitar—or learning how to cross-fade and beat-match, or to program Cubase—but find it difficult to imagine a kid working his or her fingers up and down a saxophone’s curved form, or saying, as one saxophone-playing sixth-grade classmate once told me, “It’s saxy!”

Every time I sat in Dr. Melanson’s padded chair having my braces tightened, I endured the memorable sax riff in Wham’s “Careless Whisper.” A year or two earlier, radios everywhere had honked with the sax solos in Men at Work’s “Who Can It Be Now?” Foreigner’s “Urgent,” Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart,” Huey Lewis and the News’s “I Want a New Drug.” The first LP I ever bought—I admit with as little shame as possible: I was eleven years old—was Duran Duran’s Rio, featuring a sax solo in the title song. Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist from Bruce Springsteen’s E. Street Band, seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s, his face inflated like Dizzy Gillespie’s as he blew so mightily that at times he overshadowed even the Boss. And the instrument glittered in so many MTV videos: Sade’s cinematic “Smooth Operator,” in which the camera zooms into the horn as if to penetrate its mysteries; Glenn Frey’s AOR soundtrack songs, including saxophonist Beverly Dahlke-Smith dancing—in oversized suit jacket and skinny tie: the 1980s equivalent of the pink frock—as she played.

I found all these saxophones hooting over cheesy pop songs, in the alleged aim of cool, simply embarrassing: the instrument’s pleading, lurid, look-at-me whine, its selfish-yet-smooth bleat, too often matched pop stars’ needy sensibilities, and its very tone delineated the tenor of the decade.

“It is at most a mongrel instrument,” Léon Kochnitzky, adopting the viewpoint of a saxophone antagonist, wrote in the 1949 pamphlet Adolphe Sax and His Saxophone, “a somewhat unnatural blending of the clarinet and the English horn…severely criticized and vilified by many an important critic or a famous conductor. A stillborn invention, doomed to oblivion…. I wish it had never been born.”

When Adolphe Sax—son of an instrument maker, conservatory-trained clarinettist, and inventor of the saxophone—exhibited some of his musical instruments at the National Exhibition of Brussels in 1841, he included among them a new bass clarinet he had devised, as well as an early saxophone prototype. The latter instrument had never before been seen in public, and, when Sax briefly stepped away from his exhibit, an unknown assailant kicked the saxophone to the floor. Not long thereafter Sax left his native Belgium for Paris. For the remainder of his life, his strange instrument—patented in 1846—would lead him into a tangle of business rivalries, lawsuits, and bankruptcies; privilege and disfavor as French government changed in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War; and accolades, including Grand Prize at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition and the cross of the Legion of Honor.

Nor did his entrepreneurial spirit stop at the invention of the saxophone. Sax also proposed the Saxotonnerre (a musical “instrument with the diameter of the Colonne de Juillet”), the Goudronniére Sax (a device “to impregnate the air of a room with the scent of tar, creosote, or other antiseptic”—of which Louis Pasteur requested several samples), and the Saxocannon, which would fire a “mortar-bullet, 11 yards wide and weighing 550 tons,” in order to “demolish a whole city…, smash entire walls, ruin fortifications, explode mines, blow up powerhouses—in a word, exert an irresistible devastation.” In the next century, his saxophone alone would impose such mayhem.

After a Christmastime drug raid in his home, during which his wife flushed heroin down the toilet and he brandished a handgun at police, Stan Getz tried to kick his addiction cold-turkey during a brief tour just before he was due to be sentenced. An hour after arriving in Seattle for an evening concert, he wandered, strung-out and shaking, into a pharmacy across the street from his hotel, pretended he had a gun in his pocket, and told the pharmacist to give him some morphine. (According to the Los Angeles Times, “Mrs. Mary Brewster, 44, the drugstore clerk, reported the holdup man threatened to ‘blow my brains out.’”) Brewster didn’t believe he had a gun and didn’t give him the morphine, and Getz ran back to his hotel, telephoned an apology to the pharmacy, and attempted suicide by downing some barbiturates. Police found him rambling the hotel hallways and brought him to prison, where he fell unconscious; he was taken to King County Hospital, given an emergency tracheotomy, and lay in a coma for three days. “God didn’t want to kill me,” he wrote from jail in a letter to the editor of DownBeat magazine. “Next time I’m sure he won’t let me live.”

Getz, twenty-seven years old, had been a heroin addict for a decade. After his release from jail, he began snorting the drug so that his probation officer wouldn’t notice track marks on his arms.

While Getz toured the country, an escaped mental patient strangled his wife nearly to death outside the family’s home in Laurel Canyon. Weeks later, his wife and two of his three children almost died when the driver of a car they were riding in fell asleep and crashed into a bridge; a steel truss split the car in half. On tour, Getz had become infatuated with Monica Silfverskiöld, a Swedish student and the daughter of aristocrats—and, as his wife lay in her hospital bed, immobilized in a body cast due to the fractured spine she suffered in the wreck, Getz told her he wanted a divorce. Then he fled to Sweden to be with Silfverskiöld, arriving “deep in the throes of withdrawal and with no idea where his next fix might come from,” according to biographer Dave Gelly. He ended up detoxing while straitjacketed in a Swedish hospital.

A decade later, in 1964, Getz’s gentle saxophone helped “The Girl from Ipanema” introduce bossa nova to the United States, though his affair with singer Astrud Gilberto meant he would not work again with her husband, João Gilberto, until 1976.

“I never played a note I didn’t mean,” Getz often said, before his 1991 death from liver cancer.

James Siegfried, a scrawny dropout from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, left Milwaukee for mid-’70s New York, taking his saxophone, a sculpted pompadour, and the new name James Chance. After a brief period playing with Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, he formed the Contortions—who dressed in suits like a ’60s soul act, though they played a broken, atonal, frenzied free-jazz take on punk. On stage, Chance danced and spun like a stiff, white James Brown, but became better known for punching audience members:

Those SoHo people… really bugged me. They would just stand there with a kind of blank attitude like they really thought they were so cool. I just didn’t feel any real enthusiasm coming, so I thought, You motherfuckers, I’ll get you to pay attention. A lot of it was just coming from my own emotions—my own total rage and hate…. It just came out one night at this gig at the Millennium. This overwhelming thing came over me and I just started running out into the audience and like pushing and shoving people. I just started grabbing people and slapping them around.

The Contortions’ “I Can’t Stand Myself” (itself a loose cover of James Brown and the Famous Flames’ cut) and “Dish It Out,” both from Brian Eno’s No New York double-LP distillation of the No Wave scene, groove and swing despite—or because of—carnival keyboards, repetitive basslines, scratchy guitar, and Chance’s freaked-out vocals: “When you touch me, I can’t stand myself,” he barks in the first song, then, in the latter, yowls, “I wanna see some emotion, not the usual fluff.” But the songs sound most disturbing when Chance funnels his aggression through his saxophone. The horror of that screech surpasses all his theatrics, all his microphone-bellowing, and matches the self-hatred of the lyrics far better than the buzzsaw guitars in similarly themed songs by contemporaries like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols—both of whom sound tame and poppy in comparison.

Raphael Ravenscroft may be simultaneously the most famous and least known saxophonist: his solo in Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 hit “Baker Street” is unforgettable to anyone who experienced that era, and has long been credited with reviving the instrument for pop music, but he released only one LP under his own name. “The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty,” Rob Sheffield wrote upon Rafferty’s death in 2011. “His 1978 soft-rock classic ‘Baker Street’ has to be the Ulysses of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft’s sax solo, creating one of the Seventies’ most enduringly creepy sounds.” The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone refers to “what can only be described as the Baker Street phenomenon,” claiming that,

following the success (and consequent air-play) of this number,… every self-respecting band had to include a saxophone. Soon after that an enormous percentage of TV advertisements had a sultry tenor or wailing alto taking prominence, and in the mid-1980s the saxophone became the most popular instrument for youngsters starting out.

An early episode of The Simpsons resurrected the song for a new generation when Lisa Simpson played it in a duet with her saxophone mentor, Bleedin’ Gums Murphy.

Ravenscroft, a session player, was in the studio when Rafferty recorded “Baker Street.” “And where,” asked Ken Emerson in a 1978 Rolling Stone article about Rafferty, “does the magnificent saxophone line that everyone is humming come from? At first it was part of the melody, and Rafferty reckoned he’d sing it. Then he tried it on guitar, and that didn’t sound quite right.”

“‘Most of what I played was an old blues riff,’” Ravenscroft told the Scotsman in 2008:

“If you’re asking me: ‘Did Gerry hand me a piece of music to play?’ then no, he didn’t.” Ravenscroft’s fee was a cheque for £27, which he says bounced anyway and is now framed and hangs on his solicitor’s wall. Rafferty has not attempted to make further payment, and Ravenscroft has chosen not to pursue the matter of a song that guarantees Rafferty a yearly income of £80,000.

Ravenscroft still seems to respect the pursuit of concerns other than financial ones, as he suggested to his 147 Twitter followers not long after that interview: “As the Alchemist advised I am following my dream.”

J.D., the sexy-but-murderous hipster played by Christian Slater in the 1988 cult film Heathers, is asked the famous “lunchtime poll” question: “Check this out. You win five million dollars from the Publisher’s Sweepstakes, and the same day that that big Ed guy gives you the check, aliens land on the earth and say they’re going to blow up the world in two days. What do you do?”

“Probably row out to the middle of a lake somewhere, bring along a bottle of tequila, my sax, and, uh, some Bach,” he tells the clearly intrigued Veronica, Winona Ryder’s character.

It’s only later in the film that Veronica, perhaps reflecting on this response, says to J.D. “And to think there was a time when I actually thought you were cool!”

Fifteen-year-old “nice Jewish girl” Susan Whitby played saxophone, like Elise Hall, in a pink frock—the “pink uniform she’d worn to her good private school,” as Greil Marcus reports. Six months later, she responded to an ad in Melody Maker, joined London punk band X-Ray Spex, and began calling herself Lora Logic. Just after the band released its first single—1977’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours!”—she was forced out, her saxophone parts entrusted to a new player. Still, it must be either Steve Mackay’s saxophone on the Stooges’ Fun House or Lora Logic’s saxophone on this single that gave the instrument a place in punk: “Lora Logic kicked off her saxophone solo as if she were kicking down a door, which was exactly what she was doing,” according to Marcus. Singer Poly Styrene, a fashion industry refugee and hippie runaway turned punk—and, like Lora Logic, a suburban teenager—shouts tunelessly until her voice cracks, but Lora Logic’s keening saxophone, for all its potency, does have a few moments of fluttering delicacy as her notes decay into the rest of the band’s chug. Poly Styrene’s screams and Lora Logic’s saxophone form an aggressive call and response, the two young women claiming the most audible aspects of the track. (“Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard,” Poly Styrene says, to introduce the song.) Early photos of X-Ray Spex show the teens front and center on stage, forming the band’s visible presence as well—in one, they wear raincoats against the crowd’s spitting—so it’s unsurprising that, as Lora Logic told an interviewer, “Poly saw that I was getting a little too much of the spotlight and I was just replaced without any notice after a year.”

After her ouster, Lora Logic formed Essential Logic (a band that began with two saxophonists), released a few singles and an LP, and then—“[I] was dallying with drugs a little too much, living the rock lifestyle,” she admitted later—joined the Hare Krishnas. “I know we’re not just a body and there’s more to life than putting safety pins through noses,” she told an interviewer in 1982. Poly Styrene was soon visiting the same temple. “She had been going through a lot,” Lora Logic said, “and I understood. We formed a reggae-ish band with other Krishnas…”

On the first day of June, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s motorcade, on its way to his speech at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, rolled under clouded skies through burnt-out and boarded-up buildings in South Central Los Angeles where, a few weeks earlier, days of rioting following the Rodney King verdicts had destroyed neighborhoods. On the second day of June, while California primary voters cast the ballots giving him the state’s delegates and, with them, the party’s nomination, Clinton addressed rallies in the CentralValley, Oakland, and UCLA; offered brief victory remarks at the Los Angeles Biltmore; talked to CBS’s Dan Rather on a call-in show; then, on his beachfront hotel balcony, practiced his saxophone. He played an old song based on a news story about a suicide—a man who jumped from his own hotel window, leaving only a one-sentence note: “I walk a lonely street.”

Even for the famously extroverted Clinton, the line may have matched the moment: Clinton edged California governor Jerry Brown in the primary, but still trailed in national polls: Gallup showed Ross Perot at 39 percent, George H. W. Bush at 31 percent, and Clinton at 25 percent that month. A year earlier, following Operation Desert Storm, Bush had seemed unbeatable; now, “Perot mania” seized voters around the country, and, in the wake of Clinton’s various missteps and scandals—his affair with Gennifer Flowers, his alleged draft-dodging to pursue his Rhodes Scholarship, his admission that he smoked weed but “didn’t in-hale”—few gave Clinton a chance.

On the third day of June, Clinton waited on Stage 29 of the Paramount Lot in Hollywood, cradling the saxophone slung around his neck and joking with the Posse, Arsenio Hall’s house band: “If I mess up, play louder,” he told them.

“Hey, if this music thing doesn’t work out,” drummer Chuck Morris replied, “you can always run for president.”

Standing nearby, Clinton’s staff criticized his boring outfit: dark suit, white shirt. They made him remove his neutral tie in favor of a yellow-and-blue patterned one from the host’s own collection. Just before the show went live, campaign spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers handed speechwriter Paul Begala’s Ray-Bans to Clinton: “Governor, you have to put on the sunglasses.”

The Posse played the show’s intro music, and Arsenio Hall walked onstage, blew a two-finger kiss to his crowd (a Secret Service detail occupied the front row), then pointed and smiled at Clinton, who stood at one edge of a riser, cheeks puffed and eyebrows waggling as he blew. But Clinton kept playing “Heartbreak Hotel” as the Posse laid down the eight-bar blues and the audience freaked. After a last flourish of sax notes, the song ended in a storm of cymbals, bass notes, and keyboard glissandi. Clinton high-fived bandleader Michael Wolff and adjusted his shades. “The big man!” Hall shouted, gesturing toward Clinton, “and the Posse. Boy, oh boy. You can’t beat that!” A bit later, after Clinton, sunglasses removed, played Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” with the Posse, Hall added, “It’s nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election.”

Following this appearance, Clinton began a steady climb in the polls—helped by the dismal economy and Perot dropping out of the race for several months after the Democratic convention. Commentators viewed Clinton’s sax performance as vulgar and undignified, as another announcement (welcome or not) of the increasingly multicultural influences on American politics and culture, as part of Clinton’s strategy to court the youth vote through new media. “A sad John Belushi wannabe,” sniffed Bush’s press secretary. “Saxophone playing for a president…? Forget it. It’s a very bad idea,” advised Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel. “He plays like a politician because everything was confusing. You couldn’t tell one note from another,” joked jazz saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. But a young assistant to the curator of American music at the Smithsonian told the Washington Post that “the sax… has sex appeal,” and she preferred “candidates with sex appeal.” The few minutes Clinton played saxophone on live TV became a crucial part of the narrative that began with his declaration of himself as the Comeback Kid in New Hampshire and ended with his election to the presidency.

But other narratives also demanded attention. “Could Governor Bill Clinton make a living playing tenor sax when his political days are over?” asked the Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Hunt. Hunt found Clinton’s rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” “tentative,” but noted that, in his take on Billie Holiday’s “God Save the Child,” “Clinton demonstrated a surprisingly warm tone…. Rather than clinging to the traditional melody, Clinton put it through some twists and turns.” Another reporter noted that “ever since Bill Clinton appeared on Arsenio Hall’s TV show, saxophone sales have shot up 20 percent…. Whether it’s a resurgence of traditional musical values or just a fad, the saxophone is gleaming again.”

Music, Roland Barthes claimed, “is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective…. The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that.” The saxophone’s distinctive sound renders such translations even less escapable, the descriptors even less variable. Whenever I imagined I’d come up with a decent way to characterize the saxophone’s sound, I soon realized how worn-out were my words. The saxophone, as the clichés claim, is smooth, sultry, sexy, silky, seductive; it is mellow; it is intense. But adjectives administer effects; to narrate the instrument’s expressions is to rely on similarly impoverished verbs: the saxophone squawks. It wails, or moans. Screeches, squeals, squalls, sings, sobs, snorts. Howls, honks, hoots, toots, whines, wheezes, bleats, blasts, blows, blares.

Perhaps, most of all, the saxophone skronks. “Skronk” may have been coined by Robert Christgau, as Lester Bangs would have us believe—“Christgau calls it ‘skronk.’ I have always opted for the more obvious ‘horrible noise’”—but Bangs provided the service of linking the word to Ornette Coleman’s saxophone (“he played ‘skronk’”), a pairing that, ever since, has become mandatory.

Still, the skronking saxophone—the saxophone played by the amateur, or played by the expert uninterested in wedding-background, Dave Brubeck niceties—is nearly the only saxophone I can bear. My favorite saxophone songs are those in which the instrument invents an unwelcome injury, or maybe mimics whalesong—anything that sounds as awkward and strange as the instrument itself has always appeared to me.

“I played in the first punk band in Zürich but I played saxophone…. You weren’t allowed to have a saxophone in a punk band at the time,” Marlene Marder told an interviewer in 1998, recalling the humble beginnings of the Swiss punk scene twenty-one years earlier, in the wake of the Sex Pistols: apparently X-Ray Spex had not yet reached Switzerland. Marder quit, and—ditching her saxophone for the few simple chords she knew on guitar—joined her friends Klaudia Schiff, Lislot Ha, and Regula Sing in the band Kleenex.

Recorded just before Kleenex received a cease-and-desist from Kimberly-Clark’s lawyers and changed its name to LiLiPUT, “DC-10” is straightforward compared to the primitively yelped, sing-song gems that made Kleenex a sensation in England after John Peel played their first Swiss single on his radio show and Rough Trade issued two more singles. “DC-10” didn’t appear on those joyous, raucous records, perhaps because the song attempted a more serious mood in response to the notable McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 crashes and safety incidents of the 1970s, though it shares the singles’ intensity and drive. Ha’s ferocious drumming, Marder’s simple chords, and Schiff’s eighth-note bassline capture the feel of powerful machinery on the verge of disaster, but a baleful saxophone blat punctuates Sing’s warnings: “If you wanna fly / with DC-10 / keep open your eyes / keep open your eyes / ’cause there’s a lot of risk / in the DC flights…” Amid the chaos of the song—which ends with Sing shouting “Emergency!” and the rest of the band shrieking in the background as another DC-10 goes down—the restrained saxophone notes seem mere texture, about as unnoticeable as the instrument ever gets. Angie Barrack, who joined LiLiPUT for the reconstituted band’s first single—itself featuring squawky saxophone—appears to have played the sax in “DC-10,” but Marder had found a way, like Lora Logic before her, to make saxophone punk.

The Psychedelic Furs’ debut record may have been the first time I heard a saxophone in a rock context and didn’t hate it. Duncan Kilburn embroiders the entire album with curlicued melodies and the occasional solo—the typical ways sax is integrated into a guitar-bass-drums lineup—but occasionally, as in “Fall,” he wails more wildly, and his runs trade off with the guitar’s to fill in the song around Richard Butler’s raggedy sneer and hoarse cynicism. In the droning, spooked “Imitation of Christ,” Kilburn’s horn sounds almost the only melodic notes in an insistent dirge of flanged guitars, snare snaps, and tom-tom fills like miles-away thunder. The record sounded bracing, but also stiff and British. I could possibly have admitted that its saxophone approached cool. Sax riffs like the one in “Dumb Waiters,” from the band’s next record, haunted me in the ’80s, suggesting the potential implicit in all the decade’s lame saxophone noodling.

In Wümme, West Germany, at an isolated old schoolhouse—transformed, with music journalist Uwe Nettelbeck’s praise and Polydor’s money, into a high-tech recording studio—six longhaired weirdos known as Faust and their assorted producers, guests, and hangers-on spent the early 1970s living communally, tripping on Swiss LSD-25, playing darts naked outdoors, racing (and wrecking) Porsches and Volvos on the local roads, and, occasionally, creating their own now-legendary music—the band members often recording their takes while lying in bed, microphone cables and patch cords stretched from pillows to control room.

In the late ’60s, in search of rock cred, Polydor executives had asked Nettelbeck to find an underground band the label could sign: Nettelbeck helped assemble the members of Faust, designed their record covers, produced their records, and managed Faust’s daily business, an experience he compared to “looking after a sack of fleas day and night.” The first record—a clear vinyl LP, packaged with a transparent lyric sheet, inside a transparent sleeve printed with an X-ray of a fist—consisted of three lengthy avant-rock congeries and sold very poorly, after which Polydor demanded a tour, a more marketable sound, and some return on their continuing investment. The second record—a black vinyl LP, packaged in a black sleeve and accompanied by a set of illustrations for each song—featured shorter tracks and better production, but little that might be construed as pop. The tour involved jackhammering bits of concrete on a darkened stage. Polydor cut its losses.

Richard Branson had recently founded Virgin Records, and, after a successful run importing and distributing early-’70s “Krautrock” records (the name would be applied to the genre retrospectively, after the lead song on Faust’s fourth LP), had come to Hamburg to scout and sign some German bands. Nettelback sold Branson a Faust album collaged from various home recordings made at Wümme between 1970 and 1973. These experiments, exercises, cut-ups, and other sonic fragments were spliced with a Frankenstein elegance and packaged as The Faust Tapes, which Virgin sold for 48p as a loss leader. The strategy worked too well: the label sold 50,000 copies of The Faust Tapes in 1973, meaning that perhaps some 48,972 bewildered Brits wondered what they’d just heard, never mind the LP’s disclaimer (“The music on this album, drawn from Faust’s own library of private tapes, was recorded informally and not originally intended for release…. These tapes have been left exactly as they were recorded—frequently live—and no post-production work has been imposed on them”).

Among those whom the record affected deeply, Julian Cope called The Faust Tapes LP “the social phenomenon of 1973, and it finally brought the true avant garde into everyone’s living room, for a short while at least.” The LP’s two side-long movements weren’t labeled or subdivided, so as needle tracked vinyl, a pretty pastoral folksong might displace treated drums crashing against a battery of overloaded guitar amps, or human voices made to sound like accelerating motorcycles, or a free jazz-inspired workout, or a rhythm & blues groove gone askew, or what might be TV audio overlaid with the sounds of footsteps and flushing toilets. Later reissues divided the material into twenty-six discrete tracks, most of them only brief sketches. “Untitled: All on Saxes” showcases the instrument’s “aquatic” timbres Debussy noted: for ninety-three seconds, several members of Faust make saxophones squeak an uneven alien dialogue. The track’s energy is hushed, but a looping two-note bass heartbeat running beneath the saxes and the rising, atonal harmonies summon a wilderness melancholy. I’ve heard the saxophone sound stranger; I’ve heard it sound farther-out; I’ve never heard it sound this creepy.

The kids who took music lessons after school carried their instruments to our sixth-grade classroom in scuffed black cases that banged their knees as they walked, then left them beside their desks or by the cubbies at the back of the room: a few half-size rented violins and violas, two girls’ clarinets, one kid’s trumpet, and a saxophone. The saxophonist had arrived at our school a few years after the rest of us, who’d all started together in kindergarten, and still seemed like a new kid—a little strange, a little unknowable. During afternoon recess kiss-and-catch the year before, he was often the head kisser, and now he spoke of his instrument’s “sax appeal” as if he knew something the rest of us would learn later.

The monotony of our school days was relieved by occasional outliers I never knew when or how to expect: we picked teams and spent an afternoon playing spelling baseball in class; we wrote stories at our desks in the morning, and read them aloud in the afternoon; we trooped down to the dim gymnasium for a school talent assembly, the folding wooden bleachers pressed against the walls so we all sat crosslegged on the court. One girl sang an a capella version of “Rhiannon”; another strummed something on an acoustic guitar; two sisters danced the Irish jig.

I want to tell you that the sexy saxophonist honked out “Yakety Sax” and “Tequila” while we stood and cheered, but I don’t remember ever hearing him play. I don’t remember him ever opening the snap-locks on its case and lifting the smudged brass horn from the velour interior. What I remember is that a year or so later, the saxophonist seemed to have given up his instrument. He’d renounced saxiness in all its forms and now wore a white-elbowed jean jacket collar-up, an Iron Maiden patch with grinning, long-haired skulls across the shoulder blades. His own hair hung untrimmed and lank, and moustache wisps curled at the corners of his mouth. He exhibited a paunch. Was his saxophone the crude and tawdry agent that had mutated him into this new self, or had it been the only thing keeping him, until now, from metalhead delinquency? I didn’t know: his was the first case of saxophone derangement I observed, and mostly I wanted to avoid whatever infection he’d caught.

Only later did I realize that he, like rebellious teens worldwide, had simply learned an eternal truth from Frank Zappa: “If ever there’s an obscene noise to be made on an instrument, it’s going to come out of a guitar. On a saxophone you can play sleaze [but]… the guitar can be the single most blasphemous device on the face of the earth…. The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar: now that’s my idea of a good time.”