Underground Radio Memories Meet the Internet: From Bang to Erik Satie

If you’re 60 or older, you grew up before the Web made music widely available. You heard something on the radio and you bought the record if you wanted to keep it. Otherwise, the music vanished. And if you heard something once and didn’t remember the band or song title, you were out of luck. You were left chasing the wisp of an aural moment that you could not retrieve.

When I heard and liked music pre-Internet, the drive to acquire it was strong. The 1974 movie Chinatown entranced me but I could never find the soundtrack composed by Jerry Goldsmith. Even when I lived in New York, the mighty Tower Records didn’t stock it. Finally, on a 1984 trip in Europe, I found the soundtrack in the Virgin Megastore in London. I snagged a copy for 18 pounds and very carefully carried it back on my flight on Virgin Atlantic to my studio apartment in Brooklyn. With the theme and 1930s classics “I Can’t Get Started” and “The Way You Look Tonight,” it moved my musical interests towards what’s now called The Great American Songbook. My only regret is I didn’t buy every copy I could get my hands on, since they sell for a mint online.

Radio listening also brought me experiences that took decades to unwind. I once won a contest held by the big Top 40 station in my area, KRIO-AM in McAllen, Texas. This was in 1972 and my mother drove me to the station to get my prize, an album titled Bang by the group of the same name. I was aghast, expecting something by, say, Steppenwolf or Deep Purple. Nope, I could only take Bang. Spinning the platter on our stereo back home, I found it sluggish and I didn’t keep it long. The group vanished and I never could find out anything about Bang online, which sounds impossible, but true—until, literally, I tried again while writing this piece and found the group’s website. The site provides enough videos and tracks to slake my interest. This year marks its 50^th anniversary and an anniversary album is in the works. 

The website shows that Bang album cover, which looks just the way I remember it from a half-century ago. I dove right in to listening to the music and I can’t say my opinion changed. Still, I give the band a lot of credit for recording several albums and touring, and hanging on to do a golden anniversary album. At best, Bang reaches the level of early Grand Funk Railroad and Black Sabbath. Bang probably delivers more, well, bang for the buck in a live setting than on vinyl.

By the early 1970s music my interests had matured past the 3-minute pop delights of KRIO to more sophisticated music then heard on KBFM of Edinburg, Texas. One program played what was then called underground music on the show “The Enchanted Forest,” hosted by a DJ who called himself Yosemite. You can’t get more early 70s than “The Enchanted Forest” hosted by Yosemite, right?? The show played the long versions of Doors and Yes songs. Sometimes an unknown band whacked me upside the head. Yosemite once played material by a band called Jade Warrior. As the name suggests, the music had Japanese colorings. My teen imagination assumed the group was from Japan and made awesome music replete with exotic drumming and flutes. Alas, I could never find anything by Jade Warrior. 

Then I started researching this column and of course Jade Warrior popped up. Far from being sons of the Land of the Rising Sun, Jade Warrior was an English progressive rock band with interests in African and Japanese music. Thus, the name did make sense, as did songs with titles like “Three Horned Dragon King" and "Minnamato's Dream.” The albums made solid background listening with those groovy 70s names, Floating World, Last Autumn’s Dream and Way of the Sun, and I can hear what dazzled me as a high school student. While I liked the memory of Jade Warrior more than the YouTube reality, I might dip into the catalog if the spirit of the samurai moves me.

The Internet did help me circle back to a single obscure reference in a popular album. One of the very first albums my brother Cooper and I got was the self-titled second album from Blood, Sweat & Tears, released in January 1969. As pre-teens, we didn’t really connect with the first cut, the “Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie" (1st and 2nd Movements). Songs like “Smiling Phases,” “God Bless the Child” and the disturbing (if you’re a kid) “And When I Die” written by Laura Nyro were and are more accessible, with lyrics.

Still, the title lodged in my brain for decades, as I asked myself,  "Who is Erik Satie?”

In 2021 I looked up Satie on YouTube. His piano compositions from the late 1800s through the 1920s mesmerized me. From the first listening I couldn’t get enough of Satie’s sound. The YouTube piece “3 Hours of Once Upon a Time in Paris” is often the soundtrack of my workday.

Satie was a very odd duck, his own worst enemy as this article shows, while fellow composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy thrived. But lifestyle aside, Satie’s music connects deeply with me. Ravel and Debussy are also excellent in that pathbreaking modern sound. My views were also colored by Ravel’s Bolero as featured in the Bo Derek movie 10.

The Internet intersected with musical memories and fantasies in other ways. My enjoyment of artists bobbed up and down as I rediscovered them. Renaissance (more 70s British prog rock!) faded, early Grand Funk proved grating (I guess you gotta be 14 years old to really dig that Michigan power trio sound). Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails album had a 24-minute “suite” based on the Bo Diddley song “Who Do You Love?” I never heard it but in my teen obsession with “longer is better” songs like “In-A Gadda-Da-Vida,” I assumed it was mind-blowingly brilliant. Then I finally gave it a listen on YouTube, or I heard as much as I could handle before I switched to something more concise. I'm sure it sounded more engaging for audience members. I listened to it again when writing this post to make sure I hadn't overlooked an element of hidden genius. I didn't. 

So thanks, Internet, for bringing me back to Bang and Jade Warrior, satisfying my curiosity about "Who Do You Love?" and introducing me to Erik Satie. 

Next, maybe I'll listen to Humble Pie's 1971 "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," recorded live at the Fillmore East, all 23 minutes and 28 seconds of it. At that length, it's got to be glorious. Yosemite told me so in 1973.