February 3, 2016: The Alan Parsons Project, “I Robot”
Full disclosure: There was an unpublished post regarding this album that I just couldn’t jive with. It followed the same structure as my post about Akron/Family and just didn’t feel right. So, I decided to regroup and start from scratch. The reason is that I don’t have much of a connection to this record. Friends and I spun side A of “I Robot” at a party my senior year of college and enjoyed it enough, but I never felt the need to go back and examine it. If I had an immediate reaction to the music, it’s that it would fit right at home on the Boogie Nights soundtrack, a film that has been my stock answer to “What’s your favorite movie?” since I was about twenty (for better and worse). Of the various categories I could create from my collection, this would fall into a group of records I inherited from my Uncle Rick and Aunt Linda. For Christmas 2007, they shipped their record collection from their home in Tahoe City to give their nephew, who they heard was interested in vinyl, a jump on their collection.
Rick and Linda, Virginia City, Nevada; August 2001.
Sitting on the floor of my parent’s basement, I began to unpack the numerous cardboard boxes filled with their 12-inch records and began to get a picture of my aunt and uncle I hadn’t had before. Some of my aunt’s records had “Linda” written in the upper right corner: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones were all from her collection. Eventually, I started to feel as though I could make educated guesses as to who had owned each record. Cat Steven’s Tea for the Tillerman? Undoubtedly Aunt Linda. Then there was Out of the Blue by the Electric Light Orchestra and that was clearly a Rick record. It was that thought that I carried with me as I worked over the various ways I could approach this post. I was determined to engage with a record I hadn’t found initially engaging, apart from being a great album to put on at a party. I kept coming back to this quote in the gatefold, though: “I Robot… The story of the rise of the machine and the decline of man, which paradoxically coincided with his discovery of the wheel… and a warning that his brief dominance of this planet will probably end, because man tried to create robot in his own image.”
It’s probably unknowable, but I’m going to assume this was a Rick record. It may not be, but let me tell you something about my Uncle Rick: The inside of his old pickup truck had and odor that was so strong I would swear it emanated form the cushions. It was overwhelming and distinct, but it was natural. It was the smell of someone who was constantly active. It was quintessentially Rick. The guy was just a natural. “True blue,” you might say and, as someone who might occasionally fall to a crippling sense of anxious self-doubt, it’s a trait I’ve come to very much admire about the guy. He seemed to simply enjoy just being there. During a visit I made in August of 2001, the man seemed to make it his mission to force my AOL Instant Messager-obsessed, narrow-minded self to confront anything I professed an ignorant proclamation of distaste for. He took me, who had subsisted entirely on chicken fingers and french fries up to that point, for my first meal at a Chinese restaurant; when my cousin and I went to see Jurassic Park 3, he slipped us some extra money and insisted we also get nachos at the Mexican place around the corner. At that age, I couldn’t have been less interested in a hike. Still, one morning, Rick informed me to put on my board shorts and prepare for myself for a walk around the California scenery. I figured it was punishment for not offering to do the dishes the night before. There’s this thing, though, about being a natural. It’s that it seems nearly impossible for anyone to have a bad time in their company. They’re locked in to a wavelength most of us only flirt with, if we’re lucky. That hike, complete with scaling steep hills filled with brush that made its business scratching the shit out of your shins and swimming in a lake sitting somewhere on top of the dry hills, has become one of my fondest memories of my time in Tahoe that summer.
Me, in my “Enema of the State” phase, Tahoe City, California; August 2001. Photo by Rick Sheldon. The needle just lifted off side B, so let me just share one last anecdote before I sign off. Listen: Rick was a morning person and I was on East Coast time, which made us the first two people in the kitchen my first morning there. As I sat down and began rubbing my eyes, Rick started heating up a frying pan and added butter. “You like breakfast burritos?” he said. A burrito? What is that? It sounds Spanish. Just be polite. “Not especially,” I said. Oh, god. Is he getting out the eggs? You’ve never had eggs before, Champ. Something really gross and off-putting about them, right? He’s going back into that fridge. Okay, there’s salsa. That confirms the Mexican suspicions. This can’t be good, whatever it is. “Have you ever had one before?” He was scrambling the eggs now and cutting up something I’d never seen before. It was pear-shaped, with a big brow pit in the center, and the inside looked like a green sunburst guitar. What is he feeding me? “No, I haven’t,” I said. He poured the contents of the frying pan on top of a tortilla, wrapped it up, and put the plate in front of me. “Do me a favor,” he said. “As long as you’re staying here, don’t say you don’t like something until you try it.” There’s a humility to that. It’s what kept me coming back to that quote inside the record’s gatefold.
It’s also, quite easily, some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. Thanks for that, Uncle Rick.
The most recent post from the Autobiographic Records blog.