Incident At the Sonic Drive-In

There’s something humbling about going to the Sonic Drive-In on foot. The Hyundai-jockeys all around you stare like you’re some kind of novelty. Which, in a way you are – you’re at a drive-in fast food place, driving nothing but a pair of Rockports.

It can make you feel rather small. But that feeling, the shrinking feeling when you know everyone is gawking at you, doesn’t matter much when you’re there to buy your last meal.

Nothing much mattered then. It didn’t matter that I didn’t drive. Too many medications made my brain feel like soup. The anomaly of being a pedestrian at the drive-in was lost on me as I pressed the button and ordered my greasy last meal before I sent myself to the gallows. Eating Paleo, or some other such healthy meal, when I planned to leave the world just an hour or so after would have struck me as pointless. I hadn't even closed and locked the door when I left my house that ugly summer day. Why bother? What did it matter? I wouldn’t be back.

It was quite a shock when the fog was so suddenly cleared. When you sleepwalk through every day, it’s jarring when something jolts you awake. A bright beacon of orange made its way through the haze, and there she was – Allison (so we'll call her for privacy's sake), the pale, skinny ginger girl with whom I’d have graduated a class above or below me, just a few years ago.

I was so alerted from my zombie-like trance that I even had the awareness to wonder what Allison of all people was doing back in our tiny town, working as a carhop at Sonic no less. Basic small town stereotyping, and the traditions in which those stereotypes are based, tells you someone who had been as popular and accomplished in high school as Allison didn't come back to town to work at Sonic. I was sure Allison had left town to go to college, as did everybody who had such a chance. In those days, we weren't as disillusioned with the debt-ridden idea of college as we are now. Something important must have brought her back. Maybe she blew her parents’ money. Maybe she couldn’t handle it. Maybe someone in the family got sick. Maybe it wasn't something as mundane as a summer job or just a realization that college wasn't for her. In any case, the Sonic Drive-In certainly wasn't where one who knew the protocol and promise of small-town youth would have pictured Allison.

There's nothing shameful about working as a fast food carhop. It's hard work. Like any job, a carhop puts up with any number of problems and frustrations. The Iraq War, for instance. If you're old enough to remember, in 2003 the United States and a coalition of other nations went to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq; France, however, refused to join the effort, much to the ire of some Americans, who expressed their disdain for the French by calling french fries "Freedom Fries." I am not making this up. People were rolling up to Sonic and, with a straight face, ordering "Freedom fries." And of course, the carhops and cooks who repeated the orders were expected to use the absurdly jingoistic term, or risk a lecture on patriotism by the customers. 

But that's another story, I guess. Anyway, whatever brought Allison to work at the Sonic Drive-In that ugly summer of 2007, hardship or nothing special at all, it must have slipped her mind. There wasn’t a trace of embarrassment in her big green eyes – only shock. The same was written on my face. I could feel it (I could feel something!). It was probably the first time my expression had changed in weeks.

Allison was shocked to see me, and I her, but somehow I knew it wasn’t the surprise of seeing an old schoolmate after so long. It wasn't my disheveled appearance, sweaty and clad in a wrinkled plaid shirt. Somehow, I knew that she knew. And somehow, she knew that I knew what had made her eyes grow so wide.

It was some kind of telepathy. No one can tell me any different. We didn’t say a word to each other for the longest, quietest moment. As far as I remembered, our paths had never crossed much in school. It wasn’t a reunion of pals. This silence was different. She knew. I can’t be convinced otherwise.

Allison began to stammer something. It wasn’t about my order, my final order on Earth – she wasn’t looking at the brown bag on the red tray she held. Her big green eyes were still on my muddy brown ones.

“I'm sorry you’re hurting,” I felt her say.

I felt her say it. Or, I felt her think it. It was telepathy, some kind of holy intervention in the form of a para-psychological phenomenon.

“I can’t do it anymore,” I replied. That must have been how my mind answered. Or my heart. I don’t know how much the heart is involved in telepathy.

When Allison finally spoke, with her mouth and vocal cords, it was nothing profound or moving. She repeated my order and delicately handed me my last meal.

She knew. She knew what morbid milestone she held in her hand.

I said, with actual words, “thank you.”

We stood there for another long moment. If anyone had seen us – and come to think of it, I don't remember there being a single car parked at the drive-in at that moment, as if they'd all just faded into the ether as soon as I placed my order – they’d have thought we were both dumbstruck by some unseen, unspoken revelation. As if one of us had just told the other something shocking. And, I suppose, that was indeed the case.

I know that was the case.

I couldn’t take all that beauty anymore. If I was going to do what I’d promised myself to do, I had to leave right then. All that wordless beauty, as sappy as it sounds, was breaking through to me. I couldn’t have that.

I backed away, as if the burger and fries that had just changed hands had been a hostage exchange.

Fifteen or so minutes later, I found myself in a swing in the park, eating my greasy burger and fries. I don’t remember the walk getting there. Despite still being in a daze, I had my wits about me just enough to realize I was the only person in the park. There were no dog walkers, no Frisbee players, no parents and squeaking children. Maybe everyone else had looked out of their windows and seen how ugly, how heavy a summer day could be, and had the sense to stay home.

Stuffing my fries in my mouth, made all the more salty by my tears, I felt the gentle sting of Allison’s telepathy from Sonic again. “Don’t do it. Please, don’t do it.”

I spat the tear-soaked food from my mouth and had a good sob – an actual heaving sob, not just streams of tears. When I caught my breath, I replied to Allison’s mental communique, too exhausted to argue with such mind-power. I used real words.

“Alright,” I managed to croak. “Okay. Okay, I won’t do it.”

I took a drink from my Coke and winced from the acid like it was a long swig of whiskey.

All that maudlin beauty was enough torture to convince me to do, or not to do, anything.

“Just lay off with all this sap before it makes me sick,” I thought. 

I hoped Allison didn’t pick up that last bit of my groaning, grouchy inner monologue. It seemed like such a nasty thing to say to someone who’s just saved your life with the power of telepathy. 

Album Review: Pink Floyd's "Obscured By Clouds"

You had no idea Pink Floyd released an album called Obscured By Clouds, did you? No idea. All you know is “Wish You Were Here” and “Comfortably Numb.” You don’t know nothin about nothin!

But to give you an idea of how somewhat uncharacteristically stripped down Obscured By Clouds is for a Pink Floyd album, its foreboding opening instrumental title track was used by my high school football team for our entrance music as we approached the field (go JC Chasez Mennonite School! Class of ‘04!). We couldn’t have instilled such primitive fear in our opponents with more polished, intricate Floyd instrumentals like “A Saucerful of Secrets” or “One Of These Days” (unless we skipped forward to the “I’m going to cut you into little pieces” part). 

“Foreboding” isn’t a rare adjective to Floyd’s music, but the grittiness of this guitar and prehistoric synth-dominated title track opened an album that found the band hurriedly, though craftily, writing and recording the soundtrack to a French adventure drama, La Vallee (that is, The Valley, for the laypersons). Two of the songs contained were straight ahead rock, the rowdy instrumental “When You’re In” and the searing, crunchy “The Gold It’s In the...” (I don’t know what the gold is in, that’s just the title of the song). The band had approached such heavy territory before on an earlier film soundtrack album, More (the film of which was coincidentally directed by Barbet Schroeder, who was also at the helm for La Vallee); two songs from that album, “The Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar” had approached outright heavy metal.

Soundtrack work was nothing new to Pink Floyd, but most of More, and their contributions to the film Zabriskie Point, were very Floydian – psychedelic pieces carefully textured and shaped by painstaking improvisations and ideas conceived on stage. Obscured By Clouds, however, found the band on a time crunch, locked away in a studio in France, in a rush to get back on the road, then back to Abbey Road to finish what would be their next album, Dark Side of the Moon.

The fact that this album had the misfortune to be released not even a full year before Dark Side undoubtedly contributes to its lack of a reputation. It would become their first album to crack the US Top 50, reaching #46, but Dark Side of the Moon’s decade-plus long stay on the album charts will always overwhelm such a feat. And, unlike their previous albums, none of the ten songs here were shaped over time by live performances before being hammered out in the studio – the songs here were “proper” rock songs, conceived and recorded on the clock. The result was an atypical Pink Floyd album, but a striking and highly enjoyable one nonetheless.

The jaunty, jangly, catchy “Free Four” enjoyed a bit of airplay when released as a single, though it’s doubtful that fans appreciated Roger Waters’ grim cynicism in the lyrics exploring death and futility. It also contains possibly his first reference to being “the dead man’s son,” a keystone in his music’s inspiration as time went on and his father’s death in World War II made more of an impact. The song was probably the first in Floyd’s entire catalog to so prominently feature that trademark grimness that made Waters’ lyrics so great; “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,” from the band’s groundbreaking debut The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, had been his first sole credit with the group. Unless I’m misinterpreting the nonsense in the poppy psychedelia, those lyrics held a shade of that cynical English wit, though they lay under the surface of Piper’s electronic, whimsical wonderland. But the other band members, and many fans, agree that “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” is the lone throwaway from their legendary debut.

Their next album, A Saucerful of Secrets, saw Waters’ songwriting breakout, with such staples as “Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun” and “Let There Be More Light.” But it’s the psychotic “Corporal Clegg” that hinted – or, rather flatout boasted – of the subjects and themes that would dominate Roger Waters’ later songwriting, both with Pink Floyd and in his solo career. The song told the tale of an amputee war veteran and his alcoholic wife. Grim things indeed, but grim things only the English can turn into an overbearing pop tune complete with kazoo coda.

For the next five years, though, Waters’ lyrics mostly stayed within the frame of the psychedelic noodling that made Floyd such an underground sensation throughout the world (except, so far, the States). But “Free Four” was a sudden release of a dour world view, the bassist sculpting a rotting skull with a gap-toothed grin.

Elsewhere throughout Obscured By Clouds, the lyrics follow, more tightly than at first glance, the theme of the La Vallee film, exploring the simple but daunting themes of unalterable change and the dangers and depths that lie beyond one’s comforts. The film explores the same: a group of explorers search for treasure or gold or some spiritual journey or something in a mysterious and dangerous place in Papua New Guinea simply marked on maps as “obscured by clouds.” The characters in the movie see a slow shedding of what they know as civilization until they themselves become trodden by the unknown things so far from their homes. The lyrics of Obscured By Clouds reflect this of course, which in a strange way gives it parallels with the themes of Dark Side of the Moon. 

As that album was a master portrait of the pressures of society than can lead one to absolute madness, this album slowly tracks the pressures that come with drastic change. The mid-tempo “Burning Bridges” is self-explanatory, as is David Gilmour’s “Childhood’s End” (incidentally the last Pink Floyd lyrics not written by Waters until 1987, years after he’d left the group on acrimonious terms). Purportedly with the Vietnam War in mind, Gilmour’s lyrics are much simpler than Waters’, but anything more detailed and sardonic would have been ill-fitting for such a frank lecture about the death of innocence.

While the basic narrative of the album is what makes it so strong, there are times its instrumental passages are, at the risk of hyperbole, spellbinding. “Mudmen” is my second favorite Floyd song of all time, in case you were wondering what’s my second favorite Floyd song of all time. In La Vallee, the song plays as a group of mud-covered tribal warriors or shamans, or whatever they are, in hideous, gargantuan masks dance and stalk towards a transfixed character. The song is a beautiful slowburner, grinding from melancholy to ecstasy, and was the first Pink Floyd song penned by Gilmour and keyboardist Rick Wright; it was a great dose of the musical partnership they’d form twenty years later on The Division Bell and after Floyd was done "for good" in the 2000s.

Speaking of Wright, his vocal on “Stay,” one of the band’s few “ballads,” is almost spine-tingling. The keyboardist was often critical of his voice, but its lonesomeness fits the loss and finality of the song’s lyrics. Closing the album is “Absolutely Curtains,” a gorgeous yet frightening instrumental that seems to perpetually build and build until its stunning crescendo leads into an excerpt from the film – a choir of tribesmen singing words in an exotic language that, if interpreted, would dash the mystery that lends itself so perfectly to the song.

Obscured By Clouds isn’t usually included in the lineage of Floyd works that were essential to the development of Dark Side of the Moon as is, say, the track “A Saucerful of Secrets” in 1969; the twelve-minute instrumental had been a thematic, conceptual, multi-part story, which led to “The Man & The Journey Suite” that became a focus of the band’s legendary live repertoire during the same era, further shaping their penchant for storytelling via instrumental texture. In 1971, Meddle had been vital to Dark Side of the Moon’s birth, if not in terms of structure, in terms of the quantum leaps in studio knowledge and innovation. 

But Obscured is exactly that – fogged over in the history of Pink Floyd as it relates to the elements that ultimately led to Dark Side and beyond.

The rub is, it shouldn’t be. The album tells a story, its music shapes the events and moods, and an overall, solid narrative focusing on change and departure runs consistently throughout – just the way the narratives of madness and societal pressure shape Dark Side of the Moon. Granted, Obscured By Clouds had a movie to follow. But even in that sense, Pink Floyd looked beyond slapping some mood music onto forty minutes of tape and chose rather to make a proper album using La Vallee’s story.

Though obviously decimated in sales and memory by its successor, such was the success of this record throughout the faithful European market in 1972 that it eclipsed the film for which it was recorded, which performed lukewarmly. A dispute between the band and the film studio arose, for whatever reasons those disputes always arise, and in response, the studio re-titled the movie to The Valley Obscured By Clouds, to hopefully capitalize on the positive reception the album enjoyed over the film, particularly in France.

Much like the treasure and spiritual whatnots sought by the characters in the film, Obscured By Clouds is in many ways the post-Piper, pre-Dark Side album that holds the most reward for those who seek it out. It’s not only a solid and well-written album, especially considering the rushed atmosphere of the sessions, but it captures Pink Floyd in a very non-Floydian snapshot.

It’s the perfect definition of a hidden gem.

-from my book Rocktology Exam: Classic Rock's Hidden Gems (but you don't have to buy it)