Are Friends Electric? Take a ride with me and hear songs that resonate and penetrate my soul
Welcome back to the ROX-TV website where everyone is welcome and judgement is reduced to an after thought. We are all friends here and everyone has a voice. Today I’m going to be talking about some of the songs that have really shaped me over the years and simply refuse to be left behind as I rocket through this life. I’ve always had trouble growing roots and my world seems to be one continuous push to somewhere else. About the only constant in my life besides my family is music. During my travels over the decades, some songs have managed to latch on and insist on travelling with me.
Today I’m going to talk about some of them and why they are important to me. Some of the songs are happy and some are sad. There are a few that force me to be a wild and reckless mess and others demand inflective reasoning. No matter what they are saying to me, I find value in them all and will attempt to put my vibrational feelings and preferences into words for the readers to absorb. I feel like everyone should have and cultivate songs that speak directly to them and celebrate their existence.
Music is a very unique and a personal experience for everyone. The words and meanings can be very specific to the listener and that’s ok. Songs for the masses are charming and unifying, but it’s never a bad idea to think independently from time to time. I respect individual freedom in the pursuit of happiness on this strange planet and the songs that I talk about today are by no means an end all be all, magic list that others must comply with or like. I’m merely presenting these ideas and thoughts to perhaps inspire others to cultivate their own “brand” of music which does whatever the individual needs it to do. So without fanfare or ticker tape parades, lets move on into the field of my mind and see what the hell is in there…
“Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”
This song was released by the Tubeway Army from England in May of 1979. It was a single taken from the “Replicas” album and reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart that same year. The song maintained that top posting for four weeks. Gary Numan, who was the front man for Tubeway Army, wrote the song and also produced it. In 2014 Gary had talked about the song in an interview with The Guardian. During the duration of the interview he commented on the song and said “All my early songs were about being alone and misunderstood”.
In 2015, I was two years into my relationship with marijuana, which I had started smoking to put the brakes on a thirteen year death spiral with booze. I initially started smoking regularly after leaving my 27th stay in rehab/hospital in 2013. I walked away from everything that I had known to try one last chance at living. I became a full time smoker and in 2014, after seeing how effective marijuana was in curbing my severe alcoholism, I decided to go all in and get legal.
I started growing marijuana in my house. I called the “lab” Emerald City and set up a rather nice little universe for myself. I let go of things in my life that were destructive and toxic, I grew my hair and beard out long, and just decided to float down the river for awhile. I needed time to heal my body and soul, so that’s what I did. I rowed out into the marijuana ocean and just let everything “happen” for a time. It was around 2015 when I stumbled upon “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” for the first time.
I would spend hours at night smoking potent cannabis and listening to the “sounds” I found on YouTube. I have always liked music and it has never left me, but that time in my life was different. I had grown tired of the old ways and a lot of the songs that had been ingrained in my “drunken lifestyle” didn’t really fit anymore. I wanted to grow and evolve, so I set down my old music and decided to go exploring.
One night I seen a song called “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and without knowing who Tubeway Army was or ever hearing the song before, I followed my intuition and hit play. I immediately heard a steady march of synthesizers and an interesting voice singing. The hairs on my arms and neck stood up and I was home. The song was so good that I froze in time. The lyrics reminded me of being lonely and sad, but the beat and music was up tempo and created a “speedball” affect of sad and optimistic. I related to the singer’s words and the sounds made me soar. I would smoke huge blunts, take some RSO capsules, and then puff on a chunk of hash before setting sail with this amazing audio voyage. It’s been six years since then and the song is still “speaking to me” today. I often listen to the song to remember where I was and how far I’ve come, from those dead days and years of endless madness with the bottle. The song also goes rather nicely with a punchy ball of Nitrous Oxide….just saying.
“Love will tear us apart”
What can I say about Ian Curtis and Joy Division? My god, we don’t have enough time for all the things I want to say about this song or the group. The song was recorded in March of 1980, a video was shot for the single on April 25th, and then, sadly, Ian Curtis (the group’s front man) hung himself in the earlier morning hours of May 18th, 1980. Ian had struggled for years with mental problems and had a host of marital issues with his wife Deborah Woodruff, whom he had married in 1975 at a young age. Ian was 23 years old when he died, forever cementing him in the company of troubled artists and musicians that died way too early, either by their own hand or with substance abuse.
The song reminds me of the lonely field in my mind, where the sun doesn’t shine and the sky is filled with gloomy clouds. Like Ian Curtis, I’ve had my own problems with depression over the years and sometimes things can get rather bleak, when the moon is just right. I first discovered this beautiful and haunting song around 2014, during my years of mind expansion and evolution. Much like “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, it was during a very specific time period in my life. Just like with the song mentioned above, I accidently stumbled upon Joy Division, one night while smoking the lousy feelings away.
I had heard of Joy Division in the past, but I was often dismissive of anything that came overly recommended. I’m not sure why, but for years I associated the group with a jumping off point for emo type stuff, although I had never actually listened to the music. You could say that I was close minded on some matters and if my mind was made up, then it was all over. I foolishly avoided this group for years and after finally hearing their music, I hated myself for being so close minded and so sure of what I thought I understood to be the case. If there is one piece of advice that I can pass on to anyone, it is to not be “so sure” of your own convictions, because quite often, if you allow yourself to step outside of the comfort zone and release the “know it all” point of view, you can be happily surprised.
It’s ok to let go of things that hold us back and it’s never a good idea to pass judgement on something because of what “someone else” has said. I urge all people in this country and around the world to challenge the pre-conceived notions that we all carry about other groups and individuals. If there is one thing that I have learned in this life time, it is that “things are not always what they appear” and the only thing holding us back are ideas that have been sold to us from sources that may or may not have our best interests in mind. Never allow others to think for you, only go by what you can “see, hear, feel, and experience” in the real world.
So the song was absolutely stunning and I replayed it dozens of times, waiting for it to lose some of the heat, but it never did. I’ve been running with this song ever since and it often graces the screen when I’m feeling melancholy. The song was released in June of 1980.
“Goodbye Horses”
This is perhaps one of my favorite songs of all time and I’ve spent many nights experiencing the wonderful world of “Goodbye Horses”. The song was released in 1988 by Q Lazzarus, who from what I gather has lived a life of travelling in our so called “modern” society. I obviously can relate to this with my own inability to find a permanent position in life. Since I was sixteen years old, I have been constantly on the “road” of life, and worn many hats during my own time. The continuous movement which has been my experience has allowed me to develop interesting points of view, having seen life from so many different angles. You could say that it is a blessing and a curse of the highest order. I’ve always longed for more permanence and envied people who seem to find their station in life with ease. For whatever reason, my life has been a constant flow, like a mighty river, taking me from one place to another, often times without the typical “rhyme and reason”.
Over the years, I have resigned to the fact that my job is to be a gypsy and report back to the world all the things I see and learn along the way. Maybe it’s the small amount of Romanian heritage I have coursing through my veins (thanks to a DNA makeup test I took a few years back) or possibly the overall mixture which contains Irish, Italian, Russian, and Scandinavian percentages. While my DNA is top heavy with Irish Descent at nearly half of my makeup, there seems to be quite a bit of movement going on there with the rest of the percentages. It seems I’m from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. (On a side note I think people should take the DNA makeup tests to see exactly who they are, the results might surprise people who are so sure of their backgrounds and how they identify themselves. I’m proud of every category I have which totals eight all together)
This song invokes feelings in me that highlight the general theme of loneliness that I often feel, even in a crowded room. Those feelings of being misunderstood or disregarded. That terrible idea of being judged for nothing other than pre-conceived notions and dismissed. Like other songs that I really enjoy, it takes me to a place that is marked by imperfect existence that probably doesn’t fall into “mainstream” ways of thinking. I have known about this song for a long time and it is among my most cherished audio possessions.
Q Lazzarus is a pretty mysterious figure. It is reported that she married rather young and then fled the relationship over abuse. She reportedly moved to New York City and became a nanny for a time. When the environment wasn’t supportive, she left that life and became a cabbie. It was during those years that she would be discovered by a cab rider who heard her playing a demo in the cab. The man’s name was was Jonathan Demme, and he would later go on to win an Academy Award for directing “Silence of the Lambs”. Demme took Q Lazzarus to Hollywood but no one would sign her because she was deemed unmarketable. In a 2013 story about Q, it is said that she responded to the charge “I market myself. I’m an African American Woman who wears locks and plays American Rock-n-Roll”.
It has been reported that the group “Q Lazzarus and the Resurrection” disbanded sometime before the mid nineties and then she disappeared from the public’s eye. For the next twenty some years, rumors about what happened to Q Lazzarus swirled around, until 2018, when fans were able to track her down. She wasn’t dead and was happily living her life, driving a bus on Staten Island. As for the song, the song writer William Garvey described it in a 2008 interview as “the song is about transcendence over those who see the world as only earthly finite. The horse represents the five senses discussed in the Bhagavad Gita (701 verse Hindu scripture dated back to the second century BC) and the ability to lift one’s perceptions above these physical limitations and to see beyond this limited earthly perspective”.
Well that’s about all the time I have for this piece. Please keep coming back to hear other songs that have shaped me through the years. Who knows? You might get turned onto something new that you never knew existed. Wouldn’t that be cool. I think so. Until next time….
Signing Off,
Mike Shepard
ROX-TV Head Writer
kidvicious810 on IG
