Don't really know how or where to start with this one...
Ok - my first exposure to NEFERTITI was as a freshman in college. I had just begun to get into the Second Quintet, only in reverse album order, intentionally (long story...). Started with FILLES, LOVED IT (still might be my "favorite" Miles record, period), then a few months later bought MILES IN THE SKY. Now THAT'S a weird-ass record! I didn't love it, and still don't - it's not a "love me" type record. At all - the lion's head in Miles' crotch kinda telegraphs THAT message. But I did dig it, and still do (btw, has anybody ever noticed how there's a section in "Country Son" that is almost an exact replica of the framework used for "Ssshh/Peaceful"? I've never seen that "officially" noted anywhere, but I think it's of intrest historically. But I don't have this stuff on CD, except for FILLES. So maybe somebody's picked up on it by now. Surely Belden has. If he hasn't, the muffukker needs to give me a gig ).
Anyhow....
It's the beginning of the second semester, January, 1975, and I'm going w/a buddy to check out speakers. We go into this little joint in Denton, a real dark, musty, thick-but/and-dirty-carpeted covering warped wooden floors, padded-wall, coulda'-been-a-hippie-pad-probably-was-only-now-it's-a-college-town-stereo-shop-big-difference-right? kinda place. We'd just walked in when all of a sudden, this music started playing, a long sinuous melody made all the more sinuous by the fact that the hornd were just a little bit out of sync with each other. I recognized the band, but not the album, so I stopped checking out equipment and started focusing to the music (never a bad idea, really).
Well...o...k...THIS is getting interesting....Can't wait to hear the solos....
Uh...What about the solos....DAMN this is getting INTENSE....uh...the solos...
SHIT!!!
Oh, here's a chorus without a theme statement, must be solo tiAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Hooooolllllyyyy fuuuuccckkkkinnn' SHIT.
Well, on comes "Fall". The mindfuck continued, to put it mildly. I was loving every minute of it too.
Finally I said to the guy running the stoer, "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?" He said nothing, just handed me the cover. It's autumnal colors matched the music perfectly - quiet, in the process of withdrawing from the heat, yet still full of bright, defiant blazes, blazes that let you know that even if the music was "going inside", psychologically speaking (a feeling visually reinforced by the grainy B&W back cover), that it was still full of life and that it WOULD be back, eventually, and in an equally spectacular blaze of new color (FILLES, anybody?). Of course, between Fall and Spring, there's Winter, and if MILES IN THE SKY ain't "Winter" then God didn't make little green apples, and it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.
By the time "Hand Jive was underway, I just said fuck this and walked the mile or so from the stereo shop to the record store, spent $4.98 (+ tax), went home, and surrendered.
I could talk about this music in more technical terms, or even/especially historical terms - how I no longer hear it the same way now that I've hear a fair amount of what the same band was doing live at about the same time, which was kinda the same thing, only kinda totally not, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I COULD talk about that, and more (don't get me going on the album cover thing...), and someday no doubt will. But that's not the FIRST thing I think about when I think of NEFERTITI. The first thing I think about is having just turned 19, beginning to live in a world of seemingly unlimited options, and going into some dungy stereo shop and having "seeming unlimited" take on a whole new meaning. That and buying a new LP for $4.98 that still plays wonderfully, one that I still have, and one that I hope to always have. Permanent change and permanent permanent, the new becoming the old without ever becoming old. The thrill of discovery and the discovery of the thrill. Those were the days.
May ALL our days be like them.
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