Sometimes the only way to mourn is to listen, especially when the object of loss is a musician whose work dredges up a lifetime of memories. By the time I’d heard Pyramid, The Alan Parsons Project had already recorded 2 albums; I’d come late to what the hetero boys in my burb called, derisively, art rock, that neighborhood where groups like Genesis, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Pink Floyd lived. But The Alan Parsons Project were a curious thing in the music business—the group was a cooperative of guest instrumentalists and vocalists that changed from album to album, unified only by the stewardship and songwriting talents of Parsons and Eric Woolfson, who on Turn of A Friendly Card, finally made his lead singing debut after years of setting vocals on the group’s demos.
Tales of mystery and imagination indeed. Woolfson’s sound–a bearded choirboy’s plaint–conjured magical soundscapes suitable for evenings spent passing the bong, and a poignancy that turned songs like Day after Day (The Show Must Go On), Time, the aspirationally tragic Inside Looking Out from Gaudi and Ammonia Avenue’s title track into lullabies that soothed my own manchild confusions during the decade of the 1980s.
I needed that balm after yesterday’s calamitous NYS Senate vote failed to ratify gay marriage. Sometimes only music can sing your pain and your frustrations–or relieve present-tense anxieties by plunging you into another world. The music of TAPP always operated on the scale of theater; how fitting that Woolfson wound up writing for the stage after parting ways with Parsons.
But the song is ended: Eric Woolfson died on December 2. RIP, Eric. I’m still listening.
Above: Woolfson, left, with Alan Parsons