Far Out There Character Soundtracks: Trigger

I’m glad I didn’t have the idea to make character playlists until after I’d decided Trigger would crush on Skye and go all flower child. I can’t even imagine what I would have had him listen to when he was just a kid who smiled a lot and liked to break things. A bunch of technical audiobooks, maybe? As I said before, there’s a lot of SECONDARY characters who don’t have soundtracks, but a central character like Trigger not being musical would have pretty much sunk the whole idea. Lucky me, though, he went all hippy and hippies come with a pre-established set of musical tastes to choose from along with that fashion sense, so I just went with that. Except, of course, it can’t be THAT easy. I mean, there’s psychedelic music and then there’s psychedelic music, ya know?  You got your West Coast festival jam bands like The Grateful Dead, your Swinging London mod freakbeat like The Who, your lush orchestral early prog concept albums like The Moody Blues, your guitar hero blues rock like Jimi Hendrix, your fairytale British pop singles like early Pink Floyd, and plenty more. Yeah, in case the long hair and tie dye shirt weren’t enough of a clue, 60s pop culture has been an interest of mine for a loooooong time, and I really know too much about it for my own good. And the best part is, I eventually decided Trigger wouldn’t listen to ANY of that stuff I just mentioned.

No, Trigger’s brand of psychedelia is that fleeting breed of Top 40-friendly, SLIGHTLY acid-tinged pop single that still turns up on oldies radio. I’m not talking about music for stoners living on a commune or some street performer in Haight-Ashbury, I’m talking about the square suburbanite kid who buys a few day-glo posters and Sears poncho and thinks that makes him groovy. Cos that’s totally what Trigger is. But you know what? Foolish quest to impress Skye aside, the whole psychedelic pop thing really IS a good fit for Trigger. This music is so full of simple, catchy melodies and big, major key power chords and “love everybody” utopian positivism that it really does perfectly suit Trigger’s sweet, guileless naiveté.  

There’s the really obvious flower power, Time Life Music compilation fodder like The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” The Youngbloods’ “Come Together,” Thunderclap Newman’s “Something In The Air” or CSN&Y’s “Carry On, but me being me, I couldn’t allow the whole playlist to e dominated by baby boomer greatest hits. Thus, we’ve got some deeper cuts by otherwise big name artists like “Ferris Wheel” by Donovan, “As We Go Along” by The Monkees, “Please Read Me” by The Bee Gees, “It’s All Too Much” by The Beatles, “Change Is Now” by The Byrds and “Music Is Love” by David Crosby. Okay, technically that last one was a kinda sorta successful single, but barely anyone remembers it now. Still, they all capture that same gentle singalong childishness as the big name picks. AAAAaaaaand then there’s utterly obscure rarities “It’s You” by The Millennium and “Mindrocker” by Fenwyck. These are %100 poseur cash-ins, pure pop artists trying to cash in on that whole hippy trend by recording something a little more trippy sounding than usual, which REALLY makes them perfect selections for Trigger.

And even more than that, there’s the modern revivalist stuff. Like any musical/fashion stylistic trend from years past, psychedelia has had plenty of artists come along after the original movement passed who tried to bring that trippy, colorful aesthetic back, either as a one-off throwback or a career-spanning mission statement. Trigger’s soundtrack has three of those neo-retro type songs  –“The Higher Ground” by The High Dials, “Strawberryfire” by The Apples in Stereo, and “Shower Your Love” by Kula Shaker (I wrestled with including more, it feels wrong to bring up “throwback psychedelic revivalists” and not mention Vibrasonic , Sun Dial, or The Dukes of Stratosphear)– and as is often the case with self-consciously retro works, there’s a lot of ways in which they sound more like the 60s songs Trigger would listen to than ACTUAL songs from the 60s. The reliance on big, simplistic power chord strumming is even greater, “The Higher Ground” and “Strawberryfire” are even more simplistic repetitive, and “Shower You Love” is almost laughable in its blatant Sgt. Pepper plagiarism. Since original period pieces aren’t deliberately trying to sound “like” any pre-existing example, they often tend to be more stylistically varies, while revivalist works are more slavishly faithful to the obvious clichés of the genre. For example, it’s hard to imagine a 21st century retro-psychedelic band writing a flower power anthem with a honky tonk piano break. I mean, what’s groovy about an old west saloon? And yet, “It’s You” and “Something In The Air” both boast exactly such a digression. That’s the thing about purist recreations of past styles: they focus more on the IDEA of what those styles were than the nitty gritty details of what was actually being made. But not only is that just perfect for Trigger’s surface-level appropriation of Skye’s subculture, but it’s pretty fitting for his understanding of the entire world around him… or lack thereof. There’s still a LOT about life Trigger doesn’t come close to getting, so it’s natural that he’d enjoy a simplified, dumbed-down version of things, even in musical form.

And speaking of dumb, I have to take a second and single out the one remaining song on Trigger’s soundtrack: “Atlantis” by Donovan. If you’ve ever heard this song (in any context other than background music for Joe Pesci beating a guy to death in Goodfellas) you already know what I’m talking about. If not, know that “Atlantis” is one of the most impressively, elaborately stupid songs to come out of its decade. The whole first half is just spoken word narration of how Atlantis was totally awesome and seeded all the rest of Earth’s cultures, like, not even spoken LYRICS, nothing rhymes, it’s just a pretentious lecture over some even more pretentious four chord piano melody. Then, after the song is half-way over, the singing finally starts… and it’s a single four-line chorus, set to that same melody, looping over and over gain, for two straight minutes. Imagine if “Hey Jude” only it’s actually one of those ridiculous History channel documentaries. 

But that’s not what makes “Atlantis” stupid… well, yes it is. It’s stupid enough to be an early Spinal Tap song. But what makes it LEGENDARILLY stupid just how EARNEST the whole thing is. As he breathlessly gushes about all myths and religions from all cultures are of Atlantian origin, there isn’t the slightest hint that Donovan Leitch doesn’t ABSOLUTELY believe this. I mean, there’s room for ambiguity over whether or not he actually thinks there’s a lost super-civilization under the Atlantic or means it as a weird metaphor for new age hippy utopianism, but either way, he’s taking this some COMPLETELY seriously. His song MATTERS, dang it! His infuriatingly catchy five minute misunderstanding of Plato’s dialogues is going to CHANGE YOUR LIFE! That kind of absolute straight-faced conviction, that complete absence of self-awareness or even a DROP of irony, that’s what makes “Atlantis” something truly special. Under any normal circumstances, someone performing a song with this much hippy dippy derpiness wouldn’t be able to resist planting their tongue at least SLIGHTLY in cheek, for fear of looking silly. Only in a generation with its collective head stuck all the way up its hash pipe could approach something so laughable with such sincerity. And make no mistake, the flower child generation TOTALLY bought into it, “Atlantis” was a top ten hit. And that, ultimately, is why hippy music is such a perfect musical interest for Trigger. The kid is just the walking embodiment of cheerful obliviousness, devoid of cynicism and totally unaware of anyone snickering at him. Really, what else COULD he listen to other than bright, colorful, deluded, senselessly optimistic pop like this?

(A few comments on making the playlist: even before the whole “finding videos that will play in more than one third of the world” issue came up, this playlist already had me going through five or six versions of the same song looking for the right choice. And I don’t mean “right” as in the video is accessible everywhere, I mean “this video actually contains the recording its title implies.” The older the song is, the greater the risk of bumbling into a rerecorded version the artist did decades later. Even before I started replacing the official posts with less-legit ones, I’d had to resort to a fan posting of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something In The Air” because every single video posted by anyone with the actual rights to the song used a TERRIBLE new version recorded thirty years later. Always beware of budget soundalikes, kiddies! Also, my deepest apologies to anyone in the UK who really want to see what that whole rant about Atlantis is about, but somebody in Donovan’s camp is ASTOUNDINGLY thorough about keeping his songs off YouTube. From the legit Vevo clips to tinny fan videos with 20 views, EVERY Donovan video I could find is blocked in that region, even if the entire rest of the world has free access. It’s a shame too because, for all my snarky hippy-bashing, I do like that dumb, dumb song)

TRIGGER'S YOUTUBE PLAYLIST