A Recollection of the Electric Sheik

A Recollection of the Electric Sheik

Hey All,

Several blogs ago I mentioned a figure from my past, The Electric
Sheik (TES). TES and I went to high school together. A more severe adolescent outcast I doubt you would ever find. His voice was harsh, his laughter ribald, his skin ravaged, his hair black, oily, and unkempt, and his hygiene always in question. But the guy was brilliant. His wit was as nimble as some creature sprinting over the African veldt. It was fast, sleek, and streamlined. He wasn't a nerd, he wasn't a geek, he was something "other." My father, on more than one occasion, was heard to state, point blank, "That kid is nuts." My father, the middle school principal, whose career was about compassion and guidance for the Youth of America, was at a total loss as to understand the inner workings of my TES. I won't say I faired any better, but the Sheik was far from psychotic or pathological. He was simply on a plane far above those children with whom he shared the high school hallways, classrooms, and lounges.

And he was angry. And he'd been angry a long time.

I cannot tell you how I became a time-killing partner with The Electric Sheik. I think it may have begun one afternoon when I managed to carry my own in a discussion about Frank Herbert or Gene Wolf. I think I then garnered his trust by laughing at one his snide remarks. Eventually he ceased to be the dark and sullen creature slumped in his own cloud of darkness near the back of the room. Eventually, he began to spend time with me in the breaking twilight. He was still angry. But it was the good kind of angry--the kind that propels.

The Electric Sheik was a year ahead of me in high school. In the Fall started his freshman year at Oregon State University. I was surprised; OSU was a very rural college, graduating successful veterinarians, agriculturalist, and animal husbands. The Electric Sheik had enrolled as a Philosophy Major in Downtown Cowtown. I imagine he felt he welcomed the challenge of such extreme adversity. But when I spoke to him I could hear the boredom in his voice.

We passed in and out of touch until it came time for me to burst free of the confines of high school. I'd elected to enroll at the University of Oregon, an educational environment and experience that would radically reshape my vision of reality.

TES looked me up that summer and between my graveyard shifts at the local cannery, my part-time job at a day care...and play practice, he and I would do what wse loved best-cruising record stores, bookstores, drinking lots of coffee, and going to movies. Our ritual pattern on the weekend was to cruise up to Portland and scour all of the independent record stores up and down West Burnside, get lost in the monolithic Powell's bookstore, drink lots of coffee, and eventually find our way into Northwest Portland for the midnight showing of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW at the Clinton Street Theater.

TES taught me all I needed to know about the appropriate handling of toast, rice, toilet paper, and squirt guns while attending a cult film. He also meticulously tutored me in the regional requisite audience patter for viewing ROCKY HORROR.

But most of all, The Electric Sheik introduced me to new music. In his boredom and discontent with the OSU college campus culture, he applied for, and was granted, a volunteer disc jockey spot on OSU's College Campus Radio station, KBVR (that's right, K-Beaver...they were the OSU Beavers, after all).

It was 1984, and the music industry was going through a radical transition. With the development of the silicone chip came the evolution of the microchip and micro-circuitry. Remember, this shit was all brand new in 1984. Activities done on machinery that had been large, bulky, gangly and driven by sweat or steam could now be done through a device the size of a shoebox.

Thus Came The Rise Of The Hair Band.
Essentially if you could afford an electronic keyboard, a drum machine, and a good hairdresser, you had yourself a band. Producing music became very cheap, very quickly. Musical styles were in transition as well, and Punk was meeting Pop head-on in what some people were calling New Wave. And in his cramped broadcast booth just south of the dorms on the Oregon State University campus, The Electric Sheik sat in the eye of an electronic flurry of odd untraditional music and outrÇ poetry. As a disc jockey, TES reveled in the opportunity to reinvent himself through the newly evolving Popular Culture. His scraggly hair received more attention than ever before (and not simply because he started giving it a shampoo more frequently) but because it could be found streaked with blazes of hot pink or turquoise. From his ears dangled not earrings, but the ornamental equivalent of fishing lures and discarded IUDs. His wardrobe became retinally detrimental; eye scouring day glow yellow, blue, and green string pants and muscle shirts sprayed with patterns of spiders, ants, and yellow jackets. These were the assassinations of fashion that eventually lead to the body pierced, tattoo riddled urban primitives of the 1990s; it was an obnoxious, but less permanent time for fashion statements. It was only hair dye and glitter after all, not ink imbedded deep in your dermal layers.

And though he was crass and craggy, nasty and faggy, The Electronic Sheik was a generous creature. Over the months, he passed me copy after copy of LPs stamped in gold-foil ink reading, "For Promotional Use Only: Not For Resale."

I came into possession of music I'd never heard before, and in recent years, never been able to find again. Bands with names like Industry, Hayzee Fantayzee, O Positive, Gang of Four, The Mekons, The Blue Bells, Jules Shear, Fun Boy 3, Ebn Ozn, Guadalcanal Diary, Poi Dog Pondering, Pere Ubu, Ignatious Jones, Moving Targets, Klaus Nomi, Specimen, Comsat Angels, Perfect Circle, The Crazy 8s, Lene Lovich, Nina Hagen, Oingo Boingo, Kate Bush, Japan, The Fleshtones, The Modern Lovers, The Boomtown Rats, The Cure, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Joy Division, Brian Eno, Bronski Beat and more, more than I can think of right now without instigating a cerebral hemorrhage. Is it any wonder I filled a three and half foot long orange crate to the point of bursting in less than a year? Goddamn you Electric Sheik, curse your poxy hide.

It seemed to me this was, historically, the most fevered time of musical transition since the original British Invasion in the 1960s. And the truth be told, a great many of these new musicians were arriving on our shores from the Isles. Sure, New Wave was all over the radios, but with such an influx of bands, the dropping price of production, they were coming out of the woodwork, many without major studio backing. Sound familiar? And where did TES sit in the electronic gloaming, listening to his obscure E.P.s while plotting world anarchy? That's right kids, these were the early days of College Radio, something which eventually became a Genre, and ultimately a marketing label. This time period also heavily influenced a generation of Alternative recording artists; the eclecticism, the forays into politicization, the balladeers of alternative lifestyles, the rise of Geek Chic. Good times.

Eventually, The Electric Sheik vanished into the urban wilds of New York City sometime in the late 1980s. I haven't spoken to him since. I hear he is well, and changed dramatically-no more dangling earrings or day glow stretch pants. I think of him from time to time, wondering if I would ever have developed my current musical tastes had I never met him? I guess the point is long moot. But as I pick through the Top 100 downloads listed in CMJ, and give each a listen in turn, I gather snippetts and snails of songs gone by, smuggled across the midnight desert, in the caravan of The Electric Sheik.

More Later,
Coletrane.