During the first year or so of my post-college life, I developed a habit of visiting my local record shop every Saturday afternoon (it goes without saying that I already had this habit, maybe not so firmly attached to a particular day). It was an unassuming little store hiding in a nondescript strip mall. Nothin' special, really...but it was my store.

Now this was before I got the full-on jazz bug. My prize jazz record at the time was probably Chuck Mangione's Feels So Good. The most adventurous thing in my collection was Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre. Weird? Yes. Jazz? Nope.

On one particular weekend we had a college pal visiting us. The only thing better than a solo pass through the vinyl bins is a tag team effort. Oh yes, we did some mighty damage. Two of the records that Gene picked up were George Thorogood's Bad To The Bone and Chick Corea's A.R.C.. Before he left on Sunday afternoon I made myself a nice tape of those two albums (back then just about everybody had a decent tape deck, standard issue equipment along with that Maxell "wind-tunnel" poster).

It sure was fun to pop that tape into my car's deck. Especially the Thorogood side. Many an after work drive home was kicked off with Thorogood channeling Chuck Berry on the song "Back To Wentzville". As the mid-80's economy boomed though, my commute began to involve serious amounts of stop & go.

It also began to involve side two of that tape.

I have no idea why my buddy bought that particular Corea record. It made it onto my my tape because it was one of the strangest things I'd ever heard. At times it sounds like the musicians are just trying to make each other laugh. At other times, it was like they were trying to annoy the upstairs neighbors. I was fascinated. You just would not think that a piano, acoustic bass and drums could make such a racket.

The tune (if you want to call it that) from A.R.C. that struck me right between the ears was the title track. It started with this furious bass line that made me think of an animal scrambling up a tree. That line was used as motif for the early part of the composition...until the free improv cats-on-piano fun took over.