When I was 13 or 14, there was a song that was often played on the local teenybopper/alternarock station called "Fade to Black". This was not Metallica's "Fade to Black", or Dire Straits' "Fade to Black", or even Nina Gordon's "Fade to Black", but a simple little song by a previously unknown band called His Boy Elroy.
I loved it from the start. It was musically simple, with only an acoustic guitar and tambourine for accompaniment. The lyrics were nothing special, and in any other song would actually be terrible. But there was something about the way it was performed that caught me. "Fade to Black" was slow and quiet but had a momentum that told the listener: this is it, the end has been decided and there is no way to change it, we must come to terms with our fate. It drifts between mourning and acceptance and the ragged remains of hope and ends abruptly.
Here are the lyrics, as best as I can remember them:
That was it. And it was so beautiful and so miserable that every time I heard it, I felt like weeping. I taped it off the radio once and that scratchy, tinny copy is all I have left of it. Why didn't I buy the CD? I did buy the CD. I was rather hesitant about buying it at first, as I hadn't heard anything else by His Boy Elroy, and what if they sucked? Then I reasoned - how could a band that wrote "Fade to Black" possibly write anything bad? And even if it did turn out to be a terrible CD, at least I'd have a decent copy of "Fade to Black" to listen to over and over.
Ha ha! Why would I be writing this essay if it all didn't end in pain and tragedy ? It turns out this CD was one of the worst CDs I'd ever heard. I guess I should have been more suspicious that I got it out of the $3 bin, and that the $3 bin was about half unopened His Boy Elroy CDs. But it was worth it for "Fade to Black", wasn't it? Wasn't it? Wasn't it?
As it turns out, the album version of "Fade to Black" was not the version played on the radio. It had the same lyrics and vaguely the same tune, but it was all crudded up with too many guitars, some overbearing percussion, and particularly bland and uninspired vocal work. In short, it was "Fade to Black" as if Satan was singing it into the base of your spine through one of those toy megaphones that distorts your voice. A whole three pictures of George Washington that I will never see the likes of again, and my dreams of owning that one perfect song shattered. I usually sell my used CDs, but I didn't want to insult the music store clerk by actually asking for money for this horror.
So ends my sad, sad story. If you want your own copy of this CD, maybe because you hate yourself or you want to drive others mad, it's for sale at half.com ("The Internet's #1 Source For Suspicious Merchandise) at the utterly inflated price of $0.75. Strangely, they claim that if you like His Boy Elroy, you'll also like Cake, Billy Joel, and the Dave Matthews Band. Which is like saying "If you like a musical recording, you may like other musical recordings!"
But if you order it, don't say I didn't warn you.