That’s right, folks, the most disturbing Halloween EVER! From now until Halloween, the Popdose staff are going to be thumbing through their record collections in search of the music that gives them the worst case of the heebie-jeebies. In this installment, Jon Cummings reminisces about Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.” —Anthony Hansen
Sometimes I wonder if kids today are bothered in the slightest by the sorts of things that used to freak me out when I was a boy. For example, when I was 9 I spent several months in what I now refer to as my “Hitler phase,” when – fueled by the Nazi-horror stories imparted by a creepy friend, and spooked by a coffee-table book called Sieg Heil! that I had checked out from the local library — I frequently conjured the very real image of Der Führer lurking behind my darkened bedroom door. (He didn’t have to hold a machete – the thought of that moustache alone was enough to make me wet myself.) Those months were probably the only time I was thankful to share a room with my older brother, because I couldn’t stand to be in the dark by myself. I often found myself running at a full sprint to the front of the house to escape Adolf’s clutches, and those were the days when my mom would stomp through the house, snapping off lights I had left on and muttering something about owning the electric company.
At about that same time, during the fall of 1975, my friend Kevin brought over a single he had snatched from his sister’s collection. We knew it simply as “The Exorcist,” but of course it was an edited version of the “first movement” (A/K/A side one) of Mike Oldfield’s debut LP Tubular Bells, excerpted for use as the theme to William Friedkin’s film version of William Peter Blatty’s religious-horror novel. The single, officially known as “Tubular Bells (Theme from The Exorcist),” had reached the Top 10 almost two years before, but its success had predated by just a few months my headlong leap into pop-radio obsession during the fall of ’74. And as a 9-year-old, I wasn’t yet familiar with the R-rated film.
