I’ve done a lot of stupid shit on the radio. Incessant airhorns, excerpts of Vedic texts, a Microsoft Sam rendition of Wikipedia’s entry for stoner rock backed by sheets of grey noise; it was all useless, but likely never unprecedented. Despite the vast expanse of all music ever recorded plus the range of noises that you can make, radio’s a limiting medium - the output is defined rigidly enough that you end up with a monkeys-and-typewriter sort of situation where the unconventional becomes inevitable given sufficient time spent in the studio.

That, however, was apparently not always the case. In 1964, Ernie McDaniel, a DJ at San Francisco’s KFOG (oh come on), had the bright and apparently entirely novel idea of playing field recordings of a thunderstorm alongside some kind of easy-listening bullshit to great and relaxing effect. Despite the late hour, the phones rang off the hook - perhaps the only time in recorded history that this has been a positive thing for a midnight radio show - and Ernie had an idea. He passed the story back to Brad Miller, the recorder of the now-famous thunderclaps (for posterity, the album is Steam Railroading Under Thundering Skies and appears to be available wherever .mp3s are downloaded), and enterprising ol’ Brad decided to combine the two sounds on a single album for the sake of convenience.

And so was born the Mystic Moods Orchestra. Easily my second- or third-favorite thing that I’ve ever pulled out of a $1 record bin, their debut One Stormy Night is unspeakably pleasant and well-worth your two quarters next time you’re looking at records in Goodwill and all set on Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. It’s not just the music-and-thunder gimmick - listening to music on a rainy day is a familiar sensation for everyone except maybe residents of California - the music has its own charm. Once omnipresent, not much of the genre (low-to-medium-budget jazz standards and original compositions) ended up canonized. What was once new and exciting, and shortly thereafter impossibly kitsch, is now nearly extinct and, correspondingly, somewhat exotic. Strings and voice meander in a way that someone with any knowledge of music theory could describe better than vaguely Eastern, and the whole thing is the sonic equivalent of how older movies are identifiably (and charmingly) of the past from the color palette alone. There’s a serene little ditty called Fire Island and another, Local Freight, for which Miller simply cranked up the train sounds in lieu of any non-rain instrumentation. Hot Bagel, unfortunately, is one of the lesser tracks.

Back to the point: once upon a time, musical ideas could be new. It’s a quaint idea; our era lies somewhere between recycling and its more charitable cousin, re-combination. Electronic music, a field where advances in technology are theoretically making entirely new types of sounds possible, is utterly obsessed with re-creation and emulation of… the same primitive synthesizers that created the sounds immortalized by the genre’s early pioneers. There are a bunch of possible explanations for this, and here are several that are likely all wrong:

1. The current mode of musical discovery and recommendation - algorithms - prioritizes slight variations upon one’s already-established taste; works with little to no relationship to already-celebrated sounds are unlikely to be heard, if even produced.

2. The above circles back into informing not only what type of music is easily accessible, but actual tastes as well, further disincentivizing doing something totally different.

3. One Stormy Night itself wasn’t particularly novel, but seems so because all sorts of junk like it has been totally erased from the collective musical memory of the 60’s. Further, music was much more regionalized at the time and what was new to KFOG listeners might have been old hat elsewhere.

4. *Beard grows six inches* In fact, some might say that Mother Nature herself invented the sound the first time that a concert was interrupted by a thunderstorm! Once, at Red Rocks, I -

Here’s the real deal: everything new, and especially everything new that becomes popular enough for commercial interests to be at play, collapses upon itself. The Mystic Moods Orchestra never matched One Stormy Night. Emboldened by its success, they released a string of albums in the same vein - Cosmic Force, Mystic Moods of Love, and the gonorrhea-ridden granddaddy of them all, 1974’s Erogenous, each hamfistedly amplifying and pandering to the experiences that buyers of One Stormy Night arrived at somewhat more organically.

If you can remember that Batman quote about dying a hero verbatim, pretend that I’ve inserted it here. Alternatively, consider that we’re all celebrating 2Pac’s birthday and legacy right now because the general public has wisely agreed not to acknowledge his posthumous works or the very bad biopic that just came out. New is necessarily a moment, one which fades to irrelevance or is corrupted by its own marketability. Treasure it when you see it, and be glad that we’re fully empowered to appreciate One Stormy Night in a vacuum.