Ruminations

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This poster, issued in 1972 by Saladin Productions, is by the prolific Joe Petagno, famous for not only a zillion Recreational Botany endorsements in blacklight but a legendary body of rock artwork, including Motörhead’s Snaggletooth mascot and Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song falling angel (the latter a homage to William Rimmer’s Evening AKA The Fall of Day.)

The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet has been a haunting memetic legend since 2007, taped by a teenager named Darius from a German radio broadcast in 1984 and uploaded by his sister Lydia on various forums. With its at once melancholy and hopeful melody, stern metallic baritone lead vocal with distinctive melismatic styling, half-intelligible lyrics that invited interpretation and resisted resolution, and urgent sense of youth, passion, and Call To Adventure, the song (known as “Like the Wind”, “Blind the Wind”, “Check It In, Check It Out”, and others, depending on how you construed the words and which line you extracted for the title) quickly became the stuff of endless speculation and urban legend.



A timeline, valid through November 2021:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/p2l92j/uptodate_timeline_and_master_link_post

Patient, diligent, and hyperfixated crowdsourced research has at last cracked the case: it’s “Subways of Your Mind” (1983), by German New Wave band FEX! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/1gjbrs6/tms_is_found_the_song_is_called_subways_of_your/

Turns out that at least three of the band members (vocalist/lead guitarist Ture Rückwardt, keyboardist Michael Hädrich, and bassist Norbert Ziermann; drummer Hans-Reimer Sievers has yet to be heard from) are still alive and had had no inkling of their role in an enduring Internet mystery; it must have been like being accosted by a ragtag band of pirates who return the heirloom ring you left in a West German club restroom in 1984. On 4 November 2024, Hädrich provided a cleaned-up version…along with the other two songs on the original cassette EP.



Rückwardt, Ziermann, and Hädrich convened on 7 November 2024 for an acoustic reunion:


Update: Hans-Reimer Sievers, who seems to have withdrawn from music for some time, has come forward; he still owns his old drum kit and band tapes, and it looks as if a full reunion is imminent; dare we hope for new material?

FEX now have an official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FEXband-official/videos

YouTube is a merry media mosh pit for the worst and the best (and the most mediocre) of what happens when human imagination is presented with audiovisual technology, an arena, and no editor.  Unsurprisingly, it's a showcase for Sturgeon's Law, but also for bits of retrieved memory and works of brilliance that make sifting through the dorky karaoke and home movies more than worth the annoyance.

This animated AMV for Vaughn Monroe's rendition of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", the work of one Pukipu, is one that I've come to regard as the definitive video for the song in question; the stiff, minimal, and primitive flavor of the animation somehow seems perfectly of a piece with the period setting, and its repetitiveness serves the incantatory nature of the song. More than that, it struck me somehow as having an unassailable rightness; the imagery was somehow hauntingly reminiscent of a memory I was at a loss to place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsfw9CEQITA

A discussion of favorite childhood TV commercials over on dungeonwriter 's blog helped supply the missing piece of the puzzle; this haunting PSA from the late 60's (the narrative Voice of Impending Doom is variously suspected of being either James Earl Jones or Thurl "Tony the Tiger" Ravenscroft) was the stuff of nightmares to a lot of people in the late Baby Boom/early Gen-X age bracket :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWm6PUGpfVU

Pukipu (if their userinfo is accurate) is Brazilian, and too young to remember the ad, making it an unlikely influence; nonetheless, I find the resemblance striking.