That’s when it happened: Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ”
