I’m on Facebook, but, like a lot of people, I don’t really like Facebook. But, it gives me an appropriate amount of contact with a lot of people, so I’m still there. About six months ago, I spent a couple of weeks removing anything that wasn’t 100% benign leaving behind picture of my cars, cooking adventures, gardening and vinyl record acquisitions. Nowadays, I’m basically a lurker.
That being said, a friend tagged me for what’s essentially a Facebook chain letter, but the subject intrigued me and I decided to play along. It read:
In no particular order ten albums that really made an impact and are still in your rotation even if only now and then. Post the cover (no need to explain) and nominate a person to do the same.
Below is my list, which I started-off a bit hastily. After the Peaches post, I started putting more thought into it. I may go on after these ten in another post, because there aren’t any rules here.
“The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” by Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd is my favorite band, period. Are they the best band ever? I don’t think so, and wouldn’t even be able to say that any of their albums compete for my favorite album of all time. That being said, their music has had the biggest impact on me as a listener and a composer. The first album I ever heard was “The Wall” and at first thought my friend was joking when he said he liked it. I mean, we were metalheads and this shit was weak. But, I’ll just say he eventually convinced me to appreciate their music. Anyway, I remember this album having the biggest influence on me of any of their albums. Syd Barrett was just out of this world with his songwriting and guitar playing. It was equally awe-inspiring and laughable.
“Suzi Quatro” by Suzi Quatro
Leather Tuscadero. My father would let me listen to his records in the corner of the family room where he had his system set-up. The headphones were these old, heavy, steel studio monitors which literally hurt my ears to wear. I’d sit there and just go through the collection. This one was one of my favorites. The music was tough and cool, but it was the cover that got me. Why was I feeling these things? What is it about this woman? Am I going to end-up like these gross guys who are leering, drinking beers with their hands down their pants? Will my armpits get hairy, too?!? I sure don’t want any of these things to happen!!!
“Somewhere In Time” by Iron Maiden
In the summer of 1987, my parents packed my brother and I into our blue, Chevy Celebrity station wagon and we headed west. The ultimate destination was Phoenix to visit our grandparents, stopping along with way to visit an uncle in Albequerque. Prior to the trip, my father brought home a CD player that his office had bought, along with two CDs: Van Halen’s “5150” and The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. Man… CDs were like magic at that point. Those two albums got a lot of play during 12-hour stretches of sitting in the back seat. But, the real magic happened when visiting friends in Houston on the way back. The oldest son was into heavy metal. I remember seeing commercials for the album “Somewhere In Time” featuring a space-age Eddie gyrating on stage. I asked him if he had the album and when he said he did, I must have sacrificed a cassette of something else to have him make me a copy. I listened to that album the entire way back and was essentially a metalhead myself by the time we got home.
“The Teaches Of Peaches” by Peaches
In 2004, I held weekly parties every Thursday at my apartment for a small group of friends. We would often trade mixed CDs and one night I was given a CD filled with mp3 albums. For some reason, probably through a brutal hangover, I picked this album to listen to and whoa… what the fuck is this?!? The opening track of “Fuck the Pain Away” is techno, rap, dance… I don’t know but it infected me. One of the things I appreciated was Peaches was a woman being herself, not trying to do what the guys did. It was brilliant and I probably didn’t listen to anything else for the next week.
“Jerusalem” by Sleep
This moment was at the pinnacle of my music making career, for whatever that’s worth. I’d just moved out to this little duplex in the country where my friend and I had devoted the master bedroom to a jam room. This one day, I’d just finished recording this song which was the scariest and heaviest thing I’d ever imagined. I took a copy to work with me to share with my friend who was still into metal. (I honestly thought metal was dead.) I put the tape in and proclaimed, “Haha! I’m going to bring back metal, dude! Check this out!” I don’t know if he was impressed or not, but he had this CD with him and told me about it before playing. “It’s one song and it’s an hour long.” And it was the scariest and heaviest thing I’d ever listened to, and I was back into metal.
“Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
In 2002, there was no streaming music. There wasn’t even hardly downloadable music. At least, not that I knew of, but there was probably a lot of torrenting going on. Anyway, there were two sites I’d goto that offered select tracks as previews for download. Because I was broke and couldn’t afford to buy entertainment, at work, I would listen to bits and download them if they sounded promising and listen to them later at home. The site essentially offered the first half of the opening track “Storm” from this album and it blew… me… away! I had never heard anything like this. It was like classical music, but it was rock and it was also like a soundtrack to a movie. It was intensely inspiring to me at a time when I couldn’t find any new music to inspire me. It gave me hope.
“Mellow Gold” by Beck
Beck is one of the few things from the 90s that I still like. To be honest, in my opinion, he was the greatest musician of the 90s (given that Jane’s Addiction was technically from the 80s). This album came out during the winding-down of grunge hysteria, and he essentially spoke for how me and my friends thought about pop culture and the world at the time. I remember driving my car down Route 58 leaving Oberlin listening to this, and the song “Pay No Mind” is playing and he starts singing about how the rock’n’roll singer’s “sales climb high through the garbage pail sky like a giant dildo crashing the sun” and we are all laughing like hyenas. It was classic Beck, weird, stupid, childish and absolutely brilliant at the same time.
“The Best of The Velvet Underground” by The Velvet Underground
The morning after returning home from my freshman year in college, my brother is about to head out to Sag Harbor, Long Island, to visit a friend, and my mom essentially invites me to go with him. Back then, I was still sort of spontaneous so yeah, sure, take me with you. In the car with two other friends, Mari and Megan, we head-out at what had to have been midnight. The idea as probably to get through the city before it woke-up, but it was probably just the cool thing to do. That was when I first heard The Velvet Underground through this album. It didn’t matter to me that the “Sweet Jane” I listened to was a mutilated travesty (no “heavenly wine and roses” here), it still made me “feel cool” to listen to it. The liner notes also told about their history, about how only 1000 people bought their first album when it was released, but all of those people made bands. It played into my ideals for the world at the time and I became an instant fan. A year later, I exchanged a bunch of CDs in order to get their newly released box set “Peel Slowly and See” on my way back to Sag Harbor to work that summer, which is another story for another time.
“Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison
I’d owned Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets” for years and loved it. His voice was probably my favorite in rock music. I worked at a pizza place in Oberlin in 2000 and the owner was a former student who dropped-out to go into business. He got a cable connection because the Mets were doing well and headed to the World Series (which they’d lose to the Yankees). The point is that we watched a lot of TV there which was nice because I couldn’t afford cable TV even if I’d wanted it. One of the things we watched was an Mtv top 100 count down of the best albums ever, and I fucking took notes. This was one of the albums I’d never heard of but, boy, did they rave about. Once the show was over, I took my notes and load of CDs to a record exchange and got as many of those notable albums as I could. This slot could just as easily be devoted to “Funhouse” by The Stooges, but this album was more magical for me. I was familiar with a couple of the songs from “T.B. Sheets” but these were jazz renditions, so it kind of served me like a music Rosetta Stone, translating rock to jazz, which gave me a better appreciation for the latter.
“Permanent” by Joy Division
“Oh, yeah, I like the song ‘Dead Souls’ from ‘The Crow’ soundtrack, too. You know that’s a cover song, right? No? You don’t know who Joy Division is?!? Wait, listen to this.” That was my girlfriend at the time responding to me talking about Nine Inch Nails’ version of “Dead Souls”. She was cool, she was punk rock, she was tough… everything I wasn’t and it made me crazy about her. Needless to say, I fell in love with this music, which made the perfect soundtrack for the end of that relationship with songs like “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
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