There is a viral Facebook post that asks people to post 1 album a day that was important to them. No comments, no explanation, just the album cover. I have done this a couple of times there so I thought I would try the exercise here too. Feel free to play along.
OK, I said I wasn’t going to comment because those are the rules of the Facebook post, but I have changed my mind. Since this is a list of albums that were important to me I think they need some context about why they were important. The list is in chronological order. Not the order they were released, but the order in which they impacted me.
I’m not going to make individual posts for each album. Instead I will just edit this post and add the commentary as it comes to me and when I have time.
Day 1
As a kid I was not really into music much. My friends and I rode our bikes around pretending we were long haul truckers. It was the time of a TV show called Movin’ On, CB radios and trucker lingo, CW McCall and a trucker music which was almost always country and western based music. One day my mother bought me a double album compilation of surf music called Golden Summer and I played it on our big HiFi and I was hooked on rock n roll. Pretty much all of the songs owed so much to Chuck Berry but I particularly liked the instrumentals like Pipeline and Wipe Out. This record and to a lesser extent another compilation with 50 and 60 music with Dick Clark’s name on it, were my introduction to rock and roll.
Day 2
For some reason I had this idea that hard rock was bad. I was a kid who listened to surf music and old 50s and 60s top 40 hits and what ever was on the top 40 radio stations in the mid to late 70s.
One day during summer vacation I was sitting around at home alone and bored out of my mind. Nothing good was on TV. (This is pre MTV so I didn’t even have that old crutch.) Leaning against the giant HiFi system, which was as big as a couch and looked like a wet bar with built in speakers, there was a stack of LPs. These were records that were given to my sister by some folks who could not pay her for baby sitting. I figured since I had nothing else to do I would just grab one and put it on the turntable.
From the first drum beat of the first song on Bad Company’s eponymous album, Can’t Get Enough I was hooked and could not get enough. I started digging into the rest of the collection, many of which I still own to this day. Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Bubble Puppy, The Doors. That lead me to start tuning the radio to KZEL FM in Eugene, OR which lead me to ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and more. They were even playing the Jim Carrol Band and Ian Drury’s “Sex and Drugs, and Rock and Roll.” I was a rocker running with the devil on that highway to Hell and I started growing my hair out to prove it.
Day 3
I think we all have musical sherpas who guide us, turning us on to things we might not have heard otherwise. The next two albums on this list are a direct through line from a single day visiting family in Granite Falls WA. My uncle had remodeled my grandfathers old house and in the basement he had put a pool table. So two of my cousins who were a little older than me hung out and played pool. They were down from Alaska and one of their favorite bands was Rush, but also we spent hours listening to AC/DC Highway to Hell.
After I got back home I was a huge AC/DC fan and just about that time their new album Back in Black came out. It just so happened that I had some lawn mowing money in my pocket so I hopped on my bike and peddled across town to get the tape. I had a little Casio tape deck that I carried around with me and in the back of the school bus to and from my friend and I would crank it for the whole bus to hear whether they liked it or not. I wore out the tape and by Christmas time I needed a new one. That Christmas my uncle came over and said that there was a “new” group that was popular and he brought me the “new” tape and I could keep it if I could tell him what the words to the songs were. It was AC/DC Back in Black, so I played along. I had the thing memorized by that point but I didn’t tell him. So I put the tape in my new boom box, which I had just also got for Christmas, and played a bit, told him what they were singing (screaming?) and just like that, I got a replacement tape and a louder heavy metal delivery mechanism. It was a good Christmas.
Day 4
In that time up in my uncle’s basement (totally different uncle than the one who gave me the tape for Christmas, BTW) my cousins also had a tape of Rush’s live album “All the World’s a Stage”. It had a section that was the whole first side of their concept album 2112. Quite a trip into prog rock over indulgence. Right down my adolescent alley. But it also has a monster version of their first hit “Working Man” with a drum solo that takes up a significant portion of the song, and really it was the main reason we listened to it so much. Mind blowing.
When the next album came out I did the same thing I had done with Back in Black. Jumped on my bike and headed to Payless Drugstore and bought the cassette. And just like Back in Black, I wore it out. It was my first real musical obsession that involved a bands entire catalogue. I ate it up and was first in line for every new album up to Power Windows when I had cooled on it a bit.
Day 5
Fast forward to the mid 80s. I am a high school senior and I have volunteered to DJ at the local college radio station. (Actually, I had to pay to audit the course to be a DJ, so the word “volunteer” is doing a lot of heavy lifting) I started by playing a lot of hard rock and heavy metal, but was getting tired of it, so in the latter half of the 80s I started playing a lot of what was considered alternative or college rock.
U2 had already crossed over to mainstream radio but I was still playing deep cuts from Unforgettable Fire and War on my radio show. We had a listening room where we could take the new albums and preview them before our shows and every Tuesday like clockwork our music director would show up with that week’s new records.
One day I was in there when he brought in the latest U2 album called Joshua Tree and I took it into the listening room to skim a few songs. I ended up listening to the whole thing end to end, which probably made me late to a class, but when I left the room I told anybody who would listen that this was an instant classic that we would still be listening to in 20 years. It’s been over 35 years. Still one of my dessert island disks even after having been played to a pulp by every radio station, MTV (back when they used to play music) and on my own CD and Cassette players.
Day 6
Sundays on KEOL FM in La Grande OR, the college radio station I was a DJ at, was the day dedicated to playing music that would not typically be played any other day of the week. World music, jazz, oldies, folk and blues were all on the menu. But, because of that it was very often the hardest day to find DJs. But I loved every opportunity to be on the air so I decided to use it as a crash course to the blues. We had a small but broad collection of blues records at the station and without knowing much about it but the big names like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, I just grabbed the first thing that looked good and threw it on. That love of the blues was still with me when I went with my girlfriend to Japan to work for the summer and meet her family.
What I found out was it was very difficult to get a job teaching English in Japan if you didn’t already have a degree, due to the work visa requirements. But there were a few under the table jobs I could get. Teaching English at some of the less reputable places, private lessons through friends, and it turned out I could be an English speaking DJ at one of the cable radio stations.
I worked at a station called KT-Jazz, where I played what they called urban contemporary which was a mix of easy listening soul and R and B, with some jazz fusion mixed in. Think Anita Baker, and Sade mixed with George Benson and Pat Metheny. One of the DJs there was an older guy who found out I liked the blues but didn’t know much about it and he made me a tape. On one side was early BB King and on the other side was this album. Glazed by Earl King with Roomful of Blues. This really got me going on blues and blues based rock. At that time, on the trains and sitting in my little apartment in Tokyo, I was listening to the blues almost exclusively.
Day 7
One other thing that living in Tokyo provided was CD rental places. Yep, you could go to a place called Tsutaya and rent CDs. Even better, one of the bigger stores in downtown Tokyo next to the Takadanobaba station I was using the most when I was going to school there had listening stations. You could listen for free while you sat in their cafe drinking over priced coffee, and the amount of time you could spend doing so was unlimited.
As my love of the blues was taking full hold, I was also at the same time getting tired of hearing the same old stuff all the time. I began going back and looking for music that maybe the older folks had enjoyed and since it was free, and my down time was abundant, I started going through back catalogs.
I had always been a casual fan of The Rolling Stones. I liked the songs when they came on the radio, but didn’t go out of my way to hear any and had never purchased any Stones records. But two things happened that year I was going to school in Japan that changed that. The Stones came through Tokyo on their Steel Wheels tour and my friend and I went to see them in the Tokyo Dome. And I listened to Exile on Main St. all the way through for the first time. Mind = blown. It was fantastic and I had to get more. Next up Sticky Fingers (which I had heard most of anyway because I had ears and listened to classic rock radio, then called just rock and roll radio) and Let it Bleed. If you asked me before all this if I was a Beatles guy or a Stones guy I probably would have said Beatles. After? Stones man. Stones.
Day 8
I had been living and working in Tokyo for a couple of years by the time this next record came out. I was listening to a mix of blues, alt rock and what was already being called classic rock. (kids, it used to be called rock and it didn’t take 20 years for it to get on the radio. I have a whole rant on it here.) And every day, walking home from work I would pass by a record store on the bustling street leading to my house from Tokorozawa station. Occasionally I would stop and see what new records were in. I saw this record with the baby chasing the money and didn’t think much of it. I had given up on the rock scene. When I bowed out, rock seemed more interested in shades of mascara and torn spandex than actually writing good music. I have no problems with cross dressing and if you want to do that more power to you, but if that is what your band is mostly about, then I am out. I just mentally lumped this band in with those guys. (In the words of Mike Birbiglia, “I know. I’m in the future also.).
Speaking of record stores, one of my favorite things to do is go through stacks of albums and flip through them looking for gems. I don’t have a record player so this is my form of window shopping, and a kind of meditation while I am waiting for my wife who might be in another store shopping for something else. In Tokyo the big one was The Wave. One day I was in The Wave flipping through the blues section, reading the back of the albums, killing time, when the music being played in the store kept getting my attention. WHAT IS THIS? I went over to the counter where they were displaying the record being played and it was the swimming baby chasing the dollar. I immediately went to the CD section and bout it. Lucky for me CDs don’t wear out as fast as cassettes. I tried to wear it out, but I think I still have it in my collection, somewhere.
Day 9
What the ability to listen to all those rental CDs did for me in Tokyo, file sharing did when I came back to the US and started working at Microsoft. Living in Japan and not having a lot of radio options I got pretty deep into the kinds of music I was exposed to, but not very wide. After moving back to the US I started hearing more radio, but the biggest impact was all the digital music I had access to on the various file shares on Microsoft’s corporate network. There were massive amounts of music stored there and all I had to do was plug in my headphones and listen via RealPlayer or MediaPlayer.
Techno and electronica had really taken off here in the US and in Europe but in Japan the only place it was being given any play was in the clubs, which I didn’t go to and even what I was hearing was just garbage. But people were talking about this album so I figured I should give it a listen. It was a revelation. It was a mood intensifier and for the work I was doing it really helped get into the zone. Vegas by The Crystal Method was my gateway drug into the electronica scene. The highlight for me on this album is High Roller.
Day 10
Being predisposed to challenging music, and coming to like electronic and club music, the Six Degrees compilation albums of world beat and trance music was right up my alley. I’m not sure how I even came across it but the Traveler Series was a fave from first listen. There were some songs that had to grow on my, but most of them were instant. I’d have to go back and look at my CDs to see which ones I have from this series, but this one, Traveler 06 has one of my favorite tracks is a Junkie XL remix of a song by Niyaz called Dilruba. The base line in this song makes the whole thing worth it.
Not my favorite albums
I’m not saying these are my favorite albums or my top 10. They are the 10 albums that, at this point in time, I have identified as the albums that lead me down a particular path in my musical life. If I think about it a little more I am sure I could make some substitutions.
I think I will start working on my 100 favorite albums. Rolling Stone always puts out these lists and the latest one is an abomination. My list will be mine, and maybe you might enjoy it. At any rate it will be mostly for me.
If you have a similar list to the one above, please share a link in the comments.
The Stravager 
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