I got the idea for this piece from several posts people put on Facebook called “16 Random Things About Myself”, which were basically one-sentence facts. I thought I could bend that into a music theme, but it quickly became this journey into my past. At first I tried to be as accurate as I could about my FIRST 16 albums, but that lasts until about album 4. Then I’m clearly cherry-picking the albums that had the most impact on me, which I think is more interesting anyway. I also grouped two or three albums by the same artist that I acquired at about the same time. I could have been dishonest, and disowned the ones that are now clearly mockable, but in the spirit of complete emotional honesty and disclosure, here they are, in all their cliché and saccharine. As the character Rob in “High Fidelity” says in answer to how he is rearranging his LP collection, “not alphabetically, not chronologically, but auto-biographically”.
1.) Beatles 1962-1966 (Red Album) on double LP:
My sister gave this to me along with an old record player of hers when I was 11 and she was 28 and she was moving away from Boston. In a way it was very much like that early scene in Almost Famous, when the protagonist’s older sister runs away from home and leaves a note to him that reads: “Look under your bed. It will set you free.” And he finds a stack of her best records from the ‘60’s and discovers his passion and the world through music. Well, my sister only left me two records. The year was 1973 and the Beatles were just getting their solo careers started. I remember staring at the two similar photos of the Fab 4 on the front and back covers. The front cover showing them in their early '60's mop-tops and the back cover in their late 60's long hair and beards. I would flip the cover over and over to see the dramatic change. I didn’t really know many of the songs well, though of course I’d heard most of them. I thought every song was great, and had never paid attention to music like I was now. I especially liked Side 4 with the incredible variety of sounds and themes that were like short stories:
"Nowhere Man" – 2:44
"Michelle" – 2:42
"In My Life" – 2:27
"Girl" – 2:31
"Paperback Writer" – 2:31
"Eleanor Rigby" – 2:08
"Yellow Submarine" – 2:37
2. The Beatles 1967-1970 (Blue Album) on double LP.
I saved my allowance and bought this double LP to compliment the one album I owned. When I bought this album I also discovered that my sister had left behind a hard cover book of Beatles lyrics with art by Peter Max. I would listen to the Blue Album and read the lyrics and look at the art at the same time, now totally immersed in the lyrics and stories as well as the sounds. There was more magic on these disks, but this greatest hits collection didn't flow as well, except for side 1, which was nearly perfect:
"Strawberry Fields Forever" – 4:10
"Penny Lane" – 3:03
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" – 2:02
"With a Little Help from My Friends" – 2:44
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" – 3:28
"A Day in the Life" – 5:06
"All You Need Is Love" – 3:48
That year my 6th grade English teacher would teach a unit on poetry using music lyrics. He asked if anyone could bring in a recording of ‘Nowhere Man' and I volunteered. I recorded it from my LP to my Realistic (Radio Shack) tape recorder using a cheap mike. I brought it in to class and he passed out the lyrics, but when I played it it was all muffled and no one could understand it. The teacher was mad at me for wasting the class's time. At that moment I could really relate to the Nowhere Man. But that was just a temporary bump that was quickly shaken off with a Twist and a Shout. Another spin of the vinyl and I was again set free.
3. + 4. Jim Croce, "Life and Times" and "I Got A Name", on 8-track tape.
My first two 8-track tapes were Jim Croce. Early in 1973 "Leroy Brown" was a big hit on AM radio (WRKO was the place for it in Boston). For my birthday I had convinced my mom to get me a cheap 8-Track player built into a tuner/receiver and speakers, bought at Lechmere's on Rte. 1. I bought the Croce's the same day. I was fascinated about how 8-track tapes could be played indefinitely without stopping as they looped from Track to Track (A track being like half the length of an album side, so there were really only 4 tracks, but I guess each one had a left and right channel, thus 8) and back to the beginning again. The fact that the songs faded out halfway through as the machine jumped to the next track and then faded back in didn't bother me. What did seem weird was how some tapes had a song twice, once on two different tracks in order to balance the time for each track. I memorized those Croce albums completely, but was floored when Croce died in a plane crash that fall. My first music artist that I 'discovered' and loved and he was dead within 6 months of my learning about him.
5.Cher “Greatest Hits”, on 8-track tape.
I was completely influenced by what played on the one pop radio station I listened to, WRKO, AM 680. 'Dark Lady', 'Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves', and especially to me 'Half Breed' were her big hits at the time. I loved these themes of exotic outsiders. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was also on TV at the time. They would end the show by each holding a hand of their 5-year old daughter Chastity between them, lifting her up, and walking offstage. I didn't care that some older neighbor kids at the time laughed when I told them I liked Cher. They were just doing what Cher sang about: "The other children always laughed at me…”. Sonny and Cher would divorce the following year.
6a. Three Dog Night “Harmony”, on LP. I had wanted “Golden Biscuits”; their greatest hits because of the Harry Nielson cover “One”, their first hit. They quickly had about 10 hit records and I thought they were great. I bought “Harmony” because my mom had made a special trip with me to the record store at the Tri-Town Mall in Sharon (underneath Papa Gino’s), but they were out of the greatest hits album. I bought Harmony on a whim (my first ‘surprise me’ purchase, of many to come later). I didn’t love the album, in fact I was very disappointed with it, except for one song: “Never Been To Spain”, penned by Hoyt Axton (how many artists can now say they actually ‘penned’ a song, now it’s computer composed). Even though the album contained songs by Stevie Wonder (Never Dreamed You’d Leave Me In Summer), Joni Mitchell (Night in the City), and even one of 3 Dog Night’s hits “An Old Fashioned Love Song”, by Paul Williams, it was frankly just drek. They even ended the album with two original schlocky poems. Oh well, I still gleaned the equally awful, but personally enjoyed song “Never Been To Spain”, which made a musical and familial connection to me with the one line ‘Well, I’ve never been to Spain’, and ‘I kind of like the Beatles’. My sister had moved to Spain and given me her Beatles album, which initiated my musical journey.
6B. Three Dog Night, “Golden Biscuits”, on cassette.
Shortly after my disappointment with “Harmony” I sought redemption by getting “Golden Biscuits”, which I could only find on cassette, but I bought it nonetheless, listening to it on my puny, muffled tape recorder, which wasn’t much different in quality to the portable Radio Shack lemon-colored ‘Flavor Radio’ I had listened to them on originally. The aforementioned “One”, “Celebrate”, “One Man Band”, and especially Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not To Come”. Three Dog Night may be mostly a cover band, and will never be hailed by critics or ever get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but I will always enjoy their many hits. To me they were the perfect AM pop band.
7. Aerosmith “Get Your Wings”, on 8-Track. This was Aerosmith’s second album, released in 1974, and bought by me in early 1975, just as I was bar mitzvahed, and symbolically became a man. I had known about the band from their smash hit “Dream On”, which was played every 5 minutes in Boston, mostly because Aerosmith was the first great rock band to come from there, and also because FM radio had just taken off and the DJs at WBCN (Boston) and WVBF (Worcester) had free reign to play what they wanted. (Side note: I discovered FM when visiting my soon to be step-nephew Scott, who was 4 years older than me at the time, itself a head-trip. Scott had a basement bedroom with a great Sansui receiver and Advent Speakers bought from his friend’s mom, who worked at Advent. He was into album rock, played Yes’s ‘Fragile’ for me, but mostly turned me on to FM. His brother Michael, only 2 years older than me, just had a small tape player and the cassette of Steely Dan’s first album, which was also memorable. But neither Yes, nor Steely Dan made it into my collection for many years. But after hearing Scott’s cool system playing those wonderful deep album cuts from the early 70’s, I left my AM pop behind and took up FM for good. And to me “Get Your Wings” was my first real rock purchase as I matured into that FM teenager audience. The fact that my becoming a teenager, early freeform FM coming into fruition, and the first great Boston rock band (my home city) all happening at the same time, makes this album especially pertinent to this list. All of these songs rock hard, and all are originals except for the Yardbirds cover “Train Kept a’Rollin”. I blasted this thing to no end. I also moved from Massachusetts to Florida during this school year, and wanted to keep my Boston pride by playing one of ‘Boston’s own’. I also made friends in 7th grade with a music fan named Alfred Forsley. Al loved Deep Purple and I loved Aerosmith and we would always argue about who was better (Deep Purple’s hit ‘Smoke On The Water’ was big at the time). We also talked about forming our own band someday, which we dubbed PickAxe. Alfred and I lost touch in high school, but I did know he became a drummer for a band. But back in JFK Junior High, Alfred and I traded 8-Track tapes one weekend, and I got to hear what would be my next purchase…
8. Deep Purple “Made In Japan” a double-length 8-track tape. This live album, had extended versions of their hits ‘Smoke on the Water’ (7:31) and ‘Highway Star’ (6:50). But the song that did it for me was the tune that took up a whole 8-track track, or one whole LP side, coming in at a whopping 19 minutes and 41 seconds, the epitome of mid 70’s prog rock over-the-top bloat: ‘Space Truckin’! Filled with superfluous synthesizer sound effect fills, drum solos, and the signature Deep Purple bass line, the live Space Truckin’ would today put any teenager to sleep with its excesses, but to me it was the anthem of my adolescent 13-year old energy. Play it loud, play it proud. Hats off to you, Alfred. PickAxe will definitely cover this one. This album marked my only real foray into classic ‘metal’. This was also the end of the era for 8-track tapes.
9-11. Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here”, “Dark Side of the Moon”, and “Meddle”. Later in 1975, probably in the fall, I became friends with Ron Fleischer, when I heard him mention that he makes 8mm movies. I had made some in Boston, mostly just neighborhood kids jumping around, but I did use POV shots and some stop-frame special effects work too. Ron along with Doug Hartman had been making all kinds of movies and the 3 of us hit it off. But movie-making along with Frisbee playing soon took a back seat to our musical journey over the next few years. In ’75 we listened mostly to ZETA-4, Miami’s ‘Deep Cut’ album station. “Wish You Were Here” had just come out and I bought it as soon as Ron and I heard it on Zeta (and the original release came in a midnight blue shrink wrapper and included post cards) and we played it on my new killer sound system that I bought with my bar mitzvah stash: a Marantz receiver w/ a weighted gyro tuner knob and glowing blue lights, Altec-Lansing bookshelf speakers, and a B.I.C. semi-automatic turntable. I had spent months salivating over the stereo mags before I purchased the perfect system (on my budget) at Sound Advice. “Wish You Were Here” may well be the first disc to play through that system and it became an anthem of my teenage years. After declaring it our favorite album and Floyd our ‘discovered’ favorite band, we quickly wanted to hear more from them. Not having any guidance, we just thumbed through the discs at Discount Records, and I pulled out “Meddle” and Ron pulled out “Dark Side”. We started a new ritual that day, which was to play each other’s album by ourselves first. So he took home “Meddle” and I took home “Dark Side”. When I lowered the needle to the disk it started out so mellow and calm that I turned out the lights in my room and closed my brown shutters, leaving it pitch black aside from the glowing blue lights of the Marantz. When the clocks on the album suddenly rang I nearly jumped out the window. Music had never ‘shocked’ me like that before. I took great pleasure in recreating the conditions for Ron, this time raising the volume high before the bells rang. My tact and the music itself cemented our bond with Floyd as our band. We even made a secret agent movie specifically to go along with “Wish You Were Here” as a soundtrack. Pink Floyd was also the first act I saw in concert, in 1977, for the Animals tour. Another musical milestone.
Many albums followed the Floyd purchases; so many that I can’t recall now the order of them all. Some were fluke buys bought on a whim. Once I declared to Ron and Doug as we drove to Gold Triangle in Skylake Mall to get some music “I will buy the album with the next song that comes on the radio!” That song was ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’, but we couldn’t recognize the artist. Just as we pulled in to the parking lot, the DJ let us know “That’s a song from the album “Ram”, by Paul McCartney. And so I bought it. And it’s pretty good too. But there were some duds like Ambrosia, and Ace. But many were good, including albums by E.L.O., Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, etc. So the remaining albums may not be chronological, but they are seminal in my music path history.
12. The Who, “Quadrophenia”, Double LP. Many Who albums followed it, but that remains my favorite of theirs to this day. I loved the big sound and swirling effects, but drew special affinity to the theme of the loner misunderstood teen. I was in my loner stage when the album came out and identified if not totally with the main character’s circumstances, than certainly with his feeling of isolation from his peers. (Side note: The accompanying lyric and photo booklet had a cover photo showing a factory which I believe was the same one in Pink Floyd’s Animal’s album showing the inflatable pig flying overhead. The connections between my important albums were many). And Quadro’s feelings of the despair of youth were only trumped by the following LP, which entered my collection right on its heals.
13. Paul Simon, “Still Crazy After All These Years”, LP. This one doesn’t rock at all, and is downright depressing. But I embraced it, and played it during those cool fall nights when I would walk alone for miles, trying to figure out life. My mom had just gotten divorced, finally, to her second husband. To me, “Still Crazy” is kind of a white-man’s blues. Simon was in his own funk during the late seventies with even more depressing albums like “One Trick Pony”, which like “Quadrophenia” was made into a movie. And so surprisingly, it also won a Grammy for album of the year.
14. The Kinks, “Low Budget”, LP.
This album came out in 1979, just before I went off to college. I had ‘discovered’ The Kinks in 1975, when they released “Schoolboys In Disgrace”. I bought each succeeding album: “Sleepwalker,” “Misfits,”, and finally “Low Budget”. These were the late 70’s Kinks albums that may not be considered their career best, but as each one was released I bought and savored it more than the last. I suppose they followed in the footsteps of The Who and Pink Floyd’s theme/story albums, but with more of a theatre-rock than stage-rock style. Davies was also lighter and more celebratory in his writing than Waters and Townshend. So The Kinks were the flip-side emotionally to me too. Life could be dark and deep and full of angst that a teen could relate to, but like The Kinks, it could also be fun. And at this time in my life, I was about to head out on my own to college. Life was full of promises, and I was ready for fun.
15. Woody Allen “Standup Comic” double LP.
Firesign Theater “Don’t Crush The Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers LP.
Speaking of fun, I wasn’t all dark in my youth. In fact I took a strong interest in comedy albums, finding pleasure in listening to and memorizing audio routines, skits, and stories by Bill Cosby (especially ‘Revenge’), The Smothers Brothers (especially ‘Chocolate’), and of course Monty Python (freaking out when listening to side two of ‘A Matching Tie And Handkerchief’ and hearing a completely different set of skits because they had two sets of grooves on that side for a ‘hidden’ side). But impacting me far more than those were two very different but equally brilliant albums. Woody Allen’s stand-up years are relatively unknown by most of his movie fans, but he captured two of his early year performances on LPs one given in New York and one in Chicago in the mid-60’s. The routines are so polished, so great, that I memorized the entire double LP and would recite them to friends and family on a regular basis. His choice of punchlines and deliveries were so flawless that I also ‘studied’ comedy after that, reading biographies of Groucho Marx , books about comedy history, treatises on joke telling (Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor surprisingly one of the best), and even literary satirical influences on Allen and others like Oscar Wilde, Robert Benchly, S.J. Perlman, and others. I later went on to collect comedy LPs by Lenny Bruce and others. The other comedy album that overwhelmed me was Firesign Theater’s “Don’t Crush The Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers”, which I discovered when using the Rolling Stone Record Guide to find unknown (to me and my friends) masterpieces. “Don’t Crush” is a densely layered, audio engineering masterpiece, with subliminal messages, double entendres, two-actors speaking at once, and a opaque storyline and plot that only becomes revealed at its conclusion. This album begs for multiple listenings. I had never heard anything so complex and entertaining except maybe Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon”. Mining for meaning in multiple listenings became one of my greatest audio pleasures, from the Beatles’ Paul-is-dead clues to the secret hidden audio message of Pink Floyd's “The Wall”. But with Allen’s comic brilliance and Firesign’s studio innovations, humor and audio met to bring a whole new enjoyment to my life.
16. Billy Joel, “Piano Man” and “Turnstiles”, LPs.
Just before Billy made it big with “The Stranger”, he put out these two works, which are much more autobiographical, more personal, and more intimate. The song ‘Piano Man’ was his only hit, and a minor one at that. It came out in 1973 and gave him a few seconds on the bottom of the charts. “The Stranger" didn’t come out until ’77. But I ‘discovered’ Joel in ’75 when mass audiences still didn’t know him. I played Piano Man till the LP wore out. (Side Note: The Piano Man LP has front and back images that are negatives of each other. I used to flip it over and over in my hands to watch the image reverse; just like I used to flip those Beatles Red and Blue albums. Just another connection). I bought “Turnstiles” as soon as it came out in ’76 and loved it even more. It even had a song about Florida on it. I liked a girl at the time who lived near me, and she liked me too. She came over and we listened to the radio for three hours as they broadcast a live Billy Joel concert from Gusman Hall, in Miami. We held hands on the couch, innocent and tentative.
Of course there were many, many, many more artists and specific albums that had meaning to me in my youth. Some honorable mention must go to the cassettes of The Beatle's "Abbey Road" (which I got in a trade from Neil Sacon for my baseball Pitchback), Paul McCartney's "Band On The Run", and Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions (another artist intoduced to me by my sister); The 45's of The Guess Who's "American Woman" and Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash", 8-Tracks from Elton John (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) , LPs from The Moody Blues (Greatest Hits), Cat Stevens(Teaser and the Firecat), Jackson Browne (Saturate Before Using), Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run), and The Eagles (One Of These Nights), the last which played during another milestone of my teen years, and so many more albums that were part of my years before going off to college. It's fitting that the first cds came out the year I went off to college. My youth is wrapped up in analog audio memories.
It’s amazing to me how music can bring us back to a specific place and time in our lives, and some music has extra special emotional power to bring back not only the images and factual memories of our past, but can even summon up our emotional state. These 16 albums/artists do this for me. They are interwoven into my early life like an inseparable soundtrack to parts of my past. And sometimes the past itself even comes back like a boomerang, or a spiral.
For instance, remember that girl who sat on the couch with me listening to Billy Joel sing ‘I’ve Loved These Days’ back when I was 14 years old? She is now my partner, my sweetheart, Wendy Simonds.
