I know there are many who revere this band, and I support you loving what you love. Sure. But I love me the nihilistic high-speed reptile brain of Motorhead; the swampy, stinky majesty of Black Sabbath; the operatic high theater of Iron Maiden. And Metallica just isn't fun.
I was a wee sprat when Bruce Springsteen was driving the empty highways in the 70s. I was forced to endure Born in the USA at our big junior high dance, where it was the anthem for all the serious pre-fascist assholes at our high school. So I don't come to Bruce with a whole lot of love.
But listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska, I was moved. His characters are doing the best they can in a period when when "blue collar" spoke of a class divide as big as the Nebraska plains, and carried real struggle, real pride, and real despair as the landscape of regular jobs was deflating like a whoopee cushion, slow and loud and flabby.
The masculinity I inherited from my time and place was toxic as fuck, no doubt about it. But the masculinity of Bruce's characters isn't just that of drunken louts--it was also a manhood of people who love their irredeemable brothers, who try to make intimate relationships work, despite endless problems; who do in fact know love, and uncertainty, and endurance. And in a man, those qualities run alongside the toxicity of the time, strong.
I taught yoga for a good while, and early on in that career, I got into listening to yoga music--ragas and kirtan. That was in the late 90s, when this album debuted. Prior to that I'd been gaga for the trends of my young adulthood, and had felt propelled by the changes in the world of "alternative music." Thanks to A, I got to see Stereolab at their college; I think of Air as part of that world.
When my teaching and asana practice leveled out and matured, I found my way back to the trends and bands of the era--Beck, especially, but also Air. Art rock.
Now I think of this long history and realize all the other moments when I left contemporary rock and electronica slide out of my viewscreen for a couple years.
The Pogue's Christmas song is a part of my circle of friends forever. We grew up drinking a lot, and although I never spent a night in the drunk tank, I did embarrass my friends and piss off my parents. College fixed that, of course!
What I didn't know: the Pogues were a great Irish folk band! Shane must've been so chuffed for his duets with the Dubliners. He had the spirit of his culture in his trampled, shouting heart, and we all recognize it. Salud!
Public Enemy electrified my consciousness in 1989. I was in college. Daniel & I played them at all the Arts House parties.
Note to self: from now on, my numeric rating is just about the importance of the album in my life, not about whether the album is an important cultural artifact or not.
On that level, Astor Piazzolla is very important to me. Well, WAS very important.
Growing up in Lexington, I loved the public libraries there. I remember finding "Juju Root" at 15 in their vinyl collection, which featured lots of "ethnic music" from around the world. I developed a taste for all kinds of things, but especially for stuff on Rhino or Folkways.
First year of college, Daniel and shared a late night radio show. WMFO had a huge collection of music from around the world--including Astor Piazzolla records. I played them regularly on my show, and I played recordings at home. I was entranced by the feeling images I drew from it, of late night sharks in suits and slinky dresses, cigarettes, tenderness, cruelty, caprice.
Some of his songs are etched into my memory forever.
She was a great rock singer, no doubt about it.
I had to grow into Maiden... but I did! I love the maximalism. I love the operatic highs and the growling lows. I love the grit and the glamour. Listening to it is like smelling salts for my mind.
Lauryn Hill was an especially gifted musician. She was one of the greatest voices of that moment, with few to rival her flights of melody, her fierce commitment to her message, and her deep wisdom. Her music was important to me personally; but much more, it was part of a big turning in hiphop, a diversification of the genre that had been gathering steam over the decade. I don't know the stats on the album, but anecdotally I know it was huge for my cohort--we played it at barbeques, at parties, on our walkpeople, everywhere.
For me this music came along when I was realizing that I needed to end my first long-term adult relationship. I listened to this album solo during that period; and in my next primary relationship, we listened to it together.
My son and his mom went to see Lauryn Hill's comeback tour. It was a disaster of a show. She was almost four hours late to the stage; she and her band seemed disconnected; and she spent more time delivering diatribes about faith than she did singing. At the time, I thought, "what a loss!"
But as I've grown, faith in one form or another has become more and more important to me. If I went to that concert today, I bet I'd have left as uplifted as I was when I first heard this album.
Many of my friends loved her music. And she was a cultural moment, especially early on. I saw Desperately Seeking Susan--with who, I wonder?--and enjoyed the story and her cool.
But I hated it then, and I still dislike it.
Nope!
I was all in for Joshua Tree. I spun that disc on my dad's stereo at home scores of times. I thrilled to its not-so-secret Christian messages, anathema at my Unitarian Universalist church where God and Jesus were taboo. If I could've gone to the concert, I would've. Joshua Tree was an evolution from U2's earlier work--I felt connected to the U2 that David Ammer shared with me in his bedroom lightyears before. U2 had been an arena rock band for a good while by then, and this seemed like a redemption for all the pyrotechnics.
By 2000, though, I'd moved on. I was out even for Rattle & Hum. Why would I pursue a bloated band perpetually "searching for a new sound," when there was such a profusion of excellent indie rock in the 90s and Oughties?
Listening to it now, I hear songs whose themes and production choices feel alive--and a bunch whose "searching" just doesn't land. Which is fine, right? Even an institutional band like U2 is going to have more than a few clunkers.
What keeps U2 rolling on? What is it like being a massive rock star for more than 40 years? Do Bono and Keith Richards hang out? Does the Edge go to the same gym as Robert Smith?
Peter Adams was cool AF. He's still an unusually skilled musician, and also cool AF.
Peter Adams' brother, though, was... 4 years older? 5? He played an aged Fender Stratocaster was a soupcon of weed and tobacco, and owned a Twin Reverb that was an altar to ROCK. Long stringy hair... sparse blonde beard... HE was cool AF.
ANother one: I'm 15, and I love guitar. I'd heard Musette and Drums (huuuuuge Thanks to Annie) and I was obsessed. So I took Jazz Band at LHS... an opportunity I'm still amazed even existed in 1985. Holdover from the NEA bounty of the 60s-70s for public education.
I was a sophomore. In the class was a long tall dude, a senior, with shaggy black hair. He would rip a solo before class started, every time... and 9 times out of 10, it was "Whole Lotta Love" by Zeppelin.
Suffice it to say, Zeppelin was a titan in the cultural universe of my suburban white liberal town. Zeppelin tied me back a couple high school graduating classes to the era at LHS when smoking was allowed on campus, students all had hall passes and Open Campus, and weed was regarded as a tolerable nuisance by the school administration. When Rock rode the halls unbridled and unashamed. Our elder brothers and older cousins, the guys a part of me wanted to BE, took Zeppelin as gospel, Jimmy Page as a satanic prophet, and the pro-sex pro-drugs pro "mind-expansion era of the early 70s--Zeppelin's heyday, as the best and mightiest way of life ever invented.
So yeah, I listened to a LOT of Zeppelin. Zeppelin III was Aaron and I getting high and wandering around Bard, and Tufts, and the woods of Lexington. Zeppelin II was a cassette that filled me with abyssal desires, mostly alone with my stereo. Physical Graffiti was a numinous missive from the mighty halls of The Furthest Rock Could Go.
Also Jack White stole sooooo much from Zeppelin. And made good things with it.
I grew up in a period when a Correct Reading to the way Rock unfoled from 1966-1976. The Reading posited that the wide-open heart of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band gave way to the second British Invasion--Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Sabbath, etc-- that paralleled the political tumult of the era, as it wrestled with Viet Nam and American adventurism. All you need is love passed through the gritty working class and on to the birth of arena rock and heavy metal. Cocaine and heroin, and guns... Sly holed up in his bunker, re-recording his album and getting increasingly paranoid, high all the time.
And alongside that Reading, there was a lively right-wing reaction to the hippies--Johnny Cash, the Allman Brothers. Others I don't know about. This made for lots of conflict, and was certainly part of the fuel for the deaths at Altamont.
And then there was ZZ Top. From Texas, and definitely bar rockers. But somehow they refused to take sides--"shut up and sing".
That whole Reading meant a great deal to me, growing up in the 70s/80s, as I followed the boys of my generation in saluting Rock, and the aforementioned Reading, as the true music, and spitting on Disco and all it represented.
So, on to the album!
Direct steals from Muddy Waters--but Muddy Waters was big enough to handle that.
Bar band par excellence!
And then there's La Grange.
Just
Plain
Holy
FUCK
that is a song that forces me to dance.
I'd never listened to this album--the hits, of course, but not the whole thing. There's a heavy dose of Sergeant Pepper's in this cauldron, which makes sense, as that was an inflection point album.
Great songwriting, beautiful harmony as always, and an interesting space created by the production.
"Last Chance on the Stairway", where I can hear the production choices without the overlay of my teenage relationship with their hits. Mick Karn-inspired bass--lovely; very high, almost crystalline shimmer; almost-metal guitar, smoothed into an oily Defender spaceship; more. I'm reminded of the dance music in Dario Argento's "Demons," and the fantasy of Italian dance club fashion in 1985, just 3 years later than "Rio."
What a time it must have been in Birmingham clubs 1981-82, when Duran Duran was developing "Rio." There's a lot more Gary Numan in here than I picked up on in th 80s.
I'll never publicly flog the Smiths. I listened to "Fear of Music" on one side of my TDK tape, and "How Soon Is Now" on the other, over and over in 1985. The Smiths were healing music for my tender heart.
That said--this isn't their best effort.
Novelty songs! The Who found traction early with similar stuff. Enjoyable. I much prefer "You Really Got Me," which was on WBCN before band class this one time at Clarke Junior High... and on my secret pre-Walkman radio after lights out that year.
Early concert: Siouxsie show at the Orpheum. "Tinderbox" on repeat. At the time I liked their covers better than their original music.
This time "Juju" strikes me as innovative, for 1981. I love the guitar sound Budgie came up with, her vocal style, and the broad hints at an ooga-booga witchiness as a benefit of being weird like them. At the time I was reading Maya Deren's "Divine Horsemen;" I was harboring secret hopes of running into an actual griot--which was highly unlikely in suburban Lexington at the time.
Not even. Nope!
Linkin Park put worn-out grooves together with ripoff raps, added a large helping of mediocre metal, spritzed some truly forgettable singing on top, and raked in the money. I'd venture a guess and say they were innovators in regarding the suburban tween set as a valuable demographic.
Truly, WTF is this doing on 1001 Albums?
