So, I couldn’t get the list down to 50, but I figured it was time to start posting the albums anyway. And here are the first 3, in roughly the order I started listening to them.
1. Michael Jackon – Thriller (1982)
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2EFXMVFC
Thriller came out about 7 months before I was born. I don’t remember if it was the first album I listened to on repeat (I think I had a cassette of either Tchaikovsky‘s Swan Lake or The Nutcracker before this that I listened to before bed a lot), but I do remember listening to this pretty early on in life. The cassette tape belonged, I think, to my sister, and we used to listen to it on a crappy brown portable cassette deck that may have come with a children’s book. The title track actually scared me as a child, but ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Something’, ‘Beat It’, and ‘Billie Jean’…I’m pretty sure my 6 year old self danced his ass off to those songs, along with Madonna‘s ‘Like a Prayer’. I mean, I don’t remember dancing hard to MJ like I do Madonna (we used to dance around in my friends’ basement to ‘Like a Prayer’ on repeat), but I’m sure I did dance to it in that limb-flailing way that children do. Years later, I was at a conference for high school students at the University of Wisconsin, and I remember hearing ‘Billie Jean’ for the first time in years. Someone played it at the end of what was, at the time, a killer line-up of songs: Ginuine‘s ‘Pony’, DMX‘s ‘Up in Here’ and Juvenile‘s ‘Back that Ass Up’. I had been dancing with a Chilean girl who was impressed by how good a skinny white boy like myself could move, and ‘Billie Jean’ took me back to my childhood. It was one of those moments of real joy in your life that’s hard to explain.
Thriller is also probably part of the reason that I enjoy zombie movies, and Vincent Price.
2. Eagles – Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) (1976)
http://www.fileserve.com/file/umM7v29/Eagles%20-%20Greatest%20Hits%201971-75.rar
Probably my earliest memory of listening to anything on vinyl is of the Eagles‘ Greatest Hits (1971-75). We had a record changer (a Realistic, I believe) in our livingroom at the end of the couch, and the space beneath it in the cabinet where the records should have been was home to all of my and my sister’s chidren books (an assortment or Sesame Street books, Dr. Seuss, and those ones with the gold spine – the Little Golden Books published by Random House). I don’t know where I found my mother’s old records. They were probably in the basement or at my great-grandmother’s house next door where my mom had grown up. I remember only a few of the titles in the stack I eventually lugged to the livingroom: The Knack‘s Get the Knack (1979), Trooper‘s Hot Shots (1979), and Eagles – Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) (1976). Clearly, the Eagles album was the best of the bunch. ‘Take it Easy’, ‘Lyin Eyes’, ‘Witchy Woman’, ‘Tequila Sunrise’…I loved them all. These are some of the first songs I learned on guitar (although, ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘Lullabye’ by Shawn Mullins, and ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ by David Bowie were the actual first, which means I first learned guitar around 1998; I had played bass before that). I still love this album, despite the fact that it’s a greatest hits record. And my love for it is only made stronger because of the Seinfeld episode ‘The Checks’.
3. Alice Cooper – Trash (1989)
http://www.mediafire.com/?2lgmthewz9m
This is the part of the list where things start to get a little confused for me. I’m not exactly sure of the order the next 4 albums should go in, but I started listening to them all between the summer of ’92 and fall ’94. These were the real formative years for my taste in music.
The first song I ever wrote was for a girl named Christie C. She was the second of my grade school girlfriends (Allison was the first, with whom I associate the song ‘Ice Ice Baby’, since I recall listening to it at the time we were “dating”). Christie was the first girl to ever show me her breasts (although she didn’t have any to speak of at the time, since we were in the third grade), and this act clearly had an impact on my rat-tail clad self. I carried a torch for her well into grade 4, long after she had broken my heart and left me for my bestfriend (the age old tale…), at which time I substituted her name into the lyrics to Kiss‘ ‘Beth’. I may have even sang it to her at school, I’m not really sure. All I remember vividly from my grade 4 classroom days is crying when my teacher read Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, and picking my nose a lot. Outside of the classroom setting, however, I remember quite a lot. I had written the lyrics to ‘Christie’ (aka ‘Beth’) in a bluish purple spiral bound notepad (the kind with the binding at the top), and one of the next songs I had written basically ripped off the lyrics to the song ‘Alma Mater’ from Alice Cooper‘s School’s Out (1972). Seeing as I know that I had been listening to Trash before I bought School’s Out, I’ve deduced that Trash probably fits into my musical history at #3 chronologically.
To this day, Alice Cooper’s Trash is still one of my favorite albums. Don’t ask me why. I loved, and still love, ‘Poison’, ‘Spark in the Dark’, ‘Bed of Nails’ and ‘Hell is Living Without You’. In fact, Alice Cooper has remained one of my favorite artists of all time. After I picked up Trash, I immediately started buying up his entire back catalogue. I’m sure my mom thought I was a weird kid. I mean, what 9 year old starts listening to Alice Cooper non-stop?
If memory serves me, I was introduced to Alice Cooper by a kid one year my senior, Julian, who lived next door to my friend Jeff. Jeff was the lead singer of my first band, which really wasn’t a band at all since only two of the 6 members (Jeff, Vance, Chris M., Danny, Adam and myself) of the Totally Hot Acid Rocks (I know, a terrible name, but one that was inspired by a delicious sour candy) could actually (somewhat) play an instrument. Jeff sang and played guitar, while I did back-up vocals and played bass. I remember learning ‘Smoke on the Water’ in his living room. Anyway, this is when I started listening to Alice Cooper, and when I started writing songs for the first time at the tender age of 9 or 10. I also watched a lot of horror movies at the time, mostly notably ever Friday the 13th movies, and all the Puppet Master films, all of which scared the shit out of me. I think Julian owned both Trash and Constrictor (1986), which had the theme to Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives on it: Alice Cooper’s He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask). So, whereas my first band didn’t make it very far, I continued to listen to Alice Cooper and write songs because of them.
Me and those 5 kids spent a lot of time together. They were probably one of the best groups of friends I ever had, the kind you can only have when you’re a kid and drugs and girls haven’t yet started to really make life complicated. The last scene from the movie Stand by Me actually sums things up about childhood friends pretty nicely:
As time went on we saw less and less of Teddy and Vern, until eventually they became just two more faces in the halls. It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant. I heard that Vern got married out of high school, had four kids, and is now the forklift operator at the Arsenault lumberyard. Teddy tried several times to get into the Army, but his eyes and ear kept him out. The last time I’d heard, he’d spent some time in jail. He was now doing odd jobs around Castle Rock.
Chris…enrolled in the college courses with me, and, although it was hard, he gutted it out like he always did. He went on to college and eventually became a lawyer. Last week he entered a fast food restaurant. Just ahead of him, two men got into an argument—one of them pulled a knife. Chris, who had always made the best peace, tried to break it up. He was stabbed in the throat. He died almost instantly.
Although I hadn’t seen him in more than ten years, I know I’ll miss him forever.I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
dxmusick 